Tour Notes #1: Schulz

May 29

I don't know where he came from and I don't know where he went, which is fine with me.

As I predicted, there wasn't a single unreserved seat on the train from Berlin to Cologne, four hours' journey in a high-speed InterCityExpress train. I've done this before, and wound up hurting all over. The curves are taken at speed, and your body reacts by leaning into them, but if you don't have something to hold onto, you stagger and, often, fall. Also, the only place to stand is between cars, and that part isn't air conditioned.

Karen told me the thing to do was to head straight into the restaurant car, grab a seat, and order a juice. I should have listened to her; as it was, I went from one end of the train to the other looking for a seat and not finding one. The World Church Days was on in Cologne, there was a rumor the Pope was going to be there, and the football finals had just ended in Berlin, which drew another sort of crowd, so the train was packed with people you'd ordinarily cross the street to avoid.

I wound up in the bar, which was packed with football fans and their wives celebrating the discovery of Deutsche Bahn's Weekend Special: a coke, mineral water, or Warsteiner for €1.85. Naturally, theirs was Warsteiner. There must have been 40 people, all drinking, all chain-smoking, in that end of the car. The other end had tables, and they were completely full.

So the little guy with the battered bag stood out. He walked in, took a look around, and then leaned against the wall, his bag between his feet. I'd guess he was around my age, with hangdog eyes, thinning hair, and skin the color of clay. The expression on his face was clearly that of someone who'd been told he could never have another drink again. He'd obeyed, but he didn't like it. He took his jacket off and lit a cigarette.

The bar continued to fill up with people buying things to take back to their seats and people from the non-smoking section who'd gone in there to smoke. My eyes were stinging. The guy next to me put his cigarette out and draped his jacket over his bag, then squatted.

We came to a station, and nobody got off, but some people got on. Among them was an Indian couple who didn't appear to have reservations. The little guy saw them come into the restaurant end of the car and his eyes tightened. They had two big bags, and were dragging them along, this middle-aged couple with the air of bewilderment I see on a lot of Indians here: why on earth did we come to Germany, they seem to be saying. It was real tight getting into the bar, and as they squeezed through the corridor linking the bar to the restaurant, the Indian guy's shoe touched the jacket.

"Hey, nigger! That jacket's clean!" the little man barked with a ferocity I'd never have credited him with. I'm not sure the Indian guy even understood. At any rate, he didn't register a thing and moved on.

At Bielefeld, about half-way to Cologne, some people got off, and one table in the restaurant cleared out. The little guy made a beeline for it, and, after a moment's reflection, I did, too. A young woman was picking at a breakfast, and a skinny guy with too much cologne on was reading a newspaper, underlining bits of it, and making notes in the margins. I sat next to the woman, and the little guy sat next to the other guy, who occasionally took out a notepad on which he was writing a numbered list.

Man, it was good to sit down. I ordered a Pepsi (Coke has been usurped on Deutsche Bahn) and nursed it like crazy, since it was one of the little Weekend Special glasses. Not only was I sitting, but there was no smoke. I took out my precious New Yorker, which had cost me €10.50 despite a $4.95 Canada/Foreign cover price, and started to read. The little guy pulled out a cell phone and dialled. "Uwe? Schulz! I'm on the train. Hallo? Hallo?" He stared at it, then clicked it off and put it back in his pocket. Meanwhile, the list-maker and the young woman were conversing, she, it seemed to me, reluctantly. As we drew into a station, she made a move to leave, packing her stuff up. I hadn't heard any of their conversation, but he drew out a card and handed it to her. "Perhaps you will have need of my services," he said, and I could hear the "Uhhh, sure" tone in her voice as she thanked him. I scooted over into her place. Schulz took out the phone again. "Uwe? Schulz! I'm on the train. Hallo? Hallo?"

Another guy sat down. He, it developed, was a liturgical choreographer, which fascinated the list-maker, and, naturally, precipitated a torrent of conversation from the choreographer. I read the New Yorker.

It was getting greyer outside. I knew it'd have cooled off by the time I got to Paris, and that it'd probably be raining. There would be a reserved seat on the Thalys, the Dutch/Belgian/French train that would take me from Cologne to Paris Nord. There wouldn't be any liturgical choreographers, either.

And no Schulz. He finally managed to hang on to the connection with Uwe long enough to tell him the train was on time. Then he got up, adjusted his precious jacket, picked up his funky suitcase, and shuffled away.

I found myself entertaining a fantasy. The Indian was a doctor. At some time in the not-too-distant future, whatever condition had mandated Schulz's sobriety would act up and send him to the hospital. The doctor would save his life, which, after all, is his job. And Schulz would go on living, pissed that he would now have to endure a few more miserable years on this earth.

Good-bye, Schulz.

From The Misty Past

This gem appeared in the e-mail the other day, and I've been staring at it ever since. I don't actually remember listening to Marley play the guitar, because my major memory of this evening was of various Wailers and hangers-on getting me extremely stoned and then pulling a quick room switch to get rid of me. Marley always seemed to have a visceral dislike for me, but he also gave me one of the most amazing evenings of my life.

The picture dates from 1973, and besides me, on the bed in the cheap hotel the band was staying at on Lombard and Van Ness in San Francisco, we have Chuck Krall shooting a photo, and a gentleman in a tie, whom I can't identify. I met Chuck through Lenny Kaye, who at the time was merely a journalist, not the linchpin of the Patti Smith Band, because Lenny knew I was interested in reggae -- I'd been the first person to write about it in an American magazine, Creem, in 1971 -- but I knew very little about it. Chuck was a boyhood friend of Lenny's, a veteran of the dancefloor on American Bandstand who later told me there was rampant sex in the cloakroom there, and he'd spent a couple of years in the Peace Corps in Jamaica. He also had a rare booklet, a study of Rastafarianism which had been suppressed after publication, and laid out its tenets in rather neutral prose, which was unusual given the Jamaican government's feelings about the religion.

Chuck listened to the records I was getting in the mail from Trojan in London, and was able to decode a lot of the patois and odd references on them, although not always correctly: the biggest gaffe he made was in telling me that Rastas considered the British to be their oppressors (true enough), and I could hear them referring to England as "bobby-land" on the records (uhh, that'd be "Babylon," Chuck: I'm pretty sure he figured that out after a while). He also regaled me with stories of his time in Jamaica, and when I finally got to go there in 1975, his memories were indispensable in helping me figure out where I was and what I was doing.

Lenny lived in New York, but Chuck lived in San Francisco, which was convenient, and, since he was shooting rock photos, we became good friends, and I used him for stories I did for Creem and elsewhere. We hung out quite a bit at Winterland, which kindly allowed journalists backstage, and he must have a hell of a collection of negatives documenting that era.

Anyway, when the Wailers came to San Francisco on their first tour, we made sure we had access. The band was little-known and reggae itself was mostly a cult phenomenon based around people who'd seen The Harder They Come, which had premiered in San Francisco. After the debacle which followed this photo, Chuck went back the next day without me, and shot a picture which has been reproduced a lot of Marley standing on the balcony of the motel with a teacup in his hand. At the time his dreads were quite short, but it's recognizably him. As I remember, they played at a club in North Beach somewhere, and I wasn't impressed; I still maintain that the Jamaican records were slowed down some for their American release, and certainly the original Tuff Gong singles sound peppier to me. I also had a much larger aural database of reggae to draw from, thanks to Waxie Maxie and the folks at Trojan, and I frankly thought there were other performers who were just as interesting, if not more so, like the Maytals.

On that 1975 trip, I was there ostensibly to report on a Wailers reunion at the National Sports Stadium in Kingston that was part of an event which also included a tennis tournament, a screening of a Joe Frazier match, and this concert, which would feature the Wailers, Stevie Wonder, and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, who never showed up. During a rare moment of rapprochement, Rolling Stone assigned me the story, and the shady black organization which had organized it provided me with the ticket and accommodations in the Sheraton, although I later moved to the Pegasus, next door. The whole trip was filled with amazing moments, including being chased down an alley by a gunman and interviewing Big Youth pooslide at the Sheraton, much to the doorman's disdain. "There's a Mr. Buchanan here who says he's your guest," he'd said over the phone. "I don't think he is." Oh, I said, Augustus Manley Buchanan? Tell him to go to the pool; I'll be right there.

But the outstanding moment was sitting on the dirt floor of the slave quarters at 10 Hope Road, the ancestral Blackwell mansion Island Records head Chris Blackwell had given Marley, watching the entire band rehearse the show for the next night. Present as an audience were me, Malcolm, my photographer, and Mark Jacobson, who was writing the event up for New York magazine. Just the three of us. Marley gave us the runaround, of course, and I was frustrated: I was moonlighting for a brand-new magazine which was starting up in San Francisco called Mother Jones, and doing a story on reggae without a quote or two from the only artist in the genre anyone in America would recognize was going to be tough. As I had back in '73, though, I was comforted by Aston "Family Man" Barrett, the Wailers' bassist: "Bob, 'im sometimes like dat." Same thing he'd said back then, and still true.

The other notable quote from back then was one I still hold is the reason I never much liked the Wailers' records, along with the slowed tempos. At one point, Bunny Wailer saw me with my notebook, and, although he doesn't much like white folks, came over and asked if I was writing a story. I told him I was, and he said "Den tell dem dis: dem t'ree Wailers! T'ree! Is Bunny, Peter...and Bob. T'ree." But, as far as Island Records were concerned, there weren't.

Now Bob's dead, Peter's dead, 10 Hope Road is a weird sort of commune, the Marley estate is in confusion, and Bob's image is on the box of tissues I'm currently blowing my nose on as part of Zewa's "Legenden" campaign (the other images are Elvis and Marlene Dietrich). Chuck, however, has just turned 60, and the good news was splashed across the bottom of that picture he sent me: Chuck Krall Still Photographs. Good for him. And, I have to say, he still looks the same. Here he is with Lenny a few weeks ago:

It Can Be Done

I may or may not be absent here next week, because I've signed on to sort of road-manage Carl Stone's mini-French tour. We start with a Carl solo concert at Instants Chavirés in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris, Monday evening, and then, with pi'pa player Min Xiao-Fen and shamisen player Yumiko Tanaka, we jump into a van we'll be renting and blast off for Strasbourg, where the trio will do a concert Tuesday night at the Modern Art Museum there. Then, the next day, a six-hour drive to Bourges, where I don't think I've ever been before (I did a rather frenetic driving trip about nine years ago and should have kept notes), for a concert at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des arts de Bourges. After that the trip gets somewhat unfair: I get to escort the ladies back to Montreuil on the train, and Carl gets to drive to Aix-en-Provence, where he'll surely get the best meal of the whole tour. (It's also not at all far from Montpellier).

But I have stuff to do here, including actual paying work, so I have to come back Saturday night. Anyway, once I move to France, Aix is, as I noted, just down the road.

Meanwhile, if we think back to my previous encounter with Deutsche Bahn, the following tale is interesting. I have to get to Paris on Sunday, and it's a 9-hour train ride from here, changing trains in Cologne. Unfortunately, as seems to be happening all too much these days, a huge amount of money I was owed took its sweet time getting here. It arrived yesterday, so I scurried down to the station to buy a ticket.

"Paris, on Sunday," I said to the lady behind the counter, and she looked up. "Are they giving something away in France these days? Because practically all the business I've had today is people going to France. Ah, well. Want to take a night train?" Well, no, I did that once, and been there, have the chiropractic bill, you know. Just a regular train, leaving about 10am would be fine. And there it was. "I can't get you the Sparpreis, I'm sorry," she said, looking at the screen in front of her. (This was the very bit of information the last woman failed to mention). "Yeah," I said, "I'm booking late." "Exactly. And when do you want to return?" I told her Saturday, and she typed in some more stuff. "Oh, this is bad," she said. "There are no more reservations available to Cologne." "But I can get a ticket." "Yes, but no seat." "No seat? Does that mean I have to stand?" "It's World Church Days, and everyone's going to Cologne," she said. "So the train's full." "But," I pressed her, "does that mean I have to stand?" "Maybe, I really can't say." (Today I found out that the attraction isn't so much ecumenical fellowship as that the new Pope is rumored to be attending, and he being German, everyone wants a look at him).

She wrapped things up, and even checked to see if paying €50 more for a first-class ticket to Cologne would get me a seat (answer: no), and then actually said "Sorry about the Sparpreis and the reservation. Have a good trip anyway."

Now, besides the obvious difference in attitudes, what was the difference between this woman and the old bat who'd sold me my last ticket to Paris? Easy: this one had an East German accent as thick as Griebenschmalz on a Schmalzstulle (the attraction of a slice of brown bread with lard spread on it continues to escape me, one of several reasons I've figured out I don't belong in this society). The other one was from the west.

Why should one be polite and efficient and the other hostile and dismissive? Easy: one lived in a society that took her for granted for at least the first half of her life. The second one had the postwar economic miracle providing a soft cushion for her capacious hind end and was resentful that she had to have a job. Or that's how I read it.

I'll try to log on from the road, and I'm taking my camera and connecting cable, just in case, so you can expect pictures.

And, in the chaos of departure, yesterday Et Et sent me some URLs and I did some window shopping. The Pope of Mope met him at a party, and he's an architecture student here for a year from his university...in Montpellier. Anyway, these were real-estate search sites, and I checked on the move-in prices for some apartments in Montpellier. €5-7000 ought to do it: the sites list the move-in cost. This concrete information is now stored in my head.

Now to figure out how to raise the money.

Joe Nick Remembers

I alerted Joe Nick Patoski to yesterday's post about Leon Eagleson, and he replied with an e-mail so filled with the memory of Austin in the time just before I arrived there that I felt I had to share it with you. I've edited out some incriminating info, but here's pretty much what he said:

"You triggered several memories: the joke that the name of his place was really OK Book and Records because the one book left in the place when it became a collectors' record store instead of a thrift shop was some ol' porno rag that Rockin' Dopsie and all his Twisters used to pore over in the back of the store whenever they weren't smoking 'cat dick', their description for marijuana cola buds, or shooting craps.

"All the stars hung out there sooner or later. And whenever things were slow, there was always Antone's on one side, the porno peeps, Moma's Money, Benny's Tavern (the last men-only beer bar on Sixth) and Catman's Shine Parlor. Something was always going on at Catman's.

"The parade through the store was constant -- street people like El Paso Slim ("I wish I was your age and knew what I know now" and "If I had your hand, I'd throw mine away"), the great East Austin floating-heads-on-store-windows artist Joseph Henderson who carried a funk that forced the windows down and the door open, some burly guy who grumbled unintelligibly, Cleveland "Big Cat" Williams, former champion heavyweight boxer for a spell. So-called regular people like [the late] Clyde Woodward and N_____ F_____ who had hustler and con written all over them from the git go and you still loved hanging with 'em anyhow.

"That was the hubbingest half-block I've ever known. Oddly enough, that very same real estate had a historical marker dedication last week, noting that the site of the parking garage and mini mall was once the Bremond block, which was one of the oldest buildings in Austin when it was torn down in 1979, forcing Antone's and OK to move, taking all the fun with it."

What he's remembering here is an Austin I never knew. When I first started going there in the early '70s, I hung with the "progressive country" crowd, who, while they certainly didn't have anything against black and Mexicans, didn't hang out with them, either. And that's who was on 6th Street back then. Yup, the very same 6th Street that's lined with clubs and shot bars and frat-boy hangouts today, the Bourbon-Street-like "live music capitol of the world" centerpiece. This strip of 6th Street goes all the way east to Interstate 35, which has always been the racial dividing line for central Austin: east of the line it's solidly black and Mexican, west it's pure white.

Chasing out the dime-a-dance bars like La Plaza and the Green Spot, which closed around 6pm because their clientele was basically Mexican workers who had to be up early, and routing wild places like Scotty's Bar-B-Q, home to strange is-she-or-isn't-he hookers, was essential if the area was going to be made frat-boy friendly, and when I moved to Austin in October, 1979, that change was already underway. Moma's Money, a fake Cajun seafood place that was a front for something, although I never did figure out what, was one of the first incursions of the new scene, but there were still blues bars which opened occasionally and closed just as fast when I first started going there.

When I first visited OK Records, the one I wrote about yesterday, it was on East 7th, in the Webberville area, and the blues bar I mentioned that was just up the hill, Joe Nick says, was Marie's Tearoom #2, although I remember another one with the word "chicken" in the title -- not Ernie's Chicken Shack, though.

There's a school of thought which says that American likes to excise this sort of funk like it's a tumor instead of an essential part of its soul, and I admit I was in thrall to that when I wrote Joe Nick yesterday, but he replied that people seem to like Austin pretty well these days the way it is, and I have to admit there's still plenty of soul there if you know where to find it. After all, 6th Street was still a secret, despite being right downtown, when I first got there, and that secret has just moved. A lot of what produces the whole blues culture is stuff you wouldn't want to raise your family in, and this year when I was in Austin, I stayed on the East Side for the first time in my life, and was really jazzed by the pride the residents there -- black, brown, and white -- expressed in their neighborhood. Real estate sharks are a fact of life anywhere, and they've been particularly predatory in Austin, but there seems to be a heightened awareness of that on the East Side these days, and maybe this movie has played enough times that it'll have a different outcome this time.

Or, to put it another way, it's perfectly possible to have great barbeque and well-equipped health clinics, lovingly-restored 19th century wooden houses and minority-owned neighborhood-serving businesses, and maybe, just maybe that's what's happening there.

What a strange place for Leon's death to lead me to. Thanks, Joe Nick.

Leon's Gone

Spent the tail-end of a dull Saturday afternoon checking up on some blogs, including the one by noted Texas writer Joe Nick Patoski, and was shocked to read that our old friend Leon Eagleson was dead. Joe Nick's post evokes Leon far better than I ever could, although it did bring back the memory of my visit to his mother's house in Nederland once he'd moved back there, where I watched some of the most pathological interaction possible between two people. I remember at one point, she'd been silent for a while (not, most likely, because of Leon's constant refrain of "Shut up, Momma") and Leon mentioned that Nederland once really did have a sign that said "Nigger, don't let the sun set on you here," and she sat up ramrod-straight in her chair and crowed "And I wisht it still did!" which, of course, provoked another "Shut up, Momma."

Later, we went to the barn or garage where his astonishing record collection was, and he challenged me to ask for any record. I'd never seen a Robert Johnson record in the flesh before, so I asked him if he had one. "Shit," he said, "I thought you were gonna ask somethin' hard," and then asked which one I wanted to see. And he really did have just about everything, from the country blues down to obscure Texas and Cajun sides that were great, even if nobody'd ever heard of them but him.

Even later, we somehow wound up driving to Port Arthur, still drinking, which we'd been doing all afternoon, and my only memories are a pretty much boarded-up downtown and us pissing on the grave of Harry Choates, the man who allegedly (and I do mean allegedly) wrote "Jolie Blonde" and died in the Austin jail, where he'd been hauled on child-support charges. I was still working at the Austin American-Statesman at that point, and I'd begun looking into the allegations that Choates had been beaten to death by an Austin policeman who was angry at all the noise he was making in the cell. The best information I got was from another drunk who was in the tank with Choates that night, and claimed that Choates was so drunk he slipped and fell and cracked his head on the bench in the cell, no cops in sight. Anyway, Leon and I agreed that Harry was probably thirsty and would welcome even our recyclings.

OK Records, Leon's store, was a frequent after-work hangout for me and Joe Nick. We'd head down there and hang out, watching Leon banter with the customers and hear him tell stories. I vividly remember one afternoon when some young black teenager was in there talking about how he was going into a life of crime because it was so cool. Leon impassively reeled off a graphic, detailed description of what happens to young boys his age when they get tossed into the general jail population, including a warning that involved a Folger's coffee can (I'll spare you). The kid, to his credit, kept up his bravado, but you could already see the second-thoughts forming across his brow.

When the first hip-hop records started coming out, there was no way in hell to get them in Texas, and I think this, as much as anything else, is what made Leon close the store. I'd hear of something and ask him if he could get it and it would take a month, if he could get it at all. By the time it became evident that this was the new thing, and that the impromptu Blue Monday jam sessions at the shacky bars just up the hill from OK Records were going to fade away, I think he'd made the decision to do likewise, and one day he just wasn't there. His part-time helper Huggy Bear made the transition more smoothly, but it was clear Leon wasn't interested. And now he's gone and faded away his own self.

Joe Nick said it better, but RIP, Leon. It was good knowing you.

Dom-Da-Dom-Dom

Okay, I've had my exercise today. A friend is helping put together the next edition of the Dorling-Kindersley guide to Berlin, and, since I've been frozen out of the Time Out Guide, it felt good to take the old notebook and cruise around the neighborhood for facts and figures. I did one on the galleries in my neighborhood (although it's not as important as it once was, with a number of the better galleries moving to Zimmerstr. once the real-estate sharks moved in on them), and today I knocked off pieces on the Berlinische Galerie, the New Synagogue, and the Berliner Dom.

I'd been to the first two recently enough that I could do them off the top of my head (I reportred the opening of the Berlinische Galerie here last fall), but the only time I'd been to the Dom, the central Lutheran church of the city of Berlin, was some years ago when I went to see the Tallis Scholars play there and felt like I was in a live Phil Spector production, there was so much echo. That hardly enhanced the performance, and they were visibly struggling. So was I, seated below scowling visages of Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Calvin, and a couple of Hohenzollerns, not to mention the overwrought sacred mosaics based on paintings by one Anton von Werner; I felt like I was being judged while the Tallises were trying to stay on pitch with their acappela Tudor church music.

This time, though, I was there to look, not to listen, and although I really hate the Wilhelmine style in general (except the Neptune Fountain, which is just too silly to hate, with its rampaging lobsters and putti), I had to gather facts and figures. So I even launched myself up the 267 steps (there's a sign warning the prospective visitor -- I sure didn't count them myself) to the balcony surrounding the Dom's dome, which is open in nice weather (and today was a sizzling 68 degrees F!) so you can get a panorama of this almost totally hill-less city. Had the thing not been jammed with tourists, I would have lingered, using the steeple-spotting method (always the best way to navigate a European city, something I learned on my first visit to Brussels) to spot landmarks. As it was, I could see, off in the distance, the Rathaus Schöneberg, where Kennedy gave his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, and, in the other direction, the riverside warehouses of Friedrichshain.

In the basement, on the other hand, is the crypt, and there you get to see what must be a hundred sarcophagi of various Hohenzollerns, the family which ruled Berlin as Electors, and then Germany as Kaisers, for several centuries. (There are also a couple more upstairs, including one guy who died in the 1500s, which I think is the oldest one in the batch -- definitely the coolest, with its sculpture of him on the lid). There are also many tiny coffins, belonging to children born dead -- one Elector in the early 18th Century seems to have had really terrible luck producing children -- and, of course, less ornate ones for the wives. There's one marked for Frederick the Great, although I always understood that he's actually buried in Potsdam with his beloved dogs, and, all by itself, gated off from the rest, the last Hohenzollern, dead at the age of three in 1915.

There's something creepy about the people who were hanging around, and it wasn't because of a fascination with death, but, rather, a fascination with royalty. A gymnastics tournament is in town at the moment, and it seems like hundeds of Turnvereine are here competing, all teenagers with their parents in tow, and a lot of the more rural ones were gasping over the crypt. I had a grandmother who was sort of a royalty groupie, but it's quite strange to encounter these people in the flesh in the 21st Century, especially in Germany, where the royals gave up long ago and most titled people (like the Countess in my building) don't have a great deal of money.

Anyway, I did the tour, took the notes, and came back and wrote the entry, but one sign I transcribed didn't make it into the book. I like it anyway, an old enameled sign from the late 1800s that says "Entrance for royal household, diplomats, members of the Bundesrat, Reichstag, House of Lords, and House of Commons, and high-ranking civil servants." Sad to say, they didn't have a reproduction of that in the gift shop or I would have bought one and stuck it on my door.

Har Har

Just to show you that I haven't completely lost my sense of humor, a couple of things that have come my way.

First, the first major change in Catholic liturgy under the new pope:



Thanks, Brett!

And another one which you'll have to get out your German dictionaries for or, just as easily, check out Leo, the always-wonderful online German-English dictionary.



I'm pretty sure this happens a lot these days. Sad to say.

A Different History

I've had several e-mails asking me if I'd gone to the new Holocaust Memorial (or the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, to give it its official title), and so, since DJ F.K. is currently entertaining me with Disko '82's endless repetition of bad German disco hits and AFN-style country (it's Whit Monday, or Pfingstenmontag, a holiday, today, and he's back), I figured I'd essay a few thoughts about it and other related stuff to see what comes out.

The first thing is an anecdote about my friend Andrew, who wrote that Guide to Jewish Berlin I mentioned a couple of posts ago (out of print at the moment, but he'll be here at the end of June to do some preliminary research for the next edition). He'd just published it, and the Jüdischer Gemeinschaft (Jewish Community) was having a street-fair on Tucholskystr. so he rented a booth to sell and promote it, and, since that's just down the street, I went down there to keep him company and see what was going on. At one point, a German guy came up and asked him what he thought about the then-unbuilt and uncertain monument. "It's not for me," he said. "I'm an American." The guy was flabbergasted. "But...you're a Jew," he said. "Yes," Andrew said patiently, "but I'm an American Jew."

His point, I thought, was solid. This was to be a monument built by the people who committed the atrocities, to remind themselves that it had happened, and must never happen again. Of course this is commendable, but it's got little to do with him and his history, and even less to do with mine. By the time World War II had happened, his father's family had been in the U.S. for a couple of generations. (His mother is British, and was a nurse in England when his father met her during the war). His father was doing what he could about the situation: fighting the Germans (and, for that matter, doing as much as he could, too, since America behaved rather shamefully towards immigrant Jews fleeing the Holocaust: go look it up). Being American, he had his own issues to deal with in terms of being Jewish, since anti-Semitism was still rife in his country. But it's important to remember: he was neither murderer nor murdered.

For me, the Holocaust is even more distant. I grew up knowing about it, read lots about it in books, heard survivors tell their tales, and saw films and still pictures of the camps, both before and after their liberation. But I, too, am American, and I'm also not Jewish. I know about anti-Semitism because my parents were both openly anti-Semitic, and the town I lived in was very heavily Jewish. But to be honest, World War II was never a particular interest of mine. To the extent that I was interested in European history, it tended to be much older segments of it. Hell, most of the kids I grew up with had fathers who'd fought in the war, although my father's partial deafness kept him out of the Army.

So I neither need to be convinced that the Holocaust happened, nor reminded of how awful it was. Upon coming to Germany, I was naturally very interested to see how Germans themselves were dealing with it, with the history that had happened on their soil, and for the most part, I was very impressed, particularly with the people I knew, who tended to be in their 20s and 30s, and had integrated it into a worldview that was coherent and sane, including a burning desire to see that such a thing never happened again. From time to time I'd be out with a mixed bunch of Americans and Germans, and a couple of times, an American (albeit not one who lived here) would bring up the Nazis and the Jews, only to be slapped down by a German saying "Please tell us when your government apologizes to the American Indians."

Killing fields are not my thing. Although our family took long driving vacations in the summertime and my father was really interested in history, I never was much interested in battlefields. I have no desire to visit the Little Big Horn, and I remember climbing that huge hill in Waterloo, Belgium, and looking out over the farms, trying to make sense out of the diagrams on the plaques up there. "You can just see it happening," a tourist said to his wife. Well, I couldn't.

And my feeling also extends to killing fields where the killing was one-sided, as in Cambodia or here in Germany, at the camps. Yes, I was near Auschwitz when I was in Krakow, yes, there's even a streetcar in Munich which goes to Dachau (which is a suburb -- not that that makes the streetcar sign any less creepy), yes, I could have gone to Buchenwald when I was in Weimar on assignment, and hell, I could get on the subway right now and go to Sachsenhausen, although I guess it would be closed today.

It's not my story. I know the story, and yet I'm far more interested in how the Nazis came to power than I am in what they did when they assumed it. I'm far more interested in the story I've been part of, the integration of the former East Bloc into Europe, particularly because that story includes the very neighborhood I live in. I know that the story of the Holocaust remains important, because, as Serbia and Rwanda have shown, there are still people who haven't learned its lesson.

I do, however, know that there's still a fascination with the Nazis among certain Germans. I've seen neo-fascist newspapers, which were spread around the seats of a train I was riding on once (probably by the German cops who were on the train and ripped up my passport, but that's another story). I know there is a tiny number of neo-Nazis running around this country, and in fact a couple of them just got sent to jail for trying to blow up a Jewish monument. So I know that the reminder still has to be visible. I visited the documentation center in Nuremberg a few years ago when it opened, right in one of the buildings where the great rallies were staged, and I thought it was very well done. It, too, is for Germans: a police academy class was there hearing a lecture the day I visited, and schoolchildren were being led through by docents.

But I'll tell you something else, and that it's really, really wearying being surrounded by this every day. Unlike Nuremberg or Munich, just about the only history Berlin has is the history of Prussian militarism (see: Franco-Prussian War, World War I) followed by the Nazis, and, after them, the Cold War. There are no beautiful old buildings to look at as contrast or relief, no public art from a more innocent time -- hell, very little public art that doesn't have a Message, for that matter. The streets of my neighborhood, as anyone who's taken my walking tour knows, are filled with reminders and memorials, be they the small brass Klopfensteine (stumbling blocks) a German artist has hammered into the sidewalks in front of houses of Jews sent to the camps, or the Transportation Memorial on Grosse Hamburger Str., or the bombed facade of the New Synagogue or the plaques on house walls memorializing resistance fighters (read: Communists), or the few remaining houses pocked with bullet holes from the Battle for Berlin, or the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate just a few minutes' walk from my place, or the signs lining Unter den Linden which talk about each building's history, or even the innocent-looking playground in the housing project not far from the Brandenburg Gate, under which, I happen to know, lie the remains of Hitler's bunker. Then there's Daniel Libeskind's famous Jewish Museum, to which I have no desire to return. No matter where you go in this city, you are reminded of this stuff, at least if you're the slightest bit observant and the slightest bit cognizant of history.

It's the Burden of History, folks, that reoccurring character -- perhaps the reoccurring character -- in every single story that's written about Berlin. It's here, and there's nothing we can -- or should -- do about it.

But, like all burdens, it's wearying. It never stops. It's always there. And it's not my burden, but I'm living in the middle of it.

So maybe you can see why I'm not in a big hurry to walk down to Pariser Platz and see the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe. You can see why I was so happy to read Amos Elan's magisterial The Pity of It All, a history of the Jews in Germany that stops in 1933: it was about something other than the Burden of History -- or, rather, it contextualized it and evenhandedly dealt with the fair and decent Germans -- who, make no mistake, also existed, as they do today, obviously.

And maybe you can figure out why, after being trapped in someone else's nightmare for the past eleven and a half years, I want so desperately to shed the Burden of History and move on to another place.

Neat Trick

I just registered (twice, because their submit form was wonky) at The Berlin Blogplan, a subway map of Berlin which, when you pass your cursor over it, shows you the nearest blog. I'm apparently sharing space with another American, Radio Free Mike, who seems to enjoy Saul Bellow more than I do.

I'm going to go play with this thingamajig a bit more. Who knew there were so many of us?

Saved From Disco Hell, And Other Crumbs

I just came back from walking around the block, because there have been sirens all afternoon. This is the 60th anniversary of the Germans' acceptance of the Allied peace terms, and I know that, among other bodies, the PDS, the hard-left party here, has been planning celebrations, but none in my neighborhood. All I saw was massive numbers of police cars and wagons directing traffic away from a number of streets, so what I suspect is that the Chancellor or someone else of similar importance is doing something at the New Synagogue. If I find out what's going on later, I'll let you know.

***

No question, though, that the festive season is upon us. One notable celebration missing in action (so to speak) this year was the annual Mayday riot. I didn't hear a single siren, although I did notice a few trucks of out-of-town policemen arriving the day before. The riot is used as a training situation for various police departments these days, and it would be wonderful to think that the crazies' response this year was to just do nothing, thereby frustrating the cops. But I'm afraid that's imputing too much intelligence to them, since there's not much to the content of these riots these days except a meeting of testosterone and beer. Still, interesting that it had such a low profile.

One celebration that definitely didn't disappear was the one on Thursday, which is Ascension Day, or Christi Himmelfahrt, a day whose German name has always made me think of a stuck-up cheerleader (who would have spelled it Kristi). Himmelfahrt does double duty, though, as Father's Day, which is basically an excuse for men to get drunk. And boy, do they ever. You see them in groups, sometimes riding around in an open vehicle of some sort, singing, wearing odd clothes, and drinking and drinking and drinking, and I must say that that night there were sirens well into the evening. In Dresden, apparently, a bunch of right-wingers used it as an excuse to have some sort of demonstration which ended up in a riot.

But the thing I hate most about Himmelfarhrt is that there's a restaurant with a large beer garden in my back yard, and a chill went through me when I saw a white van with Disko '82 emblazoned on the side pull up. Sure enough, a guy started unloading a mobile disco unit, complete with flashing lights, to be set up there. I was wandering around doing this and that, so by the time I got back from my errands, he was set up, blasting music at a single table with a man and a woman sitting at it.

I've always said that Germans will drink outdoors as soon as the ice breaks on the puddles in the gutter, and so seeing these people out there wasn't too surprising, but I suspected that Mother Nature had the winning card this time. After a short spell of mid-70s weather, we had some hard rains and since then it's been brightly sunny and barely 50 degrees. Not even standing in the sun is particularly warming (at least it isn't today), and as I sat here in the apartment working on this and that, I had a feeling that the endless Stars On 45-style medleys of ABBA songs and Boney M hits, interspersed with the DJ's patter, wouldn't last as long as they had in previous years. I was right; by the end of the day, I'm sure any drinkers at the restaurant had moved inside, and Disko '82 had packed up and departed to whatever Satanic hole it had crawled out of.

That said, it'd sure be nice if it actually did warm up a bit more. I like to sit outdoors in a beer garden myself from time to time myself.

***

My favorite beer garden, though, the Pratergarten up the hill in Prenzlauer Berg, had some unwelcome visitors the other evening, as did a number of other clubs around town. Ever eager to eliminate cool places before the flood of summer student tourism gets here, immigration police raided a number of premises Wednesday night looking for "black workers," ie, those engaged in illegal work. They caught a literally black worker at the Prater, some poor African with a forged passport, who was arrested and will probably be deported. The CCCP club, a Russian-themed place just down Torstr. where a lot of the Russian chic types hang out, also got raided and apparently 100% of their employees were illegal, so I hear they're in big trouble. And White Trash Fast Food, on the corner, got raided (of course: it caters to foreigners), but it screens its employees very well and the cops left empty-handed. Which isn't to say they're not in trouble, too: apparently some building inspector type showed up recently and told them they had to spend €6000 on a new ventilation system. So, more good news: it looks like they'll be abandoning this particular property in a month or two.

Look for more raids throughout the summer, particularly in illegal bars, which, although premises for them are getting harder to find, still exist. And if you're coming here as one of the student tourists, don't worry: you won't be arrested or deported for drinking in an illegal bar.

***

Thanks to Snippy for sending me, several weeks ago, the link to the BBC story from mid-April headlined "Germany's new 'great depression.'" According to the story, cases of depression among Berliners have risen by 70% since 1997, based on research by a national health insurance company. They surveyed 2.6 million employed Germans -- employed ones, mind you -- including 90,000 Berliners, so I'd venture to say the results are statistically sound. Some of the depression, apparently, was linked to the huge unemployment here, and the uncertainty as to whether the respondents' jobs would actually last much longer. The survey said they were more likely to blow off a day of work because of depression than for any other reason.

I wonder, though, if the depression might not be for reasons the insurance guys never even thought of. For instance, the fact that this city is dirty (if dog-shit were a commercially-viable crop, the city wouldn't be broke), with graffiti covering just about every flat surface. Or perhaps the fact that, with the unemployment numbers rising and the city treasury being depleted, the cultural life here has nosedived. Or the fact that ever since the government got here five years ago, the blue-noses have been doing things like raiding nightspots looking for illegal workers, putting a damper on the milieu in which the very creative people who are supposed to be making this the hip, vibrant place the New York Times says it is are doing their socializing and networking. Or maybe this is just the culmination of the culture of negativity which rules here, the impulse to say no first thing when people bring up new ideas.

I'm depressed here most of the time, so I don't see why others shouldn't be. Both visually and socially, this is a very depressing place to live. Maybe this survey is just acknowledging that with facts and figures.

***

Several people have asked where they can get the Goldapple Guide to Jewish Berlin, which I mentioned in the last post. I'm working on it, folks. There is, I think, a way to order it so that the authors make the most money on it, and, while it's not 100% up to date, it's still the best book on the subject available. Andrew? Kevin? You reading this? I need some info! Get in touch!

Hide The Synagogue!

Okay, kids, want to play a neat game? Fine! With the cooperation of the City of Berlin, and of course the necessary backing of the Burden Of History, let's play Hide the Synagogue!

I owe this to my pal Ina, editor of the estimable Neid magazine, your basic average hiphop feminist art magazine. Ina has become fascinated with Berlin's Jewish sites, although she's not Jewish herself, and one day last year we went to an exhibition in the New Synagogue of architectural models of German synagogues. There was also an exhibition of various furnishings from Berlin synagogues, including a couple of tapestries from the Old Synagogue. Now, I knew we were in the New Synagogue, which had been built in 1866, so I asked Ina where the old one was.

"Your're kidding," she said. "It's in your back yard. It's on Rosenstr., just a short walk from Hackescher Markt."

I was astonished. It was virtually in my back yard. I mean, I knew Rosenstr., and had walked down it a few times, but since it was just a short street that didn't go anywhere in particular, I wasn't there too often. What I knew it for was a particularly hideous bit of public sculpture which memorialized a brave bit of resistance to the Nazis. It was made into a film in 2003, but, like most German films, it barely played in America. What happened was, in 1943 the Nazis raided a bunch of factories and seized Jewish men who were working there, taking them to a top-secret prison they had improvised in the Jewish Community administration building on Rosenstr. Word got out almost immediately, and some non-Jewish women who were married to some of the detainees started a demonstration in front of this building. At the end of a week, there may have been as many as a thousand women in the street chanting "Murderers!" and "Give us our men back!" Ultimately, the Nazis were humiliated into releasing the prisoners, even 25 they'd already shipped to Auschwitz! In 1995, a really, really ugly stone monument was erected in the lot opposite the former prison on Rosenstr., and that was all I knew about the place.

I mentioned this to Ina, and she agreed that this was the place. "It's got a historic marker sign and everything, though. Trust me, it's there."

So I went looking. And walked right past it. Walked clear out the other end of Rosenstr. and onto Karl-Liebknecht-Str. Then I turned around and walked back. And this, more or less, was what I saw.



Now, knowing what I know today, I can see the synagogue and the historical marker. And no, it's not the red pile on the left; that's the Frauenbloc -- Women's Bloc -- monument. I didn't want to singe your eyes with a full shot of it.

See the synagogue? I didn't think so. Here, let's see if this helps.



Ah, yes, over there in the corner! The sign! Alas, there's no synagogue to be seen, because it got hit with a bomb in World War II, and thanks to the DDR, ever ready to promote Judaism as a culture, not a religion, the remaining bits were knocked down rather than restored, even though the building dated from 1714, which is pretty old by Berlin standards. Also, due to an idiosyncracy of German-Jewish relations, most of the synagogue was still intact despite the damage: it was forbidden for Jews to build buildings higher than German ones, so many synagogues had the majority of their space below ground. A simple little building could conceal a gorgeous sanctuary. (This law was off the books by 1866, when the New Synagogue was built, obviously).

So now that we've walked into the corner of the park and noticed the sign with its back turned to the public, we can check out the remains of the foundation and read the sign:



You can see the Frauenbloc monument in the distance, and you can tell from the buildings across the street where Rosenstr. is. Here's a closer look at the foundation.



So we found it, kids! Despite the best efforts of the city of Berlin to hide it, we found the synagogue where Moses Mendelssohn, Salomon Maimon, David Friedländer, Henriette Herz, Rahel Levin, and thousands of less famous Jews worshiped for over 150 years (and, of course, some stayed on after the new one went up), where some of the intellectual lights of Berlin professed their faith and went through the rituals of life and death.

Hey, at least, unlike at the Rosenthaler Tor, there's acknowledgement that it was there. But there are no signs pointing to it, and no other hints that it's there. That I managed to pass it so many times without even seeing the sign is testament to how well hidden it is. Once again, faced with a positive monument in the city's history, the city chooses to celebrate the incident which will cause Berliners to reflect on the shame their city was guilty of and ignore a site of which it could deservedly be proud.

And speaking of Rosenthaler Tor, I think I've found a solution to the non-commemoration of that, too. But I'll have to hike up the hill some nice day and get a shot of it, so that'll have to wait for another day.

++++++++

Almost forgot: much of the historical information on both the Old Synagogue and the Frauenbloc monmument came from the excellent Goldapple Guide to Jewish Berlin by Andrew Roth and Michael Frajman. Maybe Andrew's still reading this blog and can e-mail me with details as to how my other readers can get a copy of this invaluable resource.

Back Online

For the moment, at least, I'm back online. Turns out the problem with the DSL was...my fault! But of course it was! This is Germany and the customer is always wrong.

The DSL modem had died. The guy I talked to suggested I go buy another one. I asked him why I wouldn't get another one from Telekom. "Hey," he said, in that patented friendly Telekom manner, "you've had this one since 2001."

So today I went to a T-Punkt, and, after waiting about 40 minutes in line, was sold another one for a mere €89.99! There goes the food budget for the forseeable future, but at least it works.

And, last night as I was thinking about this, I remembered my very first contact with Deutsche Telekom and thought I should share it with you nice folks.

When I first got here, I lived in a succession of apartments (well, two) where the phone bill was automatically taken out of the subletter's bank account and I paid them back. But a sometime business associate was moving to Hong Kong and wanted me to take over his apartment, which was huge, so I happily did it. One thing, though: he had to put all the utilities in my name, everything but the lease. There was one problem: they'd had their telephone turned off a few weeks earlier, and this was a time when if you were lucky, it was an eight-week wait for a number, since for some reason there was a shortage of them.

So his wife ran down the street to one of the storefronts Telekom used to have all over the place, and she talked to the lady there, who looked in the computer and said "You're lucky: the number hasn't been reassigned, and we can turn the phone on for the new tenant." So they started setting me up with the new account and old number, the wife explaining that my German was very bad, and I'd authorized her to do this (I think I'd already signed something that said so). "Ward," said the Telekom lady. "Is he English?" "No," the other woman said, "he's American." The Telekom lady stopped filling out the form. "Is he a black man?" she asked. "Oh, no," she was assured. "Good," said Ms. Telekom, starting to rubber-stamp stuff on the papers. "Black people don't pay their bills."

And I wish I didn't have to end this story by saying that when this guy's wife told me of this encounter, she finished by saying "They don't, you know." But she did.

Anyway, lots of other stuff, much more interesting than my own travails here, to report, so I think this blog's going to get active again in the next few days, as we play Hide the Synagogue and report on Berliners' mental health. Now to catch up on the e-mails.

Another Catastrophe

So while I wait for Telekom to turn the DSL back on, due to happen today, but as of 2 pm not happening (and their free number for DSL service questions doesn't work today, which is encouraging), I've just had another horrifying catastrophe.

Yesterday I turned on the big computer in my living room, and after it did its thing and I didn't play with it because the DSL was still off, it went to sleep, making some odd noises as it did so. When I tried to reawaken it about an hour later, I got a gray screen. Further investigation turned up the fact that the machine couldn't find the hard disc. This may not be the end of everything on the computer (backup? what's backup?), but the fact is that I don't have the money to have it diagnosed, let alone fixed.

At the very least, it's going to be several weeks before I can do this, so right now what I would like is for any of you who read this and regularly correspond with me to please just drop me a pro-forma e-mail ("Hi, Ed," or whatever) to whatever address you're using (unless it's Compuserve: that went away ages ago) so I can re-build the old address book. I have plenty of addresses, but I think it'd be better to be safe.

I should be more shocked and depressed than I am, but it occurred to me, thinking about this as I looked at the poor old G4 tower sitting in the bright box it had been delivered in about six years ago, that I was never a computer user before I moved here, for various good reasons (although I probably would have changed in due time) but that the discovery of e-mail changed my life: I might have been thousands of miles away from my friends and business contacts, but suddenly Compuserve put them all in my lap. So, after moving here in August '93, a friend sold me his old PowerBook 160 (hey, trackballs! Remember them?) and the SXSW crew brought it over here when they visited MIDEM in January of '94. Been hooked ever since.

And, although a great deal of my older writing is backed up (I found a January '04 backup without really looking yesterday, and there may be a newer one somewhere), all the e-mail, photos, games, all the passwords for various websites and functions (like the links to Powells and Barnes and Nobel I post here), basically all my life since 1994 is contained in that silent, comatose block of plastic waiting until I can afford to take it to the doctor.

In other words, it's like some sort of period was placed at the end of a sentence. If there were ever a metaphorical event dealing with the necessity for me to get the hell out of here, boy, this is it.

Still lack the money and so on, and yeah, I'm going to have to get this at least diagnosed, and fixed if at all possible, but this metaphor may well be the reason I'm not rigid with grief and depression about this. It's like the cosmos went and reinforced something I already knew.

Of course, if someone waved a magic wand over it tomorrow and made it work again, that'd be a lot more satisfactory. But that's not gonna happen. If there's one thing this past decade has taught me, it's that there are no magic wands, very few miracles, and that luck is as likely to be bad as any other way. The solution is keeping on keeping on.

So, if Telekom ever gets the damn DSL back on, that's what me and the tiny laptop are going to do.

Telekom: The Larger Problem

I was in sort of a hurry yesterday, what with dealing with this internet cafe (from which I'm sorry to say I'm logging in again today), and realized this morning that there's more to this situation I'm currently in than just poor little me being shut off from my phone for a couple of weeks.

There's a societal problem at work here that's keeping Germany back, and it's something that may not be fixable. See, the main reason I got shut off is because I didn't do like most people here do and set up a regular draft from my bank account. This is because I never know how much I'll have in the bank at any given time. This is anathema to German institutions. You are supposed to have a regular income. It's virtually mandatory.

This is a huge problem, in my estimation. What it means, actually, is that you are to stay at a job until you retire, and that job is one where you work for someone else. That's assumed. And it's so ingrained that I once met a guy, an American, who was here working for a bank I won't name, teaching them how to communicate with their customers. It was a year-long project, something this guy is an expert at, which is why they hired him. So he moved to Berlin, set up his workshops, began training executives, and getting into life here. He also set up a bank account with the bank he was working for so they could pay him for his work, logically enough.

But then, one day, he got a note saying that they were terminating his account. The reason? He didn't have regularly-occurring deposits. The reason he didn't was that his contract with the bank for his work had him getting paid as he finished each segment of his training work, not on a weekly basis. So naturally he asked them what was going on. They told him that, yes, any bank in Germany (except one, which is where, coincidentally, I have my account) can terminate a bank account for this reason, and sorry, but that's what they were doing.

He realized, I think, that he wasn't going to get very far with what he was teaching, and left shortly thereafter.

My bank tried this, too, but fortunately I discovered they can't do it. There has to be one bank in the country which has to put up with this maddening individuality, and they drew the short straw. But the corollary to all of this is that if you can't work in a way where you get paid piecemeal, you're living in a society where you can't be self-employed. And what that means is that entrepreneurship of all sorts is discouraged by institutional fiat. Risk-taking is frowned on. I always bring up the quotation from a half-dozen years ago from the outgoing president of the European Bank, who said that Europe would never breed a Bill Gates because no young European would ever drop out of college because he thought he had a good idea.

Germans are already notoriously risk-averse, and I certainly discovered over the past decade how little they appreciate entrepreneurship, watching my own and others' attempts to start businesses get smothered by bureaucracy, unwillingness to invest in anything that wasn't a sure thing, and, in the case of a woman I know who tried to set up several businesses, the idea that women shouldn't go into business.

And another side of this attitude is that if all of your customers are good little sheep, they don't look at their bills as they get subtracted from their accounts. I like to know how much I'm being asked to pay, and why. In the past, Telekom has made mistakes on my bill, and they've behaved like they've seen old Lily Tomlin Ernestine the Operator skits and thought they were training films. I literally had one Telekom lady tell me that Telekom doesn't make mistakes. With a straight face. And people actually do submit to this.

Okay, this may be rambling. I have a hard time concentrating in this place, but I wanted to clarify some of what I wrote yesterday. I've got to find out when and if Telekom is going to turn me on, and I'm still not sure how that's going to happen, so that's today's chore. Time to pay another two Euros and head back to the house.

Meanwhile, if you've got a T-Mobile account there in the States, you might consider the company behind it. Bloated and arrogant, treating its customers in its home country as if it's still a monopoly with no one to answer to but itself. Deutsche Telekom.

Satankom Strikes Again

Bear with me. I have some nifty stuff to post, but I have to be at my desk, with access to various books and hyperlinks. Right now I'm at an internet cafe down the street, because I was a day late -- that's right, one day late with my phone payment.

This zero tolerance was also extended to two other people I know on the same day, and is, sadly, typical of Deutsche Telekom's relationship with its customers. Also, there's no negotiating with them: they turn you back on when they're good and ready.

There used to be a place, a storefront, where you could go pay your bills, but they don't do that any more. I guess there were too many irate customers coming in and threatening the workers. Wouldn't surprise me, at any rate. So I had to fill out a money transfer form, take it to the bank, and wait. That was Tuesday. Friday the thing finally went through, but of course there's no way Telekom works on Saturday, so I'm gambling they'll turn me on tomorrow. If not, it could be up to a week longer.

And, like I said, no way you can negotiate with them: I stand to lose €900 worth of work for a German government publication if I can't get back on this week, but this bit of information would make no impact whatever on them. They simply don't care what happens to their customers.

But I'll be back and posting again as soon as I can. And working overtime to get out of this horrible place.

April Crumbs

Boy, I feel like an idiot. Did I really think that Harald Juhnke's dropping dead would mean the end of the tabloids' long affair with him? I woke up the day after I wrote that post and walked to the bakery on the corner, and there were the ad boards for the newspapers, all competing to offer more coverage of the funeral than the next one. I saw one offering six pages of color photos of the funeral. Bet that was fun...

***

Much, including an essay by Mark Twain I've yet to read, has been made of the German language and its unbelievable complexity, but there are times when it just says something you can't say any other way. The best example I've run into recently was over the weekend, when my friend the dancer was over for dinner and, in the post-dinner conversation, she got curious about Arnold Schwarzenegger. "How," she asked, "could he have been elected governor of California after making all of those...those...Volksverdummerungfilme?" I was stopped dead in my tracks by the elegance of the word. Like all German compound nouns, it's just a bunch of words stuck together: Volk=people, Verdummerung=making stupid, and Filme=films. But the idea of filmsthatmakepeoplestupid is a great one, and although I don't know if my friend invented it or not, I sure hope she did. It's a great concept, anyway.

Another great German word, one which has made its way into English, since we never had a word for the thing, is Schadenfreude, literally "shameful happiness," but really just the nice feeling you get -- however briefly -- when something bad happens to someone you don't like. Thus, I should mention the demise -- or "hiatus," as they'd like us to believe -- of Tracks magazine, who I had a little run-in with a few months ago. As a friend, another veteran of the rock press for many decades, commented upon hearing the news, they were "run by rank in-crowders without a sense of adventure or taste," which pretty much sums it up. They were going to be the American version of Mojo, but I'm convinced that that's not the magazine to clone for the U.S., not any more. Nope, if you know someone with a whole lotta money (Tracks apparently burned through something like $5 million in no time), tell them to get and study Word, which is everything Mojo used to be, and more. Refinancing Tracks would just be throwing good money after bad, as they say.

***

The Pope came over yesterday to talk. No, not that Pope -- I don't let dead guys in the house. No, this was the Pope of Mope, a New Yorker and rock critic who moved here three years ago and has, I think, lived to regret it, although I also think he derives a certain energy out of being miserable. But he confirmed something I'd suspected, which is that the last great Berlin club of the golden era of techno, Tresor, is closing down this weekend. Once upon a time, caught there in the sort of no-man's-land between east and west, two clubs, Tresor and E-Werk, defined the Berlin sound and style. E-Werk was just what its name said, an old electrical generating station, mostly emptied out, with huge ceilings and a forbidding industrial vibe. Tresor, too, was what it advertised: the basement of an old department store, which had contained its vault. The building above Tresor had been pretty much bombed (although one story stood aboveground), and the basement (as you can see vaguely from the picture on their website) had a real mystery to it, stripped of anything which spoke of its previous tenants. The scenesters divided between E-Werk and Tresor partisans, but only Tresor was smart enough to really assemble a decent business infrastructure (the E-Werkers were the crowd that put on the Love Parade), starting a label, a clubwear line, and all of that.

Still, a lot of the folks who jammed the place back in '90 are 15 years older now, and the last time I was around Tresor, it looked like it had been invaded by what New Yorkers call Bridge and Tunnel People, the local variety being hicks who drive in from Brandenburg villages for a scary night out and plenty to drink. Yes, it appears Tresor will live on "in exile" somewhere over by Ostbahnhof, and sure, the label will continue, through Mute, to put out some of the harder-edged techno that's out there, but another institution from my early days here will fold on Sunday night, and I, of course, can't help but take that as yet another sign that it's time to move on and get out of here.

I'm working on it.

The Mess At Checkpoint Charlie

Yesterday, the BBC reported that the Museum am Checkpoint Charlie has to tear down the memorial they've erected on a plot of land there. I walked past it a few months ago but didn't stop, so I figured that today, with temperatures approaching 55 and a nice clear sky, would be a good time to take a walk down there and see what all the shouting is about.

I visited the Museum am Checkpoint Charlie on my first visit here in 1988, endeavoring to be a good tourist during the hours my then-girlfriend was working. It's a pretty remarkable place, which certainly does document a lot of escape attempts and has a lot of cool artifacts, but there was a creepy feeling about the place I couldn't really define. A collection box solicited donations for an unnamed "human rights organization" there, and my girlfriend gave a short laugh when I asked what this mysterious organization could be. "Probably the Ku Klux Klan," she said.

Probably not them, but certainly that far to the right. I'd still recommend the museum to interested visitors, but their agenda is something else entirely. According to the documentation at the site, it's owned by the Arbeitgemeinschaft 13. August e.V., or the 13th of August Working Group, which doesn't reveal much, and this non-profit (which is what the e.V. stands for) was founded by one Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt in 1962. Dr. Hildebrandt died on Jan. 9, 2004, and his widow re-erected a length of the Berlin Wall on a lot he'd leased from the Berliner Volksbank last year, then filled in both that lot and one opposite it on Friedrichstr. with wooden crosses, each of which represents someone killed, not, as the BBC reports, crossing the Wall, but attempting to escape from East Germany. Some of them go back to 1948, well before there was a Wall, in fact.

There are a lot of placards, very badly translated by someone who was proud enough to sign his name to them, decrying the fact that the city wants this private display of righteousness torn down. As for the monument itself, it's mostly fenced off, so it's impossible to read the captions on the vast majority of the crosses, which are made of simple creosoted wood and stand about 8 feet high. The placards express outrage that the city sold the lot to the Volksbank, instead of to the museum, although this part of town was and is a place where the city is desperately trying to establish a business district (with the minor inconvenience that very few businesses indeed want to relocate to Berlin). Widow Hildebrandt also mentions the expense she's gone to to lay wreaths at the site, although most of them seem to be at a makeshift memorial to her husband, and she also urges people who want to know why Dr. Hildebrandt's ashes haven't been interred to ask the "red, red Berlin Senate" why they haven't been. (One wonders where she's intending to plant the old guy).

There's also a guy there collecting signatures from unsuspecting tourists on a petition to allow the memorial to remain. He was busy barking at a bunch of Bavarians when I was there -- and naturally they'd be sympathetic -- but the only people who seemed to be doing really good business were the assembled Egyptians selling Soviet and East German crap: medals, watches, flags, hats, and of course matryoshka dolls, questionable amber, and painted wooden eggs. (How the Egyptians managed to get a monopoly on this would probably provide a fine primer on the workings of Berlin's criminal underground).

The city is alleging bad taste, but that's hardly going to wash with a lot of folks. They also allege that there are already two memorials to the Wall and its victims, and that's true, because one of them is near my house at Brunnenstr. and Ackerstr. There, a section of the Wall was purchased by the Berlin Museum (a museum of city history which I don't think has a building at the moment, having given up their old one to the Jewish Museum), and restored, poorly, then bookended with slabs of brushed stainless steel. I once took American artist Richard Posner there, since he specializes in political statements in public spaces and he almost had an apoplectic fit over how much of an opportunity the creators of this empty genture had wasted. Furthermore, the entire neighborhood where this thing was erected was outraged by the inscription Helmut Kohl's right-wing government had put on it, which stated it was a memorial to the division of the city and the "victims of the Communist reign of violence." For the longest while, police were unobtrusively stationed around the memorial because people kept defacing the inscription. As for the stretch of Wall itself, it's been treated by a graffiti-proof chemical, although that hasn't stopped scratchers from tagging the stainless steel inside the place.

Across from the Brunnenstr. stretch of Wall is a documentation center I admit I haven't gone to see, although I did visit it when it was owned by the church, on whose land the memorial wound up standing once the post-Wall paperwork was done. Back then, it appeared that the most horrible crime the Wall had occasioned was the dynamiting of the Schrippenkirche, the famous church which had stood there and had been caught between the two Walls. (Yes, there were two: a rather plain one on the eastern side, followed by a stretch of no-man's-land which was filled with booby-traps, dogs, and patrolling soldiers, and then the Wall we all know from the pictures.) In conjunction with the opening of the current documentation center, though, a number of glass signposts were erected all along Brunnenstr., which, because of its location with residential neighborhoods on either side and a huge wooded graveyard at the point where the current memorial stands, became a notorious death strip, with numerous escape attempts, many successful, occuring along the street. Also, the first person shot while trying to escape, a 19-year-old who bled to death in full view of West Berlin police who were unable to reach him without causing an international incident, was on Brunnenstr. right near the Nordbahnhof checkpoint. (There were numerous checkpoints, but they were all German-German for people going east to visit relatives; international visitors either had to use Checkpoint Charlie or Friedrichstr. station).

Given the horribleness of the Brunnenstr. official memorial and its inscription still taunting its neighbors, the cry of bad taste for Frau Hildebrandt's mass of crosses just doesn't wash, though. What's at play is a bit more subtle. It's the thing that's still haunting this city, the condition the Germans call Mauer im Kopf, the wall in the head. There's no question in my mind that it exists on both sides. Easterners are nostalgic for a time of full employment, even though it often wasn't very fulfilling work and it would eventually have bankrupted the country, since it depended on subsidies from Russia. Westerners are nostalgic for a time when West Berlin had its own subsidies, provided by the West German government and the governments of the Allies which occupied West Berlin until 1994. But Mauer im Kopf also means shoddier goods sold in the east (one need only visit a grocery store over here to see that in action), a persistent stereotyping of the other guy (Ossis are lazy and dumb; Wessis are yuppified and snobbish), and a general refusal (predominantly on the part of the Wessis) to visit the other side of town. Why, on my way back from Checkpoint Charlie I ran into an American who's been here for ages, and he told me he'd just rented a studio over here in the East. "I'm getting to like this part of town," he said. For those of you who don't remember the exact date, the Wall opened on Nov. 9, 1989.

But the right-wing mentality which operates the Museum am Checkpoint Charlie and is painfully obvious in the Widow Hildebrandt's public statements finds very little sympathy in official quarters in Berlin today. Yes, the Senate is governed by a coalition of the SPD (social democrats) and the PDS (successors to the communists, but really more a party of the left these days), and that, I think, actually does represent the feelings of Berliners who care to vote (and about 90% of them do, by the way). Frau Hildebrandt may want to keep the wall up in her own head, for very good business reasons as well as very questionable political reasons, but that doesn't mean she gets to trample the rights of the rest of us.

I say tear the damn things down.

HARALD'S DEAD (Pope, Too)

Boy, would I not like to be a tabloid journalist in Berlin right now; I'd be looking at a plate from which the meat and potatoes had been removed. (Everyone knows Germans don't eat vegetables).

Somehow, I missed the news that Harald Juhnke had died. For the scandal sheets, this is equivalent to Michael Jackson, P Diddy, and Britney Spears all perishing in a nightclub fire. One thing you could always count on: when the news slowed down, Juhnke would be in the headlines.

Not being German, and not being of a certain age, of course, I completely missed Juhnke's career. From what I've been able to make out, he was an entertainer who somehow survived the war, and built a postwar career as sort of Germany's answer to Frank Sinatra. Like Sinatra, he was a copious drinker, and like Sinatra, he recorded "New York, New York," only with new lyrics so that it came out "Berlin, Berlin." I've never had the pleasure of reading the words Juhnke pasted on to the song, but I'd like to give them a check for accuracy.

It was Juhnke's drinking that made the headlines, though. He was one of those people who'd drink in binges, who'd get blind drunk and keep on going for days. Unfortunately, unlike some people, he was a public figure, and he'd wind up pitching face-first into his dinner or collapsing in a hotel lobby somewhere and it'd make the news. One particularly horrible incident I remember was a series of photos with a screaming headline, "JUHNKE STAGGERS DOWN AN ALLEY." You could really see the pain and confusion on the poor guy's face; clearly he had no idea where he was, or what the flashing lights were all about as the vampires fed off of his disgrace. Vampires? That's being nice. I remember another front-page story which announed "We bought Harald Juhnke drinks to see what he'd do." Well, he did what you'd figure he'd do.

So as I spent my first few years in Berlin trying to figure out who this drunk was, I missed the fact that, when he was relatively sober, he was actually a star who commanded big fees, appeared on television, and all the rest. This was as much because German celebrity culture mainly focuses on people who are only celebrities in Germany as because German television, where I'd probably have caught his act, is so bad it dares you to watch it most of the time.

But because Juhnke showed up in the news so often, he was one of the few German celebrities whose name became part of the background noise here, and it didn't take long to figure out the cat-and-mouse game with the press, as well as the fact that he was famous for another reason. Then, he shocked everyone: he was going to retire. Apparently he'd made an ill-fated attempt to crack Hollywood (like they needed a middle-aged German alcoholic with no acting training) and then realized that maybe a dignified retreat from the scene was the wiser thing to do. He set a date for his farewell concert, and it sold out in mintues.

It was the farewell concert that brought to my attention that there was actually something to the man. As an opening act, he'd chosen Jocelyn B. Smith. She, too, is a local fixture, a black American singer who's decided that Berlin would be the place she'd make it in show-biz. Talented, but directionless, not averse to playing up the sort of weird exoticism Germany feels towards black people, an exoticism that's not quite racism and not quite not, she's always playing around, never quite breaking through. But Juhnke's gesture was moving; it was a sort of passing of the baton to the younger generation, giving her a chance to be seen by the faithful fans who'd stood by him all these years.

But when she took the stage, something horrible happened. Some of the audience started to boo, and others started yelling "Get the nigger off!" Juhnke stormed on stage and announced that he was not going to perform to an audience that behaved like that, that he'd chosen this singer himself, and that he was shocked and mortified that his fans would perform like this. It worked: the boos died away, and he got a round of applause, and Jocelyn went on with the show.

And, unlike a number of rock bands I could mention, Juhnke stood by his decision to retire. Not long afterwards, he entered a rehab facility, and it was announced that he wasn't in very good shape. Then he moved to a care facility, and there was much publicity as the press got all hypocritically concerned. And then, a few days ago, he died.

He managed to exit at about the same moment as the Pope did, which is probably why I didn't notice. The press, for their part, had tried to find other scandalous people to write about, but it just wasn't the same once Harald was off the set, and now he was gone for good. Pretty soon it'll be July, and we'll be moving into the Sommerloch, the "summer hole" where nothing happens. This was usually the time when we'd see the Harald headlines, but for the past few years, they haven't been there. And now they won't be, ever again.

I guess the moral of this is that everyone likes a scapegoat for their own failings, and that more than one drunk was moved to point at him and think "See, I'm not so bad." I have no idea what gifts this man may have had, but I do thank him for alerting me to the nature of celebrity journalism in this country. And I still do want to see those lyrics to "Berlin, Berlin."

Amsterdam

I'm still mulling over my trip to the States and my return, but I also wanted to write about the city I left from and returned to.

At least until those new direct flights I mentioned come on line you can't fly to the States directly from Berlin, so it's much cheaper to fly out of a place that does have direct flights. like Amsterdam. Plus, I had friends I wanted to see on each end of the trip there, and I could afford the train ticket. Train travel is wonderfully relaxing, and I needed to relax.

There was a point at which I thought I was going to move to Amsterdam: my friend Alex had discovered that a major newspaper there was going to launch an English-language magazine and needed an entire staff. This was perfectly suited to what I knew how to do, so I hotly pursued it. A good job in a city I'd come to like sounded pretty good, although in the end, both this project and another that cropped up simultaneously with it turned out to be chimeras.

But after this latest trip there, I somehow feel I dodged a bullet. I still like the place, and I'll happily visit when the opportunity and means coincide, but I don't think I'd like to live there. And since I know it's a place a lot of Americans fantasize about moving, maybe I should explain that a little better.

Part of it is the stairs. If you've ever been to a house in Amsterdam, or even some hotels, you know what I'm talking about: they're incredibly narrow, making it impossible to really stand on the step with any authority, and they're pitched at an incredible angle. Me, I've got acrophobia, and I've stood at the top of a couple of Dutch staircases and felt that cold sweat coming on. Not everywhere in Holland: mostly Amsterdam. The reason, Alex informs me, is that taxes on houses were levied based on how wide the house was, so you wouldn't want to have too fat a house or you'd be paying too much to the government. I'd also conjecture that the lots aren't too deep, either, since otherwise the stairs could be pitched more liberally. It's a little thing, maybe, but it sure was odd seeing my friend Mike climbing the stairs in his place like a ladder, stretching out his arms and pulling himself up by his hands as much as he was using his feet. But he got up and down fast.

That seems like a little thing, but big things are made up of little things. There's a parsimony about Dutch culture that I'm not comfortable with, and it goes way back, as Simon Schama proves so entertainingly in his book The Embarrassment of Riches, a lovely account of how the Dutch Calvinist religious beliefs started conflicting with their day-to-day life once the nation became one of the biggest mercantile powers on earth. Things have changed since the 16th Century, of course, but some of the basic issues remain. It seems perfectly logical to me that they'd make their staircases dangerously steep to save a bit of money -- and that they'd levy a tax that made it seem necessary.

Of course, you don't see that walking around. And I did a bunch of walking. For my return, I'd gone and given myself a treat -- two nights in a five-star hotel via Priceline for $88 a night. Unfortunately, I'd checked not only the button for "Central and Museum District" but also "South," so I wound up at the Holiday Inn by the RAI convention center, way south. A few minutes with a map showed me that I was theoretically only 45 minutes' walk from the central section I knew well, and after 12 hours on various airplanes and my refreshing jet-lag nap I was ready to take that walk, especially since at the end of it was the Spui and the fabulous Kantijl en de Tiger, a great Indonesian restaurant (most of the time: there seem to be two chefs, one better than the other, and I lucked out this time). So off I went, finding Beethovenstraat easily enough, and started the hike.

One reason I don't own a bike (another thing that'd get me funny looks if I lived in Amsterdam) is that I really do enjoy seeing things at a walker's pace, from a walker's perspective, without having to worry about traffic all the time. I look in shop windows, peek in apartment windows out of the corner of my eye, and let myself free-associate about what I'm seeing. And as I made my way up Beethovenstraat, something came to me: I was surrounded by the less picturesque Amsterdam, the part of town where people might actually live -- where I, for instance, would almost certainly have wound up if I'd gotten a job there. Out of nowhere, I got a strange feeling: these apartments were small. They had to be: there were a lot of them. Now, I knew, intellectually, that Holland is the most densely populated country in Europe by a long shot, but all of a sudden I had that made visible. My apartment here in Berlin is small, too, but I get the feeling that it'd be larger than average in Amsterdam.

But even fantasizing enough money for something bigger, the density is something that's going to be with you every time you leave the house. It's one of the good things about Berlin: because until recently they couldn't build much higher than five stories, and because the place is sprawled out like Los Angeles, it's a big, populous city, but it's just not as dense. It's broken up by the largest per-square-mile ratio of green-space of any European city. I've never felt jammed in here. And I have in Amsterdam, and in Paris, too, for that matter. It's not exactly oppressive, but it is annoying, and that could escalate.

Offsetting that, of course, are a lot of positive things about Amsterdam. It's genuinely multi-cultural: on the way from the Holiday Inn I saw posters for the upcoming Zimbabwean election, since, presumably, expat Zimbabweans were going to cast absentee ballots just as I had back in November. (I also saw a lot of posters slapped up here and there with a picture of a stern-looking Middle Eastern man and the caption JIHAD IS OVER IF YOU WANT IT, which I thought was pretty good). The Dutch are, to a point, tolerant (although the impulses that made Pim Fortuyn a star bubble beneath the surface, just like they do all over Europe), and this is something I appreciate. The people are by and large friendly, and I have to say that the women seem happier than Berlin women, who always strike me as looking like they're voluntarily reporting to their own execution. And there's a whimsy to Dutch culture that I think Americans notice, certainly an unknown quality in Germany, where the same impulse tends to come out either as kitsch or scatology.

But...could I live there? I don't think so. My Dutch friends hate it when I say this, but, in the end, it's another Germanic culture, if we divide Western Europe up into Germanic and Latin cultures, which makes sense to me (Belgium, for instance, is right on the border of the two). There's a Protestant rectitude, a certain amount of uptightness that no quantity of semi-legal pot from a coffeehouse is going to relax, underlying the vibe in Amsterdam, and for the moment I've had enough of that. And there's also the little problem of having to learn Dutch -- not just as a courtesy, which is why I'd do it in the first place, but in order to get a residence permit now you have to be able to speak it, and I'm just not interested in learning yet another language, one that very few people in this world speak. And yes, I know they all speak English there. It's the mandatory aspect that gets my goat.

Nope: like San Francisco and Paris -- but deeply unlike them as they are unlike each other -- Amsterdam's the proverbial nice place to visit that I wouldn't want to live in. And next time I'll know how to game Priceline better, too.

What It Was Like, Part 1

"So...what was it like?" It's what everyone wants to know when you go on vacation, after all. So, not to promise there'll be a Part 2 to this, but here are some impressions, sort of free-association-like.

There was extra security at the airport, and the airport folks felt perfectly fine about letting us know that it was because we were flying to America that they had to ask all these questions. It seemed to vex them no little amount. Once in the air, though, there was a definite damper on the mood. Maybe I just drew a cranky flight crew, but levity of any sort was discouraged with icy looks, and there's a new protocol for using the bathrooms they didn't explain to us, so I almost caused an alarm in the middle of the flight when I tried to get to the john forward of where I was sitting instead of going to the back. The tension certainly does accrete during a ten-hour flight, so I was jumpy when I got off.

Of course, for the 20-minute flight from Houston to Austin, we had to change buildings, so after dropping off my luggage and hiking to the building where the new gate was, there was additional security to go through, and here they made us take our shoes off. This remains the stupidest part of airport security, in my opinion. Have they ever found anything in shoes? Further, this was supposedly implemented after that British half-wit tried to light alleged bombs in his sneakers, and yet according to the signs I saw on my way out of the country, it's only starting on April 15 that people will not be allowed to carry cigarette lighters on their persons or in their carry-ons. But making people take their shoes off is a major inconvenience, and focuses one's attention on the fear that's so important to this administration's retaining control. One friend noted that the practice was discontinued in the Austin airport for a while, but reinstituted just before the election. Aha.

The next major problem came at the hotel. Although my hosts had arranged to pay for it, the hotel required $50 or a credit card for "incidentals" like phone calls. Due to my financial catastrophe, I've lost my last credit card and it's very unlikely I'll ever have another. In Europe, this isn't such a big deal, but in America it means you're either a nobody or some species of criminal. Since it was Saturday night, and late, I didn't have access to my bank, so I asked if I could perhaps have my phone turned on until I could get some American cash. The answer was no. "It's our percedure," the robot-like girl at the desk said. And there was no way of talking her out of it. She, however, was a trainee, so I figured the day shift would be better. And it was. The woman turned me right on, and I went about my business all day, doing the usual things to get set up for a week's stay in a hotel: buying coffee and breakfast stuff, and, of course, getting set up to see some friends for dinner. Getting back to the hotel late, I found a message from Ms. Percedure telling me that the three calls I'd made amounted to $1.50, and that my phone had been cut off until I could pay it. Having checked my e-mail, I discovered that of the nearly $3000 I was owed, not a cent had made it in yet, so I was stuck with about twenty bucks in cash. I wasn't about to give in on this one. Neither, unfortunately, was she. It took two days and a visit from someone who had much, much better things to do than deal with this before it was made clear to the hotel that I was not a sleazy criminal, that I would, in fact, pay my incidentals bill (which came to something like $6.00 on the day I checked out), and that if I skipped, he would pay.

This sort of surly, no-exceptions, humorless vibe, I found, was all over the place. Do what you're told, the feeling was, or we'll fight. Weirdly, nobody seems to mind.

The other motif of the trip was overconsumption and overproduction. This was evident on my first full day, when I went to pick up my rental car. I managed to get a PT Cruiser (the most-stolen car in Holland, I later learned), which looks cool but is actually an adolescent SUV, especially as regards gas mileage. Man, what a hog! But I wasn't aware of that as I stood by it waiting for the guy to fill out the paperwork, and stared at the vehicle which was filling -- and I mean filling -- the rental agency's carwash. It was called an Armada. Later in the trip, I got to see numerous idiots driving Hummers bedizened with enough chrome to make oncoming drivers require sunglasses. Gas is over two dollars a gallon; what are these people thinking?

Probably the same thing I noticed when I drove through my old neighborhood and saw where old houses had been demolished to make room for structures that filled every square inch of space on the lot they were built on. No yards for the kids to play in, but then, people who live in houses like that don't let their kids play outdoors unless it's an organized sports activity for which they'll get extra credit and thereby make it easier for them to get into college. The houses seemed to be constructed from some sort of plastic material, but I didn't bother to touch them for fear of setting off an alarm.

I got to eat out a lot, in part thanks to friends who bought me meals as I continued to wait -- and wait -- for my checks to come. As I often do when I'm worried about money, I ate too much. Even so, it was hard to finish the portions in most restaurants, and I'd get that unpleasant sweaty feeling of being over-full before the plate was cleaned. That said, I noticed fewer morbidly obese people than I have on previous trips. Either people are getting back into shape, or they've died off. But trips to the supermarkets confirmed that the cheaper the food, the larger the container you can buy it in. I saw sacks of potato chips that'd take two people to lift.

Of course, I spent my whole time in Austin (with the exception of one trip to San Marcos to see a panel on Grover Lewis and to celebrate his widow's donating his archives to Texas State, as well as the publication of Splendor in the Short Grass, the new collection of his writing), and thus I think I avoided a lot of the worst culture-shocking I might have encountered had I ventured too far past its city limits. Not that I think I could live in Austin again, but the worst of the right-wing theocratical mind-set is pretty alien to the place still. I'm not convinced it is up in, say, Dallas. But then, why would anyone go there?

As to overproduction, it was very evident at SXSW, as it has been for some time. There's simply too much music out there, and, for me, at least, sifting through it has ceased to be any fun at all. The sheer noise when one walks down 6th St. during SXSW -- music pounding out of just about every structure on the street at maximum level -- is extremely disheartening. Not to mention that with something like 1400 performers on deck, it's impossible to figure out if any of it's worth listening to. I found some (Susan Cowsill, Jason Moran, a strange band from Cincinnati called the Heartless Bastards who may have to change their name if James McMurtry's long-standing band hears of their existence), but in the end, the amount of game I caught wasn't worth the irritation of the hunt.

Or maybe I was just worn down from arguing with hotel robots and compulsively checking my bank balance (one of the checks -- the really big one -- hasn't shown up yet, four weeks later) and waiting for the folks I was supposed to meet in Louisiana to get in touch (they never did, so yet another year has gone by without my getting over there, dammit -- not that I'd have had the money to do it this year anyway), and wondering at the new Whole Foods Market in Austin, the most over-the-top food store I have ever seen, with its $18 pasta bar and huge underground parking garage and incomprehensible layout, a far cry from the homey, friendly place just down Lamar where that gigantic chain started out, a place so friendly that when it was flooded in 1983 (I think it was), people volunteered their time to help them dig out. Nowadays, if that happened in this place, I imagine the response would be quite different.

I dunno, there must be some good things about this trip to remember, but they're just not coming at the moment. I'm sure I'll have more to add, but I'm also aware that the snow has gone from Berlin and I have something I've been wanting to write for some time that's dependent on my taking photos of the bare ground, more evidence, if you need any, that Berlin bites.

Stay tuned.