How I Got The Posters

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Computer Followup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The S Word And The Hoodies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Service Is Not A German Word

Part one: American Service

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part two: German Service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Soft Opening

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

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

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

Sommerloch '06, Part 7

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Important Technical Update

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

You might want to change your bookmarks.

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

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

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

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

Sommerloch '06, Part 6: Mauer im Herzen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boycott the Checkpoint Charlie Museum.

Sommerloch '06, Part 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I fired her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until then, I'm stuck.

***

Achtung, Deutsche Telekom!

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

And that was it.

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

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

Sommerloch '06, Part 4

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Sommerloch '06, Part 3

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

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









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

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

***

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

Hamburger Gefunden

We interrupt this Sommerloch with an important announcement.

An edible hamburger has been found in Berlin. And not just edible: actually quite good.

If that news is all you need to hear, head off to Hazelwood, Choriner Str. 72, at the corner of Zionskirchstr. in that grey area between Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte. If you need more info, just read on.

To call this joint "bare bones" is to glorify it. My guess is that someone decided they had a genius in the kitchen and just opened up a business. There are absolutely no decorative features in the entire place, which didn't bother me because I ate out on the sidewalk at one of the tables just like everyone else did. But when the bad weather sets in, someone might want to give this some thought.

The menu, too, is small. There were two sandwiches, the hamburger and a bizarre Reuben made with ham (!), a salad, and a soup. Oh, and I guess dessert, because a table near us got a huge sundae. There was an abundant cocktail menu, but that's not what we came for.

The biggest downside to Hazelwood is the price. The hamburger alone (it comes with a side of rather rough-cut coleslaw) set me back €6.50, which is a lot for 200g of beef. Upgrading it to "deluxe" -- ie, the addition of a smallish side of previously-frozen french fries -- was an additional €1.50. I was hoping for a small salad (the coleslaw not being mentioned on the menu) and was presented with the Hazelwood Salad, €4.50, which was a Thai-style chicken, ginger, fish sauce-and-lime, chopped peanuts salad which was more than I wanted but only disappointed because I'd made a nearly identical one two days earlier. Draft Pilsner Urquel -- excellent -- was €2,90.

But even at that price, the hamburger was worth it. Or, I should say, cheeseburger; a slab of that unique cheddar available in Berlin, the one with absolutely no taste, was added on top. But the meat is mixed with a wonderful onion and spice mixture -- not a lot, but enough to subtly flavor the meat -- and I was happy I hadn't drowned it in ketchup (which would only have happened accidentally, but you can't put ketchup back in the bottle). Now, the fact that it's not, like every other hamburger I've had in this city but one, a pre-frozen, cereal-laden hockey puck is remarkable in itself. (The other one is the hamburger at the Hard Rock Cafe, which I'm not sure is still in business, the Berlin one being the biggest money drain in the entire Hard Rock empire, but all expats in Europe know that the only reason to go to the Hard Rock wherever you are is to get a decent burger). But there's an additional technological breakthrough here: the burger is served on what seems to be a hunk of ciabatta instead of one of those instantly-soggy, fall-apart hamburger buns that are the shame of a country with great baking skills. Thus, the structural integrity of the bread is maintained throughout the consumption of the burger.

A lot of Germans have a fear of ground beef, for some reason, which is weird considering they eat Hackpeter, raw ground pork mixed with spices, for breakfast. This, I think, is the rationale for the frozen patties; untouched by human hands, they go on the griddle frozen and come off hard. And that's another thing about the Hazelwood burger: it's actually grilled instead of griddled! This gives the patty a nice crisp surface and extra flavor, not to mention extra authenticity points.

Service was fast and friendly, another anomaly. And, after getting slightly lost on the way over, it was encouraging to see how close to the house this actually is. The price will keep me away as a frequent visitor, but I'll definitely be back.

Thanks to Radio Free Mike and Bowleserised for the tip!

And now back to our regularly-scheduled Sommerloch.

Sommerloch '06, Part 2

Wow, things really have gone quiet around here. Well, "quiet" isn't exactly the right word. I seem to have a knack for living near sound-enhancing bricks. In Austin, I lived behind a school, which had a big playground, and the walls of the school bounced any sound made on the playground right over to me. Now, you'd think that this would be a pain during the day, but kids make so much noise you can't tell how loud it really is. True, there was a lesbian who came to practice bagpipes, enamored of the brick acoustic effect, but she wasn't there all that often. (She managed to scare the lizards in my garden, though: they immediately changed color and scampered away). No, what was bad was the nighthawks.

Nighthawks have an amazingly annoying courtship ritual. The males soar high, then drop with outstretched wings, and recover before they hit the ground. This makes the wings vibrate and create a zooming sound. So when the neighborhood nighthawks discovered the amplification qualities of the schoolyard, every horny male nighthawk in Texas went over there to broadcast amplified zooms. And they were loud. Naturally, as you can tell by the name, they did it at night. Late at night. And there was me, trying to sleep with the windows open. Fat chance.

There are no nighthawks in Berlin, of course, but there sure are crows. Not those small, glossy ones you have in America. These guys are big, and are properly referred to as the hooded crow. And they make a variety of sounds, all vaguely cawing. I have no idea if some of these are mating strategies, but several of them have discovered the brick wall in the parking lot outside my window, so that when they call, they sound like they weigh about 25 pounds. There are those who say crows can be domesticated and kept as pets, and that they can be trained to talk like a parrot can. I can't verify the former, but there's one crow who's been visiting this year whose cry, I swear, is "VALLLLyum!" Perhaps this is a new species, and we can add to the hooded crow and the carrion crow the new mutation, the Valium crow.

Or maybe he's just as annoyed with the little electric toys the neighbor kids zoom around the parking lot in as I am.

***

Some time ago, I mentioned that our building had acquired a real live Countess, although you'd never have guessed it from talking to her, and I wrote a post about minor German royalty and how it's all over the place. The Countess got a little upset because I gave her name, and she was Googling herself instead of doing her schoolwork and found the post, so I removed her name at her request.

I walked into the courtyard the other day, though, and saw her directing a fleet of movers who were packing her things into their trunk. "I'm outta here!" she said in her fine Valley Girl accent. "I gotta have my space!" So now my landlord's here getting the apartment ready to rent again, and no doubt worrying about it, because this is the worst possible time to have a vacancy: the rental market in Berlin is wide open (especially for office space), the universities are out, and nobody has any money.

So now my building is full of no-counts, and we have no Countess. We still do have Herr Böse and Herr Schlecht, though. And, unfortunately, for a while longer, Herr Ward.

***

One industry that's going great guns here is graffiti. The owners of the building next door have decided that the best way to stop the tagging on the wall closest to the street is to hire a crew of professional graffiti painters, and I have to say, what they've come up with so far is horrible. They keep overpainting stuff, though, and maybe once they get things layered a bit more it'll look better, but I could have come up with a dozen locals who could have done better than what's up there right now.

On the other hand, creative graffiti still pops up now and again, and one of the best new tricks I've seen was when I was walking down Bergstr. on the way back from the supermarket and saw some strange English written in chalk on the sidewalk. It took a minute, but it dawned on me that I was reading the lyrics to ABBA's "Super Trooper" backwards. As I got to the Ackerkeller, the gay bar that took over the space that was formerly Bergwerk, a student bar, I found the start of the song, along with the inscription "Street Karaoke #2: Super Trooper by ABBA." And just on the other side of the bar, there was Street Karaoke #1, some German pop song whose lyrics seem to be so twistedly psychosexually right for relationships in this country (something like "I know you lie when you say you love me, but you are mine and I am yours, so I lie, too, when I say I love you") that I'm sure it was a hit.

Still, I like the idea of street karaoke, and pass it along to others who might like to experiment with the idea. Good penmanship, though, is a must.

***

I'm wondering if I'm so out of it that I've missed the idea that every European household has to have seven or eight shishas, or elaborate Arab hookahs. That's the only reason I can think of for the fact that there are, within two blocks of my house, two huge stores selling them, everything from five-foot-tall floor models to portables which come with their own intricate wooden case. One of these stores is in a really big space which used to be a bank. I have never seen anyone except the shopkeepers in either one of them, which makes me suspect that, like the dozens of Arab-run Internet cafes which erupted like mushrooms after a storm around here, they may not be in business strictly to make money.

Sommerloch '06, Part 1

"Boy, this sure is a quiet city," said the visitor from Austin. Yeah, and it's also green and warm. Hardly typical at the moment, in other words. The key word is warm, though: 36 degrees C, 97 degrees F yesterday, although some cooling breezes came in at night and mellowed it down about ten degrees F. Me, I don't mind. This heat is wonderful, as long as I don't have to rush around in it. I'm just kicking myself for not planting basil this year; in the cold, rainy summers we've had these past couple of years, it develops mighty roots, and little plants about an inch and a half high. I could have had a rain-forest, a jungle of the stuff this year! And yet I know if I plant some today by the time it comes up it'll be cold and rainy outside.

***

One thing about the WM that I'm already missing is the change in opening hours for stores, the convenience of having them open until 10 and open on Sunday. I got used to it all too quickly, I'm afraid. But help may be on the way: the Bundestag, the federal legislature, recently passed a law giving the individual states the power to regulate a lot of things the feds used to, and one of those things is opening hours. So it might be you'd find Berlin open all day Sunday, and Bavaria closed up like a prison. At any rate, my prediction is that as Christmas gets nearer, Berlin's going to experiment with keeping things open longer, and they'll notice a permanent upsurge in business. People found themselves enjoying the convenience despite their ingrained instincts and years of social programming. Once they get used to this, who knows what frontiers await? Itemized phone bills! Friendly sales-clerks! Errr, well, let's not get too carried away.

***

Berlin is a place deeply suspicious of entrepreneurship, and anyone who attempts to start a business here is faced with amazing obstacles every step of the way. And heaven forbid you try something which hasn't been tried before!

But still, every now and again, it happens. Thanks to Brent for passing along news of the Teddy Tour Berlin, a brand-new business right here in the Weltstadt. Here's the deal: you mail your teddy to these folks and they take it on a tour of Berlin, one of three they offer. Why the vacation? They figure it's stressful being a teddy, on the receiving end of your owner's tears and heartbreak, your job being to comfort a much larger organism who could easily destroy you. So: send the little feller on a vacation with people who'll show him around. You get back a certificate showing he's taken the tour, photos (on a CD if you choose the "Exclusive" or "Deluxe" tour), a postcard, a travel pass (Germans love documents, can you tell?), and "a little surprise" after your pal is mailed back to you, fully insured.

The larger question, though, is why Berlin? Few enough humans come here to relax and de-stress. The Teddy Tour folks mention that Berlin has a bear on its flag, and so it's a place where a bear can feel proud. Okay. I'm not a bear, let alone a teddy bear, so maybe I don't understand the psychology behind this. I would think that, being bears, the teddies would rather go hiking in Alpine valleys and so on, but like I said, maybe these folks know best.

What they do seem good at, though, is publicity: the first Teddy Tour sold out, and look at the prices for the three tours! (I like the fact that all the tours go to the Siegessäule, better known as the large column with the winged Nike on top that was a fixture of Wings of Desire, but only the deluxe tour takes the bears to the top of the thing for the view).

And it must be mentioned that if bears are going to be touring, they have to take care: last month one of the brown bears Italy introduced into its northern provinces as a means of trying to re-establish a wild species crossed the line into Bavaria, where, as bears do, it ate a couple of sheep and the odd rabbit. The Bavarians' reaction was predictable enough: SHOOT IT! Wildlife lovers got up in arms, but the Bavarian hunters grabbed their own arms and soon Bavaria was home to an ex-bear. So maybe if you think someone needs a vacation, Berlin is the safest solution after all.

***

Mind you, if I'd had a rifle yesterday, I might well have gone bear-shooting, thanks to stumbling on Bebelplatz (site of the Nazis' fabled book-burning) and finding the United Buddy Bears all standing around in a circle there. These goddam things are everywhere: businesses put them up outside, with their logos painted on them by "artists," and it all reeks of commercialism and desperation. The UBBs, of course, put a different face on it, promoting world peace and the friendship of all children, and blah blah blah. But they're just as annoying as the "Germany Land Of Ideas" crap that's all over town (not just the Big Pill behind the Reichstag, but huge musical notes ruining the Gendarmenmarkt, a big pile of books competing with the UBBs in Bebelplatz, which must be the city's epicenter of kitsch at the moment, and a gigantic sneaker by the Hauptbahnhof), in a syrupy irritating way.

Didn't all of this start in Chicago with the Cow Parade and people painting cows? And yet you see them all over the place now, cows and bears and eagles and any other damn symbol a city wants to use to promote itself, smeared with logos and ads, kitsch posing as art in the service of a Good Cause and civic improvement.

Not to mention the fact that between the huge pile of books and the Buddy Bears, the real attraction of Bebelplatz, the moving, understated monument to the book-burning, is all but lost in the hoopla.

The Summerloch Starts Here

Image courtesy QMDS500

The yuppies next door have given their kids two instruments of torture: an electric automobile and an electric motorcycle, both of which sound like dentists' drills and each of which costs over a thousand Euros apiece. I propose adding the above conveyance to the mix. Of course, the little girl will have to be replaced by an automaton, but if the gator is hungry enough it'll have served its purpose.

***

Monday morning Berlin will at last see the start of this year's Sommerloch, the "summer hole" in which nothing whatever happens. Meanwhile, we still have the Love Parade to endure, although it's becoming more and more irrelevant to the city and more and more a ploy to get the local equivalent of New York's bridge-and-tunnel kids -- in this case clueless rural kids in search of a little sex, drugs, and techno -- into Berlin and squeeze as much money as possible out of them while bombarding them with branding opportunities for the latest crap merchandisers want them to buy. You'd think this isn't such a lucrative move on the city's part, but there are also plenty of clueless young jet-setters who come in for this and camp out in expensive hotels.

Fortunately, its impact on my own neighborhood is minimal, but I'd sure hate to be a tree in the Tiergarten (Berlin's huge central park), after a month of football fans relieving themselves followed by a million or so b'n'ts doing the same. Still, as an index of the city's financial desperation, this all is quite instructive. No doubt there are people huddled away in rooms right now trying to figure out what next summer's attractions will be. Another Love Parade, for sure. But what could top the WM?

***

It's also an index of how slim the local music scene has gotten. Very few big concerts on the agenda for this summer, and I suspect people just aren't going out much any more. One inescapable image, though, is that of Dieter Thomas Kuhn, the campy entertainer who gently mocks the Schlager world of German mainstream pop and who, for some reason, is playing Central Park in New York this year. Even with his posters everywhere, some people may not have noticed the logo for his booking company, DTK Musik und Marketing, which features a screaming darky. (Note, clicking that link will display the DTK MuM page only briefly, but long enough for you to get a glimpse at what I'm talking about). My question is, what on earth is he thinking? DTK, that is, not the darky.

***

Meanwhile, for a glimpse of German hi-tech, not to mention a propensity for taking credit for everything, there's this video. Not that I'm sure why a German would want to take credit for it.

***

More from the Sommerloch as it widens!

A Patriotic Utterance

I don't get into American politics here. I don't live in America, and there are many, many other bloggers who do.

I do, however, belong to the Well, an online community which just celebrated its 20th anniversary (I've only been on for five of those years), and every now and again someone there makes a comment which deserves to be spread further. Thing is, you can't read the Well unless you join, and part of the rules when you join is you can't re-post other people's stuff without their permission.

Fortunately, there are a lot of bloggers there, and the other day one of them, off the top of his head during a 20-minute break from his job, wrote one of the most concise, clear, and honest appraisals of the state of the American media I've read. And posted it on his blog.

If he'd had it up yesterday, or I'd known abut it yesterday, I would have posted it here as the best 4th of July present I could give my fellow Americans, and the many people from other countries who read this blog.

Please take a minute to read it here.

Pentimenti

I really like finding old urban relics, although they rarely last very long once they're unearthed. There are some exceptions: a small-scale model of the Statue of Liberty which once stood in Madison Square in New York while the real thing was under construction used to (and may still) stand atop a building which used to house the Liberty Warehouse right across from Lincoln Center, and could be seen from the top steps there. And in Austin, someone's kept the old winged-wheel Studebaker sign and the old hat-shop sign in good shape.

Berlin, of course, where construction is fatally married to destruction, is no place to look for such things, but occasionally one appears, for however briefly, and I try to grab it.

This one (not my photo, but used with kind permission) is a reminder that the Berliner Zeitung of today was once an East Zone paper.



Wiceguy photo

And, up in Prenzlauer Berg, one which has been there for ages, reminding us that there are still parts of this city heated by coal.



I also wonder about that odd half-timbered building you can see in that shot.

There are a few more of these around here I should grab before they're gone. I fondly remember the one near Friedrichstr. station advertising the DDR lottery (kind of hard to imagine, but apparently there was one) which vanished one day, not to mention the lovely old neon sign by the Friedrichstadt Palast with the ad for the Berlin-Moscow Railway ("Comfortable, Quick, Convenient," it lied) that gradually fell apart before it was stripped from its wall. Someday the powers that be will have had their way and Berlin will look like Paramus. Until then, I'm going to grab what I can.

Weekend Crumbs

Short Story On A Lamppost:

I was waiting to cross Torstr. on Saturday when I saw two notices newly taped on the lamppost where I was standing. The upper one said "Apartment Sought!" and showed two female stick figures. (You know, with the triangular dress thing. I guess male stick figures are naked.) One was larger than the other, and had an arrow pointing to it with the number 31. The smaller one had an arrow pointing to it with the number 3 1/2.

Underneath it was another notice which said "Part-Time Father Urgently Seeks Apartment!" This apartment-hunter was 35.

Both notices showed an appalling ignorance of current housing prices in this neighborhood, too. Guess it's been a while since they've been looking.

***

The church down the street from me owns an awful lot of real-estate immediately around it, not only the Konvikt (seminary) which adjoins the house next door, but also a parish-house on Tieckstr. which is tied to the rest of the buildings. This gets rented out to various people (there are AA meetings -- yes, they have AA in Germany -- there, for instance) from time to time, and until yesterday I'd forgotten about one of its more interesting regulars. I was coming back from the store at about 3:30 and saw two very large African women in their finest Dutch Wax finery walking down the street. As I got to the parish house, I heard singing, and remembered that there's some kind of African congregation which meets there on Sunday afternoons and has all-singing services. The first time I encountered them, I stopped under the window to listen for a while, but it became evident that there was more spirit than technique at work there. I guess things were pretty played out yesterday, though, because there were only two voices, and they were pretty hoarse.

Still, that was preferable to what happened last night, as the Konvikt had another of their appalling hootenannies, with gut-string guitars strumming and voices attempting Beatles songs and "Blowing in the Wind." Man, if I play a record that's audible to anyone after 10pm I get the cops called on me. But in yesterday's warm breezy evening, I got to endure this until midnight. Yet another argument for the separation of church and state, if you ask me!

Meanwhile, Crumbs

I'm about to go off to yet another farewell party for yet another person who's decided to leave Berlin -- there are times when if I didn't have a farewell party to go to I wouldn't have any social life at all, although of course each one diminishes the odds of having one -- but I figured it'd be worth adding a crumb or two in here.

***

As those of you who don't follow sports probably don't know, and as those of you who live in Berlin are all too aware, Germany beat Argentina last night and goes into the semi-finals. The game was at the Olympiastadion here in Berlin, and the noise went on for a good two and a half hours, as cars filled with cheering, chanting fans drove away from the stadium and into the local streets. People streamed out of shops to wave at the revellers, and, off in the distance, firecrackers and police sirens alternated. And this is for the quarter-finals!

There were cops everywhere, I noted as I paid a flying visit to Postdamer Platz, which for some reason was choked with fans. Some of them were deployed in odd places, though. A big van-load of them were on the bridge near Friedrichstr. station, for instance, possibly to spell their brethren within the station. A nice touch: on the public transportation, after the usual announcements, they tell you at Friedrichstr., for instance, that you can change there for Hauptbahnhof and the Olympiastadion -- and then repeat it in heavily accented English! This is the first time I've ever noticed our public transportation acknowledging that there are non-German speakers around. True, the ticket machines function in a couple of different languages, but that's it.

Ah, well, anything to wring the tourist dollar out of the tourist's hand.

Anyway, I'm not looking forward to Germany vs. Italy. Although I think that's not going to be played here. Still, there are plenty of Italian-owned businesses near my house (yes, another Italian deli just opened up!), so the potential for ugliness is there.

***

More like it:

There's a couple of gay guys with an apartment I pass on my way from the store each day, and they've got a penchant for decorating the outside of their third-story apartment. One spring, they had Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, complete with rubber snake (and Ken and Barbie in the starring roles) in their window-box. Today, I noticed, they've got a t-shirt taped to the window which says "FICKEN STATT KICKEN." Amen.

***

And I had a horrible revelation today. Next Sunday, when the WM finals happen, isn't the end of the horror here. No, because the Friday after that comes...the Love Parade!

Someone get me outta here!