The Polder and the City

Doesn't exactly look like Vacation Paradise, does it? Even disregarding the blue sky, it's exactly what it looks like: a suburb. A suburb of a suburb, in fact; a recent development on the polders outside of de Meern, which itself is one of the ring suburbs put up after World War II around Utrecht, Holland. Still, it's where I was based for most of the past week, and there was a real good reason for it. It was free.

My friends Brett (whom I hadn't seen in several years) and his wife Carole (whom I hadn't seen, she pointed out, in ten years), who live in Portland, Oregon, had done a house-exchange with the family who lives here, one of whom is a former Portlander. Complicating things was the fact that Carole lives in a motorized wheelchair with a ventilator, owing to muscular dystrophy. Making things much simpler was the fact that this Dutch-American family has a son who also has a chair, meaning that the garage in their house was converted to a bedroom with all accessible amenities. For a Dutch house, it's huge, so I had a place to sleep. And it's also not far from a bus stop whose bus will deliver you to Utrecht Centraal, the train and bus station downtown.

I arrived on Thursday evening, and wound up schlepping my luggage all over Utrecht, because another good reason to go last week was the Utrecht Early Music Festival, and Brett, who is a music critic who does a lot of classical reviewing (and is working on a much-anticipated biography of the late American composer Lou Harrison), had an extra ticket for that evening's concert by the Orchestra of the 18th Century. Unfortunately, the program was an all-Beethoven affair, and neither of us much likes Beethoven, myself in particular. But he had to go to it and he didn't have time to head back to de Meern before showtime. Beethoven's not my idea of "early music," but the orchestra did fine.

After that it was time to find something to eat, and we wandered around until it was too late, settling for some of those inimitable, indigestible Fried Things the Dutch specialize in at a bar featuring a fine selection of Belgian beers. Hey, they had onion rings, and they were good.

Carole's battery charger had blown earlier in the week, so she and her caretaker Susan were pretty much housebound until the technology could be worked out, but they were still up when we got there (Carole: "I don't do mornings.") and we sat up late talking and getting up to date. She'd also managed to bring her iPhone -- the only one in Europe, practically -- to use the Airport wireless system they'd set up in the house, and I was really eager to play with that.

The next morning, while waiting for everyone to wake up, I walked to the outskirts of de Meern to find a bakery and a butcher they'd told me about so I could buy some bread and cheese for breakfast. Dutch bread isn't like German bread -- it's far softer -- but makes better use of herbs and spices. And Dutch cheese, well, let's just say that the cumin Gouda and three-year-old aged Gouda I picked up were a hit.

Brett had tickets for a 2pm show in the Dom, the huge cathedral that dominates Utrecht's skyline. Clarino is a small ensemble of soprano, violin, cornetto, trombone, dulcian and basso continuo, and it wasn't done any favors by the Dom's huge, echo-y interior, but the program, of works by composers at the Danish court of Christian IV (Dowland, Schütz, and Weckmann), was excellent, although the way the soprano buzzed her r's was a bit annoying.

After that, Brett had a concert but no plus one, and I opted for a free concert of music by Salomon, who wrote some gorgeous Jewish liturgical music in the Renaissance. I wish I'd heard it; the church were it was being presented didn't look much like a church, unfortunately, and I wandered and wandered until it was too late. So I wandered some more. Downtown Utrecht is all old buildings, with two major canals alongside of which are some great cafes. I spent most of the 90 minutes I had to use up trying to figure out how the town was laid out, but those canals can be disorienting, and, of course, I got disoriented. I did find a few interesting spaces, and one of them was the Museum Catharijneconvent, a museum of Catholic and Protestant life in Holland, located in a former cloister, which I resolved to go back to. Next door to it was a building from the 15th Century, the "new slaughterhouse," whose entertaining mascot, which I dubbed the "Death Steer," I hope you can see in this photo:



After Brett and I met up at the Dom, I successfully talked him out of his one-ticket Freiburger Barockorchster Mozart show (again, not what I -- or he -- consider "early music") in favor of grabbing some dinner. Carole had gotten her charger fixed at long last and she and Susan were due to head in to see a performance of Debussy's "Chansons de Bilitis" at 10:30 with Brett (not of great interest to me and anyway, how on earth can you consider Debussy "early music?"), so we managed to time it so that we found a great, affordable restaurant, had a fine meal, and Brett dropped me off at the bus station while waiting for the girls. Fortunately for me, my brain kicked in just as he was disappearing into the huge mall that's part of the Utrecht train station and I got the house key.

Given that it was looking a lot like rain by the time I got to de Meern, I was shocked to see the two women waiting forlornly at the bus stop there. Apparently, only a few of the buses on the routes into town were accessible, and they were still waiting for one. One pulled up while I was talking to them, but it didn't have a ramp, so they went to another nearby bus stop for the next bus, and I wished them luck. Almost as soon as I got back to the house, the rain pounded down, but as luck would have it, they made the ramp-equipped bus before this happened and it didn't rain in Utrecht at all.

Saturday's early bit was spent shopping for food at the nearby supermarket (the Americans couldn't get it through their heads that everything really, truly, does shut down on Sunday), and mid-afternoon Brett and I met at the Jakobkerk for the concert I'd been waiting for (although I didn't know it at the time), by the Holland Baroque Society. This is one exciting group. Other than the fact that the composers represented were Muffat, Corelli, and Lully, I'm not entirely sure what was played, but then, that shouldn't make any difference. I know that the Corelli was a concerto grosso, a soloists-and-orchestra kind of piece in which various soloists and duos get to show off instead of a single soloist being featured, and led off the program. In seconds, it became apparent what was so cool about this band. Yeah, band: like a good jazz or rock band they paid attention to each other a lot. The lack of an actual conductor (there was a harpsichordist up front, who conducted a few moments of transition and started up each movement, but he could hardly be called the "leader" during much of the performance) meant that everyone had to be aware of what was going on. Particularly fascinating were the two lead violinists, a brown-haired woman and a blonde, both of whom were playing off each other like two jazz greats trading eights. Lots and lots of eye contact, and, overall, a sense of swing, which you could watch happening as the brown-haired violinist violated all classical protocol by occastionally tapping her feet, propelling the energy up into her hands and making sure that the kind of metronomic monotony so much Baroque music suffers from was a distant memory. They don't appear to have recorded, but they do appear to tour Germany every now and again, so I'm going to watch for them.

Saturday evening Brett and Carole had tickets to a staging of a Vivaldi opera by another young ensemble called B'Rock, so we met the ladies over at the "Deranged Rabbit," a sculpture I'd managed to miss over by the post office. You do have to wonder what people who commisson public art are thinking sometimes; this actually did look like a skinny rabbit with a really bizarre expression on his face. We wandered around a little and settled on an inconspicuous-looking place in a studenty neighborhood, and were surprised by yet another fantastic affordable dinner. (I'm going to do a separate post about food on this trip). Susan and I headed back to the polder after dinner, and apparently what we missed was a blood-and-guts fest with only minimal connection to the text (which was in Italian anyway). That was okay; I'd had my musical treat for the day.

Sunday was the festival's last day, and the grand finale concert, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir, was sold out. Brett had a ticket to the Concerto Copenhagen's peformance of Handel's Acis and Galatea at 4, but I was determined to see some of the museums that were open, including the Museum Catharijneconvent. We had cards, left by our hosts in de Meern, which got us into museums for free, so we headed off and not only got that in (some extremely nice woodcarvings that had been spared the wrath of the Reformation, and a very nicely balanced view of the whole Catholic/Protestant debacle in Holland, given that it appears the administration of the place is connected with the Catholic church) but almost had time to take in the whole National Museum of Musical Clocks and Street Organs, which is truly amazing. I headed to a concert by a mostly-Polish Baroque trio, and we had one more excellent meal before returning to de Meern to start packing.

The next day found us in Amsterdam, and here I got to play local expert, although, to be honest, I'm not really an expert. I did, however, know more of the city than Brett and Carole, and managed to bring back memories of their stay in Indonesia with a trip to the legendary Restaurant Kantjil en Tijger, one of my favorite Indonesian places in the city (the other one being up a flight of stairs that scares me, let alone Carole). Tuesday I gave them my best attempt at a city tour, as we fought to indulge Brett's insistence on finding poffertjes, which turn out to be heavy little dollar pancakes drenched in butter, and to wander through the Jordaan district, which I don't know at all. We wound up enjoying a beer in the sunshine before it vanished, and then some extremely inexpensive traditional Dutch food at a restaurant whose name I clean forgot to get, on the Spuistraat near Kantjil.

All in all, a nicely relaxing time off from Berlin, thanks to my friends' generosity in buying the train ticket and picking up tabs here and there. It reinforced my decision that Holland isn't somewhere I'd want to live, although it's nice to visit. That's the problem: it's too damn nice. There's a lack of an edge there that I think would make me nuts if I had to live with it 24/7, something I couldn't quite make Brett understand. The niceness, of course, is a byproduct of living so close together. There are no wide open spaces in Holland, and no real countryside. People are packed in, and in order to make that work, they've had to rein in some of their instincts. That's not a bad thing at all, but there's a resultant blandness that gets to you after a while, not only out on the polder, but in the cities, too.

That said, it could well be that Brett and Carole will be back in two years when the other family is ready to do a house-exchange again, and by then I hope I can sell someone on a story about the Early Music Festival. It's the biggest one in Europe, and one of the oldest, and if the less than half-week I saw is anything to go by, it's an undiscovered gem -- as is Utrecht, for that matter. I'd gladly go back. It's just that I wouldn't want to live there.

Another Interval, At Last

Tomorrow morning I'll head off to the station and get on a train to Amersfoort, in Holland, where I'll transfer to another train and wind up in Utrecht. Not exactly my top pick for a holiday spot, but it has several advantages. First, a couple of friends from the States I haven't seen in years have done a house-exchange with some people in the suburbs there, and they were nice enough to buy me a ticket to come join them. Second, it's the time of the annual Early Music Festival in Utrecht, and, although I don't have a press pass (boy, is it hard to sell stories like this!) there are plenty of free fringe activities with some younger groups, and that should be fun. Third, we'll go to Amsterdam for a couple of days and I get to show my friends around a place I actually do know something about (I've only been to Utrecht twice and didn't leave the station the second time, because the nightclub Jon Dee Graham was playing in was actually inside the station). And fourth, it's demonstrably Not Berlin. This will be my first trip out of the city limits since March.

I'm going to try to blog from the festival, and I'll be taking the camera along, although I won't post any photos until I get back here on Wednesday. Okay, maybe Thursday. Meanwhile, if anyone knows anything to do in Utrecht between concerts or knows any good restaurants there, let me know!

Still Silly

Or, of course, what you call the dog days. Supposedly ruled by Sirius, the dog star, which is strong in the sky at this time of year. But whatever you call them, they're days not exactly filled with excitement around here. Nervous tension, yes, but excitement? Nope.

Still, one has to do this and that, and so here are three extremely silly things I noticed in recent peregrenations around hip! edgy! Berlin.

* * *

Like that huge poster on the building they're renovating on Rosenthaler Platz, which gets sold to one advertiser or another for a while. Current occupant is Coca-Cola, and the part of the ad I see, doubtless having something to do with some download scheme or another (I think they've got something going with iTunes, actually), and it screams "Music on the Coke Side of Life!"

You can tell this is an ad aimed at younger folks, of course. The rest of us who lived through the '70s have had quite enough of music on the coke side of life. Every time I pass that thing I think "What, do you want to chain me to a chair and make me listen to David Crosby albums?"

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Rosenthaler Platz, the derelict building across from the Coke billboard, which once housed a Beate Uhse and then part of Sony's ill-considered street-art cooptation, sprouted some ghostly inhabitants a few weeks back:



But I guess they wanted privacy, because the last time I walked past, the place looked like this:




* * *

One of my weirder international moments came one night in the '80s in London, as some friends and I were passing through Soho, and they -- all British -- stopped and pointed. "Wow, look at that!" I saw a very well preserved '52 Mercury. "Cool car," I said, and they all gave me a weird look. "It had Texas number plates!" someone said. Well, I'd just come from Texas the night before, so that didn't even register: most all the cars in Texas have Texas license plates.

Still, it was a valuable lesson in paying attention to where you are, which is why I did a double-take while waiting for the light yesterday at Friedrichstr. and Unter den Linden. A genuine Ford Crown Victoria with New York Police Department markings, a visibar on top, and what looked, in the seconds it took to turn the corner, like two of NYPD's finest in the front seat.

Turns out it lives here and you can rent it for special occasions. Like, I dunno, arresting your ex or something.

Not that they have a monopoly on this. There's a more generic, Blues-Brothers-y, black-and-white for rent at Sage Cars, who have a lot on Brunnenstr. I pass often. They've also got a yellow Checker cab, which brings back memories of the Checker Metropolitan I once had. But that's another post.

* * *

Advertising in this country has always made me a little crazy, but then, it's not aimed at me. That's been driven home by the creepiest ad campaign I've seen in a while, BVG's "Augenblicke" posters. As you can see from the website, it's sort of a lonely-hearts thing, where you submit the story and they illustrate it. The artist is so bad that the posters attract attention to themselves, actually, so while whether he/she's capable of actually rendering a human visage so someone would recognize it is questionable, it might (shudder) accidentally work.

Ah, well, it's better to look out the window anyway, right?

August: The Silly Season

Most depressing event of recent weeks: For a while the dancer and I were splitting a lottery ticket each week, figuring that, with our respective occupations, the chances of making money doing what we do and the chances of making money on the lottery were just about even. Of course, we never even got close to winning anything and eventually we stopped.

That doesn't keep me from occasionally feeling like I should throw a couple of Euros away, though, and a few weeks back a really powerful urge came over me. But every time I'd stop at the newsstand where we used to buy our tickets, I'd take a close look at my cash-on-hand and decide against it. The pot was -- for Berlin, where the lottery jackpots are nothing next to what people in the States see -- quite high. But I decided not to.

Then, I noticed a sign in the window. Someone had won €39,900 and change there. It took every bit of logic I had at my command to convince myself that if I had played, that someone would not have been me.

(Of course, that's not really the most depressing event of recent weeks, but I've decided to keep the really depressing stuff off of here for the time being, since there's nothing to be done about it, as far as I can tell.)

* * *

Thanks to my eagle-eyed former college roommate JZ off in the wilds of Los Angeles for spotting a couple of news items which will be in the dog-bites-man category for anyone living here.

The first one notes that "German workaholics may be suffering from a lack of sex, according to a university study published Friday." The story went on to say that "A survey of 32,000 men and women by researchers at the University of Göttingen found over 35 percent of those reporting unsatisfying sex lives tended to use hard work as a diversion." Which, of course, explains all those Beamten with their desks piled high with rubber-stamps, who, I have long decided, are only allowed to mate among themselves, because it's the only way they can perpetuate their species. It's not like anyone wants a job like that.

The second one tells the sad story of a young Berlin woman named Dora, a professional model who is apparently the face of Deutsche Telekom's Call & Surf Comfort promotion. Dora, it will surprise absolutely no one to learn, has been waiting three months for Telekom to set up a telephone line in her home, and, in despair, she turned to the media, publicly giving them one week (which'll be the beginning of next week) before going to another provider. The Reuters story says "A Deutsche Telekom spokesman could not be reached for comment," although you could really leave off the last two words there and it'd be just as accurate. One bit of advice, though, Dora: if my friends' experiences are anything to go by, you won't be any happier with Alice, whose own spokesmodel has, I hope, fired her agent.

* * *

The doorbell rings. I buzz the person in. Nope, it's not FedEx or UPS with a package, it's yet another person with an incomprehensible accent jamming little bits of paper into the mailboxes as fast as he can. What a way to make a living.

Nobody who's lived here for the past ten years is going to believe this, but when I first came to Berlin in October, 1988 for a visit, the city's first pizza-delivery service had just started up. Now, this isn't to say that there weren't places that'd pack up a pizza to go, but you had to go get it. (I remember a place that I think was called Four Brothers, run by four guys from Philly down in Zehlendorf who mustered out of the Army and opened a place to serve American food, specializing in pizza and fried chicken. Long gone now, of course.)

I remember this because, in my jet-lagged haze, I came upon the guy who was sharing the apartment I was staying in carefully perusing a thin brochure he'd gotten in the mailbox. "I'm deciding which pizza to get," he said. "It's not very good, but they bring it to you!" Dang, I thought, this country must be behind the times. Just a few weeks earlier, I'd house-sat for a friend in New York and practically had to use a shovel to get the Chinese menus out of her mailbox and get to the mail I was saving for her. Early on, there were only a couple of companies doing this, one of which got busted for its inordinately-expensive (DM 50) "Pizza Colombiana" which included a gram of cocaine. (I actually saw the menu for this place, which just had a telephone number, and I don't think you would have had to be Sherlock Holmes to have cracked this case).

But the reason I bring this up is because the vast majority of the guys who stuff mailboxes these days are advertising appliance repair services, and well before pizza menus, these little cards were ubiquitous, numbering up to four or five a day. And I've been wanting to ask for a while: does anyone know anyone out there who's actually used the services on one of these cards? Wouldn't you ask a friend or someone you trusted instead of just picking up one of the thousands of cards you've gotten in your mailbox over the years (two reside in my box at this very moment) and calling some random stranger?

It's August, with so little happening that these are the kinds of things you think about...

Life In Berlin By The Numbers

As we all know, statistics lie, but sometimes not. While it's true that I take a pretty dark view of life in Berlin, I was quite amazed at what I consider the accuracy of this survey, done by the European Commission's Directorate-General of Regional Policy, measuring people's happiness with the city they live in.

75 cities in the EU, plus Croatia and Turkey, were surveyed by Gallup-Hungary, and the results tabulated into some very nice graphs. Maybe it's because the results match my prejudices, but I think this is a fasciating document.

Between 75 and 95 percent of the responses indicated that people were happy to live in the cities they lived in. First four places went to Groningen (NL), Krakow, Leipzig, and Alborg (DK). Berlin came in 57th, just below Rotterdam and Torino and just above Brussels, Warsaw, and Ankara. Even so, the results look like about 80% were happy.

Less positive were the responses to "It is easy to find a good job," with Berlin scoring over 75% in "somewhat disagree" and "strongly disagree." It's 68th from the top in this, below Dortmund and Leipzig and above Kosisce (Slovakia) and Bialystock, Poland. It looks like only about 10% strongly or somewhat agreed with this statement. Given the local unemployment figures, this is hardly a surprise.

Also unsurprising was Berlin's high rating in "It is easy to find good housing at a reasonable price," what with the current real-estate glut. We wound up near the top in this one, number seven under Leipzig, Aalborg, Braga (Portugal), Dortmund, Oviedo (Spain) and Bialystock, and above Newcastle Upon Tyne and Oulu (Finland). At the bottom? Again no surprise; Paris, with close to 100% of the respondents somewhat or strongly disagreeing. Other bad values are Dublin, Luxemburg, and Bucharest.

Next up was "Foreigners are well-integrated," and again Berlin dwells in the cellar, 73rd, above Stockholm and Malmö. A little over 50% disagreed here, and only a little over 25% seem to have agreed. On top? Cluj-Napoca, Romania; Miskolic, Hungary; Pietra Neamt, Romania; and Burgas, Bulgaria. I've never even heard of these places, to be honest, but I think it shows that the melange of cultures in these countries, absent the kind of tensions that tore the former Yugoslavia apart, plus the poverty that all inhabitants are likely to share, will bring people together, rather than apart. Certainly that was my experience in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, in the four or five days I spent there. Shortly after my arrival at the American University, where I did some journalism workshops, I was up on the roof of the building with two students waiting for my professor-friend's class to end, and the dark, swarthy one turned out to be Bulgarian and the red-headed freckled one turned out to be Turkish, and they pointed to the distant mountains and said "That's Macedonia over there, where people are killing each other over this. It just doesn't make sense to us." And, indeed, the rest of my time there bore that out splendidly. Berlin's poverty in the middle of a nation of affluence, though, plus the well-documented urge to blame the Other, doesn't bode well for this sort of unity.

"Air pollution is a big problem" is one where Berlin might have scored higher not very long ago, but here we wind up pretty much smack in the middle, with a little over 50% agreeing and about 30% disagreeing, wedged inbetween Ostrava (Czech Republic) and Glasgow. The continuing reduction of coal heating and (yes, Ostalgics, get over it) the disappearance of the Trabant have a lot to do with this, I'd say.

Next up is satisfaction with the public transportation system, and, flash strikes notwithstanding, Berlin's ninth-place position only makes me wonder how great getting around top-rated Helsinki must be. Do they have stewardesses serving refreshments? Vienna, Rennes, Hamburg, Munich, Leipzig, Dortmund and...Frankfurt on Oder?... all beat us out, too, but all this says to me is Germany's pretty good with this stuff. I've never had any problem getting around any German city I've been in, which is more than I can say for Copenhagen or London, which are well below Berlin.

"Green spaces such as parks and gardens" is another place I'd expect good numbers for Berlin. We allegedly have more green space per square kilometer than any other city in Europe, thanks in part to huge forests like the Grunewald and Berliner Stadtforst being included in the city limits. And oddly, we only score 22 in this, perhaps because the rest of the city's so grim, but atop us are such hard-to-beat places as London, Vienna, Munich, Brussels, and Glasgow, who relentlessly promote their parks to their residents, which Berlin doesn't really do. Athens, Naples, and Sofia (without doubt the ugliest city I've seen on this continent) are the cellar-dwellers here.

"I feel safe in this city" was one I was curious about, given the fact that there's so little serious crime here, yet Berliners generally are paranoid beyond belief: do they lock the front door of your apartment building at 8? They used to where I lived, and it was a pain in the ass. Yet there we are at 47, although it looks like close to 80% agree with the statement, and something less than 20% disagree. But if you look at the chart, it seems that Europeans overwhelmingly feel safe, so the ranking isn't so important until you get to the very bottom, with significant fear being registered in Bucharest, Athens, Sofia, Naples and especially Istanbul.

Given Germans' hypochondriac tendencies, I wasn't overly optimistic for the graph of people satisfied with the health care offered by hospitals, but here's one where (knock on wood) I have absolutely no experience whatever. Berlin is at 28, which makes me feel better for all those folks who scream past in ambulances down Torstr. on their way to Charité.

And, finally, the one you've all been waiting for: "The city spends its resources in a responsible way." A whopping 75% negative on this, a 71 chart placement above such models of fiscal rectitude as Sofia, Naples, Bucharest and Frankfurt on Oder. Only a very tiny number seem to strongly agree with this, and if you're one of them, I suggest you get out of the house more often.

I certainly don't have the training to decipher What It All Means in any truly scientific way, but I do love charts like this, and was just astonished at the sort of intuitive accuracy I observed here.

Anyway, I guess I should be off to Alborg to look for some excuse to live there. Naaah, too cold. Maybe Groningen? Naaah, I hate how densely-packed Holland is. Hmmm, wonder why Montpellier isn't on this list...

Actually, I'm glad it isn't. Don't want the secret to get out before I can move there and find a nice apartment. And last I looked, I'm only $12,000 and change away from that...

A Couple of E-Mails and a Photo

If you live in the U.S. and walk by newsstands regularly, you'll have noticed that Rolling Stone is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. I haven't seen any of the hoopla -- although I hear their Summer of Love issue is pretty good -- but I did get an e-mail a while back from a woman who's organizing a reunion of the San Francisco staff.

Staffs, I should say; in the early days Rolling Stone went through employees pretty often. I should know. I was one of them.

For a little over six months, from sometime in March to sometime in October, 1970, I worked at Rolling Stone. It was a very exciting time to be there, because it was exactly in that period that the magazine took off, that it printed some of the first pieces that put it on the map, and, not so coincidentally, that the record industry, whose ads it needed to survive, decided it was worth supporting.

Under the leadership of the managing editor, John Burks, we learned on our feet, most of us. I sure did; I'd joined the staff, barely 21, by far the youngest, with virtually no idea how to do anything. The first thing Burks asked me to do was to start double-spacing my copy. "The typesetters go blind if you don't," he said. That's right: we used hot type. In fact, for the first weeks I was there, we shared space with the print shop that typeset and printed the paper, at 746 Brannan Street. After that, we moved a few blocks to 625 Third Street, a brand new office building, where we had a whole floor.

That's where we worked, where we printed the stories of Janis Joplin's death, of Jimi Hendrix' death, of the student protests that summer, and of Charlie Manson, stories that won the magazine an award from the Columbia Journalism Review. By the time it arrived, pretty much everyone who'd been involved in those stories had been fired. Me, too. I was cleaning out my desk as two women from the circulation department wheeled in a big birthday cake for the fourth anniversary party. "Are you still here?" one of them asked. "Why don't you get out of here." I got out.

That's why I scratched my head when the woman organizing the reunion announced that there was a web page for it, because naturally I went right there and saw this photograph:



It's labelled "Rolling Stone staffers circa March 1971 at The Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco." Which is a hoot. Yes, it's from March, 1971, but the one thing it couldn't be is the staff of that particular magazine, because pretty much every person in that photo had been fired by October, 1970, when I left. There's Jon Goodchild, British design wunderkind, on the far left; someone I vaguely remember but can't name; Patty Hafferkamp, who'd been the receptionist; Burks in some weird floppy hat; Cindy Ehrlich, from the art department (although she often spelled Patty at reception) in her nurse's getup; Robert Altman, the photographer who succeeded Baron Wolman as the Rolling Stone photo guy (and with whose permission this photo is used); John Morthland, fired just before me, the guy who brought the Hendrix story in despite being sent down a million blind alleys -- and of course, despite not being in London; Michael Goodwin, the magazine's film writer, but also a bon-vivant and folkie; a guy whose name I forget but who was an expert in direct-mail advertising; Hal Aigner (thanks, Mike!), who never had a thing to do with RS, but was a fine writer; Phil Freund, who'd been the business manager at Wolman's Rags magazine, and Phil's wife, whose name I've forgotten.

It's a staff photo, all right (although I'm not sure why I'm not in it). It's just the staff of Flash.

Flash was all too aptly named. It blew up and never happened. We had big plans, but they came to nothing. Just why is explained much better than I could in a column by another guy who's not in the picture, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll, who was responsible for our cover story, and, indirectly, for nearly getting Groucho Marx busted by the Secret Service for calling for Nixon's assassination. That made the front page of the New York Times, but, sadly, too late to save Flash. It revived Groucho's career, though, so maybe Flash didn't die in vain.

For a while, I was thinking of attending this staff reunion, although most of the folks I'd enjoy seeing again -- Burks, Goodwin, Wolman, Carroll, Morthland, Altman -- I can see any old time when I'm where they are, because we're more or less in touch with each other. It's also around the time that Village Music will be closing, and I'd really like to be around for that. But what really caused me to draw up short was when a follow-up e-mail disclosed that the events of the reunion will cost money -- $295, plus a 3.5% processing fee.

And that brought me back to SXSW this spring, and all the writers walking around wondering where the work had gone, and saying "Thank heavens my wife has a job." (It'll cost $295 plus the fee for your wife, too). In a way, it made me sad; the planned events involve catering and space rental, and a lot of care has gone into planning them. But we're also in an era where thousands of journalists are losing their jobs, where magazines are cutting back on space for writing because ads are disappearing. Maybe not many are as broke as I am, but most writers I know, even veterans -- maybe especially veterans, perceived as being "too old" or something -- are pretty broke these days.

This is going to continue. Things have been a bit better in England, a place where I have very few contacts, but the shadow is creeping up the wall there, too. This week I got an e-mail from a mailing list I seem to have gotten on for writers for two magazines I don't write for there. The one I might write for doesn't much like Americans, and I had my go-round with them years ago, so maybe that's how I got on the list. Anyway, some excerpts from the e-mail may be of interest to those of you contemplating a career in this vanishing industry.

"Dear All

"And first the bad news. For the first time in six years we were unable to negotiate an increase in freelance writers' pay rates this year.

"We had a couple of amiable and informative meetings with [management] as usual, but by the end of their budgeting process [they] explained they couldn't offer anything – likewise no annual increase for the staff.

"The background is a steep decline in advertising – "migrated" to the web and TV – alongside corporate demands to maintain or exceed the 30 per cent net profit gold standard. Consequently, three staff editorial jobs have been lost at the same time as writing for the websites has been offloaded on to the magazine staff and editorial budget cut by a large chunk. Also you may have noticed a reduction in paper quality."

And in case you think any freelancer gets rich writing for them, they posted the rates. (Quoted in pounds: double it for dollars, multiply by 1.5 for Euros).

"Features: minima 295/266; Reviews: short/standard review 43 (150 words); others, minimum 266 per thousand."

Given that this magazine is owned by a huge conglomerate which, as Jon wryly noted in that column, doesn't care about "good writing," but, rather, in the bottom line, there's even a question of whether, or how long, the magazine can be expected to keep up that 30% profit, and how quickly they'll kill it once it sinks to below that. One way to keep it profitable is to do what they've just done: give the staff more work to do. Which means give less work to freelancers. And more staff burnouts, another feature of life at this particular magazine.

It's a shame, but it's the reality of the situation right now; the profession I somewhat accidentally entered 42 years ago this coming September is in steep decline. I happen to think there'll be a correction at some point, because people will eventually discover that they don't actually like spending their lives staring into screens, and that the elegance and resolution of a plain old piece of paper is, actually, the highest and best use of the medium of words. But we'll have to struggle through the days to come first. And there will be fallout. I, for one, am trying to figure out another way of making a living. It's not easy, after all this time, and to be honest I haven't come up with a single answer. But then, I also don't want to be the last rat off the ship.

Anyway, I probably won't be making that reunion party. Not even to hear Ben Fong-Torres do karaoke. Hell, he used to sing around the office, and I still sometimes wake up in a cold sweat remembering that.

A Blog Is Born

What are the odds that two people, both named Ward, would live within a couple of blocks of each other in Berlin? Josh Ward and I aren't related, but we do share a deep interest in food and cooking, and a few weeks ago, Josh came up with an idea for a blog aimed at helping English-speakers in Berlin cope with reproducing their favorite things in Germany. The idea is to provide information on ingredients, report on sources, investigate what's at the markets, and in general make life easier for folks who like to cook. The emphasis will be on cooking, and not on restaurants, although you can bet that if we ever find edible Mexican food for sale somewhere here we'll make a big noise about it, and frankly, if that really is a Malian imbiss going in down the street from me -- as it seems to be -- where the old Chinese one was, I'm going to report on that, too.

The blog is very much still under construction, both graphically and conceptually, and Josh has been slightly hampered, too, by the birth of a daughter who's been variously described as "beautiful" and "looks just like Josh," which is certainly confusing.

At any rate, ladies and gentlemen, here it is, Hungry In Berlin

Neighborhood Ramblings

Berlin and fashion are mentioned in the same sentence about as often as Milan and Mettwurst, but over the past weekend, Berlin actually played host to something called Fashion Week, which played out in my 'hood as something called Projekt Galerie, in which a large number of the (be nice!) second- and third-tier galleries in the area pushed the art to the side and hauled in rack after rack of clothing from designers who presumably rented the space from them. Given the quality of the art in most of these galleries, this was probably the first time they'd made any money in a great long while, and given the taste of some of the designers, hell, maybe they bought some of the art on display, who knows?

Entry was by invitation only, and for some reason, the world of fashion doesn't consider me a player, so I didn't look in, but one odd thing I noted from what I could see through the windows was that all the clothes seemed to be black, with the occasional bit of white. Whether this is the result of the informal local ban on non-black clothing, some sort of scheme to make it easier to see the lines of the garments, or what I can't say, but I did find it appropriate that the poster for the event, which was plastered on just about every flat surface around here, features (as you can see on the website) an androgynous head, blindfolded by a tightly-wrapped cloth. Was s/he being protected from the sight of the clothes, or of the art, I wonder.

At any rate, the fashionistas, who'd been rushing around clutching street maps and notebooks and wearing worried expressions, all vanished on Sunday, and I'd like to thank them for taking down all the posters, too; they were a unique form of pollution, and pretty annoying. I'm sure some money was thrown around; I saw some of these folks dining at local places, and the former copy-shop run by hostile Ossis on my block was transformed into a showroom for some designer whose sign is still in the window.

Ah, well, at least we didn't have the Love Parade this year...

* * *

It looks like street art is really in the forefront of people's minds these days. A few weeks ago, I was showing a visitor from Texas around, and noted that one of those funny alien dolls had appeared overnight on a wall by my place. "Gotta shoot that," I said, and made a note to do it. Two days later, here's all that remained:



Below, the component parts of the doll, which had horns or ears, and a tongue sticking out -- clearly the best of all of this person's work I've yet seen -- were strewn all over the vacant lot, torn apart violently. Just why anyone would want to do this is beyond me, but then, I tend to respect other people's work in the hopes that they'll respect mine. I also remember Berliners' penchant for the "if I can't make art, I sure as hell can destroy it" meme, back when Keith Haring did a section of the Wall and within two hours it had had an orange line drawn across it (as every piece documenting it that I've seen has shown).

However, it wasn't as if the lot was devoid of art, because this had appeared:



Given the amount of unexploded ordnance that keeps popping up here (anyone remember some years back when a bulldozer hitting a buried bomb took out the better part of a block in Friedrichshain and nobody but the bulldozer driver -- who was vaporized -- was hurt because they were all at work?)(Too bad that was before all the hipsters moved there, eh?) that's a pretty grim piece of art.

But it's not like the doll-maker's been silent; s/he's just learned to position the dolls so they're harder to mess with, and a couple of days ago, this showed up in a location I won't disclose (but I'm sure many can figure out):



Not a great picture, but not all that easy to shoot, given the altitude and the intricacy of the face. Anybody know of any of these outside Mitte? I think I've tracked down all the ones here at one time or another.

And this post was going to include a photo of another amusing piece of street art which appeared a couple of days ago, showing Rambo as a Renaissance Madonna, but the one nearest me has vanished. The one at KW may still be up, though. It was also going to have a demented tiny doll someone stuck to the face of Hello Kitty on the sign on the shop on Rosenthaler Str., but it, too, was gone. Gotta move fast both to put this stuff up and to document it, I guess, and the cold rain last week just made me too lazy.

Pain Hurts

I'll admit it, I'm weak. I've been looking for someone who's interested in art to go to museums and galleries with ever since the last person I knew who liked to do that moved, so when I noticed that the Hamburger Bahnhof has a free admission policy from 2 til closing at 6 on Thursdays, I mentioned it to a young woman I knew and she actually seemed enthusiastic, so we made a date for this past week.

My interest was primarily in the Brice Marden retrospective because I'd read a great review of it by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker, yet I've never "gotten" Marden at all. (True trivia fact: for a number of years he was married to Pauline, Joan Baez' older sister.)

Her interest, though, was in pain. Or, rather, Pain, the current blockbuster occupying both the Hamburger Bahnhof and the Charité's Medical-Historical Museum. Well, she's a health professional, I said. At any rate, we got there at 4 on Thursday, and went in first to the Marden, which she didn't get, either, and which is so large that I knew I'd have to dedicate a whole trip to it in order to break through the surface.

Thus, we clomped up the stairs to Pain. Now, at its heart, this is a good idea. Western art is filled with images of pain, from warriors slicing into their foes to probably the most famous and universally-distributed image of pain, Christ on the cross. It's this image which the show starts with, cleverly mixing art history with science -- or at least pseudo-science. Apparently there have been dozens of works written over the centuries about Christ's wounds, and certainly there have been plenty of representations, not only of the crucifixion itself, but the scourging beforehand, the lancing of his side on the cross, and, of course, the procession to Golgotha, wearing the crown of thorns.

Right down to the present day, there have been scientists -- or perhaps "scientists" is a better way to put it -- investigating the exact method by which a crucified person dies. In the past, they've used cadavers, but there's a guy in upstate New York who's invented a painless cross on which he can fix his volunteer subjects and wire them to measure their stress levels in various organs and muscle groups. Some of his apparatus is on display here, and it looks like something out of a very specialzed S&M club.

The Bahnhof wusses out, however, when it comes to presenting an actual crucifix. If you want to see pain and agony represented, you go directly to the experts, the Spanish. Their crucified Christs bleed, drip with gore, twist in agony, and wear facial expressions that are disturbing. The closest this show comes to that is a tiny wax model whose chest comes off to serve as a kind of guide to the internal organs for the medieval doctors it was created for; it isn't even as big as it appears on your screen on the exhibition's website. But in order to get a Spanish example, the museum would have had to engage in a loan, and pay for transportation and insurance, and, as we all know, the city's culture funds are broke. Hence, there not being a Spanish crucifix in Berlin, apparently, we get a German one. Small potatoes. Further (and more salutary) Germanness is a room in which Dürer's engravings of the Stations of the Cross are on display with little stands containing a miniature score of Bach's St. Matthew Passion showing how Bach indicated pain in his score, which excerpts you can listen to on headphones. I will, however, take exception to the wall caption stating that the Passion is universally regarded as the greatest piece of music ever written, or some such balderdash.

It could hardly be said that the show wusses out much more, however. The end of the Christian part has Francis Bacon's renowned Crucifixion, a sordid, gory piece of self-loathing that is nonetheless extraordinarily powerful, once one works out its iconography. (In case you're having trouble, the cross has apparently toppled over, and Christ is lying on his back on the ground, still attached). You won't miss the Nazi armbands or the two guys sitting at the bar, either. More subtle is Bill Viola's video Observance, in which actors slowly move to the foreground, looking at something tragic, which is a cousin to the piece of his I saw in Rotterdam six years ago which re-enacts Hieronymous Bosch's painting of the crowd mocking Christ as he carries the cross, and was similarly extraordinary thanks to the actors' skills of facial representation of emotions.

Then it's on to the rest of it, and a painfully mixed bag it turns out to be. A room-length spread of surgical instruments. Votive offerings, little wax representations of "where it hurts" which were left at shrines or in churches, so that divine intercession might relieve the pain. A film about scarification. A cartoon from the DDR about a guy with a pain in his knee. A vitrine with medical specimens preserved in formaldehyde. And the hard-core room, in which we get to see police photos of men who've died in auto-erotic situations, more photos of devices confiscated from S&M clubs, a rather sedate martyrdom of St. Sebastian, Tiepolo's Martyrdom of St. Agatha, whose breasts were sliced off (she's pressing a bloody cloth to her chest, but the breasts are sitting on a plate like twin puddings), and Rudolf Schwarzkogler's Aktion Nr. 6, which may or may not show the artist slicing off his penis (all of the online sources I've found are coy about this, although all debunk the story that it caused his death, which was actually from jumping out a window). Oh, and a video of Josef Beuys boxing a television screen. I have no idea why this is included, except there's probably a law in Berlin that no major art show can be mounted without something by one of my nemeses, and its connection with pain is probably explained somewhere in a 75,000-word essay referencing loads of arcane theory. (At least there's nothing by Pippilotti Rist, who is a pain).

On the way out, you can try your skill at the Painstation, a Pong game rigged so that it ceases to operate if either player moves his hand from a metal plate. Keeping your hand there, though, subjects you to whipping by a rubber-clad piece of wire or heat from the plate when you miss a shot. People were thronged around it, waiting to try. I saw it at Ars Electronica some years ago, and passed then, too.

All in all, I thought the show more sensationalistic -- and meretricious -- than enlightening. That the crowds were thick didn't surprise me in a city which celebrates guilt and punishment as much as this one does, and I left, convinced that next year's blockbuster will be Suicide, with guest performance artists from Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Sri Lanka all competing for a posthumous prize. And nobody, no matter how good-looking she is, will get me to go to that.

Anyone up for Brice Marden?

Short Technical Notice

I seem to have abgeficked my e-mail. If you write me on an address not the one posted here and not my Well address (if you do, you know what I mean), please have patience. The best minds in Australia and India are working on moving my e-mail from the evil GoDaddy folks, who've been losing my e-mails, to a decent e-mail provider that's not trying to sell you stuff all the time and, as far as I know, does not run a NASCAR car. However, this apparently takes time, especially when the client (me) is a total idiot when it comes to things like virtual domains and aliases and stuff, so please be patient.

Snap

I had the pleasure last week of playing host to Baron Wolman, who was Rolling Stone's first staff photographer, helping to found the magazine with Jann Wenner 40 years ago. Wolman was an "old guy" back then -- 30 freakin' years old! -- and he turned 70 last Monday, the day he arrived in Berlin from an exhibition of his work in a tiny German town called Nordhorn.

The reason he was here was that this is where his career started. As a young soldier stationed in Berlin and assigned to Military Intelligence, he'd taken some pictures of the Berlin Wall being built and on an impulse sent them to the newspaper in his home town of Columbus, Ohio. They printed them on the front page and sent him $50 -- and he was astonished that he could get good money -- and that was good money in 1961 -- for doing something he'd fooled around with since he was a kid. After he mustered out, he became a photojournalist for big-name magazines like Life and Look. Living in San Francisco, he gravitated towards the exploding music scene there, and already had a good book of photos when he and Wenner joined up.

In the years that followed, he became one of America's top music photographers, and, after he and Wenner quarrelled after Wenner shut down Earth Times, the ahead-of-its-time environmental magazine Wollman started under the Rolling Stone umbrella, he, along with several other former staffers and some rebel fashion writers in New York, started Rags, which was, improbably, a hippie fashion magazine. If that seems an oxymoron, consider this: the day Rags was shut down -- I was present when it happened, although I'd only recently come to the magazine -- it was, in the words of either the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal -- I can never remember which -- "the fastest growing magazine in the history of American magazine publishing." I'll never forget the business manager, Phil Freund, coming out of his office to read those words and then declare that because the bills from advertisers weren't being paid fast enough to pay the printer, he was, after consultation with Baron, shutting the magazine down, effective immediately.

I lost touch with him after that, but he continued to photograph, gradually getting out of music photography because access to both performances and musicians was increasingly being limited by record companies and artist management. But because he still owned his images, he's continued to make a good living, because the photos he shot have become icons of their subjects. Check out the gallery on his website, or the one Rolling Stone put up recently, and I'm sure you'll see what I mean.

At any rate, he hasn't lost his verve or his sense of humor, as he demonstrated all last week, and he was avid to explore the side of town his last gig here prevented him from visiting, and we had a great time. True to his maxim of "mixing business with pleasure," he sat down with the folks at the /pool gallery to talk about their then-upcoming show of photos sponsored by Gibson Guitars, called Gibson Through the Lens. He's got three shots in the show, including one of Jimi Hendrix playing a left-handed Flying V at his debut performance at the Fillmore Ballroom in 1968 which was being used to promote the show.

The vernissage was last night, and, since the gallery's only a couple of blocks away, and because I told Baron I'd report on it, I went down. Given the large number of photos and the gallery's limited wall-space, they've done a good job hanging the show. It takes a little work to look at: the photos don't have quite enough room to breathe, for the most part, as can be easily demonstrated by looking at the few which have their own chunk of wall to hang on. The rest have to be concentrated on individually, because they're chock-a-block up against one another, and because inevitably, mixing color shots with black and white means that the colors draw your attention quicker. Once you learn to isolate them, though, they'll come into focus a lot better.

The show should also be looked at for what it is, not what it's not. What it's not is a "rock photography's greatest hits" or a history of the guitar in rock and roll, where Fender's Stratocaster and Telecaster would have at least equal footing. It's Gibson showing how many of rock's important guitarists used their products, plain and simple. Elvis? In his Vegas period, with a Gibson acoustic. Look at the early shots and you'll see he was playing a Martin acoustic -- and almost never played electric. The Beatles? Also the later period, because, as everyone back then knew, they played Hofners and Rickenbackers, which were cheap, and, in the case of the Hofner, not all that good. You're on solider ground with people like the Stones and, especially, Eric Clapton, who took Gibson's biggest flop, the Les Paul, notorious for feeding back and being way too loud, and turned those "defects" into features that defined his style. He made the Les Paul so famous, in fact, that 24 out of the 66 photos in this show feature them -- if you include the knockoff that Kurt Cobain's diving with in the parody of their Nevermind album cover. (There's even a picture of Les Paul with a Les Paul!)

The photographers themselves are a who's who of rock lensmen (yes, men: Jill Furmanovsky and Kate Simon have one shot each, but that's the rock press for you). Besides Baron Wolman, there are pictures from Henry Diltz, Bob Gruen, Jim Marshall, Neal Preston, Barrie Wentzell, Mick Rock, and many others. Plus, there are two autographed guitars (one by Slash, and I couldn't figure out who the other one was from), and one lonely amp in the corner.

The gallery itself is sort of the new kid on the block (almost literally, given that the block also contains one of the neighborhood's eminences grises, Wohnmachine, which used to occupy the space next door), and seems to be an outgrowth of a magazine, also named Pool, which seems to be targeted towards the fashion industry. But it's also already given something back to the neighborhood: during the course of the meeting Baron and photo-rep Dave Brolan and a Berlin-based photo rep and Gibson's German guy had in the gallery's basement, Baron noted that he'd had a remarkable meal the night before at a strange Chinese fusion joint just up the street. "Oh," said Sascha, the gallery's manager, "do you mean Toca Rouge? I designed that place."

Damn, this is a small town...

The Loneliest Street In Berlin

Because my mind only works intermittently, particularly as the weekend approaches, I often find myself having to buy one or two grocery items on Sunday, having spaced them out in the Saturday shopping, which I still approach with the same panic as when everything shut up at 2pm on Saturdays, as it did when I first moved here.

This means a trip to a train station, as generously defined by Deutsche Bahn. There's an Edeka market in the Friedrichstr. station which has a lot of stuff my regular supermarket doesn't, but is often so jammed that security guards close it down until it empties out some, resulting in a huge line in the station. The other alternative is the Kaiser's in the Hauptbahnhof, which doesn't have as much stuff, but isn't such a mob scene most of the time.

When I go there, I usually walk down Invalidenstr., but after I do my shopping, I generally walk back another way, a discipline I learned long ago driving through Italy with a friend who repeated the mantra "never go back the way you came," which I find excellent advice. So since there's always something to see, I generally head back by way of Reinhardtstr., the lonliest street in Berlin. I also use it when I walk to the ARD studios on Reichstagufer to record my stuff for Fresh Air, so I've been watching it for a while.

All in all, it's a pretty depressing walk, particularly if you approach it from the Hauptbahnhof. You cross the (re-channeled) Spree via a bridge, and then approach an intersection which gives you the option of heading south towards Unter den Linden or east on Reinhardtstr. Right there at the corner is a large, modern office building with a huge poster on it offering, as it has for over a year, offices for rent. "Here's where decisions are made!" it says, not forgetting to mention the stunning views of the government quarter, the Reichstag and the Spreebogen complex. But mostly, it looks like the decision has been made to rent somewhere else.

The first block is desolate, even during the week. It's kind of an orphan, not too accessible by public transportation, and with one empty apartment and office building after the other. One or two of the streetside apartments appears to have a tenant, but I also know that real-estate folks hang curtains in empty apartments to make it look like they're inhabited. There's a nice store selling 20th Century antiques, Art Deco and Art Nouveau, from Vienna, a tiny car-rental company, and a "design center" with occasional exhibits. Then you hit the corner of Luisenstr. and there's a restaurant called Kanzlereck, "Chancellor's Corner," serving up German cuisine in a room in which photographic transparancies of past and present Chancellors of Germany are printed onto the window glass. This is probably a ploy to keep people from overeating.

On an island stands a statue of a naked guy wrestling a dragon down, in honor of Rudolf Virchow, who, with Robert Koch, put the adjacent Charité Hospital on the map by pretty much inventing the germ theory of disease and the science of pathology.

Keep going and you'll see that the Kanzlereck was the gateway to Little Bonn. Actually, the whole area south of Reinhardtstr., particularly along Albrechtstr. and continuing to Schiffbauerdamm, can bear this title. Most of the restaurants are branches of popular ones in Bonn, and they and the bars hang out signs for Kölsch, the beer of choice for transplanted Bonners. Those Bonners are supposed to be living in these apartments, but as you continue to walk to Friedrichstr., it becomes evident that not very many are. The parade of empty buildings and "For Rent" signs just continues.

Which is not to say that nobody's rented. There's a store specializing in ostrich products (non-edible ones) like novelties made from ostrich eggs. There's a very tiny musical-instrument repair shop. There was a brave Persian restaurant, with an authentic-looking menu, but it closed for lack of customers and is now a "Thai" restaurant. There's the headquarters of the FDP, Germany's Liberal party, and branches of a dozen or so media companies from around the world, Switzerland, Japan, and Frankfurt among them. Probably weirdest of all is a huge store that sells nothing but glowing balls. How they pay the rent is beyond me. And almost at Friedrichstr. is another mind-twister, a cellar store selling Luxembourg wine and Persian groceries. I didn't even know Luxembourg was big enough to support a vineyard. And, inevitably, there are a few businesses that have hung on, probably since the DDR: a couple of cafes, a keymaker, an ancient stamp shop.

But mostly, Reinhardtstr. is about failure. The "Residence at the Deutsches Theater" was one such grandiose project, a gleaming white complex of luxury flats which is now, at least partially, an apartment hotel. It's depressing to see the dust bunnies through the plate glass windows of the stores which remain empty despite every effort to rent them, the way their For Rent signs have yellowed around the edges. The sad fact is, a sizeable percentage of government workers never wanted to move to Berlin in the first place, and those who did go home for the weekend. They don't like Berlin and they don't like Berliners. They have their own restaurants, bars, and clubs, but mostly, I suspect, they do their jobs and pine for retirement.

It's almost a relief to get off the street and start heading home, although as I pass the corner of Oranienburger Str. I always remember that line about tourism being like prostitution, in that you make your most attractive features available to all for a price and hope you don't invite disease or destruction.

But that's a rant for another day.

The Hidden Killer

Last Saturday, because we found ourselves each in possession of a couple of extra Euros that would permit a very inexpensive restaurant meal, the dancer and I decided to try the new ramen joint next door to Cuchi, the superb sushi place on Gipsstr. After all, it was under the same management, and ramen can be a wonderful experience.

Sad to say, this place wasn't. My soup was pretty bare-bones. Although there was some pickled ginger in it, and, unlike the place we usually go, there were the right condiment-adding things (chili and black sesame, a sesame-seed grinder) on the table, it just wasn't very interesting. Hers was even weirder: although I don't think any tomato was involved, it was very much like a thin version of spaghetti bolognaise, with ground pork and a reddish broth. Both soups had corn in them, which didn't endear the place to me.

But about three-quarters of the way through her soup, the dancer suddenly pivoted on her butt and lay down. (Fortunately, as she noted later, we had benches; otherwise she would have fallen out of her chair). "It's my circulation," she said. "It's just dropped way down." She was sweating and pale. Now, I know that every medical crisis in Germany is "circulation," just as every medical crisis in France is "liver," but I had a more exact diagnosis: MSG poisoning. Hardly surprising, of course, because MSG is a crucial part of Japanese cuisine, the "fifth taste," umami, and something you expect to encounter. You do not, however, expect to pass out as a result of eating it.

Eventually, she sat up and sipped some water the solicitous waitress brought over, and found the strength to get up and leave. We walked around for a while so she could get her "circulation" back up, and finally got her to the U-Bahn, where she headed straight home and to bed. And, she reported the next morning, felt fine.

What happened wasn't a "drop in circulation," though, but a spike in blood-pressure. I have high blood pressure, so I try to minimize my MSG intake as best I can because it (and, of course, all other sodium, like salt) will raise your blood pressure. Certainly I've always been sensitive to MSG, and that night, I, too, had symptoms of muscles bunching up and a sort of caffeinated feeling, lying buzzing for a couple of hours before sleep came.

The thing is, though, although few people realize it, MSG is everywhere in Germany. It's not just in the fake "Asia" food, or even the authentic Asian food; it's found its way into German food so pervasively that I often avoid eating in German restaurants. I read labels of all prepared food products. It really is everywhere.

What I'm looking for in the supermarket is "Geschmackverstärker E 621," which is in just about every brand of canned soup (which are already hideously oversalted), in plenty of sausages (I no longer buy from butcher counters if I can't read the labels), in the formerly delicious smoked pork chops known as Kassler, in some brands of Maultaschen (those fantastic overstuffed pillows of pasta, one of my favorite discoveries in Germany), prepared chicken broth (Fond), and even in such weird places as black olives.

But at the restaurants, I'm helpless. What has happened over the past couple of decades is that restaurants have stopped making their own sauces, using cheats marketed by food giants like Maggi and Knorr. No doubt they cheated before with other prepared products, but both Maggi and Knorr base their entire product line on MSG, and their offering up condensed sauce bases that a good cook could make from scratch in a couple of hours has ruined German food. Nor can you assume that you're safe at a high-end restaurant: friends of mine report strong MSG reactions after eating in some of Berlin's toniest joints.

Germans are notorious for the amount of salt they consume. My doctor tells me that the numbers for high blood pressure are adjusted upwards in Germany, because numbers that would cause concern elsewhere are fairly normal here. And no wonder: from the Wurst you eat for breakfast to the Döner Kebap you have for lunch, to the schnitzel with gravy you have for dinner -- not to mention the Bratkartoffeln and green beans boiled with Speck you eat alongside it -- you're at the minimum getting a ton of salt, and almost always even more sodium courtesy of the MSG in all that stuff.

The folks at the Wurst counter don't know what's in the sausages -- and, worse, they won't go look -- and in restaurants you can't even assume the server will ask the cook, or, if they do, that they'll tell you the truth. Is it any wonder German food has the awful reputation is does? People go to a restaurant to eat something that sounds excellent on the page, and wind up dizzy or otherwise distressed afterwards.

Anyway, I'll continue to make occasional visits to the ramen place on Alte Schönhauser, fully aware of what's in the soup, but my desire to eat out elsewhere is always tinged with apprehension. I wonder if any of the other diners at this new place had a similar reaction, and, if so, how many will have to pass out before the owners decide it might be a good idea to cut the aiji-no-moto in half.

House of World Stereotypes

Note to self: Stop trying to accomplish anything here, stop trying to do good things for people here, save your energy and use it to get the hell out of here.

Details: Last year a couple of filmmakers in the States made a wonderful, if harrowing, film called Bound to Lose about the folk duo the Holy Modal Rounders, who changed my life in 1964 with their first album. They consisted of Peter Stampfel (fiddle, banjo, vocals) and Steve Weber (guitar, vocals), and were so far out there that they used the word "psychedelic" in one of their songs -- recorded in 1963! (I thought the word was "psycho-belly," but jeez, I was 15.)

The world of documentaries isn't an easy one, so if you want your film to get seen you have to enter a lot of festivals and do a lot of screenings. Thus, they're participating in the Rotterdam Film Festival in mid-September and bringing Peter along to perform, and, upon hearing this, I wondered if they were thinking of doing a screening in Berlin. Then it hit me: this was when PopKomm, the huge music conference, hits town, and, of course, so do the guys who run SXSW in Austin. Now, SXSW has a film conference, too, so I thought that a screening followed by a Stampfel show under the aegis of SXSW would be good for all concerned: SXSW gets to promote SXSW Film, the filmmakers get to promote their film, and Peter gets to introduce himself to a new audience.

So along with a friend, I started working on this after getting SXSW's blessing. Wow, an actual fun event during PopKomm! Never mind that not too many people would come: it would have a lot of competition. The theater we were thinking of for the film only holds about 100 people, and the bar across the way from it where we were going to do the show only holds about 40. But we'd be handing out flyers at the SXSW stand at PopKomm, and publicity is publicity.

Then Peter said that he was going to play a folk festival here and the promoters had forbidden him to perform so close to that event. Further investigation turned up the fact that it was part of a concert series in the House of World Cultures' New York program, which opens in August and runs through November. The HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) is a mighty institution in Berlin, funded by the federal government to expose Germans to foreign cultures, and very often their exhibitions and concert series are superb: I've enjoyed many of them in my years here.

Peter passed along the name of the woman at the HKW he was dealing with, and I recognized her as someone I'd dealt with myself when working for the Wall Street Journal in the past. Peter was due to perform several weeks later, and it really didn't seem to me that our tiny show would hurt theirs. So I wrote her a letter (names have been changed to spare the guilty):

Dear Ms. X:

My name is Ed Ward, and I'm a freelance journalist here in Berlin. I think we've run into each other over the years, possibly through WOMEX or when I was the cultural correspondent for the Wall St. Journal here.

I'm writing you because in another capacity, as a representative of the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference (SXSW) in Austin, Texas. I'm setting up a screening of a film about the Holy Modal Rounders as part of SXSW's presence at PopKomm this year. The screening will be held in a small cinema in Berlin-Mitte, and we were hoping to have a short performance by Peter afterwards.

Peter has informed us that you have asked him not to perform at this show because of a perceived conflict with an event at the HKW in October. He will be coming to Europe anyway at this time for a screening/performance in Rotterdam, and this is why we decided to set this up.

I'm asking if you could reconsider this prohibition. Peter is not very well known here, and this event could only build the audience for your event. Furthermore, he would be mentioning your event during his show, which could only help publicize it. The filmmakers are planning to go through with the screening in any event, but we feel that because the venue we've selected for the show is very small -- with a capacity of only around 40 people -- and because Peter will be in Europe anyway, it would be a shame not to take advantage of his presence and put on a short show which, as I said, could only enhance the visibility of your own, much higher-profile and better-publicized event.

If Peter were a superstar, or even a major cult figure, in Germany, I could certainly understand your position, as Peter has explained it. But we anticipate the largest part of our audience to be the Fachpublikum [*] who will be attending PopKomm, many of whom are not from Berlin (although the screening and the show will be open to the general public), and for many of these people it will be the only chance they get to see the film and Peter.

I'm hoping you can think about this and perhaps we can work out a solution that will be advantageous for both our small show and your (I hope!) bigger one.

With Friendly Regards,

Ed Ward

[* The word Fachpublikum doesn't translate into English easily, but it indicates a specialty or professional audience.]

And so, except for the fact that the mail bounced back because Peter had spelled her name wrong, and one of the filmmakers finally found her on the HKW website (I still can't find her there!), the thing went off as you see it above. "Your letter seems incredibly reasonable," one of the filmmakers said. Yeah, well.

Yesterday in the late afternoon I got the answer:

Dear Ed,

thank you very much for your mail to Ms. X. We appreciate your initiative to show the film about Peter Stampfel during Popkomm very much. Unfortunately we must insist on our conditions that he should not perform before his show at House of World Cultures in Berlin. Even if the cinema is small. As you also underline, Peter Stampfel ist not so well-known in Berlin, so his audience is also small. A show during popkomm would be less then 3 weeks before our concert. And we really want to be the fist ones who bring him here these days.
As for popkomm visitors: we are not sure how many will come to the cinema, don't expect too much of them.

Of course we would be very grateful if you mentioned the coming concert at House of World Cultures at the end of your film screening. We can also mention your screening at our website for instance.

Thank you very much for your cooperation.

Best regards,


Ms. X's Boss
cc: Grand Poobah, HKW

In other words, we have rules which are not bound by logic. Rules are rules and Ordnung muss sein. We said no, and thus we cannot be flexible. As for PopKomm, you know nothing about it (despite my having participated in just about every one of them since it started in Cologne). You don't know what you're doing, and we do, so stop.

Oh: please give us publicity.

Well, to hell with that. As of this moment, SXSW has pulled out, the filmmakers are going to Glasgow instead (I think), and a situation from which every one of the participants could benefit has been nullified. And, once again, official Germany has shown itself to be rigid, inflexible, uncreative, and self-defeating.

No, not everyone here is like that. Just the people who run things. No wonder the country has a brain drain.

And I have to remind myself: stop trying to accomplish anything here. You're just a stupid foreigner and your efforts are not appreciated or wanted. Use your energy to get out and start again somewhere else.

In The Good Old Crumb-er Time

You can tell it's summer in Berlin because when it rains you feel disappointed instead of resigned. The wet seems to be related to a distraction of the Gulf Stream which is related to climate change, but more technical than that I can't get.

Still, you have to wonder how the rain affects Sandsation, the latest tourist attraction by the Hauptbahnhof, where a visiting Texan dragged me the other day. Massive sand sculptures by actual artists (some of whom appear to be professional carvers of ice, snow, and sand) are being made out of 2000 tons of the stuff dumped on the site, piled high, and carefully scraped into images. None of them are going to give Richard Serra sleepless nights, but it's an amusing thing to walk around.

There are sculptors from all over, including a guy from India who heads a sand-sculpting school there and is recreating the Taj Mahal in ridiculously authentic detail. The theme is "Welcome to Paradise," and sure enough, one of the Germans has sculpted an anti-paradise of miserable heads of boat people crammed into a tiny boat. Never enough misery, eh?

Most of the sculptors seemed to be spritzing their creations with some sort of stuff from an applicator that looked like the ones exterminators use. Maybe that's rain-protection, or maybe they're just resigned to re-doing their work from now until July 29, when the thing closes.

And inside the Hauptbahnhof, the Diplodocus skeleton has vanished, replaced by an information stand about the various (costly) wireless services German train stations are now offering.

* * *

On the rest of our walk, the Texan and I walked down Reinhardtstr., better known as Little Bonn, where I like to show people the Nazi air-raid bunker that continues to stand there because the price of demolishing it exceeds the value of the plot on which it stands. For some months, a luxury apartment has been under construction on the top of it, making me wonder who in the hell would want to live atop an ugly concrete hunk which is cold and damp inside. I got my answer last week in an article in the International Herald Tribune, informing me that an art collector named Christian Boros is moving into the apartment and housing his collection, which will be open to the public, in the bunker. I've been in this bunker, not when it was a gabba club, but afterwards when the irrepressible Hannes from the DNA gallery mounted a show in it a couple of years back. All I can say is, I hope Boros has some interesting stuff there, because this is one depressing interior.

Hope, however, springs eternal, etc: Best Western has just opened a hotel next door. That means guests have their choice of a view of the bunker or the Ukranian Embassy next door.

* * *

While we Berlin expats are seeking hamburgers now that Hazelwood seems to have gone the way of all good restaurants here, New Yorkers are warming to Currywurst. Really: a friend who works at the New York Times has declared it good, and just look at the rest of the menu:



The prices are even right. Not that I think I'll be visiting New York any time soon, and if I do that I'll be seeking out Currywurst, but I give these folks an A for effort.

* * *

Living alongside a straightaway on which speeding idiots race day and night, and given that Berlin drivers are hands down the worst I've ever come across (and yes, I've driven in Italy), I'm amused by the current anti-speeding campaign someone's mounted. I looked for images on the Web, but there don't seem to be any. At any rate, this features gorgeous women with their finger and thumb indicating a distance of about an inch, and the caption "Speeders are about this big." I know, Sigmund Freud was Austrian, but someone here has hit upon something I've suspected for a long time.

* * *

I can tell the way this week's going: today I took my last €40 out of the bank, hoping that one of the several firms I've worked for recently will be paying me soon, and went down to the market at Hackescher Markt. Standing waiting to cross at Rosenthaler Platz, a driver changed lanes so he could drive through a puddle and douse me head to foot. Undaunted, I pressed on, bought some Parmesan from the pasta ladies, bought some olives from a "Greek" stand, and headed home, at which point I realized that my wet hand had apparently stuck on a €10 note, and a quarter of my bounty was gone.

That's okay. It's going to rain all weekend anyway.

Just Another Day In Berlin

I was awakened around 8 am yesterday by a call from a friend in Prague, announcing that a friend of his, from Texas originally, would be coming to Berlin later in the day. After the call was over, I went back to sleep. I had a lot of work to do, and wanted to be fresh.

By the time I had had my coffee and was checking e-mails, the friend-of-a-friend had written me, and we went back and forth until we had a meeting set up later in the evening in Friedrichshain, where he was staying. Then it was time to get to work: totally rewriting a sample page of a brochure for a school here so it wouldn't be so stuffy and yet would appeal to the right kind of students.

This, it developed, took a couple of hours, but I figured if the school green-lighted the project I'd have made a significant score. And I'd find out: the woman in charge was leaving for vacation at the end of the day. So after I'd whipped it into shape and e-mailed it to her, I realized I'd be stupid to sit around the house waiting to hear from her, so I strapped on the trusty Nikon and went in search of the Acid Icon artist's other work.

It was just past Rosenthaler Platz, on the south side of Torstr. but proved maddeningly difficult to photograph, as you can see:



This gives a hint of the colors, especially in the face, but it obscures the majority of the piece.



This, on the other hand, gives an idea of the scale of the piece. The only proper way to photograph this would be from inside the industrial courtyard, unfortunately. Still, there are a couple of clues here. First, it's copyright by Super Blast, which explains the SB on the other icon's field. Second, the idiosyncratic spelling of "Maschine" makes it pretty certain the artist is German. And the mysterious inscription "Thanks to Play Station" doesn't, I hope, mean that Super Blast was part of that lame promotion of a few weeks back. If so, there's nothing overt in either image that indicates it.

I grabbed another couple of shots as I headed back home -- the defaced Ronald McDonald, which I added on my post about the McDonald's closing a couple of weeks ago, and a shot for bowleserised's all-things-pony blog, The Ponyhof. She and I then spent an amusing couple of hours trying to figure out how to download the goddam photos from Gmail.

Finally, since it was getting towards 5 and I knew just how fast Germans depart the office on Friday, I called the school, only to discover that I'd been in competition with some other writers and the school had gone for one who had a degree. Because naturally, making your living by writing for over 40 years doesn't mean that you know a thing about language. I wasn't even particularly surprised, since I know how much store Germans -- and, I suspect, Europeans in general -- put in such things. Hell, I'd have graduated from college if I'd understood the weird experimental educational project they'd put me in. Or not, I don't know. (It doesn't matter now: the damn place is closing).

So the next order of business was to eat some dinner and head off to the bar to meet this guy, which I did. The new tram line by my house makes it easy to get to the hip! edgy! district of Friedrichshain, where every second person is from America and nobody's much over 30. Trouble is, the new tram line, like all the tram lines in my neighborhood, are closed for the next couple of weeks for track work. Thus, I was wedged into a bus that was loaded well beyond its legal limit with drunken teenagers and ferried most of the way across town, where we were dumped to meet the part of the tramline that was running. Then I got there and there was a sign on the bar that there was a private party going on.

This turned out to be because apparently the place is officially not open for business, so I won't identify it further, but at any rate the Texan finally made his appearance and we talked for a while until the trust-fund hipster vibe got to me and I realized that I'd be repeating the same arduous journey back home, so I said good-bye and caught the tram.

Boy, did I feel smart: by the time the (mostly empty) bus pulled up at the terminus at Nordbahnhof, I could see lightning flashing in the sky, and by the time I was half-way down my block, tiny raindrops were intermittently hitting my skin. I opened a nightcap beer, sat and read with the windows open as gentle rain started to fall, and then went to bed.

Now, I don't know about you, but thunderstorms, for me, are like the best sleeping-pills ever invented. I think it's the rapid drop in air pressure that does it, and I was asleep in no time.

The beer, however, wasn't, so after lying there listening to a really bad storm pounding down, I got up to recycle it. Although all the lights were out, I could see that the entire bathroom floor was slick with water. Worse, it was copiously studded with dark lumps. Yes, folks, the sewer had backed up, the toilet had overflowed, and my bathroom was covered with the Waste of Others.

German mop technology, I'm sorry to say, isn't very good. All I have is a so-called Wischmop, a primitive thing with semi-absorbent cloth shreds which need to be wrung out every couple of seconds. Over the next 90 minutes, until after 3 am, I was angrily swabbing, pushing the, um, souvenirs, against the wall, and praying not to get cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A, or some other dread disease. When things were somewhat under control, I took a long, hot shower and collapsed back in bed, where I remained until 10:30.

Why the city of Berlin's sewers are so bad, I can't say, although you've got to admit that a city so broke that it's begging other police departments for their cast-off uniforms probably can't maintain them. This kind of thing has happened before, but it's never escaped the toilet before, and I was genuinely glad upon rising to note that there wasn't much of a smell. I spent my early afternoon swabbing the bathroom down with Mr. Clean (Mr. Proper over here) and a healthy dose of Clorox (DanKlorix), and, while it dried, went off to buy some coffee.

Some time ago, I lamented the demise of the Malongo Coffee boutique at Galleries Lafayette here, where you could buy superb whole-bean coffee cheaper than at Starbucks or Einstein or Balzac or any of the other similar "quality" coffee joints. Well, in the past few weeks, they've returned as a presence at the bakery counter there. The prices have risen so that it's no longer €4 for 250g, but more like €5, so they're on par with the others (except Starbucks, which is €6), but I can once again make my famous blend and breakfasts here at the house are far more enjoyable.

Walking home, I made sure to avoid Friedrichstr., which has apparently been entered in an international competition for auto and pedestrian inaccessibility, and instead made my way over to Museum Island. At Bebelplatz, there was a book fair going on, and if I'd stayed til 4, I could have met Rolf Hochhuth and punched the old man out for awakening an interest in Germany in the teenaged me, but instead I wanted to get home. Walking up Tucholskystr. I saw yet another horror: a Hollywood Boulevard-style star, with a Vanity Fair logo, for Damien Hirst sunk in the sidewalk outside a gallery. Yet another there-goes-the-neighborhood moment -- and Brangelina have yet to move in, as far as I know.

I was contemplating the messages the past 24 hours had brought when the doorbell rang. A young woman in a Deutsche Post uniform handed me a large, soft package of the sort I never get. It was postmarked Montpellier. In it was a huge towel, with Languedoc.com embroidered on one corner. I was puzzled until I realized I'd won it weeks ago in this contest, which I play when I'm bored in hopes of winning. (Yeah, I know the page doesn't work all that well and most of the "clue" links don't work: it's French, for heaven's sake!)

And it occurred to me: the students are leaving Montpellier right now. The apartments will be available all summer. Once again it's time to strike.

Now to raise the €12,500 I need to do it with.

Ousman Sembene, RIP

So this morning I found out that one of my favorite authors, Chinua Achebe, had won the Man Booker Prize. It said so on the BBC, so it must be true.

This made me happy, although I was sorry to hear of his paralysis. Achebe drew me into the world of Nigerian authors writing in English, which drew me into a world of my very own language, artfully re-cadenced, where aphorisms said things in a way that deflected anger: "Since men have learned to shoot without missing, said the bird, I have learned to fly without perching." Chew a kola nut and think about that for a minute.

Anyway, as I often do when I hear news, I headed over to the Well to post this in the Books conference, where I was astonished to see there wasn't a topic devoted to African literature. Surely I'm not the only one of those folks reading this stuff when I can find it! And I concluded my post by saying that now that Achebe had the Booker, it was time to get a Nobel into Ousman Sembene's hands before it was too late.

A couple of hours later, another fan of his work noted that it was already too late.

My reaction to this is twofold. First, I urge you to go out and find any of this great man's books that you can find. Second, I urge you to rent as many of his films as you can find, because he was an amazing filmmaker as well as an amazing novelist. Usually he'd write a novel, then film it, but be warned that his early masterpiece, God's Little Bits of Wood is, thank heavens, unfilmable. Nor is it an easy read, but in order to understand Western Africa, and Senegal in particular, it's a mandatory one.

Now, what does this have to do with Berlin? Something. Because after reading that superb obituary, an anecdote came back to me, and I stuck it on the Well, and now I'll put it here.

There used to be an African restaurant here in Berlin on Pappelallee called the Chop House. It served West African food -- Senegalese and Ghanian, for the most part -- and, like many restaurants in East Berlin, scammed tax credits by being a "gallery," in this case for African artists.

Because it was cheap and good and one of the few places where they'd actually put enough chiles in stuff, I went there often, and one night I went there with a couple of friends, only to find out there was some sort of gallery opening going on, and most of the tables were filled. We were seated at one with some Germans and Africans talking animatedly and minded our own business until one skinny, tall African guy said "Hey, are you speaking English? I need to practice my English because I
have a scholarship to a university there."

So we did the conversation thing, and of course, I asked him where he was from. "Senegal. Dakar," he replied. "I've always wanted to go to Dakar, ever since I saw a film by Ousman Sembene called Xala," I said. The guy's eyes got real big.

"Ousman, he is my father! He is my mother! He saved my life!" I figured this was metaphorical, but he went on. "I was a little boy, living on the streets. I never knew my parents, like a lot of street kids in Dakar. They just throw us there and if we live, we live. And I lived by begging, because Muslim tradition is to give to beggars.

"One day, I went into a bookshop and begged the man behind the counter for some money. He laughed at me. 'You're a strong young man,' he said. 'I'll give you work if you want it.' And of course, I told him yes. 'I edit a magazine, a literary journal, and it's printed across town. I never have time to go pick it up for my shop here, and they've just told me the latest issue is out. I can make money if I have copies here to sell, but I have no time to get them. I have a cart in the back. If you can go to the printer, I'll give you a note you can hand them, and they'll load the cart with my magazine. Then you bring it
here and I'll pay you.'

"So I did. It wasn't hard work, and when I got back to the shop, he asked me if I'd like a copy. I had to tell him I couldn't read.
Naturally, he said that a young man like me should be in school, and he knew a church-run school that would take me. He told me that once I could read, he'd give me a job in the bookshop, and that was how it was: I learned to read, and I lived in the back of the shop.

"Now, that man was Ousman Sembene, as you've guessed. But what you probably didn't guess is this: Do you remember the scene in Xala where the businessman is arguing with his daughter, who says he should stop speaking French and talk to her in Wolof?"

I said I did.

"And you remember that there's another child at the table, doing his homework, his son, who's younger than the daughter."

Yes, I remembered that. The kid was obviously having a horrible conflict between the father he idolized and the sister who he knew to be so smart.

"Well, that child, that boy there, that was me! Mamadou! And that was really my homework!"

He's not listed in the IMDB, and Senegalese can be notorious scamsters and hustlers, and it had been 20 years since I'd seen the film, but I figured it was okay to believe him. Because what if it were true?