John

Just when you thought every real estate bargain in Berlin was gone, up pops this one!




It's got a lot going for it. Location, for one: it's directly across Invalidenstr. from Nordbahnhof, which is twice as busy now that they have the tram line running. On one side of it, there's the historic Reichsbahn building, with its heroic statues of workers ready to build Germany's railroads, and on the other side, there's a nice park the locals use for sunbathing, with a kiddie pool that's jammed all summer long. So it's easy to get to and has nice green space.

Of course, the view's sort of hard to see, given that the windows are so high, but that's just a clue about the main thing it doesn't have going for it: if you look at the top photo, you'll see that there's a little sign high on the wall. It says WC.

That's right, folks: this is your opportunity to buy a genuine DDR public toilet.

It's been standing there, locked up and stinky, for as long as I've lived here. Not that that's stopped anyone; today as I shot this photo, I realized that the best sun was from the other side, and as I was headed in that direction, a gentleman from the building trades appeared, loosened his belt, and, um, proceeded to use the outside in the manner for which the inside was intended, if you catch my meaning here.

Maybe it's the jet-lag, but my normally rich creative faculties have frozen at the challenge of coming up with a use for this property, a reason to buy it. But I trust my dear readers will be able to think of something.

I Might Have Dreamed This

But I'm pretty sure I didn't.

I landed in Paris Tuesday afternoon, and found the hotel I'd reserved with a service I'd never used before. Pretty dingy, as was the neighborhood, which was close to Barbes, the largely African quarter. If I'd had more time, like another day, I'd probably have gone in search of the place where a man who claimed to be "the spiritual leader of the entire Senegalese community here in Paris," told me, in perfect English, of his training with the French Air Force in Oklahoma and Texas. They had great fish baked with lemon there, and I bet they had other good stuff, too.

But I knew that in 24 hours I'd be back in a place which, next to California and Texas, would have extremely limited food options, and I wanted to celebrate the possibility of gastronomic greatness one more time. Which, considering I was in Paris, shouldn't have been too difficult.

If only. Well, okay, when I woke up from my jet-lag nap and splashed some water on my face and decided to get out of the nasty room and go look for something to eat I left my indispensable Michelin Map 11 behind, not the smartest move in a city I only know in bits and pieces.

I figured, hey, I didn't have a lot of money, so I should just find some brasserie or cheap joint with a blackboard out front with some appealing choices, go in, and enjoy myself. I was tired, I'd go back to the hotel, read a little, and pass out. Seemed like a plan. Surely the neighborhood, so close to the Gare du Nord, would have plenty of places like that.

So I walked down the street the hotel was on, the rue du Faubourg du Poissonnier. After a few blocks, I saw a tiny place that looked like it hadn't changed in fifty years, but the prices -- no "menu," or multi-course, single-price meals, a la carte only -- seemed a bit high. I glanced at it and moved on. And on.

I walked down the rue des Incredibly Fat Prostitutes and wondered whether the forty-ish men who were striking poses in Calvin Klein yuppie wear on the same block were in the same business or the girls' "business managers." I made a turn and found myself on the rue du Wholesale Clothing. I found a sign which said I was in the Marais, a neighborhood I not only know, but which is stuffed with restaurants, but I couldn't figure out where I was. An hour had passed, and I was now officially hungry, not to mention somewhat lost. But luckily, I almost always have a compass in my head, and it wasn't like I'd never been in this general neighborhood. It's just that except for kebab houses and the occasional designer sushi place, there didn't seem to be anything at all to eat.

Further walking brought me to République and loads of dining options: Quick, Mac Do, Kentucky Fried... This was getting ridiculous. I decided to head back to the hotel and hit someplace by the station. I found myself on the rue du Château d'Eau, which is one African barbershop after another, men's and women's alternating, with the expected amount of socializing. Even on a Tuesday night, it was churning. But nothing to eat.

All of a sudden, I was back on the rue du Faubourg du Poissonnier. Now, that place I'd seen hours ago -- well, 90 minutes ago -- didn't seem so intimidating. I hesitated over the menu, then said to hell with it and walked in.

The front room was very small. A tiny bar was off to the left, as well as a spiral staircase pitched so that I was praying they didn't seat customers up there. A very morose middle-aged Indochinese woman (I use the word because you could tell that the country she'd left behind when she first got to Paris was French Indochina) was bringing out some panniers of raspberries. An old woman sat on a banquette to the right wearing a fawn cloth coat which one could say had seen better days except that it was also evident that it had never been anything but drab. Next to her sprawled a large dog, boxer-like but with a graphite-colored coat. She held its head in her lap and was stroking it. Between her and the bar were the entrance to the dining room and a table loaded with stuff to be served cold: some sort of terrine, something jellied, and the berries.

A stout, no-nonsense woman with pixie glasses emerged from the dining room. "Are you still open?" I inquired. She stared at me, giving me a top-to-bottom assessment. "Of course," she said. "What are you afraid of?" Huh? Was my French that bad? "Well," I said, "I'm hungry," and she smiled and led me into the tiniest restaurant dining room I've seen. Part of the problem was a huge party of perhaps 15 people against the back wall had taken up a lot of the room. I wound up wedged over by the silverware and bread service, scrutinizing the same menu that had been posted outside. The prices were still stiff, but it seemed that you could do okay if you were careful. And surely there was a house wine so I didn't have to order a whole bottle of one of the three on offer.

So: from a very basic menu, two very basic choices. Rabbit terrine and beef Bourgignon "a la ancienne," made the old way. Like I was aware there was a new way. The stout woman's male counterpart was a short, busy man who was obviously her husband, and it was he who took my order. "No, no rabbit terrine," he said. "Poultry. Even better." His eyebrows shot up when I ordered the beef, and I asked him if there were a house red I could have a pichet of. The eyebrows went up again, and he said "Of course!"

The wine and a basket of excellent bread appeared right away. I have no idea what the wine was except I suspect it was a Bordeaux, and it was better than any house wine I'd ever had. The terrine appeared next, and it was perfect: lots of elements mixed in, pistachios and peppercorns, organ meat and meaty bits, the whole thing finishing with a slight tang of alcohol which I suspect was marc, the grape-skin liqueur. As I was savoring it, I was presented with a crock of cornichons, a touch I've never really gotten, and one I'd never seen before which was perfect: sweet-sour pickled cherries. You don't want to eat a lot of them, but they do wake up your tongue.

Monsieur appeared again to take the empty plate, and informed me, gesturing at the long table, that it would be several minutes before the next course arrived. That was fine with me. I sipped the wine, ate a bit of bread, and looked at my dining companions. I couldn't make sense out of the long table, and in fact the only definite impression I had was that I was going to bop the kid who was sitting nearest me, who took to leaning waaaay back in his chair to the point where his arms, which were behind his head when he did this, almost touched me. The group was mostly young, mostly very square-looking, and utterly forgettable. Not so the woman who was at one of the tables directly on the other side of the room from me, dining with a male companion who was impeccably dressed. She looked to be in her mid-40s, and her unlined face and high cheekbones bespoke a sense of humor and an intelligence which was telegraphed by her facial expressions on occasion as she talked with the man. She was wearing a ring with a stone which, if it were a diamond (and how can you tell from across the room?) would have kept me alive for a year. It was big enough that I wondered if it were real. Next to her were two guys, one young, one old, who were just finishing, and right by the entrance to the room was another pair of men who were always taking out hand-held devices and running figures. Both were speaking English, one with a notable French accent, one with the kind of accent native speakers get when they've been speaking another language for a long time. I never did figure out what kind of business they were in.

The Bourgignon appeared at last, and with it a round white thing with brown bits showing which turned out to be made up of potatoes, onions, and bacon, all molded into the shape of a cake layer. As for the stew, it was perfumed with the wine, cooked long enough that the bits of meat could be cut with a spoon, the whole thing topped with a few pearl onions and tiny carrots. I cautioned myself to go very slowly; this was too good to eat too quickly: the stew, the potatoes, the wine. It was, I began to realize, ridiculously old-fashioned, as was the decor. There was a shelf which went around the room on three sides. One part had ladies' straw hats, the one above me men's top hats, and the long wall against which the large party was seated was a hat miscellany which included a pilot's helmet and a diver's rig.

The two English-speaking guys were presented with a cheese plate and a new bottle of white wine, which they insisted on sharing with the hosts. Madame politely took a bit in a glass and they talked for a while. Finally, the American said something in French which ended with the word "mistress," and Madame straightened up, grabbed her glass and stalked from the room. I could see her, though, as she staggered up to the bar, finally able to let loose the laughter she hadn't wanted to let go in the dining room. She was laughing and gasping for air so loudly that the American wondered if she were okay. She eventually got herself under control, walked back in the room with a few tears still leaking out of her eyes, said something concise, and everyone laughed some more.

Even with the uptight bourgeoisie splayed against the back wall, I felt right at home in this place, which was inexplicable because I wasn't really interacting with anyone. But there was nonetheless a feeling of being guests, not customers, and it was a groove that was easy to fall into. Before long, though, I was finished, and being uncertain of the eventual bite, I declined dessert or cheese. Monsieur presented the bill, a whopping €44.40 -- 14 more than I'd wanted to spend, and just about half the money in my pocket.

I knew I was returning to extreme financial uncertainty, the possibility that I'd be completely out of money when I got back to Berlin. I knew I didn't have any work ahead of me, and only one magazine owed me money and was so overdue that I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever see it. I had no ideas what bills would have come in the mail while I was gone. I suspected I'd have a letter from my landlord waiting -- he hadn't heard from me since December, after all -- and as it turned out I was right.

But none of that mattered right at that moment. I'd had one of the best meals of my life, in surroundings that were eccentric and redolent of an age that's definitely past. I'd felt at ease and happy to be alive. That's what I'd paid for, and you can't put a price tag on it.

Monsieur had opened the front door and was standing outside on the sidewalk. What, I asked him, was that potato thing? "Gallette Lyonnaise," he answered. "Potatoes, onions, bacon. You put it on the plate to look like a cake, which is why the 'gallette.'" "And the potatoes make it Lyonnaise," I said. "Exactly." The air was cool and bracing. "You are at a hotel?" he said, pointing down the hill. "The hotel," I said, pointing up the hill. "Ah, rue Lafayette," he decided. I didn't disabuse him. He extended his hand. "Well, my friend, thank you very much. Come again." I told him I would and he went back inside. I started the climb to the firetrap I was going to call home for the night.

* * *

Post script: In writing this, I pulled out my bill for the first time since I'd paid it. Weirdly, it looks like the wine, at 19.80, was the most expensive thing on the ticket, since I remember the terrine at 7.80 and the Bourgignon at 16.80. Clever trick, although I can't prove anything because Monsieur's handwriting is totally unreadable. And this Frommer's review confirms that this wasn't just a lucky find -- if nothing else, the award from the French tourism folks confirms that there may be some calculation in what I saw. Still, the chef's credentials from places like the Cordon Bleu were genuine, and showed. It was a great way to end the trip.

Restaurant de la Grille, 80 rue du Faubourg Poissoniere, 75010 Paris. Reservations: 47 70 89 73

Las Migas de Austin y Califas

And the debate on the websites continues about SXSW -- did they shut down parties they didn't control by releasing a list of them to the police and fire departments? is music doomed? did Iggy suck or not? -- while I think that the most shocking music-related shark-jump happened sometime in the last year without anybody telling me about it: Gibson Guitars seems to have donated a bunch of 8-foot-tall guitars for local "artists" to paint or otherwise decorate under the aegis of a corporate sponsor in much the way that Berlin's got its stupid bears, Chicago its stupid cows, and so on. Ever since Austin declared itself the "live music capital of the world" I've been waiting for the city to make a really boneheaded gesture in that direction, and now I can relax, because they sure have.

* * *

Food in Austin's been mainly on the go, with no great new discovery yet, although it's wonderful to see that my pal Sappachai has opened a Madam Mam's in South Austin. I've known him since he was the manager of my local supermarket in Austin, and got passed over for promotion and was certain it was racially-based. He decided to open a Thai restaurant, of which we had none at the time, and arranged a partnership with a cousin, as well as backing from some rich Thai guys. He confessed, though, that he was scared: they didn't think Americans liked spicy food. I told him that the solution was to take them to a Mexican place -- I think I even recommended one -- because the first thing that would happen would be that the waiter would plonk down some chips and salsa (and I recommended a place with good fiery stuff). When the Thais noted all the gringos (and farangs) around them nonchalantly eating fire on chips, they'd get the picture.

And thus it was that Satay was born, a sort of pan-Southeast Asian restaurant which spawned a family of sauces and other jarred groceries. Sap and his cousin argued, though, and he went over to the UT campus area and opened a little hole-in-the-wall place called Thai Noodle, which, despite its near-inaccessibility, did very well. But a long-lost romance re-bloomed in Thailand, and Sap went back for a while, returning married to his high-school sweetheart, whose mother, Madam Mam, was a masterful cook. Along with his new wife, he had a bunch of Madam Mam's recipes, and, in an incredibly audacious move, he rented a huge storefront on Guadelupe -- "the Drag," as UT students call it -- and opened a vastly expanded version of his old Thai Noodle joint, with entrees starting at $3.00 and going up to $14 for an astonishing catfish soup with an incendiary, fruit-infused broth that rated 5 or 6 chiles on the menu (which markings are to be taken seriously) and remains one of the most amazing things I've ever eaten.

Needless to say, with a menu that pleased both impoverished students and high-end foodies, not to mention one so vegetarian-friendly that whole tables of various Indians and hippies were a full-time feature, he started printing money, so it was with great pleasure that I accompanied Patrick and Denise down to his brand-new joint for my second meal here on this trip. Denise really scored with a special, which I've just returned from enjoying myself: a sort of coconut custard made with salmon and a fine spice mix, with chunks of salmon stirred into it and a bed of collard greens. Again, an incredible achievement.

On the other end of the spectrum, I had another great oyster po'boy from Gene's, which I so loved last year. My love was somewhat diminished by the fact that it took me an hour and forty-five minutes to get my sandwich. There was a young guy who entered after me who'd phoned his order in and he left with his order with five minutes to get back to work. It's a great place, but apparently not at the end of the week.

* * *

And what's a trip to the States without some bumper stickers and t-shirts? There are many, many Republicans for Voldemort bumper stickers around Austin, but the one that had me chuckling most was non-political and said "Yes, this is my pickup truck. No, I will not help you move." And anyone who's been around bands on their way up will appreciate the t-shirt on a kid who got on my Denver-Austin flight on the way back from California: "Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver."

* * *

The California trip was short and sweet, mostly concerned with meetings and hanging around Village Music, having dinner with some folks from the Well, and having lunch with legendary CREEM writer Jaan Uhelski at Viks Chaat, which I'd long wanted to try. I'll have some photos of all of this later, but if you're looking at their page, the Dahl Batata Puri was the winner, and I scored a couple of killer tiny Indian cookbooks at the grocery store next door, which was paradisical -- if impractical for my Berlin-based Indian cooking needs. More different kind of dal than I'd ever seen, though. And I also had a great meal cooked by my friend Bob, whose long service as art director of Salon hasn't diminished the talents that once made him the Bay Area's best-kept secret chef, at whose restaurants the celeb chefs could be seen dining contentedly on their days off. All in all, a nice trip.

There's more, but it involves photos that are hard for me to download at the moment, so stay tuned.

The Magic Question

So today's thinking exercise was going to a SXSW panel called Covering Music In New Media, moderated by my pal Jason Gross. The participants were Michael Azerrad from eMusic, Erik Flannigan of AOL, Amy Phillips of Pitchfork Media, mighty Mark Pucci (one of my favorite publicists) and someone I think was Nick Baily of Shorefire Media, another great publicist. The panel description ended with this sentence:

"Without a reliable and financially sustainable model for online media, what is a rock critic to do?"

Well, yeah.

Naturally, all the folks with dogs in the online media fight -- Azerrad, Flannigan, and Phillips -- sought to assure everyone that their online publications were as viable as the print ones, as opposed to the many unreliable bloggers and fan-sites. The talked about coping with the flood of product, the fight to maintain some sort of credibility in the face of illegal uploads and rumor-mongering. They said that discussing which online sites will eventually work and which won't is like asking if Rolling Stone would survive in 1973 -- a good point.

What they did not discuss is what every single writer I've talked to here has been talking about: there is no paying work. Anywhere. Rumors of magazines going broke abounded, and the most-spoken sentence was "Man, I can't remember when it was ever this bad." When I'd respond that I couldn't, either, I got a shocked look, since I was writing about music something like 20 years before any of these other folks came on the scene. Nobody is making a living any more. Nice to have spent your life learning a trade you can no longer practice and can't make a living at, eh?

"Great audience at this," commented the irrepressable Jim Fouratt, who's been in this business even longer than I have (well, by a year or two). "Half of 'em are dinosaurs and half of 'em are 18-year-olds." And what we old folks had in common with our spiritual grandchildren was that neither of us can figure out how to make a living doing what we want to do. What we did not have in common with them was that once, we actually did, even if it was never a good one.

In a way, I'm lucky. Writing about art and culture for the Wall Street Journal for all that while liberated me from rock criticism, and I'm less and less interested in writing about (and listening to) music these days. Rock criticism has always paid less than any other cultural commentary, and that hasn't changed: one major indie-rock mag pays its writers a dime a word. That's what I got in the early '70s, and those dimes were worth a whole lot more back then. If I can make the right connection (and getting out of Berlin would help me subject-wise), I've got a lot more to write about than ever before. A lot of the poor souls trudging around here are a lot more committed to one subject than I am, or they really don't want to write about anything else. Or can't. I'm itching to write about a whole lot of stuff, and I've already proven I can.

But where? As general-interest magazines die like there was a plague going around (and actually, I guess there is), the options get more limited, and there are more people competing for less space than ever before.

I sure don't have any answers, but then, after an hour and a quarter, neither did anyone on Jason's panel. You either wrote for a website with good writing that doesn't pay, or you squeezed yourself into someone's idea that 700 words is just about all anyone needs to write about anything and got paid commensurately. Blender, the reigning paper rock mag, doesn't allow record reviews of over 80 words, for the most part.

I've currently got two book proposals out, neither for a music-related book. I hope one of them will give me the lifeline to make the changes I need in my life so that I can keep on doing the only thing I know how to do well enough to get paid for it. Neither has an agent who's committed to it yet, though, so I'm living in suspended animation.

And posting on my blog.

Which doesn't pay.

Las Migas de Austin, Part 1

I'm grabbing a moment before I have to head in to the Austin Convention Center to interview Joe Boyd to jot down some of the stuff that's happened so far on this trip.

***

Paris was okay, although the restaurant I ate at wasn't worth noting (although it was inexpensive and not bad). The hotel was convenient to the Gare Montparnasse, which is where the buses to the airport leave from, and it occurred to me that Montparnasse is worth a walk when I have time. There was a nearby bar called Le Chien Qui Fume, whose neon smoking dog I'd have liked to get a picture of, although whether or not I have the skills to do this is quite another question.

I saw a number of election posters for Segolene Royale, the Socialist candidate (and, potentially, France's first woman president, although her chances don't look too good a the moment) with the slogan "A fairer France is a stronger France," and I mused that this is a slogan both stirring and, uh, empty. Think about it: what on earth does it meant?

The bus to the airport has a video loop it plays, presumably to distract you from the not-so-inspiring scenery after you leave the city limits, and, as on the other trips I've taken on it recently, there was a longish public service announcement about pedophilic sex tourism. A good cause, of course, but a strange thing to see over and over, the litany of how many years in foreign jails various men have gotten. Do a significant number of Air France's passengers to Charles de Gaulle Airport have sexual predation in mind at their destinations? That seemed to be the message.

Spotted on the way out of town, another Parisian eatery we won't be patronizing: Cheaper Food Sandwiches.

***

I haven't seen much music yet here, mostly because I've wanted to re-read Joe Boyd's book White Bicycles to prepare for this afternoon's interview. Jon Hardy (who was turned down yet again for a showcase here this year) recommended I see some of his friends from St. Louis who'd moved to New York, a band called the White Rabbits, and it was a good tip. They feature a very intense piano-playing guy, a more serene guitarist, and three other guys who move back and forth among bass, keyboards, percussion, and three drum sets. I didn't catch enough lyrics to see if the songwriting's there, and there's a bit of sameness to the material which ought to even out when they write more songs. I'd be very interested to see them in a year.

Last night, of course, there was no choice: I had to at least try to get into the Stax show at Antone's. Although the line went around the block, by some miracle I got in, and at long last got to see Booker T and the MGs, who are probably the greatest band-as-band America has produced. I mean this in kind of a jazz sense: the way the four original members, Booker T. Jones, Donald "Duck" Dunn, Steve Cropper, and Al Jackson, Jr. (who was murdered years ago: his place was taken by one of his cousins)(and yes, I know Lewis Steinberg was the original bassist), interacted almost telepathically and could raise material as bathetic as "More" and "Summertime" to astonishing heights. Forty years later, Cropper's let the guitar-hero thing go a little bit to his head (Steve! It was all about the minimalism of your playing!), Booker seems less invested in the results, and Dunn is still the greatest bass player around, but hey, what do you want after all this time? An hour of Booker T music was something worth waiting for.

William Bell has still got it, too, and his snazzy pinstripe suit, dark sunglasses, and soul-man show was way too brief. Hunger got me out of the building during Eddie Floyd's set. I know he's not as young as he once was, but this "clap your hands" schtick gets old fast. And I'd seen what I'd come for, and was glad.

* * *

And I was hungry. I've gotten some good food here, and will probably do a full post on it later, but so far the big discovery was just a couple blocks from my hotel. My friend Scoop, whom I hadn't seen in eons, has moved here, and he came in from his Rancho Deluxe in Bastrop County to have lunch with me. We headed for the Tâm Deli, the superb Vietnamese place Jean Caffeine turned me on to last year, only to find it closed Tuesdays, so we decided just to cruise until we found a taqueria. Buried in a strip-mini-mall, bundled with a convenience store, an auto insurance agency, and a pool hall, was Jefe's, which I picked because they also run a taco truck, which was parked out front. We had tacos al pastor, which is marinated pork, and the order came with two squeeze bottles of salsa, one kind of brick colored, the other a pale green. Both were astonishing, the red having citrus undertones and hellfire overtones, the green subtly fiery with a wonderful herb combination. Four tacos, $4.99. I'm going back.

Yet Another Decent Interval

So tomorrow morning I'm off to SXSW again. Last year I said I'd be reporting from the scene, but got so weirded out by culture shock that I never got around to it, so this time I'm not making any promises. I'll probably be uploading some food reports to Dishola, and I'll undoubtedly expand on them here, especially if I find some great new places, but usually the nights of music leave me so exhausted and depressed with the sheer volume of mediocre stuff that I lack any enthusiasm for writing about it afterwards. Or that's what happened last year.

Actually, one of the more interesting SXSW-related activities is happening before the event, in the form of a blog discussing the impact of technology on the record biz. Even if you don't follow some of the more intricate details, you'll be able to pick up on how dire things are even for those heroic little guys who're supposed to be profiting from the dinosaurs' malaise. And this year I'm actually on a panel, or, rather, I'm conducting one of the live interviews with an old hero of mine, Joe Boyd, who's probably produced at least one of your all-time favorite records, even if you haven't heard it yet.

I'll also be headed off to Marin County (got a super-cheap ticket) to pay my respects to the about-to-vanish Village Music, but unless I win the lottery in Texas offering my respects is about all I'm going to be able to do. But I'll be seeing some folks from the Well, as well as some old friends from when I lived there. Then it'll be back to Texas for a couple of days, and back here at the end of March.

And a couple of days after that, you just know I'll be pissed off at Berlin again.

More History Gone

There it goes: another piece of Berlin history is biting the dust.


That's right, folks: by the time I get back from the States, the Tränenpalast will be no more. Apparently Deutsche Bahn has decided that this memory of the old East-West border has to be demolished immediately, the easier to excise the memory of what the building used to be.

I know for a lot of people, the Tränenpalast was a curiously-named entertainment venue, one which, if the experience my friend Gary Lucas had when he was booked there a few years ago is anything to go by, was horribly managed. In fact, practically from the day it opened in that incarnation, I heard sordid tales about the management, and the new managers didn't seem to be any better than the first ones.




My first time there, though, wasn't exactly for entertainment. The building's name, "Palace of Tears," came from its use as the processing terminal for Western visitors leaving East Berlin on their way back home. In retrospect, this seems like an odd name: Friedrichstr. station was an international checkpoint (the other being Checkpoint Charlie, further down Friedrichstr.), not a German-German one (which were scattered all over town), so the story that it saw the tearful separation of families who had come over to visit doesn't hold water unless these families were from countries besides Germany.

When I made my first visit to East Berlin, it was in the company of a guy who apparently had raised some red flags at Checkpoint Charlie, and had suffered a cavity search on his last time over. He decided it might be easier to try Friedrichstr., and indeed it was, so my first view of East Berlin was the Admiralspalast theater. We quickly headed on to the Pergamon Museum, Alexanderplatz, and Frankfurter Allee, where we marvelled at the grandiose Russian-style apartment buildings.

But our ultimate destination was Prenzlauer Berg, where we met up with a guy named Norman. Norman was part of a group of vegetarians who met occasionally in East Berlin with some folks from the West, including some British and American soldiers, who were also vegetarians, for big dinners. Apparently (by which I mean maybe, see below), the day before, Norman had seen one of these guys on the street and waved to him. The morning of the day we met him, he'd been awoken by the Stasi secret police and interrogated for six hours. By the time we met up with him, Norman was a wreck.

Our solution to this was to get him as drunk as possible. This was also the solution to another problem: the 25 Marks one had to exchange one-for-one at the border. Eastmarks were worth nothing, and there was nothing much you could buy with them, but you weren't allowed to take any back with you, either. To burn them up, we bought Norman dinner and found a bar where we drank ourselves silly. Finally, it was almost midnight, the time by which we had to be out of East Berlin, and we were just about out of money. We slipped Norman our spare change, and headed to the checkpoint in the building which is now called the Tränenpalast. Norman was still traumatized by his treatment at the hands of the Stasi, and was begging us to find him a black Jewish woman to marry. "That way, if the state tries to keep us apart, I can charge them with racism and anti-Semitism!" We tried to explain that black Jews of any gender were thin on the ground, let alone ones who might be inclined to marry him, but he told us we were lying, covering up for our unwillingness to help him.

On the one hand, Norman was being ludicrous, but on the other, I never forgot this rather intimate view into life in East Berlin. The guy I went over with later published a rather icky book called Once Upon a Time in the East, detailing the wacky fun he and his friends had had travelling in the East Bloc before the Wall came down, eating bad -- but cheap! -- vegetarian food in places like Romania and Czechoslovakia and generally behaving like the boorish British tourists they were. Norman's story was in there, too, along with an interesting postscript. When the border to Hungary opened up, Norman was one of the first to leave East Berlin, and travelled the long way around, through Czechoslovakia, Austria, West Germany, and then back to West Berlin, a trip of hundreds of miles to achieve a journey from Prenzlauer Berg to Schöneberg. But once he was there, he began acting very strangely, and there are some among that circle who think, today, that Norman was a Stasi agent keeping track of them, and that it's not impossible that the whole interrogation story he told us that day had been made up.

I have no idea, but I do think of Norman, who was last heard of living with his mother back in Prenzlauer Berg, when I walk past the Tränenpalast.

Or, as with so many other things here, maybe I should put that in the past tense. Once again, an uncomfortable souvenir of Berlin's past is extirpated. In two years, no doubt, there'll be a little pocket park there (to compensate for the one on the other side of the station, on which rose yet another untenanted office building), or maybe a Tränenpalast Museum sponsored by Deutsche Bahn, where the story the exhibits tell might not jibe exactly with the memories a bunch of aging people seem to have of the reality. The Palast der Republik is pretty much down by now, the Tränenpalast is going down...What's next?

On Sunday, one of the tabloids had a headline screaming that Deutsche Post is going to tear down the Fernsehturm. It'll take a little more than the Berliner Kurier to convince me of this, but after what I've seen here, I'm not ruling it out, either.

Crumbs From Behind The Wall

First, I would like to make extra sure that readers of this blog realize that it has nothing to do with the dining-out column by the same name in the wretched Ex-Berliner magazine. It's really not even worth wasting electrons on those people and their amazingly myopic view of Berlin's anglophone communities, but it probably is worth highlighting their astonishing lack of originality.

Those who are interested in my dining-out experiences here should a) wait until I can afford doing it again and then b) check over at Dishola, the Austin-based experiment in restaurant blogging or whatever it is. I'm the official Berlin Editor over there, and I've really got to get some stuff up about Toca Rouge and that ramen place on Neue Schönhauser and a couple of other places I'm thinking would appeal to their readership.

* * *

As promised some time ago, a new work by Nike, this one on Brunnenstr. near the park. Is this an hommage to Gaugin, or...?



* * *

I'm headed to Texas and California via Paris for a couple of weeks, starting in a week, and walked over to Hauptbahnhof recently to buy my ticket to Paris and see if I could get beaned by a piece of falling steel so I could sue Deutsche Bahn and get myself free tickets for life. I did manage to accomplish one of those goals, but it was the one that cost me money, not the one that cost them money. Whatever: I'm leaving this place for a while, and that always feels good unless I'm headed to someplace even worse like Frankfurt/Main.

At any rate, I was amused by a rather ambitious currywurst budde over there which calls itself Berliner-Curry.de. Around the name are listed cities: New York, Dubai, Paris, and so on. Interesting; an entrepreneur actually attempting to franchise Berlin currywurst around the world? That actually could be a winner (although not in Dubai unless the sausages were beef). Naturally, as soon as I got home I hit the URL, and was disappointed, as you no doubt will be. It is emblematically Berlinish, though, to hop on a trend without really understanding it. I remember years ago when a new office supply company opened here in Mitte calling itself Papyrus.com. Naturally, they hadn't registered the URL, and didn't even have a website. But that dot-com stuff was trendy, right?

* * *

One thing you can always say about Berlin is it's a really safe city. Violent crime here is almost unknown in most places, and I've only been burgled once, which was pretty much my landlord's fault. But that's not to say there isn't an undercurrent of anger here which blossoms forth every now and again in unpleasant ways. Currently, the trend seems to be throwing paving stones (easily dug out of the sandy soil here with a pen knife) through windows. Just in the past couple of days, I've seen smashed windows at the hookah bar on Chausseestr. and Tieckstr. (although this is probably just the tip of a larger story involving the huge number of these places and shops to supply them which have sprung up virtually overnight: do people really enjoy sitting around sipping sweet tea and smoking perfumed tobacco if they're not Arabs?), at the huge SAP software company building on the corner of Rosenthaler Str. and Gipsstr. (where you can see the place they dug the stones right in front of the building), and at the former Beate Uhse porn shop on Rosenthaler Str. This last suddenly sprouted some weird art-like installation in the windows almost within minutes of the Uhse folks pulling out, and it was apparently part of some viral marketing scheme by one of the game box companies -- I've lost track of Playstations and Nintendos and so on, but one of them has put up fake street art, opened a fake art gallery on Torstr., and now this. Not only did the windows go, the bricks were still there when I walked past, and someone was filming it.

I have to admit, I understand how street artists can get irked by this sort of thing, because the paper art with the URL was just bad enough that it stood out as fake. It was as annoying as the ad campaign for the new Toyota auto which has -- and I'm not exaggerating here -- taken up about 95% of all advertising space in this city for most of this week, and which will, if there's any justice, disappear tomorrow when the car is actually introduced. The Toyota campaign is yet another one which presupposes the utter stupidity of the consumer, the "Hey dumbass, buy this" attitude that's at the basis of so much German advertising, as opposed to the "You're clever enough to want this" approach the Brits pioneered and the Americans eventually figured out. Trouble is, there aren't enough paving stones to take this one out.

* * *

Yes, I know Berlin is changing, but... One night not very long ago, I was walking down Invalidenstr. and there was cheesy pink light streaming off a ginormous disco ball inside the staid walls of the old DDR post office. A couple of weeks later, I saw that Volkswagen was staging an event there. Now, when I first moved here, that was my local post office, and I've (naturally, because it's what one does at the post office in Germany) stood in lines there many a day, admiring the strange metal sculpture on the polished marble walls. After Deutsche Post went private and the post office moved into a MacPaper outlet (I am not making this up, for those of you who don't live here), the building was empty for a long, long time. But apparently it's been rescued by a club which will give the lie to all those reports of hip! edgy! Berlin! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bangaluu! (Warning: cheezy handbag house music when you click the link). Opening a branch of this -- or even an imitation of it -- would soon empty Friedrichshain of hipsters, and the flights back to Williamsburg would be packed. I kept clicking links on that site out of sick fascination. And to think it's right next door to where, many many years ago in the Paleolithic Era, the Technics Club was...

* * *

And finally, the pictures to explain the headline. Some months ago, I posted a picture of some graffiti "artists" spray-painting the wall of the building next to me, which I have to walk past on my way to my front door. I thought they were done -- surely it couldn't get any more hideous than that -- but they kept working at it until there were all sorts of horrible details: a little green head of some depressed-looking guy, a woman-robot...who knows what they thought they were doing? But they signed it and left their phone numbers, in case anyone else wanted their house desecrated.

Then, as I guess artistic collaborations do on occasion, this one went south, and one of the "artists" came back and obliterated his former partner's work and re-did it to his own liking. Not only that, he also went to work on the wall next door to it, so now we have a diptych with the theme of the Berlin Wall. Now, just why someone would want to spray-paint a new Wall, I cannot tell you. In fact, besides the eyesore factor, the depression this horrible set of murals sets off in me every time I have to see it (which is, of course, every day) is hard to even verbalize. What is the point of this? Who on earth would pay someone to do it? And just in case you think I'm making this up, here's the wall closest to the street:



And here's the wall on the rear building:



There's only one solution I can think of. The original Berlin Wall attracted graffiti artists from around the world. Not just the collection who did the stretch known as the East Side Gallery (which was all post-Wall anyway), but Keith Haring over by the Gropius-Bau, and the French guy who did all those heads that wound up in Wings of Desire on that stretch in Kreuzberg. So maybe Nike can come and stick a nude or two up on this "Wall" and make it that much less depressing to look at.

I still liked our wall better when it had a big billboard on it featuring the Puhdys shilling for Berliner Pilsner.

Scary Movie

Some years ago, Berlin had the first of its Biennales. I went, looked, and wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal Europe, because that was my job at the time. A few weeks later, an art critic I knew from Philadelphia came through to check it out. I caught her leaving the Postführamt, where the show was, and asked her what she'd thought. "Aaah," she sneered. "A lot of one-liners." An apt description, I thought. "Except...well, there was this piece by this Portugese guy..."

Oh, yes. It was called Kitsune, and it made me confront a lot of my ideas about art at that time. Basically, it was what's called a video installation, although, unlike most video installations, which can be seen for as long or short as you feel like in order to get the idea, this one was linked to a narrative, which meant you really had to sit through the whole thing. It was worth it. The visual was fairly static: Japanese mountains, over which fog was coming and going. The text was read by two Japanese radio actors, in Japanese, and there were English subtitles. The story was simple: two old men are waiting out the rain in a teahouse, and, although both are rather shy, eventually they begin to talk, and wind up telling each other ghost stories. I loved it.

And because I'd loved it and said so in print, and was apparently one of the few people who reviewed that exhibition who didn't zero in on the super-trendy but empty stuff there, the artist, a guy named João Penalva, contacted me about getting a copy of the review. He lives in London most of the time, and one of his dealers, Volker Diehl, is in Berlin, so he's here from time to time. That's where I met him almost exactly three years ago, at the opening of another video work, Bahnai. He's short and round and has a great sense of humor, as I discovered when we had lunch at the Vietnamese place down the street.

So when I got an invitation to the DAAD Galerie for the opening of his latest piece, The Roar of Lions, on Feb. 2, I made a note to go see it. I was extremely busy at the moment getting some book proposals ready, so I didn't make the opening, and although I used the invitation as a bookmark for what I was reading at the time, I'm ashamed to say it took an e-mail from him asking if I'd seen it, and, if so, what I thought, to get me off my butt to go see it. I used to have several friends here who were always up for gallery-hopping but they've all moved, so I don't keep up as much as I'd like. But I found time to walk down to Zimmerstr. yesterday to take a look.

It's another amazing piece. It starts with a couple of flashlights moving around in the dark, and then cuts to a scene of a frozen-over lake, the Grunewaldsee here in Berlin. The text this time is in Mandarin Chinese, which, as with Kitsune, means you have to pay attention to the subtitles. This time the story isn't so easily described, nor do I want to give any spoilers, but at the start the narrator has just witnessed a bloody car accident involving a woman and a girl, and is talking to the policeman at the scene about what he saw. The policeman thanks him, tells him there were other witnesses, and checks his papers, perhaps a little closely. At this point, a note of dread enters the story, although you don't quite know why. It gets worse when he gets home: unlocking the door, he finds the same policeman and a guy in civilian clothes inside his apartment, although how they got in he can't figure. The dread gets a lot thicker at that point, in part because of what happens, but in part, also, because we can't tell where this story is taking place or what the stakes are.

Meanwhile, we are watching the scene on the ice, as ordinary folks are walking on the ice, some (but only a few) skating, and a lot of them are out with their dogs, who are not at their best slipping around. Imperceptably, the sort of brownish-green of the video acquires more and more color, to the point where someone in a red jacket really stands out. But as the story being told gets odder and more infused with fear, the colors start bleaching out again, something Penalva also did with Bahnai. But the story has gotten so gripping by this part that you're likely not to notice this right away, and it also undergoes a complete metamorphosis in its last few lines so that by the time the credits roll, you're even more unsure of what you've just sat through than you could have imagined.

Suffice it to say that the walk home was completely different than the walk to the gallery. It was the same street (Friedrichstr.), but the experience I'd just been through had changed it utterly. The Roar of Lions was done while Penalva was here in Berlin with a DAAD grant, and if it reflects his experience here, then that might well explain my reaction. There's also the disconnect between the images of the people out walking and playing on the ice and the narrative overlaying it, much of which occurs in the narrator's small room. I'd really have to see it again to say anything more intelligent about it, but there's one thing I can say:

If you get the chance, go see this. The gallery is open from 11 until 6 every day except Sunday, the piece is 37 minutes long, and screenings are every 45 minutes. The show closes on Mar. 10, so you've got two weeks. I'll probably go again, so if anyone wants to join me, let me know. Just don't expect any light-hearted banter afterwards.

The Crumbiest Month

Just a couple of random things for those who aren't at the Berlinale...

***

A friend who works with a company here in Berlin that produces trade magazines, several of them for the food industry, was over the other day. "That bread you get in the bakeries here," he was saying, "you know they don't bake that on the premises, right?" Well, that hardly takes a genius; most bakeries don't have the room to mix, form, proof, and bake bread. No, of course it's brought in from somewhere else in what readers of a certain age might recognize as Brown N Serve condition and finished in the tiny ovens in the bakery. "Yeah, right," he contined, "but here's the really weird part. Do you know where that bread starts out?" In some factory somewhere, I suppose. "You're right -- but the factory is in China. They fly the bread in, frozen, and it gets distributed to an intermediate point, and then it gets thawed and delivered to the bakeries."

I'm not passing this along as gospel, although I suspect it might be true for some of the chains. I've often known I was approaching Berlin on the train, for instance, because of a huge Thobens Bakeries facility just outside of Potsdam, but I don't know what they actually do there. Anyone else have info on this? It'd help explain why the bread here is so bad -- the independent bakery in Berlin is virtually extinct -- but it would also open up a new market for German bakers: it would be just as easy to re-heat this stuff in ovens in America or Japan as it is to do it here. And you could market it as "authentic German bread."

***

Speaking of magazines, a friend passed this article along. Ho-hum, another magazine startup. But...Vanity Fair isn't just any magazine. It's hard to say if the Spiegel article is tongue-in-cheek -- although, like the country it's published in, it's not known for a sense of humor -- but there are some rather astounding things in it. Like this quote: "And rumors abound that Gruner + Jahr is already working on a magazine in case Vanity Fair is successful. The working title sounds like something Poschardt would come up with: Neues Deutschland or New Germany." Ummm, I know Germans are expert at forgetting their history, but did no one notice that this was the name of the house organ of the East German government? I mean, I can go to the DDR Museum and buy a replica copy of the first issue for €1.50.

Not to mention the folly of doing this as a weekly, doing it as a weekly with a tiny staff, and running a picture of Till Schweiger with a goat on the cover of the first issue. Till Schweiger with his shirt off, sure, but...a goat??

Read it and weep.

***

Which is pretty much what I did this afternoon while trying to figure out if I have enough in the bank for a round-trip train ticket to Paris. I probably do, but when you go to the Deutsche Bahn travel information page and try to book the ticket, you're met with a link that says "Unknown Tariff Abroad." Click it, and you get this message:

"For the most important foreign cities (e.g. Vienna, Amsterdam, Zurich) fares are available.

"For your requested connection fares are unfortunately not available."

So Deutsche Bahn is still fighting the Franco-Prussian War and we, the customers, get the benefit.

Even Smaller Crumbs

All I seem to have to do is to save up a few tiny items for one of these collections of trivia and the very next day I find a bunch more. Almost immediately after pushing the "publish" button on the last batch, I was walking around the 'hood and found a new Nike painting. But that'll have to wait...

***

Meanwhile, it's that time again, and for the first year in recent memory the Potsdamer Platz public transportation is open for the Berlinale, Berlin's once-mighty film festival. Two things I never do is go to the Berlinale and read the pitiful excuse for an English-language magazine here, the Ex-Berliner, but I do get a kick out of their sadsack music editor, David Strauss, and he's gotten the no doubt unpaid job of blogging the Berlinale for them. It could be fun to read, and so if you're interested, I suggest you click here.

***

Last year, out of nowhere, I got a two-Euro coin that looked like this:



The building is the Holstentor in Lübeck, pretty much the symbol of that city, and seeing it on the back of these special coins was, in fact, the only way to see it during much of last year, because the real thing was covered by scaffolding. Just why Germany would choose to change its coinage design only a few years into introducing it I had no idea, but last night I was in some seedy dive or another, and got this in change:



It took me a bit of surfing around to find out that this is Schwerin Castle, representing the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and to find an explanation, rendered in the stiffest possible English translation. Basically, the various Federal states of Germany take over the annual presidency of the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, and get their own coins as a perk. Germany's the only country doing this, which is further proof that a lot of the Euro system was designed by them. Why else would we have a 20-cent, instead of a 25-cent, coin, not to mention the tiny, confusing 2-centers?

Of course, what they're really really good for, these special €2 coins, is making cashiers -- especially outside of Germany -- hand you your change back and tell you it's not good.

***

Has anyone else noticed the proliferation of "French" cafes around town? There must be a dozen of them which've sprung up in the past six months, particularly around trendy areas like Weinbergsweg, Kollwitzplatz, and so on. What's really weird, though, is that there's nothing particularly French about anything but the wine they offer (and that's usually not so hot), and the ones that pretend to have a little deli section don't seem to have a clue what French food is. One I've got my eye on, though, is just down the street from me on Torstr. In the former Döner Kebap joint that had the weird poem about children being the future of the world on its wall, someone's opening something called Bandol, and they've been installing vintage meat lockers and a blackboard wall for writing the menu, plus diner-y chrome stools -- and two huge TV monitors above the door. Or that's what it looks like from the street. We'll see (if "we" can afford it, that is) what it turns out to be. Meanwhile, though, to date it looks like "French" is the new "Mexican."

***

Places We Won't Be Dining: Spotted on Marienburger Str.: Pizza Pimp.

February Crumbs

First off, the reaction to my last post was very interesting: I got an e-mail from David Kamp, the author of The United States of Arugula, thanking me for the "review," and noting that, as he mentions in the book's introduction, there were threads of the story which he just couldn't wedge in to the narrative as he was telling it. As an example -- also mentioned in the introduction -- he cites the history of Chinese cooking in America, which isn't mentioned at all.

He's right: once you start a story, it goes where it wants to go, and if it's going to be readable, you have to make sure there aren't too many digressions. And, as Kamp said in his note, both Edna Lewis and John Thorne lie outside the narrative he was writing. (He also noted that he'd eaten at Gage & Tollner under Lewis' regime, but, unlike me, his table had gotten a visit from the grand lady herself, checking up on things. I am officially jealous.) As for Raymond Sokolov, he tried to get an interview with him, but they kept missing each other. This kind of thing happens, too.

As for me, I told him that this piece, like pretty much every post on this blog, was written and edited in an hour or less, which is a discipline I maintain in case I ever wind up with a serious writing career again. And in my case, I left out one of the threads of my argument, which was why I'd mentioned Bill Bruford's book Heat at the top of the post: that besides the Food Network honky-tonk I mentioned, the other current trend seems to be towards a kind of connoisseurship that takes the ability to make good food out of the hands of ordinary people, be it through the kind of perfectionism Mario Battali practices, or the sous-vide fad or the weirdo-cuisine trend of El Bulli and so on.

Finally, Kamp mentioned that he was familiar with my writing, because of what he called "a morbid affliction of mine".

***

Not as morbid, of course, as this news about a German Chinese restaurant. It's pretty obvious -- well, pretty obvious to those of us who grew up around organized crime, anyway -- that some of the "Asia" restaurant phenomenon here is about more than the bad food they serve. One guy I knew said it was an immigration scam: since Germans can't tell one Asian from another, successive waves of workers pass through the restaurants using the same set of ID cards.

It's obvious that something's going on a lot of the time: people who remember the original White Trash Fast Food club on the corner by my house probably wondered why the Chinese motif, but that was because it was the Kaiser des Chinas restaurant before that, ornately decorated, with room after empty room. You never saw anyone in there, and the one person I knew who'd eaten there asked me if I had. When I told him no, he just said "Don't." (And he was German).

And then, one day, it just closed. It sat there, empty, for over a year. When Wally and his crew took it over, he showed me the kitchen. "These people left so quickly that they left the spices still measured out," he said, pointing at a row of porcelain bowls with various powders and shriveled remnants in them. That was when I remembered having found a bunch of waiter's wallets in the trash outside my house and wondering how in the world they'd gotten there. Still, nothing like this has happened here yet.

***

Following up on the last set of crumbs, it should be noted that the good voters of Berlin actually went for the renaming of a stretch of Kochstr. as Rudi-Dutschke-Str. a couple of weeks ago. Sometimes the good guys do win, even if it's just a bit of harmless symbolism.

***

And following up on another crumb, I want to report that the Yum Mee bánh mi sandwich joint up at the top of Friedrichstr. is doing a pretty good job. I think the baguettes could be crisper, and they use some kind of margarine instead of the homemade mayo the place I was introduced to them in Honolulu used, and of course they don't use shredded green chiles because they're scared of frightening the Germans. Turned out the guy who actually puts your sandwich together speaks pretty accent-less American English, although he's apparently never been there, and he interrogated me pretty thoroughly last time I was in there about my opinions on his product and my experiences with bánh mi in America. I told him he should add Vietnamese paté to the menu, but he wasn't sure Germans would go for it -- and he may be right. He is, however, about to add tiger prawns to the bánh mi side of the menu, which should be good. And, as lagniappe, as they say in Louisiana, his co-worker taught me how to say pho correctly. I'd been saying something like "phaw," but it turns out to be more like "pheu." Now if someone here would learn how to make that right...

***

I recently discovered that there are so many refugees from Brooklyn's hipster enclave, Williamsburg, here in Friedrichshain that they're calling it Friedrichsburg, but that is not why Deutsche Post issued this stamp this year. Really.

Eat, Think, Gossip

While I was in the States in October, I was lucky enough to acquire a copy of this book, The United States of Arugula by David Kamp, which I'd been wanting to read for some time. Foodie-ism, if I may be forgiven the term, is an interesting cultural phenomenon, and hardly restricted to the United States, although the degree of it there and the swiftness with which it arrived can be unnerving. Furthermore, this book ties in with a couple of others which have been getting a lot of discussion recently, most notably Bill Buford's Heat, and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, , the former of which I've read, the latter not. I did, however, read Pollan's great article on "nutritionism" on Sunday, and suddenly a bunch of stuff came together in my head. Now let me see if I can disentangle it.

Kamp's story begins with pioneers like James Beard, Julia Child, and Craig Claiborne, each of whom had an individual way of awakening postwar Americans towards the possibilities of what they put on their tables. Beard's approach was that of the hearty bon-vivant, a man's man who wasn't afraid to mess it up in the kitchen to produce good-tasting, all-American food, and who was particularly adept at that manliest of all pursuits, outdoor cooking -- although he could also whip out a mean loaf of bread. Child and Claiborne, on the other hand, were lucky enough to come onto the scene just as America's Francophilia was initiated by Jacqueline Kennedy's love of French food and put into high gear by the restaurant at the French Pavillion of the 1964-65 World's Fair on Flushing Meadows on Long Island. Child had taken cooking lessons in Paris while her husband was employed there and came back to the States determined to turn Americans onto this amazing cuisine. Claiborne, for his part, was reviewing restaurants for the New York Times and got to watch the phenomenon grow, eventually hooking up with one of the chefs who'd worked at the Fair, Pierre Franey, to make the Times' food section the template for all other American newspapers'.

But the story really becomes important when the idea of eating well leaves the expensive restaurants and democratizes by merging -- in California, of course -- the impulse for fine cooking with the search for perfect ingredients, which latter was an inevitable product of the hippie-driven natural foods movement. The central figure for this was -- and, really, still is -- Alice Waters of Berkeley's Chez Panisse restaurant, and the early chaos of that revolutionary place is a story which meets Kamp's skills head-on. The intrigue, the musical beds, the drug use, and above all the titanic egos on display are perfect fodder for his Vanity Fair sensibility. Still, he never loses sight of the Big Picture, which was that ultimately this was a very, very successful movement, one which soon expanded past the California borders and into other states, and also expanded past the restaurant business into producers like Celestial Seasonings and Ben & Jerry's and -- especially -- into the grocery business through America's Whole Foods chain (which started in a building near my house in Austin which is now a laundromat).

The book's momentum is such that you're just swept away by the stories, and the skillful way Kamp joins them all together. The Food Network! Iron Chef! The Zagat Survey! Mark Miller! Tony Bourdain! It really is a great read. Except...

Except three really important figures in my own telling of this story are missing, two entirely, and one mentioned in passing for something I don't consider his most important contribution to the story. And, in a really, really backhanded way, this also reflects on Pollan's essay. Let me take these three missing persons in roughly chronological order.

First is Edna Lewis. who died last February at the age of 90. Mrs. Lewis was, unlike anyone else I can find in Kamp's book, black, and she learned how to cook the traditional way from the traditional sources. Untraditionally, however, she left for New York at the age of 16, and, after a short time as a domestic, became known as a cook. She ruthlessly pursued that career, doing private catering work and finally taking over the kitchen at Barney Josephson's Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, a hangout for all manner of lefties and jazz fans. She worked in several other restaurants, gave cooking lessons, and kept up her catering business, and in 1972, put out her first cookbook, The Edna Lewis Cookbook. Four years later came The Taste of Country Cooking, which made her reputation. I finally caught up with her (in a manner of speaking) in the late '80s, when she was brought in as executive chef to help rescue Brooklyn's fabled Gage & Tollner steakhouse. I remember going there with a group which included two German friends who loved to cook, and on the way out, one of them bought one of her cookbooks -- one I already had -- at the cashier. "You won't be able to make any of that back home," I warned her. "I don't care," she said. "Anyone who takes this much care knows things I don't know, and they're things I can turn to my own uses. This is a very wise woman." And she nailed it.

Edna Lewis was fanatical about two things: paying attention and having the perfect ingredients. Observing what you were doing while you were doing it so that it became part of you was obviously something she'd picked up from her mentors. And having perfect ingredients, although it was considered eccentric when she first came into the public's notice, is now a sine qua non of any good cooking. It wasn't so much that Mrs. Lewis brought Southern cooking north, but that she brought what she considered Southern practice public. And yet, she is ignored in Kamp's book.

The second figure is Raymond Sokolov, mentioned in passing as the guy who replaced Craig Claiborne as the Times' restaurant reviewer. Which he was, at the beginning of his career. He also became, through his books and his column in, of all places, Natural History magazine, one of the first to make the point that there were a lot of native American ingredients and foodways which were vanishing thanks to Big Agriculture and the Interstate highway system. I'm not even sure his 1981 book, Fading Feast: A Compendium of Disappearing American Regional Foods is still in print. While writing other books, including a cook's apprentice narrative which pre-dated Buford's Heat by a couple of decades, The Saucier's Apprentice, which also serves as a practical guide to classic French sauces. But it was his sounding the klaxon about the "fading feast" which puts Sokolov in line for mention in this book, because people heard the alarm and responded to it, which has at least as much to do with the current greenmarket revival as Alice Waters and the guys in Union Square. (Due diligence: I worked under Sokolov during the years I was a cultural correspondent for the Wall Street Journal Europe, and had dinner with him once or twice, and although he can be a tough editor, I really like the guy).

The third missing figure here is one you can link to from the list over there on the side of the page: John Thorne. Thorne is far more of an outsider than the other two, but once again, I consider him important to the American food story for his doggedness in seeking out historical precedents and attempting to reproduce classic bygone dishes at a time when this was something very few were doing, as well as his non-gor-may attitude, and, most importantly, his ability to render that attitude and the reasoning leading up to it in absolutely crystal-clear prose. Thorne's never been in much of a position to deal with classic French cuisine, having spent his formative cooking years in rural Maine and, now, in Massachusetts, but his was the absolutely perfect recipe for cornmeal pancakes I cooked this past Sunday morning and when I heard he was investigating Louisiana Cajun and Creole cuisine for his book Serious Pig, I was happy to pass on to him all the knowledge -- and recipes -- I had. (He wound up quoting me). I'm happy to have noticed that, after a slight interruption, he seems to be publishing the Simple Cooking newsletter again, and you could do yourself no bigger favor if you like to cook -- and, just as importantly, if you want to read some of the best-written, best-thought-out writing on food and foodways -- than to send the Thornes money for a year's subscription.

What all three of these figures have in common is what breakaway cookbook author Eric Gower calls "mindfulness," a being-there-in-the-moment approach to the not-so-simple acts of cooking and eating. This kind of mindfulness is at the core of the approach Pollan is suggesting in his long essay -- and about as far away from the celebrity-driven honky-tonk of the second half of Kamp's book as you can get. It's also, I'm utterly convinced, at the heart of healthy, sane living, something I may not always achieve, but not for the lack of these exemplars' lessons. In short, I'm glad I read Kamp's book, for the scandal and for his attempt to structure a story which didn't seem to want to sit still. But I do think it's necessary to point out that that's not all there is to the story.

How Green Was My Week

Over the years, it's become something of a tradition: a visit to Green Week at the mammoth ICC convention center, perfect for combatting those mid-January blues. It's a huge celebration of food, a Berlin tradition ever since the end of World War II, with countries from around the world and all of the German states showing their wares.

But I think I'm over it.

I hadn't been in a couple of years, so this time I guarded my cash reserves so I could go there and, I hoped, pick up some cool stuff I couldn't get anywhere else, which is something that's always happened before. It was going to take a little more cash than usual; in the past, I'd either had a press pass or had friends in the restaurant business who were overwhelmed by freebie tickets from their suppliers. After all, the real reason for this event is so that German wholesale grocers and restaurant suppliers could make contacts with the agricultural export and processed food export divisions of other countries, although we normal consumers could always get something unusual to eat and sometimes bargains to bring back home.

Olive oil, for one thing. Back when quality olive oil was hard to find in this city, Green Week gave you the opportunity to sample oil from the entire Mediterranean, with Greece, and particularly Crete, selling a wide range of oils. My bet, though, was always the guy from Tunisia who showed up with oil from the same farm on which he grew the grapes for his (not very good) wine. Tunisia is Italy's dirty little secret: "Italian" olive oil only has to contain a limited percentage of grown-in-Italy oil to be so labelled. The rest is almost always made up of high-quality, low-price Tunisian stuff. Thus, I could buy a half-liter of pure Tunisian oil for five Euros, thereby saving myself about 15 Euros for a fancy label.

Another regular stop was the Irish stand, where I not only knew a couple of the people working there, but I could also pick up some actual Cheddar cheese with flavor. Yeah, it was Kerrygold, from some huge mega-corporation, but after the orange rubber which passes for Cheddar in Berlin, it was pure heaven, and never lasted very long.

Then there'd be serendipity: the year some Mexicans gave me a bunch of jalapeno and serrano chiles because they couldn't give them away to the Germans and were happy to see someone who knew what they were and appreciated them. The year I suddenly realized, in the middle of the exhibition hall, that I was out of coffee and almost immediately came upon the Cameroonian stand, which sold me some stuff that turned out to be delicious. There was the intensely smoky (and never again seen) sauna ham from Finland, the hair-raising and sweat-inducing Estonian mustard, the year the Portugese were unloading cans of tuna in olive oil for 19 cents. Before the pasta ladies started showing up at the Thursday market at Hackescher Markt (before there was a Thursday market at Hackescher Markt, for that matter), it was a source for high-end Parmesan cheese, and the guy always talked me into buying a salame soaked in Barolo wine, which could turn an ordinary pizza truly extraordinary.

But this year: nothing.

Well, almost nothing. The Tunisians had long ago stopped bringing wine and olive oil, and concentrated on herbs and crappy handcrafts, but this year, that same olive oil (with a much-improved label) was there, and was dutifully scored. As was almost-authentic Cajun sausage (under the name Knoblauch Knacker) from the Wattwurm Wurst guy, who shows up at various markets -- although not, alas, in Berlin -- around this part of the country. But something basic has changed in the way this thing is presented to the public, and not in a good way at all.



Part of the problem is alcohol. Green Week has always had a large contingent of vendors of beer and wine -- indeed, it's impossible to imagine a German food show without big displays of German beer and wine, with the former, at least, being done around bars dispensing the sponsor's product. And, of course, people drink it and become what the American alcohol industry calls "overserved." National stands always offer some sort of local schnapps, too, and people drink those on top of the beer. Late in the day at Green Week can be pretty nasty, especially in the men's bathrooms. But if you wanted something else, there was a wide range of stuff to eat. There was far less of that this time, and people were far more drunk at 3 in the afternoon than I'd ever seen them. And on a Tuesday, at that. (Always avoid Green Weekends). No doubt, behind the Albanian vodka, there were Albanian export guys selling Albanian lamb to German restaurant suppliers. But boy, was there a lot of alcohol.

Another part of the problem, sad to say, is Germany. The Republic of Malaysia, which is spending millions this year promoting its cuisine, a promotion I'd love to get in on, was absent. Fortunately, I had a real live Malaysian to consult on this, and he told me that the government gave up. "The Germans hated the food." Well, I can understand that: it wasn't Chinapfanne, that gooey, malodorous concoction so many Germans think is what people eat in that (broadly defined) area of the world. The Malaysians made the mistake of offering actual Malaysian food instead of Malaysiapfanne, and got rejected. Meanwhile, I stood by the Vietnamese stalls, which were cooking up Chinapfanne of some sort while waiting to hook up with a friend who was at the show and was going to meet me there, and I finally recognized the component of the dish that makes it smell so bad: overcooked cabbage. Germans, of course, have no problem with overcooked cabbage.

But it goes beyond the Malaysians and their hurt feelings. Other nations were missing as well. Israel, purveyor of loads of the vegetables and fruits in our markets during the winter, was absent, as, thank heavens, were their stinky Pfanne. Ireland, where I'd usually beg off a steak sandwich one of my pals was ready to cook up for me, and where I'd really hoped to stock up on some white sharp cheddar: missing, although Guinness was represented by two bars. France, which is usually promoting beef (which Germans barely eat), cheese (but not the higher-end stuff, just the heavily-processed fake Brie and so on you find in our supermarkets), oysters (which R in season!), and downmarket wines (wine "tastings" with an eye towards getting you to subscribe to regular deliveries are a big scam at Green Week): pas la. The United States of America, for heaven's sakes, which was usually willing to embarrass itself by a hotdog-and-doughnut stand, another place selling Samuel Adams beer, a wine-subscription guy selling Californa wine, and, uh, some company in Wisconsin that made pots and pans: outta here.

My take on this is that the world's exporters have more or less given up on Germany as a market for quality stuff. Of course, I didn't need to go half-way across town and spend 12 Euros to get into the ICC to postulate this: all I'd need to do would be to visit the "upmarket" food floor at Kaufhof in Alexanderplatz, but spending three hours on the floor of Green Week brought it home. The people who buy for the German mass market haven't yet discovered what I know to be a sizeable contingent of younger (ie, 30-40-year-old) consumers with more refined (or, let us at least say, less crass) tastes which are making inroads even here in impoverished Berlin. So they buy what they've always bought, and feed the masses with booze and Pfanne and stuff that looks just like traditional German food but which is jacked up with MSG (that's E 621 for you label readers, or Natriumglutamat). Meanwhile, the jungle telegraph among my friends passes along news of a new store where you can get some good things that were hitherto unavailable, a new restaurant that is good enough that it probably won't make it, a mail-order house which ships to Germany. In fact, I'll be posting some of this stuff as soon as the info reaches critical mass.

But Green Week? Nein, danke. Und...schade.

Tamalada

Tamales in Berlin? Impossible. Well, not entirely. There was a Mexican woman who showed up at the first Karneval der Kulturen and handed out tamales to promote her new tamale-making business, and dissolved in tears after the Germans first accepted them, then threw them in the street because they couldn't bite through the corn-husks. Never occurred to them to unwrap them, I guess. But -- wise woman that she was -- she soon gave up the business.

Late last summer, though, a friend from Texas announced he was coming over, and I asked him if he could bring some stuff over for me, including some cornmeal. Instead of cornmeal, I got a four-pound sack of masa harina, the treated cornmeal you make tortillas from. Oops! But when I mentioned this to RFM, he mentioned he was going to California and could pick up some corn husks and any other stuff I might need to make tamales with. Just the ticket! He dutifully bought a few thousand of them, and I researched a recipe, coming upon this one, which, with some tweaking, looked like it would do the trick.

Finding a time and a place that was convenient to all took a bit of doing, but on Sunday, he, his friend Kristen, and I showed up at the dancer's place (she's got the only kitchen big enough to do this) and got down to some serious tamale making. Actually, I showed up first to get five pounds of pork roast and two chickens boiling and returned some hours later to find them boiled and cooled off. I proceeded to shred nearly the whole meat-mountain by hand, which was essential; as we discovered, the strings of meat are like shreds of tobacco to be rolled into a tamale/cigarette.

Next, I heated the meat-seasoning paste on the stove and cooled it some. By this time Mike and Kristen had showed up, and it was time to get to work. First, Mike kneaded the spice-paste into the meat:



Next, I stirred more spices into the dry masa, added some oil, and then we whisked in the broth with an electric mixer. All this while, the corn husks had been soaking in the sink, so we were ready to go. Here's the wet fixins:



Learning not to overfill them, learning to roll them correctly, and learning to fold them carefully wasn't easy, as you can see from the wide variety of shapes they wound up in:



As it turned out, Kristen was extremely proficient at making perfect tamales:



Her secret was to really roll them back and forth in the husk, just as you shape a cigarette in a cigarette paper. She can probably roll something that looks like a Camel with one hand. Anyway, we took the first batch and steamed them while we were rolling the next batch: we had two pots and two steaming baskets we could use, which was fortunate because it sped things up well. The recipe said to steam them for two hours, which seemed excessive and -- fortunately, because we were starving by now -- was. About 30 minutes proved to be enough to firm up the gloppy masa and heat the meat all the way through, and before long we were attacking them like the ravenous beasts we were: the smell had long since permeated the kitchen.

They don't look so good, but if you could smell this photograph, you'd know that looks aren't everything:



After dinner, we realized there was a lot of meat left over, so we whipped up another bowl of masa and continued rolling. This last batch we didn't bother to steam, and I produced a box of Zip-Loc bags and proceded to pack tamales, six to a bag, ready to freeze. We each wound up with three bags apiece, each as heavy as a brick. Kristen shows off part of her take:



Quite a project, and physically exhausting, but I'd happily do it again. Once, that is, I'm through eating the ones I have.