PostKomm '08

Sorry about the protracted absence; things have been just a bit nuts around here. Some of it, which involved getting a ghost-writing deal for a book finalized, isn't of much interest. And, when I finally got that settled, along came Popkomm again.

Since I am no longer much of a consumer of contemporary pop music, and have never been a consumer of European pop music to any large extent, Popkomm doesn't have much to do with me other than the fact that the executives of SXSW in Austin, for whom I do occasional work, come to town. Since these guys are old friends of mine, it's an excuse to hang out with them, hear their stories, and have a couple of very good meals.

The actual work I do at the conference here is simple: I'm the nut-catcher. While the Texans -- and our Irish-based UK rep and our Tübingen-based European rep -- run around having meetings with people who will be attending SXSW, in particular export associations of European countries who are interested in setting up showcases and trade-show stands, I keep track of where they are ("He said he was headed to Finland" -- meaning the Finnish stand, not, like, the actual country) and talk to people who drop by, most of whom are blissfully unaware of what we do or who we are. It's my job to interrupt their carefully-rehearsed sales-job for their band, event, service, or whatever and steer them into discussing whether SXSW has any value for them. It's also my job to make sure they leave a business card -- most of them have business cards, although I continue to be amazed by people who'd go to an event like this armed only with a stack of self-produced CDs -- because it's not my job to decide whether what they're pushing is of any value to SXSW or not.

I've been doing this for years, since Popkomm was in Cologne. Cologne in early September was usually a really nice place to be: drinking Kölsch by the side of the Rhine on a warm late-summer evening is an experience everyone should have. Now it's in Berlin, at the ICC convention center, having been bought by the city from the consortium who started it, just in time for the collapse of the record industry. Berlin: always such great timing. Still, this has meant that the music part of the conference, in clubs during the evenings, has expanded, which is good PR for the event, even though, from what I could see, the daytime part, the trade show and conference, is smaller than ever. (Rumor has it that the event won't be held at the ICC next year, and I'm wondering where it would be held, if not: Kongreshalle am Alexanderplatz? Maybe...)

My perspective, from the booth we were given (we do a trade deal with Popkomm, which represents at the SXSW trade fair), may have been skewed. We were almost in the corner of the hall, not terribly visible, between a royalty-collection service and an only-in-Germany merchandise provider called Deaf and Dumb, who were giving away t-shirts featuring a huge, well, it was hard to tell what it was, which wasn't a great advertisement for their printer. It appeared to be a star with wings, and I guess that's what it was. Once their freebie t-shirts ran out, so did their visitors. I wonder if they are even minimally aware of how bad the name of their company is: not only is it offensive to handicapped people (having had a father with tympanic sclerosis, I'm maybe a bit sensitive to all issues around hearing-loss), but giving a company a name which implies it can't hear you and is stupid to boot can't bring in many English-language-savvy customers. We were directly across from Music Catalonia!, whose impressive booth featured a mirrored wall with the group's logo on it, and it was a gas watching people coming into the hall stop to check that their image was right before walking on.

As always, the export agencies did well, mostly networking with each other, from what I could tell. Only two major record labels that I could see had stands: a modest one for Warner Records Group, and a much more ornate one at the other end of the hall from us for Universal Music Group, which had, to me, the coolest feature: a sign made out of water. Operating somewhat on the principle of a dot-matrix printer, this thing had a long tube high above the floor with many tiny holes in it which were lined up with the floor, on which there was a drain. Water pumped up the side was released in controlled bursts which turned the falling water into letters. It even had different fonts. Cool as it was, I'm just as happy we weren't situated next to the constant splash! splash! splash! the thing made.

The rest of the trade show was the usual mixture of junk-retailers (there's always some company which provides those out-of-copyright box-sets you see at discount stores), digital music services, merch retailers, we'll-get-you-on-radio services, trade publications, and miscellaneous doo-dads like the USB-stick concert-recording services, of which there were two, housed side-by-side in furious competition.

I stood (or sat) at our booth and watched the parade, such as it was, go by. (I'll wait for the final figures, but my guess is that this wasn't exactly the most-attended year of Popkomm by a long shot). Just down the way from us was the Icelandic national stand, and they were trapped in Berlin for three days while their country imploded. (They had set out some tortilla chips and dip, and, bizarrely enough, the tortilla chips were good. But were they Icelandic?) There are people who have been attending these things for years, the Conference Dogs, and I'm one of them. We all know each other and greet each other, even though, in my case, there's no way they're going to do any business with me or I have any business I can do with them. But they hustle around, renewing old deals, modifying current deals, getting new deals -- whatever kind of deals those might be.

The room was overheated -- or perhaps the ICC folks were caught short by the unexpected good weather. For the first time, there were no food stands around the halls, which didn't exactly make us happy. I went on a trek to see what I could find and came up with some curling bagel sandwiches in the entryway, something called China Express way way back at the end of the exhibition area selling "Asia food," which is an insult to both Asia and food, a tiny stand selling coffee and cake, and, out in front of the building, a cart selling cold hotdogs in cold buns. Eventually, someone mentioned that there was another place in a room no one had looked in, and sure enough, there were two bars, one of which was promoting Swiss coffee, the other of which was selling cocktails. Although there wasn't a single sign announcing it, the coffee folks were selling ciabatta sandwiches (not bad at all) and pizzas (grim-looking) and the cocktail people had trays of the usual chemically-treated prefrozen sushi for sale. There was also a smoking area outside this room, at which some really ganky-looking Bratwurst were being fried. Note to Popkomm: it can't hurt to inform delegates who are forced to be inside the ICC all day that these facilities exist. Note to facilities: doubling the serving staff might cut down on the number of non-Germans yelling at you because they're missing their meetings because of having to stand in line for 20 minutes to get a cup of coffee or a sandwich. (And no, I don't mean me; I live here and am well acquainted with the German sport of standing in line).

I didn't see any music, didn't acquire a single CD (although a band dropped off a press-kit on a 2-gig memory stick which has been cleared and is awaiting use on my desk), I didn't acquire any cool swag (nobody can afford it) although the cigarette lighter-flashlight that came in the registration bags was nice, and, unlike last year, I didn't get offered any apartment tips in Montpellier. I did, however, run into a couple of old friends and hear some good stories.

Here's one: a group from out of town was staying in a 4-star hotel, a small one out of the center, with a small lobby-bar. Returning late one night after an evening of clubbing, they decided on a nightcap before turning in, and the night-clerk brought them some drinks. "So we're sitting around this little table," one of them said, "and we have our drinks and we suddenly realized we were out of cigarettes. Just then, someone noticed a pack of cigarette tobacco and some papers on a table, so we picked it up. Imagine our surprise when, opening it up, we saw not only the tobacco, but a nice bag of weed. So we thought, cool, this is a nice nightcap and began rolling a joint. Just then the night-clerk walked back from his office and saw what was going on and ran over and started yelling 'Give me back my weed, dammit! That's mine!' We were just flabbergasted. One of our people speaks excellent German and really laid into the guy. Wonder if he'll have his job when this thing is over..."

Then there was one which happened to me. I was coming home on the Ringbahn, and stopped off one station early to do some banking at the Sparkasse office in the Gesundbrunnen Center. After I'd done my business, I walked back home over the bridge which spans the giant cluster of tracks by what used to be the Wall. As I got to the bridge, there was a guy shouting at me, very excited. I got closer and he asked me if I had a cell-phone. As it happened, I did, but one of the things I'd done at Gesundbrunnen was to buy some more credit because I was down to four cents. I hadn't loaded it on yet. But this guy was yelling "Look down there! Quick, we have to call!" Sure enough, on a side-line there was an S-Bahn train, kept ready for an emergency replacement at Gesundbrunnen, and as I stared at it, I realized that it was being covered with graffiti, very quickly and very efficiently, by three tiny black-clad figures working with incredible precision and teamwork. The tags weren't much to look at but the way they were working was. "You have to report this to BVG!" the guy was yelling. "They'll give you €60!" But it was too late. Their work done, the crew signed it and, with a speed which announced how well they knew the territory, they were leaping tracks and third rails like a bunch of steeplechase horses, heading towards the housing projects of west Berlin. From what I could see of them, they appeared to each be around eight years old.

* * *

As for the moving project, I've been telling people it's an astrological problem. Three planets need to be in conjunction: Enough Money, Available Apartment, and that most difficult one, Trusting Landlord. It's almost impossible to convince French people that an American my age who's self-employed is a good risk, although currently things are going very well indeed for me. Only the Enough Money planet is currently in place (and of course the third one depends on finding the second one), but I'm still getting e-mail alerts (and, in fact, got one while I was writing all of this) and if the frequency picks up as I suspect it will in the next few days, I could be back in Montpellier waving cash in front of a landlord as soon as next week.

Tacheles Closing: Who Cares?

Back in 1998, I was the head of a group of people trying to put an English-language magazine together in the wake of Zitty having killed the one I'd been editing, Metropolis. At one point, we decided to dummy up a cover, and our genius art-director, Tanja, whipped out a nice image, a nice logo, and...all we needed was some headlines. So, looking at the current events around town, I came up with the one above. Unlike some of the other headlines on that cover dummy, there was no article to go with it.

Life imitates imagination, or something: a couple of people have e-mailed me a Guardian article on the latest crisis in the life of this unhappy space, and, after reading it, my response was familiar: who cares?

A little history: Tacheles was an idea ahead of its time, a shopping mall. Europeans were familar with market halls, in which food-vendors gathered in a covered space to protect themselves and their wares from inclement weather, and arcades, covered single-story collections of merchants, were also not unknown: see Leipzig, for instance. But a multi-story collection of varied businesses, including fashion merchants, was a new idea, and it didn't work. Before the bombs damaged the building, it was already derelict, since its promoters had gone bankrupt. And, like most of Oranienburger Str., it stood empty during the post-war DDR era. The communists didn't quite know what to do with Oranienburger Str., due to its Jewish history, other than to use the Neue Synagogue for peace-oriented rhetorical statements.

They also didn't know what to do about various derelict buildings all around East Berlin in the days when it was becoming evident that the government was about to fall. Communists are great when it comes to drawing up plans, less so about executing them. A list of old buildings scheduled for demolition was prepared, but there was a serious shortage of workers to actually perform the demolition. Immediately after the Wall opened, a photocopy of the list was circulated among people looking to squat East Berlin, and a number of prominent squats -- Eimer on Rosenthaler Str., the Italian art-junkies on Auguststr., the complex on Castanienallee -- were the result. But Tacheles was the first, inhabited by people who styled themselves artists. Who knows, they may actually have been artists at first. But by the time I caught up with Tacheles, it was just another squat, albeit one which loudly proclaimed itself for artists.

The thing is, I actually knew a lot of artists, and they didn't take Tacheles seriously -- not past its bar, anyway. The people who lived there seemed more provocateurs with dimly-defined politics than creators of anything serious. At one point, the city tried to normalize its status, offering, according to a long Berlin tradition of dealing with squatters which went back to the Charlottenburg squatters in 1968, for a token rent in exchange for the squatters bringing it up to fire and sanitation code. A split developed in the Tacheles crowd, with some wanting to take the city's offer, and others screaming "Art should be free! Down with the pig capitalists!" Word on the street was that the latter group involved a heroin-dealing ring tied to a larger organized-crime operation, and there were, in fact, several overdoses on the premises during this time.

The provocateurs wound up in Poland, I heard, trying to build a spaceship on a beach somewhere in the north. I also heard that those who stayed had reached an accommodation with a Swedish investment group which had bought the larger parcel of land, and were paying a token rent and improving the place. But, as the Guardian article points out, that deal is due to expire.

A little perspective here: an art-historian friend in Philadelphia e-mailed me some years ago that an artist from that city, armed with some grant money, was coming to Berlin to make some art, and game me his e-mail address so he'd know someone when he got here. He was looking for studio space at the same time some businessmen I knew were looking for office space. When the artist, who'd read so much about Tacheles, insisted on going there to inquire about a studio, he reported that they were incredibly hostile to him because he was American and because he had a grant. They also quoted him a price per square meter that was just under half what the businessmen had been quoted for space in one of the less expensive skyscrapers in Potsdamer Platz. Given that the Tacheles crew was paying a euro a year to Berlin for the property, someone was doing very well.

Thus, I had to laugh at the so-called artist who told the Guardian "This is the last place where you are free to be an artist." Puh-leeze. It might be the last place in Mitte -- except it isn't. When I first came to Mitte twelve years ago, it was heaving with alternative art spaces: Die Aktionsgalerie, Berlin-Tokyo, Haus Schwarzenberg, Eimer, and others which never had a name. Of these, only Haus Schwarzenberg remains, and in very different form due to the real-estate war which they won by going legal and buying their property with funds from an angel. But, much as I hate to break the news to the guy at Tacheles, behind the locked metal gate in Haus Schwarzenberg are a couple of wings in which actual real artists who have a place in the local and international art worlds work on art. No, there's no gift-shop there. They have galleries. And much as one hates to agree with the Berlin city cultural bureaucrat who said "Tacheles used to be a very exciting place with major cultural importance, but it isn't any more," he's telling the truth. About the only real cultural value the decaying hulk has any more is that occasionally Cafe Zapata will book a good band, but, as the article points out, Cafe Zapata and Tacheles only share space; they don't talk.

One other salient detail. The Guardian's headline calls Tacheles the "last stand of Berlin's bohemians," which is not only hyperbolic, but inadvertantly points out Tacheles' failure. Not to be too pedantic about it, but bohemianism is not a permanent state. It's a stage of development some people go through which may lead to a way of life, usually in the arts. But there's usually a point when each bohemian realizes that it's time to either get serious about their life-project or put on a suit and start looking for work. Tacheles' residents are bohemians, nothing more. They're not artists, no matter how many "galleries" of welded distorted shapes and weird photographs the place has. Bohemians, as residents of Montmartre and Greenwich Village know, are easy to sell to tourists. That keeps the tourists from disturbing the artists.

So Tacheles is soon to close. Who cares? I don't. Well, I do, but only in that what will replace it will be another episode in Berlin's vain chase for the upscale tourist dollar, which is almost certainly bound to fail. Oranienburger Str. has long since lost its hip! edgy! cachet to the pub crawling EasyJetters and mass-market clothing stores. And I care because I have memories of when the area was actually culturally vital, before real-estate speculators moved in and turned Berlin-Tokyo into the Beverly-Hills-on-bad-acid of the Rosenhof. But I've packed away those memories, just like I've packed away the memories of the magazine which was going to bear that headline. As long as Berlin stays poor and cheap, there will be bohemians and artists taking advantage of that fact. And once they've made a neighborhood interesting, the real-estate sharks will move in and the artists will move on and the bohemians will have their tough choices to make again.

The Crumbs Of Late Summer

It's always a bit astonishing for someone who moves to Berlin from more salubrious climates to notice that it's getting distinctly chilly by the third week of August -- the week in which I usually took my vacation when I worked at the newspaper in Texas because I knew that the psychological moment when I just couldn't take any more occurred in that week. But it's been a good summer, warm enough that I'm kicking myself for not planting jalapenos, and...like a few other things, it's coming to an end. Herewith some miscellaneous observations.

* * *

The invasion of Eastern European street musicians ending is one thing I always look forward to when summer ends, something which occurred to me the other day, when, trapped under the U-Bahn tracks at Schönhauser Allee waiting for the light to change, I endured a group of two saxophones, two accordions, and a three-year-old dancing boy while a guy in a shiny green suit rattled a coffee-cup with some change in it under my nose demanding payment. These people have annoyed me so much over the years that I found myself incapable of sharing the general world-music endorsement of the various Orkesters and wedding bands churning out records a couple of years ago. I still can't listen to that stuff.

But...there is one mysterious virtuoso among us. His name is Stefan Daskalos, and he plays the gadulka, a metal-stringed bowed instrument from his native Bulgaria. I first caught him in that same under-the-tracks site, fat, bearded, and playing like a dervish. Part of the instrument's charm is its haunting sound: you'd never think something that small would make that much noise, but the secret is in the sympathetic strings, which ring in such a way that the instrument sounds like it's being played in an echo chamber.

I caught up with him this weekend as he sat next to the Kettwurstbudde on a nice day, sawing away. This time, I thought, I'd give him a euro or two -- I never give money to street musicians -- in return for standing and watching his technique for a few minutes. As I stood there, another guy, shabbily dressed, red-faced and missing most of his teeth, came and stood next to me. Then, unfortunately, he started talking to me in an almost-impenetrable accent. What I could make out was that he was from "Ost-Preussen," and that someone he'd known there played a "Geige" like this. I made it out because he said it several times. Then Daskalos stopped playing and Mr. Ost-Preussen started giving his spiel to him. Daskalos' gadulka wasn't very pretty -- there was no ornamentation at all and the wood wasn't at all polished -- but it was clear that it was a good instrument. To shut up Ost-Preussen, Daskalos started another tune, and I looked closer. He wasn't fretting the strings, he was stopping them with the two middle fingernails of his left hand, which had been reinforced with some sort of varnish that had turned a greenish-black.

After the tune, I made a hasty decision and handed Daskalos €10 for the double CD of tunes he was selling, figuring that would buy me an interview, too. He told me that the instrument was made -- by himself -- out of a single piece of wood (although I can't really believe this, given how thin the upper face has to be to resonate). It was clearly a homemade instrument, though, right down to the nut holding the strings. He and the gadulka were both from Bulgaria, and it was at that point that I started hearing "Ost-Preussen!" being shouted and things got a bit confused. There was something about a son and a financial catastrophe, and as our neighbor got louder, he picked up the bow and started another hora. I thanked him and went to the bank, and as I was walking there it occurred to me that I should take a picture for the blog.

Nope: he'd made twenty euros at one location (Ost-Preussen had also bought one), so it was time to move on. I saw him the other day under the U-Bahn -- it does have good acoustic properties -- but I didn't have time to stop. Sill, recommending a street musician is a new one on me, so if you see him, take a minute or two to listen to him and watch his astonishing technique. And if you're tempted to buy a gadulka, this guy has them for between $350 and $600, plus case and shipping.

* * *

In other live world-music notes, someone in my building has started playing the sitar. Since whoever it is doesn't seem to understand how to play an alap, fumbles the jod, and spends the gat showing off flashy, if fumble-fingered, technique, I gotta assume he/she is German. Still, I (unlike some of my neighbors) enjoy someone else's musical tradition being butchered instead of my own. The sound is still charming, even if the execution isn't. And we also have an oboist somewhere here who practices with the windows shut. He/she's very good.

* * *

Congratulations to Ben and Yuhang on their wedding! It, and the events around it, made me think a little about what it means to live in a foreign culture. Ben wanted a bachelor party, but quickly discovered there was no strip bar available for him to celebrate in. We started at The Bird, and I parted company with the merry crew as they headed to Oranienburger Str. for the "American" strip bar -- which I heard was a major disappointment. But at least he didn't dress up in a stupid costume and wander around a public place with his friends in matching t-shirts acting dumb, which is apparently a German tradition. I noticed it recently on a return trip from France, when I had two hours to contemplate the Cologne railway station and a woman, dressed as a scarecrow or tramp, was going around giving away little items which were tied to her costume as her friends handed out leaflets of some sort. There's probably a name for this ritual self-humiliation, and there's probably a deep cultural message in it, but I haven't bothered to think much about it.

Ben and Yuhang did, however, participate in another weird German tradition, the Polterabend. "Poltern," my dictionary says, means "to crash about," which perfectly describes the Poltergeist phenomenon, questionable though it may be. On Polterabend, your friends show up with crockery, which they then smash. According to Wikipedia, this is supposed to bring luck. But it got me thinking: would I want to do this if I were to marry a non-German here? (For the utterly clueless out there: Yuhang is not a traditional German name. Or an untraditional one, either. And Ben is American.)

The answer I came up with is no. Not just because years of poverty has made me wary of waste, which this custom certainly indulges in, but because it's like putting on a costume. Unlike Germans, who desperately don't want to be German, I've never felt that I've needed to assimilate in other than the absolutely necessary ways, like learning the language to the best of my ability, saying "hello" when I enter a shop (a kind of pan-European custom, actually), registering with the police when I move into a new place, and generally respecting others' rights to their traditions. It's not out of fear of losing my identity, but more taking pride in the bits of my identity that don't harm anyone's right to be who they are. On the one hand, I've certainly participated in Thanksgiving and Fourth of July meals -- which I've shared with Germans -- and I've also participated in German traditions like St. Martin's Day and the German version of Christmas. I even did the melted-lead fortune-telling thing one New Year's.

But I've also inadvertantly participated in a German tradition which may have colored my answer. On my 50th birthday, I invited a lot of people for a meal or a drink at my favorite restaurant, Honigmond. I made it clear that I was not following the German tradition of paying for it all: to "invite" someone in German means you're going to pay for it. I was simply asking people to show up, and they would have to pay for their own stuff. I made it explicit in the e-mail I sent around, in fact. It was a good party, I got some wonderful presents, and at the end, I gathered them up and went to pay for my meal and the beers I'd had and was confronted with an extra DM350 on the bill. One of the people I'd invited (and yes, Christian Maith, I know it was you, you coward) had invited a number of his friends, people I didn't even know, and they'd eaten and drunk on my tab and then left.

Ben and Yuhang's party was, but for the odd flying shard of pottery coming a little too close for comfort, a far happier affair, and I wish them much happiness. And I may yet think more about this, because last night I started another of William Dalrymple's magnificent books on India, White Mughals, which has started with a detailed overview of how the earliest colonizers and merchants in India were seduced by Islam (and, in rare cases, Hinduism, although Hindus don't convert, as Muslims do, believing one has to be born into the religion) and "went native."

* * *

Finally, earlier this summer, I had a visitor with whom I was walking up Brunnenstr., when we came upon, of all things, a new painting by Nike! It was even dated '08, so I know she's still working. Unfortunately, the picture this woman took never made it into my in-box for some reason, and I didn't get it until the other day. So here she is, Nike's new nude. Who, I should add, was missing a week ago when I went past the place I'd seen her. Nike: as collectable as Banksy? Hmm.



* * *

Oh, one more thing. This blog may come to an end in a few weeks, to be replaced by another with another name. I don't want to jinx anything, but I had a very encouraging talk with a landlady on Monday. Stay tuned.

Fifteen Years

On the morning of August 12, 1993, an American Airlines jet landed at Tegel Airport in Berlin and I got out.

I was excited, or as excited as someone that tired could be. Something like three years of planning, saving, working, scheming, and, in the end, meticulously pulling details together had culminated in this moment. On the other side of the glass wall by the baggage claim was a guy with a key to an apartment, an apartment I'd be living in for the next six months as this experiment in expatriation progressed. After that, I'd see if I wanted to stay. But right now, I was here.

Which made me one up on the guy with the key. As the crowd outside thinned, I stood there with my densely-packed luggage, looking for him. Maybe there'd been a parking problem. Maybe he'd just gotten up late and was still on his way. I sure hoped so; I hadn't bought a lot of Deutsche Marks before I'd left Texas, since it was easier to get them from an ATM here as soon as I could access my Sparkasse account. I made a furtive check of the cash-on-hand. Would this be enough to take a cab? And, if so, where would I go? Since I'd bought the Marks at my bank, there were no coins, so I couldn't even make a phone call. Okay, I said, I'll take a cab to his record store and see what's up.

The cabbie was Iranian. His German was even worse than mine, but he insisted on talking all the way to Schöneberg. I remember his repeated assertion that "Shah war besser!" as we parked in front of the store. I hoped this wouldn't take long; the meter was still ticking. But it didn't: Tim the assistant was there, and whipped out the key.

He also filled me in on what had happened. The reason I was able to rent this flat in Moabit was that this guy had moved in with his girlfriend long ago, but, long programmed by the West Berlin scarcity mentality, never gave up the little student flat he'd rented when he and his former girlfriend -- now also my former girlfriend -- moved to Berlin some years earlier. And the reason I knew I wouldn't have to move out was that he and his current girlfriend were going to have a baby. Which, most unexpectedly early, had just happened, and not only that but there had been an all-night emergency when something had gone wrong and the mother was teetering between life and death. They seemed to be out of danger by now, Tim said, but the doctors weren't sure.

Well, that put the kibosh on the rising irritation I'd been feeling.

The Iranian whipped me through the Tiergarten and around the Grosser Stern, and pretty soon the familiar lawn of Schloss Bellevue went by and we turned into Melanchthonstr. I gave him nearly all the money I had, unpacked, and loaded my stuff into the tiny elevator. I wasn't going to walk two floors at this point. And, when I got into the apartment, the first thing I did was crash for a few hours.

Fortunately, I had stayed here quite a bit. I had first moved into the place on my first visit to Berlin, which is when I'd gotten the first intimations that the woman I'd fallen in love with was, perhaps, going to be a bit of a problem. Besides being with her, my reason for coming here in late 1988 was because of a music conference, Berlin Independence Days, which had been founded by journalist and radio personality Wolfgang Doebeling as a way of scamming some of the vast quantities of money the West German government was handing out on the supposed 750th anniversary of Berlin's founding. Among the uses that money had found was flying me in as a representative of South By Southwest. I was ecstatic: a free trip to Europe to stay with this amazing woman! Unfortunately, however, that same old West Berlin housing problem had caused a snarl. She'd long been broken up with her last boyfriend, but he was still in residence, since apartments were so hard to find. And, in order not to make trouble, she'd decided that all three of us were sleeping alone. Given that her apartment was huge -- well over 100 square meters, I think -- there was plenty of room, but I wasn't exactly pleased. After two nights, she came up with the solution: this flat not too far away that her business partner and ex-boyfriend had. So I was still sleeping alone, but in another apartment.

On subsequent visits, it became my pied a terre in Berlin. I'd come in, he'd meet me at the airport and drive me there, and I'd have my own place, for free. As for the girlfriend, we broke up not long after that first visit, as she got weirder and weirder, first getting into a smorgasbord of esoterica of which astrology seemed to be the nexus, and then announcing that she'd become a fully-committed lesbian: "This is me! This is who I am, and you must accept it!" she declaimed during one of our last marathon arguments at the Cafe Berio around the corner from the store where she still worked despite her feeling that it was more and more immoral to espouse such a worldly thing as popular music. "This is not a fashion you can put on and take off like this year's dress!" It's worth noting that this pagan wild-woman lesbian is now a happily-married mother of three (two her own, one who came with the husband) who goes to Mass twice a week.

But another of the side-effects of that first trip was that a second guy from SXSW went to BID (the boss -- rightly -- thought I'd be blinded by my own obvious agenda) and was dazzled by it, and when we returned with our report to the boss, he decided we had to form a partnership with them. BID represented SXSW in Europe, and SXSW represented BID in the U.S. It was a fairly lopsided proposal, since many more Europeans wanted to try their luck in the States than American bands wanted to try to crack the German independent label market (which was what the "Independence" in the title was about).

And so it was that every October we'd load up our propaganda, fly to Berlin, and enjoy BID. I'd come over early to help out on the program book attendees got, which always included a bunch of essays in English about the various issues being discussed on the panels. BID '89, in fact, had a lot of representatives of the East German pop press milling around. "Next year," one of them said to me in very good English, "you'll be doing this on our side of town." Preposterous! I managed to stay around afterwards -- I had a free apartment, after all -- and help with the post-conference cleanup, not to mention the post-conference partying at the Pinguin Club on Wartburgstr. in Schöneberg, which was home to a nicely odd collection of expats and Germans. I had my birthday party there in 1989, in fact, and stayed around a while longer, then headed back to Texas.

The day I landed, the Berlin Wall opened up. I'd missed one of the greatest stories of my life by 24 hours.

With a free apartment in Berlin, I came as often as possible. And with the Wall coming down, there were many, many great things to see and do. I befriended a young female taxi driver, a grad student, and in April, 1990, we drove to Czechoslovakia to see the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution. She was an exception, though, to the prevailing attitude of the folks I knew in West Berlin. They wanted nothing to do with the East, and made no bones about it. There was nothing there! And, for a while, I bought into this. I'd been across on my first visit, and East Berlin was extremely depressing, especially the neighborhood where the guy who took me over and I went to meet a friend of his, a neighborhood called Prenzlauer Berg, where there were still loads of bombed buildings just laying there, weeds and small trees growing out of the wreckage, and people lined up in front of grocery stores because you had to use a basket and there were a limited number of them.

But eventually, some of the folks I knew around the Pinguin, including one of the owners, started spending more time over there. As the guy at BID had predicted, the next year there were BID showcases at a place called Tacheles (there was no electricity, so a generator had to be rented and installed, to Wolfgang's great chagrin), the Haus der Junge Talent, and a venue called Die Insel, which was so far away nobody really knew where it was.

I was curious to see all of this on an ongoing basis, because I thought there were stories to write that folks in the States would be interested in, although I'd already had a very chastening experience when I'd hurred back to Berlin in late January 1990 and researched a story on the changes West Berlin would be seeing as the city began to unify. I got a great story, great quotes, and even interviewed an East Berliner who'd been a dissident and had forced the government to expel him to West Berlin on the eve of the opening of the Wall. I'd written it up as soon as I got back, and was shot down by every magazine I submitted it to, none of whom lost the opportunity to explain, as to an idiot, that I'd missed the real story, which was how happy the East Germans were to be free of communism and how they were looking forward to freedom and a bright new day. Of course, this wasn't strictly true, but then, I'd been to Berlin and these editors hadn't.

Still, this European experience was beginning to open me up to some new possibilities, and they finally knit together into an insight one day when, on assignment from several magazines, I was in Antwerp, Belgium. I was wandering around the old harbor area, which hasn't been a working harbor in many years, but still has loads of picturesque buildings, all of which, I suddenly noticed, seemed to be for rent. Seriously: there were signs in just about every window above street-level, and it hit me -- what would it be like to live here? Why should I be doing these travel stories -- because that had become an increasing amount of the work I was getting -- by flying from Texas to Europe when I could be based right in Europe, getting the kind of knowledge only someone on the ground could get, and get to places a lot quicker and cheaper than someone who'd have to fly in?

This became even more urgent a question when, on my return, I was stripped of my last Austin-based gig for no particular reason. I spent the day this happened furious, and the fury wore me out. I slept like someone drugged that night and woke up in one of those states you have after a particularly memorable dream -- except that I didn't remember it. I did, however, have a solid revelation: you don't have to live in Austin any more. You can move to Europe.

And on that day, I started my planning. My idea was to save enough to survive for six months, get a job doing whatever I could, and see what it was like. As for the job, that would probably be no big deal: my brother-in-law's cousin edited the major English-language magazine in Brussels, an ideal location for me because my French was pretty good. I dashed off a letter to her and, by return post, she dashed my hopes: the publication had just been bought by a media conglomerate which was only keeping her on because her mother had founded it and she'd been editor for ages. "I couldn't live with myself if I got you a job with these people," she said.

Fair enough. What was Plan B? Um, Plan B was Berlin.

Not that I really wanted to move to Berlin, but it wasn't out of the question. I had friends here because of BID, expats and natives alike. I had an apartment, although not the one I wanted. (I'd responded to an ad in tip and talked to a nice couple with an immense place in Friedenau they were going to sublet while they took a year to educate themselves about French wine by spending the time going from one area of France to another. We loved each other, and I was happy to have found such a wonderful place. Then the landlord refused to let them sublet to a foreigner. Which, yes, is legal. I'd just learned my first lesson about Germany, although I refused to believe it at the time). I didn't really speak or read German, and, well, I wasn't sure I really liked the place. But there was no doubt that the whole post-1989 opening of eastern Europe was exciting -- my Czech trip had sure proven that -- and one heard there were very cool things happening in East Berlin. Job? There would be a BID, the fifth one, in 1993. Although I couldn't speak German, there were certainly things to do.

And I started doing them the morning after I arrived. That year, BID had joined together with some world music types who were going to put on a satellite event called WOMEX. (Wolfgang despised -- despises -- world music, but it was the only way he could get this thing funded again). There was an office on Köpenicker Str. near Schlesisches Tor ("Say that correctly," a German friend had said, "and you don't need to worry about your accent any more."), and an office full of people, some of whom I knew and some of whom I didn't. It was August, and we had an event to put on in October. We got to work.

That was 15 years ago tomorrow. A great education was about to begin, and the future would soon take some completely unpredictable twists. Somewhere in West Berlin there's a 15-year-old boy I've not seen since he was an infant. I don't see his parents any more, nor practically anyone I knew back then. And soon, I hope, I won't see much of Berlin anymore. I wouldn't trade the past 15 years for anything, but it's long since been time to move on.

Meanwhile, Back In Berlin...

Owing to the PayPal debacle last time I was there, and the loss of $1500 worth of work due to one screw-up or another, it'll be some weeks before I can get back to Montpellier to continue looking for an apartment. Well, that and the fact that I've only had one offer since I've been back, and it was more than I could spend.

So that means staying in Berlin a bit longer. Not that, in glorious summer weather like we haven't seen in many a year, that's a completely horrible thing. Although, of course, Berlin remains Berlin.

For instance: Since there still isn't a decent public transportation link to where I live from the Hauptbahnhof -- Berlin's main train station is still working out its transportation kinks -- I take a cab there and back when I'm travelling. And, after a 16-hour train-ride, it's an excusable indulgence. After my first trip in June, I found myself welcomed back in typical Berlin style: I got in the cab, the guy tripped the meter, and then asked me where I was going. I told him, and he started arguing. He'd never heard of the street or the neighborhood: was I sure I was headed there? Yes, I said, I live there. Well, he'd never heard of it: could I point it out on his map? Of course I could. And I did. The meter now read €3.80 and we hadn't budged. He eventually got me there, all right, but wound up blaming it on my horrible accent. Which, not to be vain about it, was better than his, since German was clearly not his first language, either.

In contrast, the driver two weeks ago knew just where I was going, got me there via an ingenious short-cut, and, as the surroundings penetrated his brain, began to talk to me in English. After all, what other kind of foreigner lives in this 'hood? I kind of saw his point a couple of mornings later, when someone was noisily CLANK recycling bottles CLANK one at CLANK a time out in the courtyard. The prompted an angry response from someone -- perhaps the unemployed gentleman a half-floor above me in the Halbetreppe apartment who seems to spend his time inducing hangovers -- and there was a pause in the recycling noise. Finally, the recycler said "Um, can you speak English?" and, after a half second, there came the reply: "Yes. Kann you plizz do zat LAUTER?"

Of course, there's another stereotype for residents of this neighborhood, and it came to mind when we got plastered with small handbills with some photographs on them. What had happened was that, last September, a woman had met a man reading a history of the Holy Roman Empire while riding on the U-Bahn. They had chatted, and she had had a failure of nerve, because she was so attracted to him. Now, almost a year later, she'd decided to find him and had printed up these flyers and pasted them onto building fronts. There was a picture of the book he was reading, what looked like a police sketch of him, straight on and in profile (that's what attracted me to the flyer: I thought it was a police sketch and we were in the middle of a crime wave), a picture of her, and a picture of someone I guess is a movie star as "Doppelgänger." And, of course, her phone number. I almost sent her an SMS asking her if she'd considered the possiblity that the guy was batting for the other team, but figured the idiom would be beyond her.

Yes, ladies, and although I'm never spotted pushing a €10,000 baby buggy down the streets, I'm not one of them. But they're there, in my building, along with the Americans (and I suspect the two groups overlap, too). And to tell the truth, the guys who have been playing the same three ABBA songs day and night at ear-challenging volume ever since I came back would be bad enough even if they didn't get about 3/4 of the way through each one and then start it over again, which is at least as annoying as breaking bottles one by one. Maybe they'll stop when Mama Mia leaves the local movie theater. Naaah...

So it's back to the usual: reading breathless accounts of hip! edgy! Berlin in the media, most disappointingly Gary Shteyngart's breathless account of the city as observed from his cushy post at the American Academy earlier this year. Jeez, for someone who nailed trendy expats so neatly in his great first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, ol' Gary sure drank the kool-aid on this one. At least it's not as bad as the more recent tour of Berlin music history the Guardian printed, filled with enough typos that you'd think the information was gleaned from a bad telephone connection.

Still, over dinner the other evening, someone posed a nice, barbed question: what if the current state of affairs is as good as it's ever going to get here? Excellent point: there are a lot of reasons to believe that things are going to get worse for most Berliners as the economic decline neatly pegged in a recent column in the Wall Street Journal progresses. The fact that the expats on what this same person has termed "the two-year Spring Break" here haven't been touched by this speaks only to their isolation from the native population and the fact that the problems haven't reached far enough into their daily lives. But it's not inconceivable that they will, especially as real estate values escalate in their neighborhoods and they're forced into daily propinquity with large masses of the hard-core unemployed with whom, as our bottle-breaker found out to his great embarrassment, they're unprepared to deal. As the arts subsidies decrease even further, and as the cheapness of living in Berlin gets to be outweighed by the increasing gloom of a city circling the drain, those who are here for fun are going to be faced with unpleasant choices if they wish to stay. Since my guess is that they'll choose to leave, and they'll have to find another Eurotopia in which to have their cheap holidays in other people's misery.

So it looks like in a week, I'll be passing my 15th year here, barring both an economic and a French real-estate miracle. Expect a post with some wry nostalgia and at least one very amusing link on that day.

Bamalama

Yes, the obligatory Obama post.

Of course I went. I'd seen Clinton in...'94?...and couldn't remember a word he'd said and wanted to see if Obama could do better. Opting for comfort (a relative term in a situation like this) over being metal-detected and waiting in line to get into the main venue, we stopped at the first video screen we came to on 17 Juni, and that turned out to have been a great decision.

The trade-off, of course, was suffering through the pre-show "entertainment," a reggae-oid band and a standard-issue rock band which sounded like a fourth-generation xerox of U2. Although, I have to admit, finding rock bands in Europe with the credentials to get the kind of security clearance you'd have to have to play a gig like this couldn't have been easy. Asking them to be good would be too much, and not having them would have meant more of the DJ, who got extra points for tone-deafness for sticking on some remix of "Sympathy for the Devil" shortly before Obama hit the stage. (Actual last song before he spoke, though, was Bowie doing "Let's Dance," and I think I can now live without hearing that one ever again. Talk about dated...)

As for the speech itself, the New York Times summed it up nicely in their morning headline: Obama, Vague on Issues, Pleases Crowd in Europe. The thing I had to keep remembering as the blurry phrases piled up around the wall metaphor he'd set up at the start (the Wall and the Berlin Airlift were the two leitmotifs) was that this was a speech for Americans, not the Germans who'd taken off from work early on a nice Thursday afternoon to hear him.

It was good to hear him defend a military presence in Afghanistan, which is something a sizeable number of Germans, with their knee-jerk anti-war attitudes, don't want to hear, but he was right: this is a golden chance, already mostly-blown by the US, to restore a country devastated by war to a functioning, and peaceful, state. It was good to hear him denounce nuclear weapons, not just in Iran (where they don't have them) but around the world. And it was really good to hear him emphasize that the US and Europe have to listen to each other, and to reject unilateralism: that part of the speech was for the Europeans.

If the speech was, in the end, the proverbial Chinese food ("you're hungry an hour later"), it was still a good PR move by the man who will very likely take the reins of the US government next year. The weather was beautiful, and by delaying his speech til a little after 7, he was helped by a setting sun rich in red tones, which burnished his skin into a nicely metaphoric medley of colors.

I got what I needed -- a (bootleg, I think, since it was being sold by some people also selling t-shirts for a sauna company) button I can attach to myself discreetly in Ameriskeptic contexts (read: France) -- and we left right after the speech, while the video screen still showed him shaking hands with the crowd. As we headed up 17 Juni, the loneliest man in Berlin stood, a 60-something-year-old guy holding an umbrella, from which little McCain signs depended. Germans were mocking him loudly, and I almost felt sorry for him except for the fact that he was, in fact, advocating a continuation of the horror the US has lived through for the past eight years.

And yes, an hour later I was hungry.

A Night At The Elevator

Or, rather, half a night.

Readers who've been with me a couple of years know about Blaise Lawless, the painter with the best name in art, who lived here for a couple of years before giving up on Berlin and moving back to his home town, Boise, Idaho. While he was here his brother came to visit, and I gave him my Famous Walking Tour of the city. Earlier this year, that same brother contacted me about helping him out on a television series he was developing for cable, which is an ongoing project.

Anyway, earlier this week, he contacted me because an old friend from Boise was going to be performing here last night, and arranged for me to have a couple of tickets. I'd never heard of this guy, Curtis Stigers, which just shows how out of touch I've been. Turns out the guy's sold millions of records, and made the great Nick Lowe wealthy by the inclusion of his version of Nick's song "What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love, and Understanding" on the soundtrack of The Bodyguard, which sold 17 million copies thanks to its star, Whitney Houston, butchering Dolly Parton.

Stigers was going to be a guest on a show which, I have to admit, didn't look like it was going to be much fun: an open-air "classics" show starring Till Brönner, Germany's latest gift to jazz lite. Also appearing would be a symphony orchestra from Rostock, Thomas Quasthoff and various others. On the one hand, I thought, it was dire. On the other, this Stigers guy sounded interesting -- the sound bites on his website weren't too bad -- and anyway, it was a free concert outdoors in the Gendarmenmarkt on what would likely be a nice Sunday evening. Now...who would be interested in going to such a thing?

Why, the Dancer, of course! I hadn't seen her in ages, and I knew she'd gone to a Quasthoff recital of Schubert lieder, so maybe this would be up her alley. And so it proved to be. We made plans to meet at the boxoffice where the freebies were, I exchanged a couple of e-mails with Stigers, and that was that.

Once we found the right line, getting in was a breeze, but the box office wasn't a model of German efficiency (or, rather, it was). Our seats were in the back, raised up on bleachers, with the steps of the Konzerthaus forming the stage on which the orchestra would sit. To the right, the Till Brönner Band, augmented by some studio musicians, were seated. Around the edges stood VIP pavillions for the guests of the sponsors: Opel, Radeberger Beer, the Berliner Morgenpost, Wall advertising.

Initially, it was as grim as I'd figured: after an introduction by an MC who appeared to have a piece of dead sheep on his head, the orchestra came on and played a medley of tunes -- elevator music. Then an obsequious young man came on and babbled about what a wonderful evening we were about to have, how happy he was that all these special guests were here -- wait a minute! Was this Till Brönner himself? Yup, it was. -- and then called up the first guests, the New York Voices, one of those vocal ensembles who allow people to think that what they perform is jazz because they hit weird chords from time to time -- with, it must be granted, extreme accuracy, and equally extreme irrelevance.

It got a little better, when, after an almost interminable introduction by Brönner, a little man named Paul Kuhn sat down at the piano and knocked out a good version of "Route 66" marred only by Brönner's trumpet-playing. Kuhn is 80, and a Berlin legend, although despite my five years at Jazz Radio, I'd never heard of him before. As for Brönner's soloing, it was a bunch of completely unoriginal ideas, performed virtuosically, as if the notes had been approved by some German Jazz Academy.

Then it was Stigers' turn. He came out wearing a tenor sax, which worried me, since singers and sax players tend not to inhabit he same body (well, except when it's Louis Jordan's), and, further worrying, was announced as performing a song by Tom Waits, not one of my favorite performers, to put it mildly. The song was slight, but Stigers has a superb voice, more suited to what I consider pop than what I consider jazz, perhaps, but capable of delivering this trifle with conviction and warmth. In the middle he took up the sax and blew a perfectly credible solo for a chorus, then sang the song out, ending with a short coda on the sax.

Next came a stubby little black guy who apparently lives here, whose name sounded like -- but couldn't have been -- Frank McCunt. He played a sentimental Donny Hathaway tune, "Ghetto Boy," accompanying himself on a Fender Rhodes, with lots of style but no particular content other than sugar. Then out came Quasthoff, who sat down (he's a thalidomide baby, which stunted his arms and legs, but oh boy not his voice) and first gave us "There's a Boat Leavin' Soon For New York" from Porgy and Bess, and then some piece of pop crap which showed off his instrument but made one question his taste. Brönner, introducing him, said he'd wanted to put him on the program, but it was a jazz program, and Quasthoff had assured him "I know jazz." Sadly, not.

Even more sadly, the New York Voices trotted out again to wreak violence on "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard." Mr. Simon, your attorneys may contact me: this is defamation of character, and I was a witness. But it got worse: apparently the pianist was also an arranger who has worked with Herbert Grönemeyer, who, the Dancer informed me, is Germany's richest artist. I guess it makes sense if this was anything to go by: the song was pure treacle, the arrangement smothered any hint of melody, and the audience went nuts afterwards.

Stigers came back to close out the first half with a rather audacious move: a jazzy version of "That's All Right, Mama," which also included some scat singing, some more judicious tenor-playing, and, of course, some trumpet from Brönner.

The minute the musicians started leaving the stage, the audience spilled out to eat overpriced Bratwurst, drink overpriced Radeberger, and look at Opels. The Dancer and I sat there, looking at the people who'd scored vantage points on the French Cathedral and the luxury apartment house nearby (and the open windows at the Hilton), and we were both thinking the same thought: who pays €69 a ticket for stuff like this? Not jazz fans: this is hardly jazz. Not classical fans: a bad weekend in Berlin has more classical content than we'd seen so far. Who were these well-dressed people -- several thousand of them -- who were seated below and around us? Some were no doubt guests of Opel, Wall, Radeberger, and so on, but clearly the vast majority had paid to get in. And what does this say about culture in Berlin?

We were still musing on this when something whipped past my face -- a bat! Looking up to see if there were more (as a long-time Austin resident who knows that each bat eats twenty times its body weight in insects every day or it starves to death, I've long been a bat fan) I saw only swallows. She caught me looking. "Thunderstorm," she said. "When the swallows fly low, a thunderstorm happens in an hour." It was certainly humid enough...

So, I said, do you want to stay? "NO!" she thundered. "There is no groove happening here. Every time something gets going, Brönner comes on and yaps and yaps and breaks the flow. I really like Stigers -- I wish we could just see him, and I really wish we could go backstage -- but this program is annoying me." I was actually relieved. I, too, would like to see Stigers do what he does with his own band, so I can figure out what he's trying to do, what his approach to the odd but appealing repertoire he's working with is. But I could certainly do without the rest of it. I found most of the crowd stuffy and way too bourgeois for my taste, too. So we left. I gave my re-entry ticket and my main ticket to some guy who asked nicely (although he then said "But I need two!") and we walked up Charlottenstr. past the stage door, where the orchestra guys were out in force enjoying their cigarette break.

Then the Dancer did something I couldn't have predicted. She turned back and said to them, "Good music, but shitty concert." "Wait," one guy said, "it's only getting started." "I'm sorry," she said, "but there's no movement to this, no groove. It stops and starts."

I'll admit it: I was a little embarrassed. I know a lot of professional musicians, not famous people, but working stiffs of both genders, and I know that most of these guys -- from Rostock, no less, out in the sticks -- were probably enjoying a not-very-taxing gig playing pap, in exchange for getting to dress up, get paid well, and play in a pretty lovely setting. They weren't responsible for Brönner's blather, for the low quality of the charts they were reading, or for the headliners they were backing up. It was a gig!

Ah, well. It made her feel better, and I'll never see those guys again. I talked with Stigers later and thanked him, and yeah, I'll go see him if we're ever in the same town.

And fortunately, if all goes well, my next live music should be a couple of gigs by the Carolina Chocolate Drops. That, I'm sure I'll enjoy.

Reported Without Comment

E-mail from the U.S. Embassy:

On Wednesday evening, June 25, Germany and Turkey will meet in the semifinal round of the 2008 European Football Championship in Basel, Switzerland. Various cities in Germany have set up viewing areas for the public to watch the live broadcast of this game. The "Fan Mile" in front of the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin is expected to draw up to 500,000 German and Turkish fans, Frankfurt am Main will host a public viewing area at the Rossmarkt, and Munich is setting up a large public viewing area at the Olympic Stadium where 30,000 fans are anticipated. Similar events are planned in other cities and spontaneous celebrations or demonstrations related to the match may occur throughout Germany.

Because of the high fan interest in this prestigious semi-final elimination game between Germany and Turkey, there exists the possibility that disturbances, including violent disturbances may occur before, during or after the match, which begins at 20:45. At a minimum, post-game celebrations will likely result in traffic congestion in larger cities. Crowds celebrating previous German and/or Turkish victories have blocked streets and rocked vehicles attempting to pass through them.

We remind American citizens in Germany that even mass gatherings and demonstrations intended to be peaceful can turn confrontational and possibly escalate into violence. American citizens are therefore urged to avoid the areas of demonstrations if possible, and to exercise caution if within the vicinity of any demonstrations. American citizens should stay current with media coverage of local events and be aware of their surroundings at all times.

Way Ta Go, Weltstadt!

Over the weekend, I ran into a couple of old friends, and among the info I picked up was a rumor that the plug was about to be pulled on Radio Multikulti, Berlin's absolutely unique radio station. Further research turned up an article confirming this.

Now, I'm in a bad position to defend Radio Multikulti for a number of reasons. First, I never listen to it. I never listen to any radio unless I'm driving. I've got too many CDs, and too little time. But that's neither here nor there.

Another factor is that I'm always uncomfortable with German multiculturalism as it's officially expressed. I've touched on this before some years back. And, for all the good work it does giving foreign residents of Berlin a touchstone, Radio Multikulti also fuels that syndrome.

A third, personal, factor is that when I moved here, one of my employers was a Big Honcho in the local world music scene who went on to become even bigger when he joined the staff of the brand-new Radio Multikulti. This guy was a piece of work: he was the first West German I'd ever met who hated Americans. There were three of us on the job, and he stiffed us -- and just us -- our last month's salary. Just because. I asked him one day where this bizarre animus came from, and he told me "It's because you destroyed a civilization. You did absolutely nothing to stop the Vietnam War, and this meant the destruction of Vietnamese culture, a very old culture." In this particular year, when the media is making so much noise about the events of 1968, the idea that Americans, especially young Americans, one of whom I was at the time, did "absolutely nothing" about the war in Vietnam, may seem a bit odd. But he believed it, he really believed it.

So I can't say I'm the biggest booster of Radio Multikulti, but I can say that this turn of events is both sad and unsurprising. Sad because this station, in both its avowed mission and its execution, is unique in the world, as far as I know. A radio station that both attempts to help immigrants integrate into an alien society (well, exotic immigrants, anyway; we Euro/American types are on our own), while seducing the locals into acceptance by playing them "world music," pop music from foreign climes (except, again, Euro/American styles, but I don't have any complaint against that: there's enough of most of that around), is, at least on paper, a good idea. And, since it's run by human beings, and, thus, imperfect, what actually comes out of the speakers has been pretty good every time I've heard it.

More to the point, pulling the plug on yet another unique, interesting, popular cultural manifestation in Berlin not only deprives Berliners of yet another of the things which ameliorate life here, it also proves that the people who make cultural policy here are totally unconcerned with Berlin's hip! edgy! image -- which is attracting who knows how much money to this city -- and only interested in supporting the most mainstream, culturally conservative institutions. Since another villain here seems to be ARD, the central public radio-television network of Germany, I'd say this de-funding also brings up questions of just how welcome immigrants -- particularly ones outside the Euro/American ambit -- actually are, not just in Berlin, but in Germany generally. Funny how that question keeps popping up.

Anyway, I'm glad to be leaving. At the rate this city is self-destructing, I can see myself coming back to visit friends in a couple of years and realizing there's nothing to see or do here while those friends are at work and I have free time. Berlin will have committed cultural suicide and become as fascinating as Bochum. Well, almost as fascinating.

Nachmieter Gesucht And Other Crumbs

It appears that the money is now in place for me to get an apartment in Montpellier when I get there the week of June 16. I've been ransacking the Montpellier equivalents of the website that got me the place I'm in now, and have actually found two apartments that look good, although one of them, I believe, was vacant when I was there in March, which is a bit ominous. But nobody's putting up the students' apartments yet, so I'm sure I'm just seeing the tip of what'll be a huge iceberg once I get there.

And, although nothing's signed yet, I should probably be looking for someone to take over the lease here. It's listed as a 2 1/2 room place, around 60 m2, but if someone wants to work on the loft-bed frame in the smallest room, which isn't as sturdy as it ought to be, and is also incomplete, you could actually fit three single people in here. Gas heat, although none in the room I use as a living room and office because the guy who turned on the heat in the kitchen and bedroom couldn't get it to work and then never showed up again. But the landlord's said he wants to hook this place up to the central heating anyway. At the moment, of course, it doesn't matter. Neighborhood couldn't be nicer; there are yuppies moving in, but there are also a lot of young American, German, and French hipster-types living around the 'hood, and a ferment of cultural activity, including a literary magazine being published by a couple of Americans out of this very building. The downside is that the apartment doesn't get a lot of light, and that gets a bit oppressive in the winter. Gas stove, which is pretty unusual -- and a real boon for those who like to cook -- and the refrigerator and washing machine are going with me, because, well, they're mine. Rent is €430, and you'll have to take over my €500 deposit. Available July, exact date uncertain. Tell your friends, send an e-mail if you're interested and set up a time to look at it.

I'm not sure what the exact legal requirements are -- I once heard something about my having to present three candidates -- but I'm pretty sure that if you want it and I want you to have it, you'll get it.

* * *

And with the prospect of leaving the city I've lived in for almost 15 years, naturally comes a bit of trepidation. I know this place, I'm somewhat identified with it (dang, I'm going to have to get new e-mail addresses!), and I've got a nice network of friends at the moment (although I'm sure that a sizeable proportion of them will, like the others I've had, move on after a while in frustration). I expressed this ambivalence to a friend, who wrote back that he understood perfectly; this often happens to men in prison, who find the life inside easier to cope with than life outside. Okay, that worked. I'll start packing.

There was a very good article by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times this week which ostensibly dealt with the fate of Tempelhof Airport, but also had some excellent insight into Berlin that, for once, didn't sound like the paper was trying to offload some Prenzlauer Berg real estate. As the story moves from the hard news of the "referendum" on Tempelhof, it makes telling comments on the inability of the city to get anything done about, seemingly, anything, and its almost knee-jerk negative reaction to any kind of change. The reference to the destruction of the Palast der Republik despite its ongoing viability is telling, and the reference to the new Schloss -- if it ever manages to get built, which is looking unlikely at the moment -- as "a forthcoming Potemkin village and a sad excuse for a showpiece in a city that prides itself on its cultural sophistication," is dead-on. Berlin desperately wants that cultural sophistication, but it expects others to actually produce it, offering no help in the form of subsidies or venues. It starves the avant-garde which made it famous in the immediate post-unification days in favor of maintaining three major (and at least one minor) opera house and has shut down every major avant-garde musical venue in the city. And Kimmelman's right on the mark in zinging Berlin for "provincial megalomania," and comparing the situation at Tempelhof with the destruction of New York's Penn Station. Read it, particularly between the lines.

I'm happy to be flying one last time out of Tempelhof on June 5, because I agree with Kimmelman about how nice it is. And no, where I'm moving has nothing like Berlin's cultural scene. But then, increasingly, neither does Berlin.

* * *

There's a car I've been seeing parked around my neighborhood with a great sign in its back window. There's a heart, a peace sign, and what looks like a stick figure hoisting a barbell with one arm. In English, under each glyph, it says "Make Love," "No War," and "Wear Glasses." It's an ad for an optician, and every time I've seen it, I've said "Man, if I ever need glasses, that's where I'm going." Then, last Sunday after a day at the horse races at Hoppegarten (with very possibly the worst selection of nags I've ever seen there, which is really saying something), a screw fell out of the post of my very nice Ray Bans. Hardly a major operation, but, I thought, the perfect excuse to hand over a couple of euros to Mr. Love/War/Glasses.

Haven't seen the car since, of course.

The Emigrant's Dilemma, Chapter 3: Running the Numbers

Yesterday, my Yahoo horoscope said it was a good day to face a task you didn't want to do, because it would prove easier than you thought. That was enough of a goad for me to sit down and start putting together a budget for this move. I divided it into three categories: Berlin, Trip, and Montpellier. The first is for expenses I'll incur here, the second for the forthcoming Berlin-Fes-Montpellier trip, and the third for money I'm going to have to have once I get there.

Weirdly enough, the figure I came up with is very, very encouraging. I don't have all the money yet, but I'm working on that. And it's a worst-case figure, in any event: I spent an hour the other day paging through websites dedicated to renting, very much like the one I used to find this place, and discovered that even if I have to use a real-estate agent, which, given everything, I may not have to, my total move-in would be around €2100. That's rent, security, "charges," and agent fee. I'm going to have to not only raise this by June 16, when I start looking, but I'm going to have to figure out a way to get it after I hit town. I do not want to go running around the Fes Medina with a couple thousand euros in my pocket.

Another encouraging thing was running into someone whose friends had just moved from Berlin to Brittany, and who remembered how much the moving van cost. It was far less than I'd thought: around €1500. But that brings up a question I haven't figured out yet: how much the last day costs.

Let's say I get the movers in, they empty the apartment, and now what I want is to be at the new place when they get there. How on earth am I going to do this? It's at least a 14-hour drive, and I don't want to do it alone. In fact, I can't do it alone: if I rent a car, the drop-off fee would be equivalent to actually buying one! Plus, of course, when I did drive, I took two days. That's too long a haul for me.

So what are my options? Can I ask the movers to hold off a day? Flying is prohibitively expensive, but taking the train isn't: I can start in Berlin at 8:32 and get in at 9:48 in the evening, but where do I go? To a hotel overnight? The apartment will be utterly empty, as only a European apartment, devoid of lights and everything else, can be. But I'm equally sure the movers won't move me in at ten at night.

This is where I'm stuck. As soon as I can calculate costs for the last day -- and for the movers more accurately, since I haven't actually called any yet -- I can come up with a solid figure.

I guess I should also start looking for a Nachmieter, someone to move in here, but I don't want to do that until I secure the next place, although interested parties should get in touch. With any luck, by the third week of June, this should all be worked out.

Then comes the next stage. Scary. But I think I'm up to it.

Thank You For The Liberation

Around this time of year, posters get slapped up all over town, the same ones every year, printed by the FDJ, of all people (and who knew they were still around?). In three languages, they say "Thank you for the liberation," and feature crude black-and-white photos that I guess depict the events of May 8, 1945, when control of the city was wrested away from what was left of the Nazi government.

What came next was the Occupation. It's somewhat bracing to remember that when I moved here, I was living in an occupied city. Certainly the first time I came here, in 1988, I had to change planes in Frankfurt because I was flying Lufthansa, and that airline was owned by the West German government, which was prohibited from operating in the occupied city. Back then, I didn't particularly notice the division (except for the obvious one made out of concrete). The British, American, and French zones all looked alike, and there weren't any obvious signs which you were in.

The key word there is "obvious." I'd assumed that where I spent all my time on my first couple of visits -- Schöneberg, Moabit, Charlottenburg -- was the American sector, so I was amazed to discover that, according to this map, it wasn't. In fact, but for a short visit to Kreuzberg, I never entered the American zone at all. But then, I never saw any soldiers except at obvious places like Checkpoint Charlie, or, during my first hours in the city, by the Brandenburg Gate when a Lada with a couple of uniformed Russians pulled up next to the car I was in. Boy, that gave me a start; I hadn't realized I was quite the child of the Cold War that I was.

It seems that it was obvious if you lived here, though. I had a friend who grew up mostly in Wedding, in the French sector, and she said (although I have no other proof of this) that the French were notoriously worse in their treatment of Germans, and that the locals went out of their way to avoid contact with them. As far as she was concerned, there was spite in their occupation -- and given the history between the two countries, who's to say that she might not have a point? At this very moment, there's a large contingent of French expats here, and I'm told they never socialize with the locals, since they've settled here because they have European passports and it's so much cheaper than Paris. I do know that they have their own free newspaper, which you can pick up in pubs, and which, as someone who tried and failed to establish one in English here for many years, makes me very jealous.

On the other end of the scale was a friend I'll call Z, because he lived in Zehlendorf, right in the heart (spiritual, if not geographic) of the American zone. A total Americanophile, he was working as a book translator at that point, and had been an exchange student not once, but twice, in the United States. ("Hey," he said, "if you'd had a teenage kid like me, wouldn't you have wanted to ship me half-way around the world to get rid of me?" He had a point...) After I moved here, it was becoming obvious that the Allied troops were going to be leaving, and he was dreading the day. There were second-hand bookshops run by Americans in Zehlendorf where he'd shop, and there was a pizzeria called Four Brothers which started as a fried chicken joint run by three black ex-soldiers from Philadelphia and was failing spectacularly (you can not get Germans to eat fried chicken: just ask the Colonel) when a fourth Philadelphian, an Italian-American, joined the team, turned it around to make pizza instead, at which point they started printing money. Having had carry-out from there at Z's house, I can attest that it was the best pizza in town -- if you wanted American-style pizza.

By early 1994, some American troops had already left, and Z had turned me on to Truman Plaza, on Clayallee, across from the American Consulate. Here, there was an American newsstand open to the public, and the PX, which wasn't. But outside the PX was a bulletin board, and when I needed a stereo, Z urged me to head straight to Truman Plaza and check the bulletin board. A brilliant idea: the PX sold stereos at cost, but they were, of course, for European, not American, voltage. I scored a couple of pieces of equipment which I still use, far better than I could have afforded new, from a soldier and his German wife who were headed back in a couple of weeks. Both of them just couldn't wait to get out of Berlin, and he was totally shocked that I didn't want his television and a half-dozen other appliances, too. (Totally unrelated PX anecdote: I once went to a party where I was charged with making hamburgers from my secret recipe, part of which involves sprinkling them with Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning, which I'd smuggled in after a trip to Texas and made a big "you can't get that here" deal about. One of the Germans at the party looked at my precious canister of the stuff and said "Oh, yeah, Tony Chachere's. You could get that at the PX. We always had some around.")

As the day for the troops to leave approached, Z was more and more distraught. The bookstores closed, the Four Brothers (which depended heavily on the military for its customers) closed, and he made me promise to meet him to watch the final parade down the Strasse des 17 Juni, which was going to happen on June 19. I'd already missed enough history here (I left town in 1989 the day before the Wall opened, and on another occasion, I missed the last Pan Am flight out of Berlin, an emotional occasion because they'd donated many airplanes to the Berlin Airlift) that I wasn't going to miss this -- plus, the parade route was only a few minutes' walk from my place in Moabit anyway. The New York Times story will give you the factual background, but my memory also includes the low-flying aircraft flying flags, and trailing red, white, and blue smoke from their exhausts (convenient for the Americans, British, and French!) while soldiers stood in their open doors at full attention, which certainly got my acrophobia going. The other memory of that day certainly didn't make the Times: Z was openly crying.

It seems weird at this point in history to think that someone like him would be so deeply affected. It's not that he wasn't a proud German, but he'd spent 35 years in either the American zone of West Germany, or West Berlin, and his most important cultural touchstone was being ripped away from him. He'd been occupied his whole life, and he'd formed a bond with his occupiers, whether he was reading their pulp fiction or surreptitiously smoking their pot and drinking their beer in one of their high schools. German identity, whether some people would like to admit it at that point or not, was partially dependent on the occupiers reminding them of why they were occupied. From this day on, they'd have to go it themselves. I suspect this provoked a tinge of fear in some people.

Anyway, I think of Z every year when these posters show up. He abandoned our friendship long ago as he quit his translating job and got into the film business, where he's produced some of the very worst teen comedies this nation has ever offered to a reluctant movie-going public. He's a millionaire now, I suspect. At any rate, he's been liberated from who he used to be.

Me, too, as almost 15 years in a foreign country will do to you. Not that I've gone native, as some expats do. But I've become accustomed to some of the European norms which are pretty much universal in the countries I've visited: a different pace of life, an acceptance of universal medical care as a human right instead of a privilege, an abandonment of puritainsim, a scepticism about nationalism, and a feeling for cross-border cooperation. I think you can be liberated from the United States without becoming a subject of where you live, too, in the same way that the Italian-Americans I grew up with were both Italian and American. I think of myself more as an American-European in that sense, and, like those Italian-Americans, I can live with the best of both cultures and make a new one out of what I've been dealt by life here.

So, much as I bitch about Berlin and much as I can't wait to get out of here, I gotta say it: thank you for the liberation.

It Must Be Spring

More in the nature of a collection of crumbs, but...

First, there's the matter of the arboreal genocide on my street. The aftermath has been interesting: on the stub (it's not tall enough to call it a stump) where one of the trees was someone has taken a Christmas tree outline, made of stout bronze wire, and screwed it to the former living tree. On the end of each of its "branches," this decoration has a candle-holder, and various residents have stuck candles in there and lit them. There's nothing in them as of a few minutes ago, but this may change. In the meanwhile, it's been festooned with strings of tinsel and ribbon.

A few more trees on other streets have gone, too, and apparently there are plans for even more. One, I noticed, only got severely trimmed, perhaps in deference to a very large bird's nest near its top. Species-ism, if you ask me.

The comments on that item were interesting, too, as were backchannel e-mails like the one from Gary detailing a homicidal Californian tree. I suppose that kind of thing can happen anywhere, but maybe a tree living in a place where people retain a vestigal communion with tree-spirits makes it happen far less frequently. Makes me wonder if it happens at all in Latvia. I was also sent a tree-hugging joke by Friedperson, but if you know her, you know it's not the kind of thing one can post on a family-oriented blog like this one (stop laughing). Mature adults can apply via e-mail. The easily offended need not bother.

Across the street from the former trees, a local child is attempting a social experiment: hanging from one of the building's balconies by a stout rope is a small felt basket. If you look in it, you'll discover candies and a note asking you to take one and leave another behind. This has been going on for several days now, and I'm amazed to see that there's been a steady change in the basket's contents. Yesterday, someone left a banana instead of candy, thereby teaching the kid that there are health-food nuts everywhere. My guess is that the basket gets hauled up every now and again and the really good stuff is impounded.

It's not just the sap oozing from the tree-stubs that reminds me it's spring, though. The windows can be open most of the day now, and there is actually sunshine outdoors. Plus, of course, last night was Walpurgisnacht, which then segues neatly into May Day rioting, that old Berliner tradition. The park near my house was, for some reason, closed off and police stationed to check people coming and going, and there were helicopters late into the night. Now, I know there was also a Howard Carpendale concert last night, but somehow I don't think the security was about him. Today, broken empty bottles of horrific sorts of alcohol I didn't even know existed are all over the street, and, for the first time since I've been in this neighborhood, there've been police sirens at regular intervals.

All of which makes me nostalgic, because it now looks very much like I'll be leaving here come July. Details -- many, many details, you can be sure -- will follow as things fall into place, and no, I don't have the money yet, and yet it's more likely than ever that I will when the proverbial push comes to shove. The first item on the agenda is an apartment search, which will follow closely after a week in Morocco. After that, it'll be back here to pack.

And, of course, this scares me to death. I don't know many people in Montpellier, and two of the folks I do know are leaving for the summer; I don't have a job there (other than the writing I do which can be done from anywhere), and I'll be moving somewhere that's a bit more expensive than Berlin and where I'll be paying more rent than I am here. Plus the usual unknowns on this end. If experience is anything to go by, I'll both fall in love with someone who can't move and be offered a totally fantastic job here about three days before I roll out of town.

I also won't be living in a town with loads of brilliant artists who do events involving head-lice.

Not that, at this point, I'm going to let that stop me.

Treehugging And Its Discontents

There is a tiresome meme, particularly in America, that goes "scratch a German and you'll find a nazi." Get one of these people worked up enough, the thought seems to be, and the inner authoritarian antisemite with delusions of world conquest comes out. Nobody who's lived here for more than ten minutes, let alone anyone who's ever actually met a real live German believes this, of course, but it persists.

No, the real meme is "scratch a German and you'll find an animistic pagan."

The early Christian missionaries must have really had a hard job in these lands, because they never really succeeded, in my opinion. Could the ancient Germanic nature-religion really have been wiped out when 2008 years after the birth of Christ nobody thinks twice about naming a child "wolf-path?" (Well, what did you think Wolfgang means?)

This is why, when German cinema first started making Westerns, it went straight to Karl May, the German writer who never left Europe and ground out pulp novels about the Old West which centered on the Indians. German Westerns weren't ahistorical: the Indians always lost, but they were also clearly the tragic heroes. They lived in close harmony with nature, and revered it. Why, they were almost Germans!

It's why Germans have those little settlements of garden houses everywhere there's enough space to wedge them in, and it's why they go mushroom hunting at the crack of dawn on weekends in the fall. It's why, when they go to America, they head to the National Parks, drive down Route 66, or groove on the Arizona desert. It's why they number the trees in their parks and forests (and really, if you don't believe me, go look: there'll be a little tag there somewhere, placed in the name of Ordnung).

And it's why my street is about to erupt into a seething cauldron of civil disobedience. Or not.



Early last week, some official-looking papers were taped to the doors of our buildings informing us that tomorrow, Monday April 21, city workers would fell most of the trees on our street and some adjoining ones. The trees in question were black cherry trees, and had, according to a Herr Doktor at the Berlin Environment Office, developed a root syndrome which might result in their falling over and hurting cars parked beneath them. The reaction was swift: more signs appeared, taped to the trees in question. One of them had word from yet another Herr Doktor questioning the accuracy of the first Herr Doktor's report. All of them noted one truly unfortunate detail: the city didn't have funds to replace the trees being felled.

In a repeat of something I've seen a lot before, signs resembling funeral notices appeared on the condemned trees, with a big black cross. "CONDEMNED TO DEATH" read a huge headline. A more reasonable sign in green then went up, calling for a mass demonstration. "The report of the root damage to the black cherry trees is doubtful," it says. "Not all the marked trees must be taken down. There is no money to replace them."





Then some red and white striped tape was stretched between the trees to be felled, along with no-parking signs effective at 7am on Monday. Sometime last night it vanished.

Today at 2pm, a demonstration was scheduled. About 30 minutes into it, I went to check it out. A merry old chap with a beard was pounding black wooden crosses into the patches of ground where the condemned trees were standing, as a television crew documented it. A pair of grim young men unfurled a huge sign that said "FIRST THE TREES...THEN THE PEOPLE!!" and just as quickly unfurled it after they'd gotten some attention. There was a table set up, at which signatures were being collected, and some guy walked down the street sticking copies of the mock-obit flyers under people's windshield wipers. The center of attention seemed to be another old guy with one of those contraptions of stick and string which make gigantic soap bubbles, and clusters of young parents stood around with their kids and chatted. A couple of bored cops checked every car coming into the street and otherwise stood around.

Will any of this cause the city to reconsider or put off the date of the trees' doom? Can demonstrating on a Sunday, when you'd better believe any relevant office is closed, do any good? Will this end up like every other instance like it I've ever seen in Berlin, with officials nodding their heads in sympathy and going ahead and doing what they'd intended to do anyway? And...are these trees really such a menace to automobiles and real estate? I don't know.

One thing I do know: it's not smart to mess with trees in Germany. It really does seem to call forth an atavistic response from people, as if the tree spirits had spoken to them and reminded them of the symbiosis that binds the Volk to the Bäume.

Another thing I know is that I've never yet seen the city of Berlin dissuaded from doing anything, no matter how stupid, once it had made up its mind to do it.

My heart's with the trees, but my money's with the chainsaws.



(The doomed eight, above, in green).

UPDATE: Went out at 1pm on Monday, all trees gone. A new, badly-painted sign declated it a SAW-MASSACRE!!

France/Austin/France, The Finale

I hate to say it, but Deutsche Bahn has just made getting to Paris even quicker, with a train that goes Berlin-Frankfurt, from which you transfer to a Frankfurt-Paris (Gare de l'Est) train on DB that gets you there 15 minutes or so quicker, not to mention that you don't have to ride the Thalys, the Belgian/French/Dutch high-speed train which I've always found dark and cramped. Plus, there's apparently some deal going with DB that gets you first class for something like €20 more round-trip, which I sure took advantage of. They even serve you a free meal which wouldn't be out of place on an airplane, but hey, it's free.

* * *

As always, there was more to do in Austin than listen to music and eat. The Harry Ransom Center on the UT campus was hosting an exhibition called On The Road With the Beats, which I couldn't wait to see. The center of the thing (although it's displayed right as you walk in) is 48 feet of the original, unparagraphed, manuscript of On the Road, which Jack Kerouac famously wrote on a roll of teletype paper. Even though I get more ambiguous in my feelings about this book as I get older, it's still a part of every American counter-culturist's heritage, and it's an incredible thing to actually see it stretched out like that. The exhibition is text-heavy, and you're going to have to do a lot of reading if you're really going to get into it. It's also very fair, including the Los Angeles scene, and such supposedly minor figures as Ted Joans. There's posters for Beatsploitation films, photos (although not enough) by Allen Ginsberg, and much, much more. I kind of raced through it because I didn't have much time, but it's worth devoting an afternoon to if you have any feeling at all for this period of history.

Even better, next door to it is a show devoted to the undeservedly obscure artist Jess, who was a modern master of collage inspired originally by Max Ernst. You may know him from his Tricky Cad cutups of Dick Tracy comics, which got him sued, but which are often cited as important precursors of Pop Art, or, if you're into poetry, you may know him as Robert Duncan's partner (they had a wedding ceremony in 1951, which sure was ahead of the curve), who provided art for many of his books. I'd never seen much of his stuff, and was very impressed by the show.

I just noticed that the Beats show is up through the beginning of August but the Jess show closes soon, so if you're in Austin, get down there! I'm glad I did.

* * *

There was all the music at SXSW, and then there was the best music I heard in Austin. That was on a pirate radio station I found somewhere in the middle of the FM dial (hmmm, it seemed like a familiar frequency, somehow), which brought back all the joys of free-form radio I used to listen to -- and use to discover new stuff -- back in the early '70s before consultants brought their heavy boots down on the radio industry and utterly ruined it. Oh, sure, there was stuff I didn't much like -- '50s pop a la Rosemary Clooney, one evening that seemed heavy on handbag house, some heavy-handed comedy -- but that's the way free-form radio works. At one point, a guy's voice came on and said something like "You are listening to an illegal radio station. See that cop over there? He's part of the control for this sector. Immediately change your dial to a commercial radio station. Listen carefully to the ads, and then buy everything you hear advertised. You'll feel a lot better." The signal doesn't always come in clearly -- in fact, sometimes the station's off the air for a few hours -- but in central and south Austin it usually sounds pretty good. The big problem is not knowing what you're hearing. I heard a couple of tunes by artists I'd like to investigate further, but with no DJ to announce them, I can't tell you who they were. But I sure like that rebels out there are defying overdetermined radio, and risking their necks to do so. Whoever's behind this has good taste in music and one hell of a record collection. Long may it wave!

* * *

From Austin, I flew to Newark, changed planes, flew to Paris, and then went to the TGV train station inside the airport, waited two hours, and got on a direct train to Montpellier. I was one cripsy critter when I got there, in part because Continental Airlines now offers some 350 movies on demand and I watched a couple of them instead of sleeping, which would have been a far better idea. But the hotel I stayed at has great beds, and I was able to nap and begin conquering my jet-lag immediately.

The idea of going to Montpellier directly after Austin was to find students who'd be leaving their large, cheap places this summer, talk to their landlords, and get a reservation to move into one if I found one I liked.

Unfortunately, I looked at exactly zero apartments. Apparently, there was a student strike last year, which means that many students won't be vacating until mid-June instead of May, like usual. This means that I'm going to have to go down there again, and that timing will be crucial, since school will undoubtedly start up again in August. Fortunately, though, I seem to be developing a great network of folks down there who'll help me look. Some of them, like Marie the translator and of course Bart (go ahead, click the link; he only gets 6000 hits a day, as opposed to my maybe 100 on a good day, not that I'm jealous or anything), I know from blogs. Others I met through Bart's friends at the Bar Vert Anglais, which is a friendly spot. Others I met randomly through friends. I'm a great believer in networks, so I really hope I get results with this one.

Of course, moving means raising around €3000 between now and the first of June. I'm not at all sure how I'm going to do this. I was hoping to sell my old guitar in Austin, but it proved to need too much renovation to make this practicable at the moment. Now I'm just praying that some work will come over the transom, and that, at long last, I can say good-bye to Berlin.

* * *

Of course, I'm back now, and it doesn't look so bad now that spring is beginning. But I got a potent reminder of where I am the very night I returned. Walking back to my building after going out for dinner, I passed a ground-floor apartment. On the wall was a huge poster edged in black, with the scowling face of Kurt Cobain on it. Beneath the photo were the words, written in huge capital letters "I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE." Just what I'd want in my living room, I'm sure.

Yup, I'm back in Fun City, all right.