This week, all Germany is humming with energy. Sunday will be the first Sunday of Advent, an event which is merely a statistic in most parts of the world, but resonates like the starting bell at a racetrack here. Already, the Weihnachtsmärkte have opened, Christmas bazaars selling handcrafts, traditional foods, knick-knacks, gew-gaws, and, of course, Glühwein and sausages. The most famous one is in Nuremberg, where I found myself a couple of years ago when I went there to do a story on the Nazi Documentation Center. I definitely needed cheering up after that, and headed back into town to the huge crowd (largely Japanese, for some reason) milling around there.
There's apparently another famous one in Dresden called the Striezelmarkt, which I missed despite being in that city at that time of year once. But pretty much every major city has one: I was assigned a boneheaded story on Christmas in Leipzig last year -- Leipzig not being famous for its Christmas stuff -- and found a very good-sized one strewn all over the market square and throughout the old town. Berlin has several: I saw the little huts being built last week both in Alexanderplatz and around the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche over by Zoo Station, and almost certainly the one by the Opera House on Unter den Linden will fire up again this year.
It's pretty certain that I'll wind up wandering through one of them, because they're so inescapable, and, as always, I'll probably check out the latest from Seiffen, a small town in the extreme southeast near the Czech border where the citizens turned to making hand-carved wooden toys when the tin ore in the local mines ran out in the 18th Century. (There's a good history of it here, but, unfortunately, no pictures). This was a major hard-currency source for the DDR back when it existed, and you've undoubtedly seen the nutcrackers -- albeit probably Chinese copies. But they also do these complex little figures called Rauchermännchen, or little smoking men. They come apart at the middle and you insert an incense cone, then put them back together. In a few seconds, the mouth begins to puff smoke. They come in all manner of forms, representing a huge variety of occupations: the year I was in Seiffen, the big deal was computers, which had basically just hit German consumers, and there were lots of little guys seated in front of terminals. The next year, they were using cell phones. One of my favorites was a little guy pumping gas -- uh, a little unclear on the concept, dude?
Because I don't eat much sugar, I miss out on the big attractions of the Weihnachtsmärkte, the food products. In Nuremberg, this centers around Lebkuchen, a flat piece of pastry somewhere between a spice cookie and a gingerbread which is made with leavening which comes from fermenting flour with honey. The firm which invented them back in the 1300s apparently still does this slow fermentation throughout the year in its basement. The Christkindlmarkt there is loaded with variations: frosted ones, chocolate-covered ones, with nuts, without nuts... There's also something called Früchtebrot, the distant and more palatable ancestor of our own fruit cake.
Dresden has its Stollen, which my mother used to make. This is subject to innumerable variations; my notes from Leipzig mention "Our Best" (no idea what that was about), Kunath Christstollen, Kunath Butterstollen, Dresdner Mandelstollen (with almonds), Mohnstollen (with sweetened poppy-seeds), and special Stollen for diabetics. Dresden's other contribution to the Christmas larder is Pfeffernüsse, tiny hard cookies made with black pepper which are usually made at home -- again, my mother used to make these, and they're not really good until several weeks after they're cooked, when they're hard as the nuts they're named after.
Berlin, of course, has no particular culinary tradition, so we get what we get: a mixture of all of the above, leaning perhaps a bit closer to Dresden -- I can get that exact Stollen on the link there in my crappy supermarket. There's always a huge wok-like pan of Grünkohl with Pinklewurst (kale with little hot-dogs) and vats of Glühwein (bad red wine mulled with plenty of sugar and spices), the very smell of which gives me a headache when I walk past them.
And these markets are packed from the minute they open until they close, as are the department stores and the shopping malls. The reason? Many (but far from all) German workers get something called Weihnachtsgeld, a Christmas bonus equal to a month's salary. Civil servants almost always get it, but so do plenty of private employees. A collective spending mania then descends on the general population right up to December 23, at which point it just stops. I'm wondering how much Weihnachtsgeld I'll be seeing this year, though, with Berlin currently suffering 20% unemployment. Guess I'll find out in a week.
Monday, November 22, 2004
Friday, November 19, 2004
Another Technical Note
Really Soon Now there'll be a couple of ads on the side of this thing for a book called The Rose and the Briar and the CD that goes with it. I have an essay in the book, in the company of everyone from Joyce Carole Oates to R. Crumb to (ugh) Stanley Crouch, and the ballad I wrote about is on the CD.
What this means in general is that I've been accepted by Amazon.com's Associates program, and that I can link to products (books and records in particular is what I was thinking of) that I refer to and if you click on the link and wind up buying the item, I get a check. I think the maximum they'll give you, though, is $25 on an individual sale, so I didn't bother to see if Amazon sells Ferarris.
It also means I'll likely be talking more about books and records here, which I've wanted to do more of, and I'll likely post a year-end top ten list, too, all clickable, great for last-minute Christmas giving or something.
Speaking of which, The Rose and the Briar makes a great Christmas gift! Love and death! What could be more Christmassy than that?
What this means in general is that I've been accepted by Amazon.com's Associates program, and that I can link to products (books and records in particular is what I was thinking of) that I refer to and if you click on the link and wind up buying the item, I get a check. I think the maximum they'll give you, though, is $25 on an individual sale, so I didn't bother to see if Amazon sells Ferarris.
It also means I'll likely be talking more about books and records here, which I've wanted to do more of, and I'll likely post a year-end top ten list, too, all clickable, great for last-minute Christmas giving or something.
Speaking of which, The Rose and the Briar makes a great Christmas gift! Love and death! What could be more Christmassy than that?
Thursday, November 18, 2004
Ruins
Okay, I'm a lazy bastard, so I didn't go take pictures of the site next door, and now it's too late. German workmen can work fast, and this crew certainly has. (And, unlike many work crews in this town, these guys really are German instead of Czech or Polish, both of whom work cheaper and aren't in German unions). So we'll have to resort to the magic of words.
One really good, if totally obscure, movie about Berlin is called The Big Lift, a 1950 fiction film about the Berlin Airlift that was Montgomery Clift's first role. It was shot on location, at Tempelhof Airport and on the streets of Berlin. It's not a very important film, other than exposing the Eternal Perfidy of German Women and having a wonderful scene set on the U-Bahn (subway), but one institution it deals with is the brick-women. Even in 1950, it wasn't hard to find a scene of desolation in which to film, and in these blocks of bombed-out apartment buildings, hundreds of women were at work, picking up bricks, knocking the mortar off, and stacking them up to be recycled into new buildings.
Or, rather, this was what happened in the American, British, and French Zones. The Russians had a different idea: they would build the new society on top of the rubble of the old one, new, daring, beautiful Socialist architecture without a single reference to the past. Which they did, in the more visible parts of town, except calling it new and daring was maybe a stretch.
But the first time I went to East Berlin, in the company of someone who was something of an Eastophile, we went to Prenzlauer Berg to meet a friend of his who lived there. From what I can remember and figure out in retrospect (because who'd have thought I'd ever go back, let alone live near there?) it must have been Prenzlauer Allee, because I marvelled at the Planetarium in Ernst Thälmann Park, a masterpiece of Socialist Futurism that looked like it could launch itself into orbit. There was a real constrast between that and the buildings along Prenzlauer Allee, which apparently hadn't been bombed, and the side-streets. There, lots still contained the rubble of bombed buildings. Weeds grew up among them, and small trees had established root-systems in the ruins. The West Berliners rebuilt. The East Berliners paved over the wreckage or just let it sit there.
Now, as I've mentioned, the construction next door has started again, with the scooping out of a big hole which had been dug some years back and just let sit while the company developing the project apparently went out of business. And, as I reported earlier, the Countess in our building had said they were just going to smooth the property out and plant grass. I think she was half right: the proposed second building isn't going to be built (the existing building is only half-full as it is, and has gone from offering apartments for sale to offering rentals as well -- never a good sign. But they've dug out what appears to be a passageway for the underground garage that was advertised, and now they're putting in concrete forms that look like walls for it. That's the noise you hear in the background as I type.
What the digging uncovered, though, was bricks, thousands of them. And as I looked at it, I realized that there had almost certainly been a building behind Borsigstr. 4, as with most buildings in this city. Depending on the lot, you either had several buildings, one behind the other (I've seen up to five consecutive buildings), or you had a sort of E-shaped arrangement without the central bar. The buildings were called Vorderhaus (front house), Hinterhaus (rear house, and, if there were more than one, zweite Hinterhaus, dritte Hinterhaus, etc.), and, for the one on the side, Quergebäude (side-building). Since the blocks are bigger, you don't get the same building pattern as you do in New York, for instance, so the Hinterhof (rear courtyard) model makes sense.
In fact, the Berliner Hinterhof is a beloved insitution. I feel very fortunate to have seen one aspect of this, in the first apartment I lived in. A guy with a hurdy-gurdy (well, actually a small barrel organ with one leg and a strap holding it to his body) came to the neighboring building and ground out a melody. The windows opened up, and tissues wrapped around small change rained down on him from the old ladies living there. Several histories of Berlin have pictures, by Zille and various photographers, of a man and his kids performing in a Hinterhof for the residents, playing instruments, singing and dancing. Another aspect I've taken part in many a time is the Hinterhof party, where everyone just gets out there in the summertime and (with permission from all the residents, of course!) grills, eats, and drinks. One of the many silly things in the German Pavillion at Expo 2000 was a huge room where you went in and were transported into the middle of a Berlin Hinterhof party via film projected all around you. It was a pretty weird party, though, because people of all ages were there, and black people and Turks and Orientals. I only know one person who gives parties like that, and he's considered very special -- and even Turks don't come to his parties.
Anyway, this is getting far afield from the bricks in the lot next door. I know this neighborhood was bombed because the building across the street is brand new, as is the one across Torstr. from it. If a building was only damaged, it would be repaired, as my house was (I assume). But the Hinterhaus at Borsigstr. 4 was flattened, and the place where it had stood was covered over and turned into a lawn that stood there up til the time they started developing. To see this ghost appear -- the cellar, in particular -- is very odd.
I used to see a lot more of this sort of thing earlier in my stay here, of course. Once the city was unified there was an astonishing amount of work to be done, and there was (I know this is hard to believe if you've been here recently) far more construction than there is today. One danger was the UXB, the unexploded bomb. I used to exercise in the Tiergarten, our Central Park, when I lived next to it, and there was a bunch of construction in there. Imagine my surprise when I read an article that said they'd dug out a couple of UXBs from a trench I used to pass every day. Or there was the little incident where a bombed building was being dealt with over on Frankfurter Allee and the guy with the backhoe hit a UXB. Half a block got vaporized, but amazingly the only fatality was the poor worker who'd hit the damn thing. The pictures in the paper were pretty impressive, I'll tell you.
Of course, not all the ruins were dangerous, and some were downright cozy. Tresor, one of the first techno clubs to open over here, was the safe and the storage area in the basement of a department store. But the store had been bombed to the ground, so there was only a small building on top, and then the other dance floor downstairs in the vault. And I'll never forget the bombed-out lot next to Friseur. Friseur was, as its name implies, a former hairdressing salon. (East German businesses, being communist, didn't have names, which was one of the things I found so disorienting about walking down East Berlin streets, since it seemed like you were walking in circles -- didn't we just pass Friseur? -- when you weren't). While it lasted, Friseur was a rock club, a stuffy, hot, and uncomfortable one, but after the show, you would walk into the lot next to it, and, if you were lucky, you'd see a couple of candles burning on the ground. Walk over to them, and you'd see a hole with a stairway in it. Walk down the stairway, and you'd be in an amazing illegal club run by a bunch of insane Brazilians which may or may not have been called Favela. (That was the name of the bar they opened afterwards). They introduced the caipirinha to Berlin, and it remains one of the city's favorite drinks. I (sort of) remember an amazing evening there with the all-female rock band Die Braut Haut Ins Auge, who were friends with an old friend of mine here after their gig at Friseur, and walking up the stairs at the end of it all, and, as my head emerged from the hole, noting that the sun was coming up. I paused at ground level, seeing the lot and the city beyond it from a mouse's eye view, then continued up the stairs, onto the street, and, with the rising son at my back, proceeding through the Brandenburg Gate back to my apartment to try to catch a few hours' sleep.
I was once approached by someone on behalf of Seiji Ozawa and asked to recommend some clubs "on the edge" he could visit after conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, and I enthused about the Brazilians. Wonder if he ever went there?
But that real estate was too valuable to remain like that. I think the building where Friseur was still stands on the edges of Potsdamer Platz, but the lot is long since built on, and I wonder if I could find it today. Still, it's a measure of the devastation of this city that it could be 2004 and a long-buried cellar right next door to me would come to light.
But it leads me to a thought that's both historically accurate and, for me, a part of my own history: this city is mostly about where things used to be. For Heinrich Zille and for me.
One really good, if totally obscure, movie about Berlin is called The Big Lift, a 1950 fiction film about the Berlin Airlift that was Montgomery Clift's first role. It was shot on location, at Tempelhof Airport and on the streets of Berlin. It's not a very important film, other than exposing the Eternal Perfidy of German Women and having a wonderful scene set on the U-Bahn (subway), but one institution it deals with is the brick-women. Even in 1950, it wasn't hard to find a scene of desolation in which to film, and in these blocks of bombed-out apartment buildings, hundreds of women were at work, picking up bricks, knocking the mortar off, and stacking them up to be recycled into new buildings.
Or, rather, this was what happened in the American, British, and French Zones. The Russians had a different idea: they would build the new society on top of the rubble of the old one, new, daring, beautiful Socialist architecture without a single reference to the past. Which they did, in the more visible parts of town, except calling it new and daring was maybe a stretch.
But the first time I went to East Berlin, in the company of someone who was something of an Eastophile, we went to Prenzlauer Berg to meet a friend of his who lived there. From what I can remember and figure out in retrospect (because who'd have thought I'd ever go back, let alone live near there?) it must have been Prenzlauer Allee, because I marvelled at the Planetarium in Ernst Thälmann Park, a masterpiece of Socialist Futurism that looked like it could launch itself into orbit. There was a real constrast between that and the buildings along Prenzlauer Allee, which apparently hadn't been bombed, and the side-streets. There, lots still contained the rubble of bombed buildings. Weeds grew up among them, and small trees had established root-systems in the ruins. The West Berliners rebuilt. The East Berliners paved over the wreckage or just let it sit there.
Now, as I've mentioned, the construction next door has started again, with the scooping out of a big hole which had been dug some years back and just let sit while the company developing the project apparently went out of business. And, as I reported earlier, the Countess in our building had said they were just going to smooth the property out and plant grass. I think she was half right: the proposed second building isn't going to be built (the existing building is only half-full as it is, and has gone from offering apartments for sale to offering rentals as well -- never a good sign. But they've dug out what appears to be a passageway for the underground garage that was advertised, and now they're putting in concrete forms that look like walls for it. That's the noise you hear in the background as I type.
What the digging uncovered, though, was bricks, thousands of them. And as I looked at it, I realized that there had almost certainly been a building behind Borsigstr. 4, as with most buildings in this city. Depending on the lot, you either had several buildings, one behind the other (I've seen up to five consecutive buildings), or you had a sort of E-shaped arrangement without the central bar. The buildings were called Vorderhaus (front house), Hinterhaus (rear house, and, if there were more than one, zweite Hinterhaus, dritte Hinterhaus, etc.), and, for the one on the side, Quergebäude (side-building). Since the blocks are bigger, you don't get the same building pattern as you do in New York, for instance, so the Hinterhof (rear courtyard) model makes sense.
In fact, the Berliner Hinterhof is a beloved insitution. I feel very fortunate to have seen one aspect of this, in the first apartment I lived in. A guy with a hurdy-gurdy (well, actually a small barrel organ with one leg and a strap holding it to his body) came to the neighboring building and ground out a melody. The windows opened up, and tissues wrapped around small change rained down on him from the old ladies living there. Several histories of Berlin have pictures, by Zille and various photographers, of a man and his kids performing in a Hinterhof for the residents, playing instruments, singing and dancing. Another aspect I've taken part in many a time is the Hinterhof party, where everyone just gets out there in the summertime and (with permission from all the residents, of course!) grills, eats, and drinks. One of the many silly things in the German Pavillion at Expo 2000 was a huge room where you went in and were transported into the middle of a Berlin Hinterhof party via film projected all around you. It was a pretty weird party, though, because people of all ages were there, and black people and Turks and Orientals. I only know one person who gives parties like that, and he's considered very special -- and even Turks don't come to his parties.
Anyway, this is getting far afield from the bricks in the lot next door. I know this neighborhood was bombed because the building across the street is brand new, as is the one across Torstr. from it. If a building was only damaged, it would be repaired, as my house was (I assume). But the Hinterhaus at Borsigstr. 4 was flattened, and the place where it had stood was covered over and turned into a lawn that stood there up til the time they started developing. To see this ghost appear -- the cellar, in particular -- is very odd.
I used to see a lot more of this sort of thing earlier in my stay here, of course. Once the city was unified there was an astonishing amount of work to be done, and there was (I know this is hard to believe if you've been here recently) far more construction than there is today. One danger was the UXB, the unexploded bomb. I used to exercise in the Tiergarten, our Central Park, when I lived next to it, and there was a bunch of construction in there. Imagine my surprise when I read an article that said they'd dug out a couple of UXBs from a trench I used to pass every day. Or there was the little incident where a bombed building was being dealt with over on Frankfurter Allee and the guy with the backhoe hit a UXB. Half a block got vaporized, but amazingly the only fatality was the poor worker who'd hit the damn thing. The pictures in the paper were pretty impressive, I'll tell you.
Of course, not all the ruins were dangerous, and some were downright cozy. Tresor, one of the first techno clubs to open over here, was the safe and the storage area in the basement of a department store. But the store had been bombed to the ground, so there was only a small building on top, and then the other dance floor downstairs in the vault. And I'll never forget the bombed-out lot next to Friseur. Friseur was, as its name implies, a former hairdressing salon. (East German businesses, being communist, didn't have names, which was one of the things I found so disorienting about walking down East Berlin streets, since it seemed like you were walking in circles -- didn't we just pass Friseur? -- when you weren't). While it lasted, Friseur was a rock club, a stuffy, hot, and uncomfortable one, but after the show, you would walk into the lot next to it, and, if you were lucky, you'd see a couple of candles burning on the ground. Walk over to them, and you'd see a hole with a stairway in it. Walk down the stairway, and you'd be in an amazing illegal club run by a bunch of insane Brazilians which may or may not have been called Favela. (That was the name of the bar they opened afterwards). They introduced the caipirinha to Berlin, and it remains one of the city's favorite drinks. I (sort of) remember an amazing evening there with the all-female rock band Die Braut Haut Ins Auge, who were friends with an old friend of mine here after their gig at Friseur, and walking up the stairs at the end of it all, and, as my head emerged from the hole, noting that the sun was coming up. I paused at ground level, seeing the lot and the city beyond it from a mouse's eye view, then continued up the stairs, onto the street, and, with the rising son at my back, proceeding through the Brandenburg Gate back to my apartment to try to catch a few hours' sleep.
I was once approached by someone on behalf of Seiji Ozawa and asked to recommend some clubs "on the edge" he could visit after conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, and I enthused about the Brazilians. Wonder if he ever went there?
But that real estate was too valuable to remain like that. I think the building where Friseur was still stands on the edges of Potsdamer Platz, but the lot is long since built on, and I wonder if I could find it today. Still, it's a measure of the devastation of this city that it could be 2004 and a long-buried cellar right next door to me would come to light.
But it leads me to a thought that's both historically accurate and, for me, a part of my own history: this city is mostly about where things used to be. For Heinrich Zille and for me.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Choppers
Just a quick one today, since there's work to do and more on the horizon.
I did go the dentist, and he did agree to replace the shattered plate for free. That was the good news. He grilled me about my financial situation, saying that what he'd really like to do would be put in implants for a mere €20,000, but even though I had over €50 in my pocket at the moment, I didn't think I was quite ready, thanks. He then indulged in the great Berlin tradition of the-customer-is-always-wrong and told me that it was because my gums were now so healthy -- thanks to him -- that the old plate had loosened up. Then he took an impression and told me the new plate would be ready in 24 hours.
It was. It didn't fit, of course, so he had to modify it, twice. Each time I could sense him getting angrier and angrier at putting in free labor when he could have had a paying customer in the chair, and in the end, they weren't totally snug, but he said -- and I believe him -- that my mouth will adjust. He practically ejected me out of the room.
The adrenaline was so great after this that I walked back to the subway station (which was the end of the line) up Britzer Damm. Britz is said to have some of the oldest structures in Berlin, although I've pinpointed them to a different area than I was walking through. Still, I saw a couple of old farmhouses that had been turned into city dwellings, as well as a couple of the early 19th Century townhouses, two stories and lots of frosting, that I'd also seen up in Pankow last year. Might be worth going back to look for those old houses, but not until the weather gets better.
In a great happy-ending conclusion, this morning's e-mail brought one from Goldapple in San Francisco, giving me the name of his former dentist here, a nice Jewish girl with a degree from Tufts, much more centrally located. And that Tufts degree means that she's in the same great tradition as another great dentist, my maternal grandfather!
Tomorrow I'm going to try to photograph the construction next door (given how it wakes me up every day, I might as well get something out of it), because it's unearthed an entire bombed building.
I did go the dentist, and he did agree to replace the shattered plate for free. That was the good news. He grilled me about my financial situation, saying that what he'd really like to do would be put in implants for a mere €20,000, but even though I had over €50 in my pocket at the moment, I didn't think I was quite ready, thanks. He then indulged in the great Berlin tradition of the-customer-is-always-wrong and told me that it was because my gums were now so healthy -- thanks to him -- that the old plate had loosened up. Then he took an impression and told me the new plate would be ready in 24 hours.
It was. It didn't fit, of course, so he had to modify it, twice. Each time I could sense him getting angrier and angrier at putting in free labor when he could have had a paying customer in the chair, and in the end, they weren't totally snug, but he said -- and I believe him -- that my mouth will adjust. He practically ejected me out of the room.
The adrenaline was so great after this that I walked back to the subway station (which was the end of the line) up Britzer Damm. Britz is said to have some of the oldest structures in Berlin, although I've pinpointed them to a different area than I was walking through. Still, I saw a couple of old farmhouses that had been turned into city dwellings, as well as a couple of the early 19th Century townhouses, two stories and lots of frosting, that I'd also seen up in Pankow last year. Might be worth going back to look for those old houses, but not until the weather gets better.
In a great happy-ending conclusion, this morning's e-mail brought one from Goldapple in San Francisco, giving me the name of his former dentist here, a nice Jewish girl with a degree from Tufts, much more centrally located. And that Tufts degree means that she's in the same great tradition as another great dentist, my maternal grandfather!
Tomorrow I'm going to try to photograph the construction next door (given how it wakes me up every day, I might as well get something out of it), because it's unearthed an entire bombed building.
Saturday, November 13, 2004
A Few More Words About Bread
Since moving to Germany, one of the local tics I've picked up is eating a German breakfast at least a couple of times a week in the cooler months. In case you've never experienced it, you get bread, cheese, cold cuts, maybe some quark (insufficiently described as "yogurt cheese"), maybe some smoked fish. I let it get out of hand in the early days and wound up with a bellyache most days I tried it, but now I've got a good routine, involving cream cheese (the Germans are masters of this) and one kind of cold-cuts (currently apple-onion liverwurst, liverwurst being another thing these people excel at).
Naturally, what you need for this is bread, and of course German bread is famous, although Berlin is renowned throughout Germany as having the worst bakers in the country (true, from what I can tell). When I first experimented with the German breakfast, I'd buy Brötchen, or rolls, because then I could get a couple of kinds of bread. But I wound up eating too much, mostly because I liked the bread too much, so I bought too much of it, and when I re-upped on this program, I discovered the best way to do it: buy half a loaf, which any bakery will happily sell you: half a pound (250g), stays fresh for a couple of days.
Trouble was, when I first moved to this neighborhood, for the first time ever, there wasn't a bakery on the corner. In fact, there was only one bakery, about four blocks away, and it was terrible, a relic of the old East German times. There was a health-food store about three blocks in the other direction, but it didn't open until 10, since it was run by lazy East German hippies, and I often get started earlier than that. There's a supermarket (of sorts) across the street from me, an old Konsum from the DDR days, but the bread they sell there is total crap.
Then, out of the blue, one block away on Torstr., a store called Brot & Mehr opened, selling a mass-produced "bio" line of bread products. (The concept of "bio" as opposed to organic, which is "öko," is so nuanced that I can't understand it at all: suffice it to say it's not organic, but it's also not too bad). Their bread was pretty good, so that's where I started shopping. The place was always full of breakfasters, the Brötchen were good, and it was nice having a place that close. A couple of other bakeries further away opened, too, but they're of the usual kind around here: they get half-baked stuff and finish it in on-site ovens, or they get frozen stuff and bake it as needed. The quality of the bread at these places is awful, but Berliners will eat anything.
So earlier this summer, I mentioned that the cursed building on the corner of my street, which had sat empty for years looking for a tenant, and which has an awful smell that hangs around the outside, finally got rented, and a sign went up noting that a bakery would open soon. It took them forever to renovate the place, which had been a second-hand TV shop. Just as I started noticing things like shelves and so on going in, something odd happened: a block away from that, in the other direction, a former art gallery got a sign in its window announcing that a bakery would soon open there. And, two blocks in the other direction, a long-vacant storefront papered its windows over and put up a sign. Guess what it said?
The place on the corner opened last week. It's a Turkish bakery, which is excellent, not because they make such great bread (they do, huge round loaves called peda, with sesame seeds or nigella seeds -- or both -- on them, but I haven't seen any peda in this place yet), but because they make wonderful savory pastries, which make a great light lunch. I managed to gum down a nice little cheese turnover today, for instance, and there was a "tomato strudel" and a "spinach strudel" sitting there, too.
But the place two blocks away also opened last week, and it's puzzling. Bio freaks need only go half a block to a health-food store for an array of bread that's uneven, but often includes the justly famed Munich Hopfisterei bakery's products. Brot & Mehr isn't far. And this place also has expensive snacks and drinks, like candy, potato chips, soda and beer. The only way that works is if it's "family owned," and, as such, is allowed a loophole in the opening-hours law, but when I walked past it at 5:30 today, it was shuttered tight.
The other place, which is far from finished, is even more of a mystery. It's around the corner from a bio-shop which advertises aggressively, and which also carries the same mass-produced bio-bread as Brot & Mehr.
This is the mystery of capitalism in Germany: the copy-cat syndrome that had three Italian delis opening in one block (as I noted in the post entitled Deutscher & Digideroos). How are all of these going to co-exist? I can see that Brot & Mehr and the Turks have such widely different lines that they'll be able to get along, and both are on Torstr., which is a big street. But this other place? Doomed before it opens, unless it has a concept.
And Germans aren't big on concepts. I remember when Oranienburger Str. was undergoing its first boom, and two people I knew were involved with one of the restaurant startups there, which some guy was pouring boxcars of money into. One friend was helping him with his business plan. "It's gonna be great!" he told me. "You should see the decoration!" (My other friend was doing this, so I knew it'd be good). Fine, I asked him, what kind of restaurant is it? And he gave me a blank look. "What do you mean?" Well, I said, there are already all kinds of restaurants opening up in that row, and he'd better have something different if he wants to make a go of it. So the guy went and asked the owner, and the guy told him "Just good food."
It's now an "American-style lapdance club," in case you're looking for it. Closed almost as soon as it opened.
I dunno, I don't feel particularly sorry for people who waste tons of money on things they haven't thought through. And, as happened with this restaurant, sometimes friends of mine catch some of the trickle-down. But I'd feel a lot better about the mentality of the people I was living among if I felt that they gave a little thought to what they were doing.
In any event, there'll be lots of bread in the neighborhood. For awhile, anyway.
Naturally, what you need for this is bread, and of course German bread is famous, although Berlin is renowned throughout Germany as having the worst bakers in the country (true, from what I can tell). When I first experimented with the German breakfast, I'd buy Brötchen, or rolls, because then I could get a couple of kinds of bread. But I wound up eating too much, mostly because I liked the bread too much, so I bought too much of it, and when I re-upped on this program, I discovered the best way to do it: buy half a loaf, which any bakery will happily sell you: half a pound (250g), stays fresh for a couple of days.
Trouble was, when I first moved to this neighborhood, for the first time ever, there wasn't a bakery on the corner. In fact, there was only one bakery, about four blocks away, and it was terrible, a relic of the old East German times. There was a health-food store about three blocks in the other direction, but it didn't open until 10, since it was run by lazy East German hippies, and I often get started earlier than that. There's a supermarket (of sorts) across the street from me, an old Konsum from the DDR days, but the bread they sell there is total crap.
Then, out of the blue, one block away on Torstr., a store called Brot & Mehr opened, selling a mass-produced "bio" line of bread products. (The concept of "bio" as opposed to organic, which is "öko," is so nuanced that I can't understand it at all: suffice it to say it's not organic, but it's also not too bad). Their bread was pretty good, so that's where I started shopping. The place was always full of breakfasters, the Brötchen were good, and it was nice having a place that close. A couple of other bakeries further away opened, too, but they're of the usual kind around here: they get half-baked stuff and finish it in on-site ovens, or they get frozen stuff and bake it as needed. The quality of the bread at these places is awful, but Berliners will eat anything.
So earlier this summer, I mentioned that the cursed building on the corner of my street, which had sat empty for years looking for a tenant, and which has an awful smell that hangs around the outside, finally got rented, and a sign went up noting that a bakery would open soon. It took them forever to renovate the place, which had been a second-hand TV shop. Just as I started noticing things like shelves and so on going in, something odd happened: a block away from that, in the other direction, a former art gallery got a sign in its window announcing that a bakery would soon open there. And, two blocks in the other direction, a long-vacant storefront papered its windows over and put up a sign. Guess what it said?
The place on the corner opened last week. It's a Turkish bakery, which is excellent, not because they make such great bread (they do, huge round loaves called peda, with sesame seeds or nigella seeds -- or both -- on them, but I haven't seen any peda in this place yet), but because they make wonderful savory pastries, which make a great light lunch. I managed to gum down a nice little cheese turnover today, for instance, and there was a "tomato strudel" and a "spinach strudel" sitting there, too.
But the place two blocks away also opened last week, and it's puzzling. Bio freaks need only go half a block to a health-food store for an array of bread that's uneven, but often includes the justly famed Munich Hopfisterei bakery's products. Brot & Mehr isn't far. And this place also has expensive snacks and drinks, like candy, potato chips, soda and beer. The only way that works is if it's "family owned," and, as such, is allowed a loophole in the opening-hours law, but when I walked past it at 5:30 today, it was shuttered tight.
The other place, which is far from finished, is even more of a mystery. It's around the corner from a bio-shop which advertises aggressively, and which also carries the same mass-produced bio-bread as Brot & Mehr.
This is the mystery of capitalism in Germany: the copy-cat syndrome that had three Italian delis opening in one block (as I noted in the post entitled Deutscher & Digideroos). How are all of these going to co-exist? I can see that Brot & Mehr and the Turks have such widely different lines that they'll be able to get along, and both are on Torstr., which is a big street. But this other place? Doomed before it opens, unless it has a concept.
And Germans aren't big on concepts. I remember when Oranienburger Str. was undergoing its first boom, and two people I knew were involved with one of the restaurant startups there, which some guy was pouring boxcars of money into. One friend was helping him with his business plan. "It's gonna be great!" he told me. "You should see the decoration!" (My other friend was doing this, so I knew it'd be good). Fine, I asked him, what kind of restaurant is it? And he gave me a blank look. "What do you mean?" Well, I said, there are already all kinds of restaurants opening up in that row, and he'd better have something different if he wants to make a go of it. So the guy went and asked the owner, and the guy told him "Just good food."
It's now an "American-style lapdance club," in case you're looking for it. Closed almost as soon as it opened.
I dunno, I don't feel particularly sorry for people who waste tons of money on things they haven't thought through. And, as happened with this restaurant, sometimes friends of mine catch some of the trickle-down. But I'd feel a lot better about the mentality of the people I was living among if I felt that they gave a little thought to what they were doing.
In any event, there'll be lots of bread in the neighborhood. For awhile, anyway.
Friday, November 12, 2004
Toothless
Aw, man, just when things were looking brighter...
But this is just a temporary glitch, I keep telling myself.
Two weeks ago, I was eating a tortilla chip and one of the little plastic teeth on my bridge -- which is basically most of my lower front teeth -- popped out. When I got home, I called the dentist. He was gone for two weeks. I was sort of glad; this is not one of my favorite people in this city. But I did need it fixed, so I made an appointment for this coming Monday, his next day in the office.
Then, last night, I was eating a salad, for heaven's sake, and the bridge just snapped. It's art. Unfixable.
The good news is, I already have my appointment. Also, no major dinner parties to attend; I can slop around here until Monday.
The bad news is...well, it's this dentist.
Last Feburary, I came down with the most excruciating toothache I'd ever had. It was so bad it was screwing up my vision, that's how bad it was. I called my doctor and asked him if he could recommend a dentist, because much as I trust the Germans, I want all my medical procedures in a language I can understand no matter how many drugs I'm on or how much pain I'm in. Sure enough, he knew one.
So I went to see the guy, and he took one look at me and told me flat-out that my life was in danger. I'd sort of read about this possibility, that you could have abcesses so bad that they could break loose and head for your heart and kill you in a second, but this guy was really, really persuasive, and the X-rays didn't lie: the abcesses were there. Anyway, he talked about how he could pull the bad teeth, fit me with plastic ones, and all at a price that wasn't so bad. I'd have to borrow the money, true, but I didn't see that I had much choice. He told me to come back so he could make an impression and start making the new teeth.
So I did, and as I sat there in the chair -- this office looks like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise -- he casually asked me if I wanted the extractions now or later. I said later, living dangerously, but it's a good thing I did. After he'd taken the impressions and informed me that I could come back in a couple of days for the bridge, he started in about money. I told him I'd be able to pay him, albeit not in two days. "Well," he said, "I'll do no further work until I'm paid. I've had really bad experiences with people in this city running out on bills, and I don't trust you." Instantly, I began to dislike him.
But what could I do? I was over the proverbial barrel, and he had me. The price -- €800 -- seemed very low, given what I'd heard elsewhere, but I still didn't have it. A friend offered to loan it to me, though, and so I was able to go back there and get my new teeth.
He sat me down in the chair, got out all these needles, filled them with anesthetic, and in no time, my head felt like a block of concrete. A very strange feeling indeed. And as I sat there feeling weird, he stripped off his rubber gloves and extended his hand in my direction. "Right. The money. Let's see it. Now!" I took it out of my pocket and he moved to where I could watch him count it, loudly snapping off each €50 bill and saying the sum. Four times. Then he put on some fresh gloves and got to work.
And this, and no other reason, is why I'm dreading Monday. A friend tells me there may well still be a warranty on the bridge, and I hope so, because I'm currently owed a bunch of money which hasn't materialized. If I have to wait until I have a few hundred Euros, I'm going to be gumming my food for a week or two. And, to be honest, I'd rather pay my landlord or the electric company if some dough comes in. But I've got to have teeth. And if he pulls this weird stuff again, I won't have any until someone pays me.
One thing, though: I've resolved that once this gets straightened out, I'm going to redouble my search for an English-speaking dentist here and give him my business. It's bizarre: most people fear the dentist because of drills and pain and so on. Me, I thought his array of technology was astonishing, and when he used it on me, it was totally painless, thanks to the drugs and his skill. When it came time to do the extractions and fit the bridge, I went down to his office -- a 45-minute trip -- had the procedure, and came back, all on one two-hour subway ticket. Of course, I was illegal for maybe the last 20 minutes of the trip, but that's how fast it all went.
Nope, it's not the pain. It's the bread.
But this is just a temporary glitch, I keep telling myself.
Two weeks ago, I was eating a tortilla chip and one of the little plastic teeth on my bridge -- which is basically most of my lower front teeth -- popped out. When I got home, I called the dentist. He was gone for two weeks. I was sort of glad; this is not one of my favorite people in this city. But I did need it fixed, so I made an appointment for this coming Monday, his next day in the office.
Then, last night, I was eating a salad, for heaven's sake, and the bridge just snapped. It's art. Unfixable.
The good news is, I already have my appointment. Also, no major dinner parties to attend; I can slop around here until Monday.
The bad news is...well, it's this dentist.
Last Feburary, I came down with the most excruciating toothache I'd ever had. It was so bad it was screwing up my vision, that's how bad it was. I called my doctor and asked him if he could recommend a dentist, because much as I trust the Germans, I want all my medical procedures in a language I can understand no matter how many drugs I'm on or how much pain I'm in. Sure enough, he knew one.
So I went to see the guy, and he took one look at me and told me flat-out that my life was in danger. I'd sort of read about this possibility, that you could have abcesses so bad that they could break loose and head for your heart and kill you in a second, but this guy was really, really persuasive, and the X-rays didn't lie: the abcesses were there. Anyway, he talked about how he could pull the bad teeth, fit me with plastic ones, and all at a price that wasn't so bad. I'd have to borrow the money, true, but I didn't see that I had much choice. He told me to come back so he could make an impression and start making the new teeth.
So I did, and as I sat there in the chair -- this office looks like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise -- he casually asked me if I wanted the extractions now or later. I said later, living dangerously, but it's a good thing I did. After he'd taken the impressions and informed me that I could come back in a couple of days for the bridge, he started in about money. I told him I'd be able to pay him, albeit not in two days. "Well," he said, "I'll do no further work until I'm paid. I've had really bad experiences with people in this city running out on bills, and I don't trust you." Instantly, I began to dislike him.
But what could I do? I was over the proverbial barrel, and he had me. The price -- €800 -- seemed very low, given what I'd heard elsewhere, but I still didn't have it. A friend offered to loan it to me, though, and so I was able to go back there and get my new teeth.
He sat me down in the chair, got out all these needles, filled them with anesthetic, and in no time, my head felt like a block of concrete. A very strange feeling indeed. And as I sat there feeling weird, he stripped off his rubber gloves and extended his hand in my direction. "Right. The money. Let's see it. Now!" I took it out of my pocket and he moved to where I could watch him count it, loudly snapping off each €50 bill and saying the sum. Four times. Then he put on some fresh gloves and got to work.
And this, and no other reason, is why I'm dreading Monday. A friend tells me there may well still be a warranty on the bridge, and I hope so, because I'm currently owed a bunch of money which hasn't materialized. If I have to wait until I have a few hundred Euros, I'm going to be gumming my food for a week or two. And, to be honest, I'd rather pay my landlord or the electric company if some dough comes in. But I've got to have teeth. And if he pulls this weird stuff again, I won't have any until someone pays me.
One thing, though: I've resolved that once this gets straightened out, I'm going to redouble my search for an English-speaking dentist here and give him my business. It's bizarre: most people fear the dentist because of drills and pain and so on. Me, I thought his array of technology was astonishing, and when he used it on me, it was totally painless, thanks to the drugs and his skill. When it came time to do the extractions and fit the bridge, I went down to his office -- a 45-minute trip -- had the procedure, and came back, all on one two-hour subway ticket. Of course, I was illegal for maybe the last 20 minutes of the trip, but that's how fast it all went.
Nope, it's not the pain. It's the bread.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Literary Note
In a couple of days (or maybe sooner) I'll have figured out how the Amazon Associates program works, and then I'll write some stuff about a couple of books I'm involved with, as well as some of the ones I've been reading recently. The links there will connect you with the listings at Amazon, and if you buy from that click-through, I get paid! Doesn't cost you a nickle more, either. I expect to be at least a dimeonaire very shortly. But first I gotta figure out this complicated system. Stay tuned.
It Was 15 Years Ago Today...
Well, yesterday, actually, but I didn't find out until too late. Or, rather, I knew, somewhere in the lizard part of my brain, but it never surfaced. It wasn't until I read the BBC News headline that I remembered: Nov. 9 was the day the Wall opened up.
And so, like everyone else who lives here, I get to tell my true story about the Wall's end. I missed it.
That year, 1989, like the year before, I was in Berlin at the end of October for the Berlin Independence Days music conference, which was held this time in the House of World Cultures, an imposing structure in the Tiergarten (Berlin's Central Park) not ten minutes' walk from the Brandenburg Gate, and, thus, the Wall. And, for the first time, there were attendees from the DDR, most notably from DT64, the rather daring "youth radio station" in East Berlin, and Junge Welt, a newspaper for young people. Even weirder, some of them spoke English, and I remember one of them saying "Next year, we'll have this on our side of town." You're awfully optimistic, I replied. "Not optimistic. Right."
Wrong. We had it in the same place the next year, and it wasn't until the next year that it was held in the House of Soviet Science and Culture on Friedrichstr.
But I was aware, vaguely, of reports from Dresden and Leipzig that said that there were huge protests in the wake of Gorbachev's visit. I ignored them; the Communists were good at crushing this sort of thing, and anyway, things had liberalized a little recently, and that was shocking enough in and of itself.
One thing I was going to do was to stay in Berlin afterwards to celebrate my birthday on Nov. 2 and try to figure out what was going on with my supposed girlfriend. A party was arranged at the Pinguin, at that time all my friends' bar of choice, and the back room was set aside for it. It was, as I remember (and I don't remember much, thanks), a very successful party, with indoor fireworks at one point in the evening, a great chocolate cake that tasted wonderful despite an odd shape, higher on one side than on the other, and all my oddball friends (who, come to think of it, rarely needed an excuse to go to the Pinguin). I can't even remember if my girlfriend was there. Probably not.
I'm also not sure how I spent the next few days, although I know I didn't jump right on a plane. But early on the morning of the 8th, I took a cab up to Tegel and started the trip back to Austin.
Now back in those days, West Berlin was an island surrounded by the DDR. This meant a number of things in terms of getting there. For one thing, the city wasn't part of Germany: it was a city jointly administered by four occupying powers, the U.S., Britain, France, and Russia. Thus, West German things -- like mail from your draft board, which was delivered by a separate postal system owned by the army -- weren't allowed in. That meant that all those handy flights on Lufthansa from the States had to land elsewhere, so you'd fly to Frankfurt and then change to a U.S. or British carrier for the short flight to Berlin.
It was also the same way leaving, so I got on my plane, flew to Frankfurt and...found that my connection to Dallas, which was coming in from Bucharest, was nine hours late due to an equipment malfunction. There was nothing to do but wait. It was cold, so the idea of going into Frankfurt and looking around didn't appeal (there's virtually nothing there anyway), and I exhausted the airport's diversions in almost no time. There was a dimly-lit long-stay lounge for people with similar problems, and I remember a Nigerian guy collapsing in a heap into one of the chairs and opening his briefcase, from which a large and very healthy cockroach sprung and headed off to explore Germany. I read and read and was soon out of stuff to read. Nine hours passes slowly enough in a plane, but time almost seemed to have stopped at the Frankfurt airport.
Then the plane came in, we finally boarded, and we headed off to New York. By the time we got there, it was late in the day, and there were no more planes out to Dallas, so we were issued vouchers for meals and a hotel room, and sent to a hotel at JFK. I remember a bunch of Russians, who were definitely novelty items in those days, eager to get to Brooklyn, which, they determined after looking at a map, wasn't that far away. After checking in, they decided to walk, at about 10pm. I advised them against it, but they were sure they would have a fine time. I may have been one of the last people to see them alive, for all I knew.
The next day, the 9th, was similarly plagued with problems. It had snowed, a freak snowstorm, and there were conflicting reports of whether or not we'd be able to land in Dallas. By mid-afternoon, the snow seemed to have burned off, but, as it developed when we got to Dallas, there was still the question of whether we'd be able to land in Austin. That, too, eventually got settled, and I remember it was dark when I got home. I'd suspended the newspaper delivery while I was gone, and it was due to start up the next day. I was tired, glad to be home, trying to figure out what was going on with my girlfriend, eager to see what had come in the mail, what was on the answering machine...and before long the exhaustion hit me and I crashed.
The next morning dawned warm, as if the freak snowstorm had never happened, and I walked out onto the lawn to get my paper. As I opened it, I saw the headline: the Berlin Wall had opened, thousands of East Berliners were surging through to take a look at the city they'd lived next door to for ages, families were being reunited, people were dancing on the Wall, etcetera etcetera. I couldn't believe what I was reading. Sure, I knew there had been protests, but...did that guy from Junge Welt know something I didn't? (Well, sure he did, but did he know for sure?)
Then, at 3 in the afternoon, the phone rang, and it was one of my friends in Berlin. "Hey, where are you, man? We're having a party!" I grumbled something, but I was already making plans to get back over there as soon as I could.
In the meanwhile, though, I almost got to be a part of the story even from thousands of miles away. Another guy called about a week later. "They're planning to have a big concert at the Brandenburg Gate," he said, "and they've asked me if I could get Z Z Top. I think you know them, right?" Well, I knew Billy Gibbons, and, more importantly, I knew how to put a formal request into the ear of their management very quickly. Which is how it had to happen: the concert was scheduled just a few days hence. I told the guy to hang on, and went to work. Gibbons was beyond enthusiastic: he grasped the historic importance immediately. But it was up to Bill Ham, their manager, to formally say yes, and Ham was out fishing somewhere. One day went by...two days went by...finally, I heard from my contact: Ham was ready to send the band, so I was to give him the contact names. And yeah, they'd fly me along just for setting it up. I was jazzed and called Berlin. "Oh, I was about to call you. Someone else came up with Joe Cocker, and he's much more popular. Sorry." Not as sorry as I was.
And I did get back soon: at the end of January, after the MIDEM conference in Cannes, France. I took a train up there as fast as I could get there from Paris, whipped out my notebook, and started to report a story I was absolutely sure I could sell: how West Berlin would change without the Wall. I knew that the subsidy-fat, anything-goes nature of West Berlin was doomed now, that money had to go into rebuilding (or in many cases, building) the infrastructure to unite the two cities, I knew that there was going to be immense culture shock (brilliantly explored by a German acolyte of Gilbert Shelton's, Gerhard Seyfried, in a graphic novel called Flucht aus Berlin, which I got as a birthday present the next year), and I knew that nothing was ever going to be the same for any of my friends there. I had an interview with a guy who'd been a dissident in East Berlin and had become such a pain in the regime's ass that they actually threw him out. I talked to lefties, barflies, and members of a band that had played tons of gigs in East Germany and had banked the Ostmarks they'd earned there in the Landesbank because you had to do something with them, only to discover that they were now going to be exchanged for Deutsche Marks one-to-one: they were rich!
It was a great story, and it taught me a valuable lesson. Don't try to upset the media's simplistic understanding of world events. After I wrote it up, I sent it all over the place, only to get the same rejection everywhere: I'd missed the story. The story was that the East Germans were ecstatic not to be Communists any more (not true, of course: many of them felt -- and still feel -- that they had an authentic culture with many valuable things they lost in unification), that the West Germans were welcoming them as long-lost brothers (instead of shunning them like the ignorant, unwashed swine most Wessis I knew took them to be), and that Berlin was the forerunner of a massive freedom movement that would sweep Eastern Europe (well, sort of true, although it was Leipzig where the action was, and I think I've blown that riff before on this blog so I won't do it here).
Nearly everything my story predicted came true: the real estate boom; the underhanded dealings around the Treuhand, the agency set up to deal with state property from the DDR; the "Mauer im Kopf" (wall in the head) attitudes on both sides; the weird tension that hung in the air as everyone waited to see what would happen next. Unfortunately, I no longer have the story: I'd bought a Xerox word-processor that recorded stories on huge 5" floppy discs, so when my last paper copy went out to its rejection grave I didn't worry. Of course, the disc drive failed, and nobody could recover anything from the discs.
It wasn't a waste of time, though, because I lived through it and still remember that trip. In a way, it was better than being there when the Wall opened up, because things were way more complex, and, therefore, more interesting. And that spring, I was back, in a rented car, ready to drive to another newly-liberated territory, Czechoslovakia. But that's another story.
And so, like everyone else who lives here, I get to tell my true story about the Wall's end. I missed it.
That year, 1989, like the year before, I was in Berlin at the end of October for the Berlin Independence Days music conference, which was held this time in the House of World Cultures, an imposing structure in the Tiergarten (Berlin's Central Park) not ten minutes' walk from the Brandenburg Gate, and, thus, the Wall. And, for the first time, there were attendees from the DDR, most notably from DT64, the rather daring "youth radio station" in East Berlin, and Junge Welt, a newspaper for young people. Even weirder, some of them spoke English, and I remember one of them saying "Next year, we'll have this on our side of town." You're awfully optimistic, I replied. "Not optimistic. Right."
Wrong. We had it in the same place the next year, and it wasn't until the next year that it was held in the House of Soviet Science and Culture on Friedrichstr.
But I was aware, vaguely, of reports from Dresden and Leipzig that said that there were huge protests in the wake of Gorbachev's visit. I ignored them; the Communists were good at crushing this sort of thing, and anyway, things had liberalized a little recently, and that was shocking enough in and of itself.
One thing I was going to do was to stay in Berlin afterwards to celebrate my birthday on Nov. 2 and try to figure out what was going on with my supposed girlfriend. A party was arranged at the Pinguin, at that time all my friends' bar of choice, and the back room was set aside for it. It was, as I remember (and I don't remember much, thanks), a very successful party, with indoor fireworks at one point in the evening, a great chocolate cake that tasted wonderful despite an odd shape, higher on one side than on the other, and all my oddball friends (who, come to think of it, rarely needed an excuse to go to the Pinguin). I can't even remember if my girlfriend was there. Probably not.
I'm also not sure how I spent the next few days, although I know I didn't jump right on a plane. But early on the morning of the 8th, I took a cab up to Tegel and started the trip back to Austin.
Now back in those days, West Berlin was an island surrounded by the DDR. This meant a number of things in terms of getting there. For one thing, the city wasn't part of Germany: it was a city jointly administered by four occupying powers, the U.S., Britain, France, and Russia. Thus, West German things -- like mail from your draft board, which was delivered by a separate postal system owned by the army -- weren't allowed in. That meant that all those handy flights on Lufthansa from the States had to land elsewhere, so you'd fly to Frankfurt and then change to a U.S. or British carrier for the short flight to Berlin.
It was also the same way leaving, so I got on my plane, flew to Frankfurt and...found that my connection to Dallas, which was coming in from Bucharest, was nine hours late due to an equipment malfunction. There was nothing to do but wait. It was cold, so the idea of going into Frankfurt and looking around didn't appeal (there's virtually nothing there anyway), and I exhausted the airport's diversions in almost no time. There was a dimly-lit long-stay lounge for people with similar problems, and I remember a Nigerian guy collapsing in a heap into one of the chairs and opening his briefcase, from which a large and very healthy cockroach sprung and headed off to explore Germany. I read and read and was soon out of stuff to read. Nine hours passes slowly enough in a plane, but time almost seemed to have stopped at the Frankfurt airport.
Then the plane came in, we finally boarded, and we headed off to New York. By the time we got there, it was late in the day, and there were no more planes out to Dallas, so we were issued vouchers for meals and a hotel room, and sent to a hotel at JFK. I remember a bunch of Russians, who were definitely novelty items in those days, eager to get to Brooklyn, which, they determined after looking at a map, wasn't that far away. After checking in, they decided to walk, at about 10pm. I advised them against it, but they were sure they would have a fine time. I may have been one of the last people to see them alive, for all I knew.
The next day, the 9th, was similarly plagued with problems. It had snowed, a freak snowstorm, and there were conflicting reports of whether or not we'd be able to land in Dallas. By mid-afternoon, the snow seemed to have burned off, but, as it developed when we got to Dallas, there was still the question of whether we'd be able to land in Austin. That, too, eventually got settled, and I remember it was dark when I got home. I'd suspended the newspaper delivery while I was gone, and it was due to start up the next day. I was tired, glad to be home, trying to figure out what was going on with my girlfriend, eager to see what had come in the mail, what was on the answering machine...and before long the exhaustion hit me and I crashed.
The next morning dawned warm, as if the freak snowstorm had never happened, and I walked out onto the lawn to get my paper. As I opened it, I saw the headline: the Berlin Wall had opened, thousands of East Berliners were surging through to take a look at the city they'd lived next door to for ages, families were being reunited, people were dancing on the Wall, etcetera etcetera. I couldn't believe what I was reading. Sure, I knew there had been protests, but...did that guy from Junge Welt know something I didn't? (Well, sure he did, but did he know for sure?)
Then, at 3 in the afternoon, the phone rang, and it was one of my friends in Berlin. "Hey, where are you, man? We're having a party!" I grumbled something, but I was already making plans to get back over there as soon as I could.
In the meanwhile, though, I almost got to be a part of the story even from thousands of miles away. Another guy called about a week later. "They're planning to have a big concert at the Brandenburg Gate," he said, "and they've asked me if I could get Z Z Top. I think you know them, right?" Well, I knew Billy Gibbons, and, more importantly, I knew how to put a formal request into the ear of their management very quickly. Which is how it had to happen: the concert was scheduled just a few days hence. I told the guy to hang on, and went to work. Gibbons was beyond enthusiastic: he grasped the historic importance immediately. But it was up to Bill Ham, their manager, to formally say yes, and Ham was out fishing somewhere. One day went by...two days went by...finally, I heard from my contact: Ham was ready to send the band, so I was to give him the contact names. And yeah, they'd fly me along just for setting it up. I was jazzed and called Berlin. "Oh, I was about to call you. Someone else came up with Joe Cocker, and he's much more popular. Sorry." Not as sorry as I was.
And I did get back soon: at the end of January, after the MIDEM conference in Cannes, France. I took a train up there as fast as I could get there from Paris, whipped out my notebook, and started to report a story I was absolutely sure I could sell: how West Berlin would change without the Wall. I knew that the subsidy-fat, anything-goes nature of West Berlin was doomed now, that money had to go into rebuilding (or in many cases, building) the infrastructure to unite the two cities, I knew that there was going to be immense culture shock (brilliantly explored by a German acolyte of Gilbert Shelton's, Gerhard Seyfried, in a graphic novel called Flucht aus Berlin, which I got as a birthday present the next year), and I knew that nothing was ever going to be the same for any of my friends there. I had an interview with a guy who'd been a dissident in East Berlin and had become such a pain in the regime's ass that they actually threw him out. I talked to lefties, barflies, and members of a band that had played tons of gigs in East Germany and had banked the Ostmarks they'd earned there in the Landesbank because you had to do something with them, only to discover that they were now going to be exchanged for Deutsche Marks one-to-one: they were rich!
It was a great story, and it taught me a valuable lesson. Don't try to upset the media's simplistic understanding of world events. After I wrote it up, I sent it all over the place, only to get the same rejection everywhere: I'd missed the story. The story was that the East Germans were ecstatic not to be Communists any more (not true, of course: many of them felt -- and still feel -- that they had an authentic culture with many valuable things they lost in unification), that the West Germans were welcoming them as long-lost brothers (instead of shunning them like the ignorant, unwashed swine most Wessis I knew took them to be), and that Berlin was the forerunner of a massive freedom movement that would sweep Eastern Europe (well, sort of true, although it was Leipzig where the action was, and I think I've blown that riff before on this blog so I won't do it here).
Nearly everything my story predicted came true: the real estate boom; the underhanded dealings around the Treuhand, the agency set up to deal with state property from the DDR; the "Mauer im Kopf" (wall in the head) attitudes on both sides; the weird tension that hung in the air as everyone waited to see what would happen next. Unfortunately, I no longer have the story: I'd bought a Xerox word-processor that recorded stories on huge 5" floppy discs, so when my last paper copy went out to its rejection grave I didn't worry. Of course, the disc drive failed, and nobody could recover anything from the discs.
It wasn't a waste of time, though, because I lived through it and still remember that trip. In a way, it was better than being there when the Wall opened up, because things were way more complex, and, therefore, more interesting. And that spring, I was back, in a rented car, ready to drive to another newly-liberated territory, Czechoslovakia. But that's another story.
Friday, November 05, 2004
Therapy
Well, that certainly was a crappy birthday present, people!
I actually achieved a sort of Zen-like above-it-all feeling after I mailed my absentee ballot off, and stopped reading polls and following any campaign news. What would happen would happen, and I'm afraid it did.
The immediate results for me are that it's probably going to be a lot more dangerous to be identified as an American in a lot of places over here, because Bush's mistaking another squeaker for a mandate will mean that his crew of fundamentalist lunatics will almost certainly be pushing for an invasion of Iran or Syria within the next few weeks, and there will be angry Arabs and other Muslims around who have had their suspicions that Christian America is on another Crusade to eliminate them from the earth confirmed by over 50% of the American electorate. My long-held dream of moving to Southern France, in other words, becomes more perilous. At least in Berlin most Muslims are Turks, and they're not as likely to be poorly-educated products of madrassas. Algerians and Moroccans, on the other hand...
The dollar, also, will probably continue to sink as the debt piles up. I noticed this morning that the Euro has now climbed up to $1.286, and I predict it'll break $1.30 by the end of the year. Given that I work mostly for dollars, this is catastrophic. My €504.30 rent now costs me $648.33, which is pretty awful considering that when I moved here it was less than the same number of dollars. The rent hasn't changed, either.
This, of course, is the point in the post-election cycle where people start talking darkly about wanting to leave the country, and my guess is I'm going to be hosing a lot of them down with reality. Most of the people I've seen talking about it don't even speak another language, and seem to think that Canada or England will welcome them. Canada has an on-line test you can take, and I know I failed it, even with a knowledge of French, although just for the sake of fun, maybe I should take it again now that the passing grade's been lowered. England is impossible. Just forget it unless you have such stellar qualifications that they'd be stupid not to take you. Others dream of New Zealand, probably having overdosed on Lord of the Rings and not considering the deep implications of the phrase "more sheep than people." Not to mention how extremely far away it is from, like, everything.
People also forget about the finances, and I would urge any potential expat of the moment to read those figures for the dollar versus the Euro again and consider how many currencies are tied to the Euro rather than to the dollar. It costs a lot to have your stuff shipped over here, especially if you don't want to wait a few months for some ship to tie up in Marseilles or Bremen and then offload it into a warehouse where it will be "inspected" by folks who'll help you on your quest for Nirvana by lessening the burdens of so many material possessions before sticking it on a truck that'll take its time. You'd also be surprised at how few people are willing to rent apartments and houses to foreigners who don't have jobs, especially when they don't speak the language. They're also shocked by the amount of taxes they're going to pay, not to mention the price of gasoline. But hey, it's an entertaining fantasy, and if you're serious about doing it, I'm always ready to offer counselling.
Anyway, election night I decided not to go to any of the election parties around town, which turned out to be a very good idea. The tension of the day prevented some of my well-intentioned friends from taking me out to dinner, which was also fine with me, because that's wound up with my learning where some of Berlin's worst eating establishments are. Last year's was a Cuban stand-up snack bar (Stehimbiss), and while the rice and beans were good, if someone had told me that the piece of pork I got with them was actually a piece of boiled wood, I would have believed them. So I stayed home and made Gong Bao Chicken, which was what I wanted.
But waking up the next day certainly was depressing once I started to read the news. Clearly, something has gone very wrong in the country I grew up in, and I spent Wednesday pretty much incapable of doing anything, although I do have two stories due early next week. I finally found the solution, and guys, ask the gals in your life if you need confirmation: shopping works as therapy.
I hit Lands End for a pair of gloves (they have a German store, although they almost backed out when the government here sued them for their money-back guarantee on the grounds that -- get this -- it stifled competition, because, you see, German stores might have to actually serve their customers a little better, and, as anyone who's endured German the-customer-is-always-wrong service knows, that would go against years of tradition), and then I took a bit from the bank and called a friend and went to Centro Italia, the Italian wholesale market. So now I've got enough pasta and olive oil to last me until the 2008 election, or close enough, and let's face it, I'm not living in America, and so I don't have to look at the faces of my fellow citizens and wonder which of them believes Al Qaeda lives in Iraq or that the economy's in great shape or that gay marriage trumped every other issue troubling the country. Or which among them are still ossified by the amorphous fear that's been cranked out to distract them from the horrors being perpetrated on them and in their names.
And so now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to open one of my Italian cookbooks (remember folks: you can never have too many Italian cookbooks or too many Duke Ellington records!) and get to work.
I actually achieved a sort of Zen-like above-it-all feeling after I mailed my absentee ballot off, and stopped reading polls and following any campaign news. What would happen would happen, and I'm afraid it did.
The immediate results for me are that it's probably going to be a lot more dangerous to be identified as an American in a lot of places over here, because Bush's mistaking another squeaker for a mandate will mean that his crew of fundamentalist lunatics will almost certainly be pushing for an invasion of Iran or Syria within the next few weeks, and there will be angry Arabs and other Muslims around who have had their suspicions that Christian America is on another Crusade to eliminate them from the earth confirmed by over 50% of the American electorate. My long-held dream of moving to Southern France, in other words, becomes more perilous. At least in Berlin most Muslims are Turks, and they're not as likely to be poorly-educated products of madrassas. Algerians and Moroccans, on the other hand...
The dollar, also, will probably continue to sink as the debt piles up. I noticed this morning that the Euro has now climbed up to $1.286, and I predict it'll break $1.30 by the end of the year. Given that I work mostly for dollars, this is catastrophic. My €504.30 rent now costs me $648.33, which is pretty awful considering that when I moved here it was less than the same number of dollars. The rent hasn't changed, either.
This, of course, is the point in the post-election cycle where people start talking darkly about wanting to leave the country, and my guess is I'm going to be hosing a lot of them down with reality. Most of the people I've seen talking about it don't even speak another language, and seem to think that Canada or England will welcome them. Canada has an on-line test you can take, and I know I failed it, even with a knowledge of French, although just for the sake of fun, maybe I should take it again now that the passing grade's been lowered. England is impossible. Just forget it unless you have such stellar qualifications that they'd be stupid not to take you. Others dream of New Zealand, probably having overdosed on Lord of the Rings and not considering the deep implications of the phrase "more sheep than people." Not to mention how extremely far away it is from, like, everything.
People also forget about the finances, and I would urge any potential expat of the moment to read those figures for the dollar versus the Euro again and consider how many currencies are tied to the Euro rather than to the dollar. It costs a lot to have your stuff shipped over here, especially if you don't want to wait a few months for some ship to tie up in Marseilles or Bremen and then offload it into a warehouse where it will be "inspected" by folks who'll help you on your quest for Nirvana by lessening the burdens of so many material possessions before sticking it on a truck that'll take its time. You'd also be surprised at how few people are willing to rent apartments and houses to foreigners who don't have jobs, especially when they don't speak the language. They're also shocked by the amount of taxes they're going to pay, not to mention the price of gasoline. But hey, it's an entertaining fantasy, and if you're serious about doing it, I'm always ready to offer counselling.
Anyway, election night I decided not to go to any of the election parties around town, which turned out to be a very good idea. The tension of the day prevented some of my well-intentioned friends from taking me out to dinner, which was also fine with me, because that's wound up with my learning where some of Berlin's worst eating establishments are. Last year's was a Cuban stand-up snack bar (Stehimbiss), and while the rice and beans were good, if someone had told me that the piece of pork I got with them was actually a piece of boiled wood, I would have believed them. So I stayed home and made Gong Bao Chicken, which was what I wanted.
But waking up the next day certainly was depressing once I started to read the news. Clearly, something has gone very wrong in the country I grew up in, and I spent Wednesday pretty much incapable of doing anything, although I do have two stories due early next week. I finally found the solution, and guys, ask the gals in your life if you need confirmation: shopping works as therapy.
I hit Lands End for a pair of gloves (they have a German store, although they almost backed out when the government here sued them for their money-back guarantee on the grounds that -- get this -- it stifled competition, because, you see, German stores might have to actually serve their customers a little better, and, as anyone who's endured German the-customer-is-always-wrong service knows, that would go against years of tradition), and then I took a bit from the bank and called a friend and went to Centro Italia, the Italian wholesale market. So now I've got enough pasta and olive oil to last me until the 2008 election, or close enough, and let's face it, I'm not living in America, and so I don't have to look at the faces of my fellow citizens and wonder which of them believes Al Qaeda lives in Iraq or that the economy's in great shape or that gay marriage trumped every other issue troubling the country. Or which among them are still ossified by the amorphous fear that's been cranked out to distract them from the horrors being perpetrated on them and in their names.
And so now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to open one of my Italian cookbooks (remember folks: you can never have too many Italian cookbooks or too many Duke Ellington records!) and get to work.
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
Crumbs, Part XIV
What did I say? The Berlinbites Tech Team spared no effort, so the PayPal link works again. Our thanks to the toiling multitudes for their unstinting efforts.
***
Had a conversation with the Countess von Pfeil yesterday concerning the construction in the back yard. Actually, she lives in my building and is a friendly 20-something-year-old with a nearly Valley Girl American accent due to the years she lived in the U.S., but she was as concerned as I was about the noise, and discovered in talking to the construction workers that the land speculator who bought the building is insolvent, that the underground parking garage isn't going to happen as promised, and that they're just going to plant a bunch of grass in the area where the other buliding that would cut off my light was going to be. Of course, they also told her that this work would be over in a week, and that was two weeks ago. All I know is, if I'd paid all that money for an apartment in this building, I'd be pretty steamed by now. No wonder half the building isn't sold or rented yet.
As for their being a Countess in my building, there's royalty all over Germany, and it rarely means anything. There was a Baroness in one crowd I was running with when I first moved here, and I didn't know about it until I had to call her one day and picked up the phone book and saw that's how she was listed. "Oh, please don't bring that up with her," one of her friends told me. "She's really embarrassed by that." And then there's my friend Fred, the No 'Count Count, over in London, whose family extends to Texas and the plot against Hitler and lots of other interesting historical stuff. But he's got a day job just like loads of other people. As far as I can tell, there are very few titled people in Germany with any money or position, and having a title doesn't seem to help you, at least not with anyone who counts, although one does see little old ladies reading magazines devoted to some of the wealthier sorts and their loves, lives, and horses.
***
I suspect this is going to be a long day. Apparently a lot of my friends are going to a party sponsored by Vote 44, one of the innumerable expat get-out-the-vote organizations, not far from my house, and I'll be joining them there. One friend who won't be there is working the overnight shift at Deutsche Welle, the German equivalent of the BBC World Service, and boy would I like to be a fly on the wall there. But I guess we'll all know more by this time tomorrow. Let us hope for good news. And if you'd like to see it expressed more eloquently than I can at the moment, attend to words of the guy who's been running the Electoral Vote blog, another expat who would like to go back to living a normal existence instead of having to deal with seeming to represent a bunch of bloodthirsty, arrogant morons.
***
Had a conversation with the Countess von Pfeil yesterday concerning the construction in the back yard. Actually, she lives in my building and is a friendly 20-something-year-old with a nearly Valley Girl American accent due to the years she lived in the U.S., but she was as concerned as I was about the noise, and discovered in talking to the construction workers that the land speculator who bought the building is insolvent, that the underground parking garage isn't going to happen as promised, and that they're just going to plant a bunch of grass in the area where the other buliding that would cut off my light was going to be. Of course, they also told her that this work would be over in a week, and that was two weeks ago. All I know is, if I'd paid all that money for an apartment in this building, I'd be pretty steamed by now. No wonder half the building isn't sold or rented yet.
As for their being a Countess in my building, there's royalty all over Germany, and it rarely means anything. There was a Baroness in one crowd I was running with when I first moved here, and I didn't know about it until I had to call her one day and picked up the phone book and saw that's how she was listed. "Oh, please don't bring that up with her," one of her friends told me. "She's really embarrassed by that." And then there's my friend Fred, the No 'Count Count, over in London, whose family extends to Texas and the plot against Hitler and lots of other interesting historical stuff. But he's got a day job just like loads of other people. As far as I can tell, there are very few titled people in Germany with any money or position, and having a title doesn't seem to help you, at least not with anyone who counts, although one does see little old ladies reading magazines devoted to some of the wealthier sorts and their loves, lives, and horses.
***
I suspect this is going to be a long day. Apparently a lot of my friends are going to a party sponsored by Vote 44, one of the innumerable expat get-out-the-vote organizations, not far from my house, and I'll be joining them there. One friend who won't be there is working the overnight shift at Deutsche Welle, the German equivalent of the BBC World Service, and boy would I like to be a fly on the wall there. But I guess we'll all know more by this time tomorrow. Let us hope for good news. And if you'd like to see it expressed more eloquently than I can at the moment, attend to words of the guy who's been running the Electoral Vote blog, another expat who would like to go back to living a normal existence instead of having to deal with seeming to represent a bunch of bloodthirsty, arrogant morons.
Monday, November 01, 2004
Technical Note
Just so you don't think it's your fault, the PayPal button up there doesn't seem to work right.
Our highly trained technical personnel are on this like white on rice, and they'll have it fixed in a jiffy. And I'll let you know, with luck in a post that's not as miserable and angry as the one below. Sorry about that; it was One Of Those Days.
Our highly trained technical personnel are on this like white on rice, and they'll have it fixed in a jiffy. And I'll let you know, with luck in a post that's not as miserable and angry as the one below. Sorry about that; it was One Of Those Days.
Birthday Begging
No, this doesn't have anything to do with that PayPal button up there. That just got added because several people have told me they often contribute to blogs they like, and so I thought, hey, I'm not getting paid for the things I write for money, so why not? After all, if all 100 of the people who read this blog regularly sent me €300 apiece all at once, I could move! I might also add some Google Smart Ads, but first I'd like to figure out just how tiny the click-through rate is. And, given that I'm involved with two books coming out this month and another one next April, I might also offer people the chance to buy them through Amazon or Powell's or something on an associate program.
But that, as the Germans say, is future music.
Right now, I'm trying to cope with the oh-so-predictable pre-birthday depression, which has been on me like a soggy blanket for the past few days.
Some of this is due to having been completely broke for the past five days, waking up to 14 cents in my pocket and nothing in my bank account. However, I had a notice in my mailbox on Saturday that there was something needing my signature up at the post office, and sure enough, a nice International Money Order for over €200 was there. Hey, money orders are already paid for, so this could be instantly negotiable, I thought, and headed to my bank. I carefully explained to them that I needed this cashed immediately, but would put half of it in my account. The woman couldn't understand the words International Money Order and had to talk to a colleague. Then she came back, typed a bunch of stuff into the computer, walked away to pick up a printout, came back and told me the money was in my account. "So what about the money I need now?" I asked. "Oh, it takes three days for foreign checks to clear." "That wasn't a check. It was a money order." "It was a check. You'll have your money in three days. Next!"
Fortunately someone loaned me a very little bit to make it through til then, but boy, was I steamed.
And it was totally congruent with everything else going around in my head. I mean, tomorrow, Nov. 2, I turn 56. I find myself not the slightest bit improved from last year at this time: still writing small articles for tiny amounts of money, although when I get the chance, I'm writing better stuff than ever. Still behind in the rent -- eight months -- and every cent I make goes to the landlord, the phone company, the power company, or the grocery store, in about that order. I'm having to realize that I'm going to spend the rest of my life alone, since women tend not to want to form relationships with men who can't support themselves at the age of 56, and who can blame them? There might be yet another female psychopath with a substance abuse problem come along, as there was earlier this year, but I hope this time I can see the danger before it hits. And because so much of my life is spent in the hunter-gatherer mode, as it is right now (it took me four hours to deal with this money order thing today!), the leisure to dream is absent. I'm trying to stay focused on moving to France, on the idea that two well-paying articles back-to-back would clear up the whole back rent situation, but that would mean finding an outlet or outlets that actually honor their commitments. I'm hoping against all logic that a break will come that will allow me to finally get back into living a real life again. I'm not too optimistic, but consider the alternative.
So that's the pre-birthday depression.
Now for the begging.
I was born on Nov. 2, 1948. That day is famous for having produced one of the most famous headlines in history, the Chicago Tribune's DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN blooper. (Well, actually the headline came out on the 3rd). But it was, like this one is, a very close election. Neither party stooped to the filthy tactics the Republicans have made their trademark over the past decade back then, since politics was a game of, if not gentlemen, at least people with minimal ethics.
Once again, my birthday falls on Election Day. Now, I've already voted absentee, and with luck Deutsche Post and the USPS have gotten the oversized envelope to the Travis County Courthouse in Austin. But, as an American living overseas, it is particularly important to me that the junta that seized power in 2000 be defeated. Even ignoring the horrible cost to the United States in soldier deaths, out of control debt, environmental disaster, media censorship and Big Brother-like spying that four more years would bring, it would literally endanger every American living outside the country. I don't need to repeat the cliches about how the Bush Administration squandered the outpouring of sympathy the world had after 9/11, but I do get tired of having to explain to people over here that I'm no more like the Bush crowd than they themselves are like Nazis. (That always gets a swift intake of breath, at the least, and usually a defensive "Well, I never implied that..." remark afterwards). I get tired of people making the assumption that I'm of a mind to be arrogant and pushy, that more than a small number of Americans actually think like the junta, or that anyone who identifies as a Texan (as I usually do, with even less justification than Dubyah himself) has to be One Of Them.
So I'm hereby asking for presents. Or one big present.
If you're American, you know what it is. Now go do your best to deliver it, okay? Thanks.
But that, as the Germans say, is future music.
Right now, I'm trying to cope with the oh-so-predictable pre-birthday depression, which has been on me like a soggy blanket for the past few days.
Some of this is due to having been completely broke for the past five days, waking up to 14 cents in my pocket and nothing in my bank account. However, I had a notice in my mailbox on Saturday that there was something needing my signature up at the post office, and sure enough, a nice International Money Order for over €200 was there. Hey, money orders are already paid for, so this could be instantly negotiable, I thought, and headed to my bank. I carefully explained to them that I needed this cashed immediately, but would put half of it in my account. The woman couldn't understand the words International Money Order and had to talk to a colleague. Then she came back, typed a bunch of stuff into the computer, walked away to pick up a printout, came back and told me the money was in my account. "So what about the money I need now?" I asked. "Oh, it takes three days for foreign checks to clear." "That wasn't a check. It was a money order." "It was a check. You'll have your money in three days. Next!"
Fortunately someone loaned me a very little bit to make it through til then, but boy, was I steamed.
And it was totally congruent with everything else going around in my head. I mean, tomorrow, Nov. 2, I turn 56. I find myself not the slightest bit improved from last year at this time: still writing small articles for tiny amounts of money, although when I get the chance, I'm writing better stuff than ever. Still behind in the rent -- eight months -- and every cent I make goes to the landlord, the phone company, the power company, or the grocery store, in about that order. I'm having to realize that I'm going to spend the rest of my life alone, since women tend not to want to form relationships with men who can't support themselves at the age of 56, and who can blame them? There might be yet another female psychopath with a substance abuse problem come along, as there was earlier this year, but I hope this time I can see the danger before it hits. And because so much of my life is spent in the hunter-gatherer mode, as it is right now (it took me four hours to deal with this money order thing today!), the leisure to dream is absent. I'm trying to stay focused on moving to France, on the idea that two well-paying articles back-to-back would clear up the whole back rent situation, but that would mean finding an outlet or outlets that actually honor their commitments. I'm hoping against all logic that a break will come that will allow me to finally get back into living a real life again. I'm not too optimistic, but consider the alternative.
So that's the pre-birthday depression.
Now for the begging.
I was born on Nov. 2, 1948. That day is famous for having produced one of the most famous headlines in history, the Chicago Tribune's DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN blooper. (Well, actually the headline came out on the 3rd). But it was, like this one is, a very close election. Neither party stooped to the filthy tactics the Republicans have made their trademark over the past decade back then, since politics was a game of, if not gentlemen, at least people with minimal ethics.
Once again, my birthday falls on Election Day. Now, I've already voted absentee, and with luck Deutsche Post and the USPS have gotten the oversized envelope to the Travis County Courthouse in Austin. But, as an American living overseas, it is particularly important to me that the junta that seized power in 2000 be defeated. Even ignoring the horrible cost to the United States in soldier deaths, out of control debt, environmental disaster, media censorship and Big Brother-like spying that four more years would bring, it would literally endanger every American living outside the country. I don't need to repeat the cliches about how the Bush Administration squandered the outpouring of sympathy the world had after 9/11, but I do get tired of having to explain to people over here that I'm no more like the Bush crowd than they themselves are like Nazis. (That always gets a swift intake of breath, at the least, and usually a defensive "Well, I never implied that..." remark afterwards). I get tired of people making the assumption that I'm of a mind to be arrogant and pushy, that more than a small number of Americans actually think like the junta, or that anyone who identifies as a Texan (as I usually do, with even less justification than Dubyah himself) has to be One Of Them.
So I'm hereby asking for presents. Or one big present.
If you're American, you know what it is. Now go do your best to deliver it, okay? Thanks.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Mietminderung
Just a few moments ago, my entire apartment was shaking. I've lived through earthquakes before, when I lived in California, but this was different: it wasn't as irregular, and the vibration was much faster. Dishes were rattling, stuff was dancing around on my desk. I wasn't worried, though, because I knew what it was.
For the past three years, the luxury apartments next door to me, which cost a quarter-million Euros apiece, have looked out over a hole that has filled up with windblown garbage and construction debris, a hole that was advertised as an underground parking garage. I have no idea why construction stopped (although it's probably for the usual reason things stop around here, ie, the money ran out), but just last week, they've started again. This has involved bringing in a huge shovel to scoop out the hole, and from the amount of shattered brick they've been lifting out, I have to assume there was a bombed building there, perfectly routine for this part of Berlin, which got hit pretty badly due to its proximity to the Reichskanzlei on Wilhelmstr. (Not that close, but you could only be so accurate from that high up back then).
The shovel scoops, and big trucks perform a tricky maneuver of driving down the alley and then backing into the parking lot just behind my building (which has spaces that were rented, I guess, to the unfortunate tenants of the place next door) and onto the piece of ground they're excavating. This starts at 6:30 in the morning when they fire up the shovel, although I have to say these workmen don't yell at each other or drive cars blaring heavy metal music like the last crew did. At some point this morning, I guess one of the trucks was in physical contact with our building, which explains the vibration. I expect my landlord's unpleasant mother, who sometimes lives in the apartment across the hall from me, will find evidence of this when next she occupies the place. (Not that I'll know: she stopped talking to me when I informed her son she'd forced her way into my apartment to look it over. She decided on the spot that I was a dirty foreigner -- I admit the place wasn't in such good shape that day -- and told me, no kidding, that "You should spend a minimum of two hours a day cleaning." Fine, I'll put a slave on the to-buy list.)
But if you've looked at that supremely uninformative but Flash-heavy website for this building project, you'll notice that in addition to the apartments at Borsigstr. 3a and 4, which are already in place, they're planning to build a 4a, a brand-new building which was supposed to be finished this spring. Fortunately for my peace of mind, it hasn't even been started, although I fear that this new spurt of activity portends something of that nature, and that's going to be a disaster.
When I sit at my desk here, I have two windows in front of me (one of them is a door, which leads to the back yard, except there aren't any steps, which adds to the Winchester Mystery House vibe of my landlord's family's ambitions. It got me burglarized, but that's another story.). They look out at the small back yard, beyond which is a wall, which has partially collapsed, and the paved area that served as a parking lot until the construction boys needed it back. There are a number of trees, which at the moment are wearing a wonderful flame-yellow color, some bushes, and a couple of old brick sheds which may be descendents of the hay-barns that used to be placed in this section of the city when the old medieval city wall, which ran along Torstr., was still up. As far as I can figure from the rather ambiguous map the planners erected in the alley, the one which announced the completion of Borsigstr. 4a this spring (and hey, I just looked and it's gone!), this nice scene is going to be replaced by the new! modern! building of 4a. And this is going to require jackhammers breaking up the pavement, a foundation being dug, pilings being driven, and all the merry chatter of the work crews as they report for duty every morning at 6:30. And in the end, the building will go up, the tiny amount of sunlight this ground-floor apartment gets will be severely diminished, and I'll get to look at a building standing empty for months, probably years, on end as the developer re-learns that the market for luxury housing in Berlin is sorta depressed at the moment. To put it mildly.
I really, really want to be out of here before this all happens, although the prospect at the moment isn't very good for it coming to pass.
But in the meanwhile, there's a silver lining nobody told me about until I'd lived here for years. One of the very good things about renting in Germany is how unfairly the rights are distributed: they're all on the tenant's side, or very nearly so. And because the noise level here is so high with the construction -- it was so loud this morning that I couldn't even hear my coffee-maker, which usually sounds like a 400-pound hog coughing up a hairball -- because it causes dust to come into the house and contaminate everything, so that there's a thin layer of yellow over things 24 hours after I've cleaned them off, because of the interrupted sleep which causes me to wake up at 6:30, five hours after I've gone to bed, then fall asleep again fitfully and wake up logy four hours later, I have recourse. It's a little thing called Mietminderung, rent-abatement, and now I'm going to actually make my American readers salivate with envy.
You can write your landlord and request Mietminderung, which he may grant you if he thinks you have a case. He makes less, but he makes it up because the construction firm carries insurance for just such an eventuality -- all part of the cost of doing business. In the end, neither the landlord nor the construction company is terribly disaccommodated, and the tenant gets lower rent. If I'd known this when I first moved in here and the landlord and his family were knocking this place down and putting it up again and knocking it down again and so on, and then when they started renovating Borsigstr. 2, and then again when this project on the other side started up, hell, I'd never have paid retail at all! Or, more realistically, maybe one year out of seven. Of course, in extreme cases, as happened to one friend of mine, when they do a radical renovation project on your place, they're obligated to find you another apartment to live in. As long as it's not in Germany, I'm down with that.
But, alas, the other side of the coin is that with your Mietminderung, you still have to endure the noise. And, as it gets colder -- and I have to say, we've had a wonderful fall, with spots of Indian summer appearing here and there -- I'll be spending more and more time in the noisy, dusty, vibrating apartment. When it's quiet and clean, it's bad enough. I just hope this will give me even more motivation to figure out a way to get the hell out of this dying city. As if I needed any more.
For the past three years, the luxury apartments next door to me, which cost a quarter-million Euros apiece, have looked out over a hole that has filled up with windblown garbage and construction debris, a hole that was advertised as an underground parking garage. I have no idea why construction stopped (although it's probably for the usual reason things stop around here, ie, the money ran out), but just last week, they've started again. This has involved bringing in a huge shovel to scoop out the hole, and from the amount of shattered brick they've been lifting out, I have to assume there was a bombed building there, perfectly routine for this part of Berlin, which got hit pretty badly due to its proximity to the Reichskanzlei on Wilhelmstr. (Not that close, but you could only be so accurate from that high up back then).
The shovel scoops, and big trucks perform a tricky maneuver of driving down the alley and then backing into the parking lot just behind my building (which has spaces that were rented, I guess, to the unfortunate tenants of the place next door) and onto the piece of ground they're excavating. This starts at 6:30 in the morning when they fire up the shovel, although I have to say these workmen don't yell at each other or drive cars blaring heavy metal music like the last crew did. At some point this morning, I guess one of the trucks was in physical contact with our building, which explains the vibration. I expect my landlord's unpleasant mother, who sometimes lives in the apartment across the hall from me, will find evidence of this when next she occupies the place. (Not that I'll know: she stopped talking to me when I informed her son she'd forced her way into my apartment to look it over. She decided on the spot that I was a dirty foreigner -- I admit the place wasn't in such good shape that day -- and told me, no kidding, that "You should spend a minimum of two hours a day cleaning." Fine, I'll put a slave on the to-buy list.)
But if you've looked at that supremely uninformative but Flash-heavy website for this building project, you'll notice that in addition to the apartments at Borsigstr. 3a and 4, which are already in place, they're planning to build a 4a, a brand-new building which was supposed to be finished this spring. Fortunately for my peace of mind, it hasn't even been started, although I fear that this new spurt of activity portends something of that nature, and that's going to be a disaster.
When I sit at my desk here, I have two windows in front of me (one of them is a door, which leads to the back yard, except there aren't any steps, which adds to the Winchester Mystery House vibe of my landlord's family's ambitions. It got me burglarized, but that's another story.). They look out at the small back yard, beyond which is a wall, which has partially collapsed, and the paved area that served as a parking lot until the construction boys needed it back. There are a number of trees, which at the moment are wearing a wonderful flame-yellow color, some bushes, and a couple of old brick sheds which may be descendents of the hay-barns that used to be placed in this section of the city when the old medieval city wall, which ran along Torstr., was still up. As far as I can figure from the rather ambiguous map the planners erected in the alley, the one which announced the completion of Borsigstr. 4a this spring (and hey, I just looked and it's gone!), this nice scene is going to be replaced by the new! modern! building of 4a. And this is going to require jackhammers breaking up the pavement, a foundation being dug, pilings being driven, and all the merry chatter of the work crews as they report for duty every morning at 6:30. And in the end, the building will go up, the tiny amount of sunlight this ground-floor apartment gets will be severely diminished, and I'll get to look at a building standing empty for months, probably years, on end as the developer re-learns that the market for luxury housing in Berlin is sorta depressed at the moment. To put it mildly.
I really, really want to be out of here before this all happens, although the prospect at the moment isn't very good for it coming to pass.
But in the meanwhile, there's a silver lining nobody told me about until I'd lived here for years. One of the very good things about renting in Germany is how unfairly the rights are distributed: they're all on the tenant's side, or very nearly so. And because the noise level here is so high with the construction -- it was so loud this morning that I couldn't even hear my coffee-maker, which usually sounds like a 400-pound hog coughing up a hairball -- because it causes dust to come into the house and contaminate everything, so that there's a thin layer of yellow over things 24 hours after I've cleaned them off, because of the interrupted sleep which causes me to wake up at 6:30, five hours after I've gone to bed, then fall asleep again fitfully and wake up logy four hours later, I have recourse. It's a little thing called Mietminderung, rent-abatement, and now I'm going to actually make my American readers salivate with envy.
You can write your landlord and request Mietminderung, which he may grant you if he thinks you have a case. He makes less, but he makes it up because the construction firm carries insurance for just such an eventuality -- all part of the cost of doing business. In the end, neither the landlord nor the construction company is terribly disaccommodated, and the tenant gets lower rent. If I'd known this when I first moved in here and the landlord and his family were knocking this place down and putting it up again and knocking it down again and so on, and then when they started renovating Borsigstr. 2, and then again when this project on the other side started up, hell, I'd never have paid retail at all! Or, more realistically, maybe one year out of seven. Of course, in extreme cases, as happened to one friend of mine, when they do a radical renovation project on your place, they're obligated to find you another apartment to live in. As long as it's not in Germany, I'm down with that.
But, alas, the other side of the coin is that with your Mietminderung, you still have to endure the noise. And, as it gets colder -- and I have to say, we've had a wonderful fall, with spots of Indian summer appearing here and there -- I'll be spending more and more time in the noisy, dusty, vibrating apartment. When it's quiet and clean, it's bad enough. I just hope this will give me even more motivation to figure out a way to get the hell out of this dying city. As if I needed any more.
Sunday, October 24, 2004
Greg Shaw
I got the news this week that Greg Shaw had died suddenly, and found myself transported back to the past. I hadn't seen Greg in years, but he was once a friend and neighbor.
I ran into him when I was working at Rolling Stone, and Jann Wenner assigned me a story on fanzines. I had an inkling of what fanzines were, since I'd been a science-fiction fan years ago, and knew fanzines played a part in that world, but I wasn't quite sure what a rock fanzine would be. I found out soon enough: I went up to Greg and Suzie Shaw's house in San Anselmo and spent the afternoon talking with them about Who Put The Bomp, Greg's current one. Some years earlier, he'd edited Mojo Navigator, the Bay Area's first rock magazine of any note, which dared to cover not only the rise of the ballroom bands like the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, but also the teen-club scene, where garage bands were purveying a far simpler and more direct kind of rock and roll. He was also lucky to have started the magazine in August, 1966, right as it was all taking off. As for Who Put the Bomp, it was similarly concerned with good old pop music as much as the sensations of the day.
This may have been why Wenner was so contemptuous of him when I came back to the office and announced that I'd gotten the story. "He's a pimply-faced nerd with an amateurish magazine, right? It ought to make a funny story." But I didn't play it that way. (Somewhere there seems to be a cache of Rollng Stone articles of mine, since I've had others throw them back in my face, but they're apparently not on the Rolling Stone site, at least as far as I can determine; I was hoping to have a link to the story I did on Greg). This didn't improve relations with Wenner.
After I was fired, of course, I had a lot more time to hang out, and I'd see Greg and Suzie every so often, either at shows or sometimes just hanging out at his house, as we played old records and talked about stuff. The article -- and Greg's own skills -- had brought the magazine a degree of fame, and it began to do very well. At one point before he moved to Michigan to hook up with Creem, Lester Bangs came up from Southern California for a rampage of drug-taking, writing, and, I believe, a liaison with Suzie (with Greg's blessing), and the result was a nearly issue-long screed entitled "James Taylor Marked For Death." I was part of the collating party for that one (man, the things computers have made obsolete!) as we walked around the room in a circle, pulling one sheet from a pile and one from the next, until we had the whole issue in our hands, at which point it got dropped onto a desk and stapled. Yes, it was mimeographed. You young people should probably Google that word.
Still, this was no way to make a living, and, like many rock writers of the time, Greg finally took a job with a record company. United Artists had a low, one-story building with mirror windows across the street from Hollywood High School, and their head of publicity, Marty Cerf, hired Greg to co-edit with him a UA-funded rock mag called Phonograph Record Magazine, which was distributed free to record stores. It paid well, reviewed records besides UA ones, and gave a start to many a young journalist, as well as providing a place for some of us older ones to earn a few bucks. Given that it was a major record label, UA was a pretty screwy place in those days. I mean, would anyone attempt something like Phonograph Record these days? Or hire Greg Shaw to run it? (Or, for that matter, hire Marty Cerf, one of the weirdest publicists I ever knew?) Because she came with the package, Suzie Shaw had a job there, too, and one of the great tragedies of my life then was that when UA acquired the Blue Note Records catalog, Suzie mailed a few of us a checklist of Blue Notes, and she just tossed the ones we checked into boxes and sent them to us. Unfortunately, she lost my list and my education in Blue Note's wonders was delayed by years. But that was the kind of thing people routinely got away with back then.
At one point, Greg found out that one of our favorite bands, the Flamin Groovies (a band I'd been forbidden to write about at Rolling Stone for some reason), had recorded a killer record but didn't have a deal. Greg founded Bomp Records to press it up: "You Tore Me Down" was a magnificent change of direction for the Groovies, who went on to record a bunch of superlative, but out-of-time records which did a lot better in England than America (where they were more interested in Yes than three-minute pop masterpieces) and helped lay the foundation for a lot of the new wave stuff that came out later in the decade. Greg then quit UA to become the Groovies' manager.
With Bomp Records a reality, Greg was able to latch on to a lot of new sounds that were just beginning to surface in the mid-'70s, and released some of the first stuff by Devo and the Dead Boys and (for some reason this sticks in my head, although I can't verify it) Blondie. I'd already lost touch with Greg by this time, although I watched as Bomp became a thriving business concern. Greg and Suzie separated, and I'd occasionally run into her at music biz events.
But the main thing knowing Greg Shaw did for me was to make me aware very early on that the model of major-label record label wasn't for everyone, and that it was possible to make your own records and distribute them yourself, which, of course, the punk and new wave kids made a central part of their scene. Greg was in the right place at the right time twice in his life, which is something not a lot of people get to do, and was apparently a happily-married father when, last Tuesday, his blood sugar rose alarmingly (he had always been a diabetic) and he was rushed to the hospital, where he apparently just fell apart.
If you want to read his official biography, you can get more detail about all of this than the jumbled, half-remembered stuff above. Or you can go play the Groovies' immortal "Shake Some Action." That's what I'd do.
I ran into him when I was working at Rolling Stone, and Jann Wenner assigned me a story on fanzines. I had an inkling of what fanzines were, since I'd been a science-fiction fan years ago, and knew fanzines played a part in that world, but I wasn't quite sure what a rock fanzine would be. I found out soon enough: I went up to Greg and Suzie Shaw's house in San Anselmo and spent the afternoon talking with them about Who Put The Bomp, Greg's current one. Some years earlier, he'd edited Mojo Navigator, the Bay Area's first rock magazine of any note, which dared to cover not only the rise of the ballroom bands like the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, but also the teen-club scene, where garage bands were purveying a far simpler and more direct kind of rock and roll. He was also lucky to have started the magazine in August, 1966, right as it was all taking off. As for Who Put the Bomp, it was similarly concerned with good old pop music as much as the sensations of the day.
This may have been why Wenner was so contemptuous of him when I came back to the office and announced that I'd gotten the story. "He's a pimply-faced nerd with an amateurish magazine, right? It ought to make a funny story." But I didn't play it that way. (Somewhere there seems to be a cache of Rollng Stone articles of mine, since I've had others throw them back in my face, but they're apparently not on the Rolling Stone site, at least as far as I can determine; I was hoping to have a link to the story I did on Greg). This didn't improve relations with Wenner.
After I was fired, of course, I had a lot more time to hang out, and I'd see Greg and Suzie every so often, either at shows or sometimes just hanging out at his house, as we played old records and talked about stuff. The article -- and Greg's own skills -- had brought the magazine a degree of fame, and it began to do very well. At one point before he moved to Michigan to hook up with Creem, Lester Bangs came up from Southern California for a rampage of drug-taking, writing, and, I believe, a liaison with Suzie (with Greg's blessing), and the result was a nearly issue-long screed entitled "James Taylor Marked For Death." I was part of the collating party for that one (man, the things computers have made obsolete!) as we walked around the room in a circle, pulling one sheet from a pile and one from the next, until we had the whole issue in our hands, at which point it got dropped onto a desk and stapled. Yes, it was mimeographed. You young people should probably Google that word.
Still, this was no way to make a living, and, like many rock writers of the time, Greg finally took a job with a record company. United Artists had a low, one-story building with mirror windows across the street from Hollywood High School, and their head of publicity, Marty Cerf, hired Greg to co-edit with him a UA-funded rock mag called Phonograph Record Magazine, which was distributed free to record stores. It paid well, reviewed records besides UA ones, and gave a start to many a young journalist, as well as providing a place for some of us older ones to earn a few bucks. Given that it was a major record label, UA was a pretty screwy place in those days. I mean, would anyone attempt something like Phonograph Record these days? Or hire Greg Shaw to run it? (Or, for that matter, hire Marty Cerf, one of the weirdest publicists I ever knew?) Because she came with the package, Suzie Shaw had a job there, too, and one of the great tragedies of my life then was that when UA acquired the Blue Note Records catalog, Suzie mailed a few of us a checklist of Blue Notes, and she just tossed the ones we checked into boxes and sent them to us. Unfortunately, she lost my list and my education in Blue Note's wonders was delayed by years. But that was the kind of thing people routinely got away with back then.
At one point, Greg found out that one of our favorite bands, the Flamin Groovies (a band I'd been forbidden to write about at Rolling Stone for some reason), had recorded a killer record but didn't have a deal. Greg founded Bomp Records to press it up: "You Tore Me Down" was a magnificent change of direction for the Groovies, who went on to record a bunch of superlative, but out-of-time records which did a lot better in England than America (where they were more interested in Yes than three-minute pop masterpieces) and helped lay the foundation for a lot of the new wave stuff that came out later in the decade. Greg then quit UA to become the Groovies' manager.
With Bomp Records a reality, Greg was able to latch on to a lot of new sounds that were just beginning to surface in the mid-'70s, and released some of the first stuff by Devo and the Dead Boys and (for some reason this sticks in my head, although I can't verify it) Blondie. I'd already lost touch with Greg by this time, although I watched as Bomp became a thriving business concern. Greg and Suzie separated, and I'd occasionally run into her at music biz events.
But the main thing knowing Greg Shaw did for me was to make me aware very early on that the model of major-label record label wasn't for everyone, and that it was possible to make your own records and distribute them yourself, which, of course, the punk and new wave kids made a central part of their scene. Greg was in the right place at the right time twice in his life, which is something not a lot of people get to do, and was apparently a happily-married father when, last Tuesday, his blood sugar rose alarmingly (he had always been a diabetic) and he was rushed to the hospital, where he apparently just fell apart.
If you want to read his official biography, you can get more detail about all of this than the jumbled, half-remembered stuff above. Or you can go play the Groovies' immortal "Shake Some Action." That's what I'd do.
Saturday, October 23, 2004
Gallery Opening
It's a good day that starts with me doubling my money. Here I was with that five cents in my pocket and I realized the laundry needed doing, so I opened the washing machine, and there was a five-cent coin that had apparently been cast off by a pair of pants I'd washed last time. A good omen, as was going to my bank's web-page and discovering that a magazine had made a deposit. So I was ready for anything.
Good thing I was, too: yesterday was the official opening of the Berlinische Galerie, the city's latest modern art museum. As an institution, it's been around for quite a while, but it's never had a home, displaying occasional shows on the upper floors of the Martin-Gropius-Bau, among other places. It was supposed to open at the Postfuhramt right near my house, but somehow that came to naught, and instead they built a brand-new building on Alte Jakobstr., sort of behind the Jewish Museum.
Apparently the concept here is to mix architecture, photography, and painting and sculpture into a collection reflecting Berlin's contributions to all of these, although press materials were thin on the ground. Also lacking was a coherent map on the invitation to the opening: a friend of mine and I set off to find it, and it turned out that about half the streets we needed to find in order to get there weren't on it. It's a fairly obscure corner of town -- the Jewish Museum at least now has signs to it, which helps a lot -- and we wasted about 20 minutes trying to find it.
Once we had, I began to wonder if it was worth it. The downstairs is spacious and has huge-ceilinged rooms, but they're filled with art of a nearly relentless mediocrity. True, there's a pretty good representation of adopted Berliner Wolf Vostell's Fluxus paintings, and a grouping of the huge photo portraits of young soldiers from Frank Thiel's "The Allies," two of which now adorn Checkpoint Charlie, but too much of it is given over to huge splashy over-theoretical contemporary works and silly abstractions by deservedly forgotten painters, and Emilio Vedova's hugely unimpressive "Absurd Berlin Diary" gets a whole room. A temporary show, "Architecture of the Homeless," is pretty incoherent; I'm not sure what it's supposed to prove, although Wolfgang Tillmans has a couple of interesting photos and Dayanita Singh has some wonderful photos from her book Myself Mona Ahmed, in which she spent two years documenting the life of an Indian eunuch. But probably the most telling work on display on the ground floor is Ed and Nancy Kienholz' "The Art Show," which consists of life-sized folks standing around with vents from cars replacing their faces (hot air, geddit?), holding glasses of wine in cheap plastic cups. If you press a button attached to a lucite box they each bear, you can hear them bloviate in perfect art-speak about...something or other having to do with art. Dang, I guess irony really is dead.
And so, with all the walking I'd already done, was I, very nearly, when I mounted the stairs and discovered that the real reason to come here is above ground-level. Here is an excellent overview of Berlin art from around 1890 until the immediate postwar era, including a semi-reproduction of the notorious Dada show, a whole bunch of Russian Suprematist and Constructivist paintings and architectural models, lots of Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Hanna Höch, and Georg Grosz, a model of Albert Speer's projected Germaniahalle (I think that's right; there's no caption), with a scale-model Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag near it so that its idiotic hyper-grandeur is put into good perspective (apparently, one reason it couldn't be built was that moisture would gather up around the top of the dome and eventually the building would generate its own weather indoors -- the other reason, of course, was that Hitler never had the money or the time to build it), and a number of Arno Fischer's wonderful Situation Berlin, 1953-1960 photographs, mostly shot in the East.
Overall, I'd say the new Berlinische Galerie is a modest addition to the city's museum scene, but that modesty might be overcome if and when some more dynamic (and less academic) curation is applied to the ground floor. From the list of upcoming events, though, this doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon. Why, they're even hosting this year's infamous Total Music Meeting, the corduroy-clad groovy professors' own jazz festival on Nov. 4-6. Ah, well. Given that the Hamburger Bahnhof museum wound up having to accept the Flick Collection, a oh-so-trendy what-money-can-buy troll through the least interesting trends of the past couple of decades, just to have something to keep their doors open, it could be worse. At least the Berlinische Galerie hasn't added Pipilotti Rist, the antichrist of contemporary art to its collection. Yet.
Good thing I was, too: yesterday was the official opening of the Berlinische Galerie, the city's latest modern art museum. As an institution, it's been around for quite a while, but it's never had a home, displaying occasional shows on the upper floors of the Martin-Gropius-Bau, among other places. It was supposed to open at the Postfuhramt right near my house, but somehow that came to naught, and instead they built a brand-new building on Alte Jakobstr., sort of behind the Jewish Museum.
Apparently the concept here is to mix architecture, photography, and painting and sculpture into a collection reflecting Berlin's contributions to all of these, although press materials were thin on the ground. Also lacking was a coherent map on the invitation to the opening: a friend of mine and I set off to find it, and it turned out that about half the streets we needed to find in order to get there weren't on it. It's a fairly obscure corner of town -- the Jewish Museum at least now has signs to it, which helps a lot -- and we wasted about 20 minutes trying to find it.
Once we had, I began to wonder if it was worth it. The downstairs is spacious and has huge-ceilinged rooms, but they're filled with art of a nearly relentless mediocrity. True, there's a pretty good representation of adopted Berliner Wolf Vostell's Fluxus paintings, and a grouping of the huge photo portraits of young soldiers from Frank Thiel's "The Allies," two of which now adorn Checkpoint Charlie, but too much of it is given over to huge splashy over-theoretical contemporary works and silly abstractions by deservedly forgotten painters, and Emilio Vedova's hugely unimpressive "Absurd Berlin Diary" gets a whole room. A temporary show, "Architecture of the Homeless," is pretty incoherent; I'm not sure what it's supposed to prove, although Wolfgang Tillmans has a couple of interesting photos and Dayanita Singh has some wonderful photos from her book Myself Mona Ahmed, in which she spent two years documenting the life of an Indian eunuch. But probably the most telling work on display on the ground floor is Ed and Nancy Kienholz' "The Art Show," which consists of life-sized folks standing around with vents from cars replacing their faces (hot air, geddit?), holding glasses of wine in cheap plastic cups. If you press a button attached to a lucite box they each bear, you can hear them bloviate in perfect art-speak about...something or other having to do with art. Dang, I guess irony really is dead.
And so, with all the walking I'd already done, was I, very nearly, when I mounted the stairs and discovered that the real reason to come here is above ground-level. Here is an excellent overview of Berlin art from around 1890 until the immediate postwar era, including a semi-reproduction of the notorious Dada show, a whole bunch of Russian Suprematist and Constructivist paintings and architectural models, lots of Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Hanna Höch, and Georg Grosz, a model of Albert Speer's projected Germaniahalle (I think that's right; there's no caption), with a scale-model Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag near it so that its idiotic hyper-grandeur is put into good perspective (apparently, one reason it couldn't be built was that moisture would gather up around the top of the dome and eventually the building would generate its own weather indoors -- the other reason, of course, was that Hitler never had the money or the time to build it), and a number of Arno Fischer's wonderful Situation Berlin, 1953-1960 photographs, mostly shot in the East.
Overall, I'd say the new Berlinische Galerie is a modest addition to the city's museum scene, but that modesty might be overcome if and when some more dynamic (and less academic) curation is applied to the ground floor. From the list of upcoming events, though, this doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon. Why, they're even hosting this year's infamous Total Music Meeting, the corduroy-clad groovy professors' own jazz festival on Nov. 4-6. Ah, well. Given that the Hamburger Bahnhof museum wound up having to accept the Flick Collection, a oh-so-trendy what-money-can-buy troll through the least interesting trends of the past couple of decades, just to have something to keep their doors open, it could be worse. At least the Berlinische Galerie hasn't added Pipilotti Rist, the antichrist of contemporary art to its collection. Yet.
Thursday, October 21, 2004
Frustration
In the last post here I was complaining about editors not getting back to me, as well as the financial situation that's brought about, and while I honestly don't want to use this blog to whine about my problems, I had an interesting sequel to what I posted that, I think, brings up some larger issues, even if, in order to talk about them, I'm going to have to filter them through my own experience.
As I mentioned, Tracks Magazine was one of the ones I was waiting to hear about. Now, Tracks was launched with high hopes about a year ago, under a much-respected former editor of Spin, with some apparently good financing and a stated aim to become the American competition for Mojo, which was a good idea because although Mojo sells well in the U.S., filling a market niche no other music magazine does, it's also quite hostile to American writers.
Naturally, I pursued Tracks, because as someone who'd written a lot for Mojo before they'd become well-known (and hostile), I thought I'd be a natural, particularly because I was already getting a lot of the stuff they were going to write about. Or so I thought.
A first issue with a cover photo of Sting did nothing to increase my confidence, but what really made me scratch my head was when the editors showed up at SXSW in March. As far as I could tell, there was no promotion for this new magazine at an event that was almost custom-made for them to promote it. When I finally got to sit down with the editor, I pitched him an idea I had for a regular column, which I thought he'd go for because I'm already well-known thanks to the spots I do on Fresh Air. He blinked a couple of times and said "I really don't see where there'd be any place for that at the moment." Well, then, I said, at least put me in touch with your record-review editor; I could be of real service there. He gave me the guy's name, but no way to contact him. Interestingly, he didn't even have business cards himself.
Then it really got weird. I was standing talking to a couple of friends and another guy for about ten minutes when the editor came out of an interview he'd been leading with Joan Baez (in which, I was told, he'd agreed not to rehash her past once again but instead talk about the stuff she was doing now -- and then went ahead and spent the rest of the time rehashing her past, to her growing annoyance) and said "Oh, I see you've found our record review editor." It was the guy I didn't know. Curiously enough, he didn't have a card, either, although after I gave him mine, he promised to be in touch.
I went looking for the magazine. They made a great fuss out of the fact that they target record and book stores over newsstands for their distribution, and Borders was a big outlet for them. And yet not only did the mini-Borders in the SXSW trade show not have it (nor had they received a request to stock it, as they had other magazine titles and books by authors appearing at the conference), neither did any record store or book store I went to in Austin.
When I got back here, I wrote followup e-mails to both of them, and, although I tried a couple of times more, never heard a word. What was going on here, anyway?
A couple of months later, another editor, whom I'd never met, e-mailed me out of the blue. He was editing their travel section, he said, and wanted a story on Berlin. It took a couple of reminders, but he finally mailed me a package of the next few issues of the magazine, and I saw stories on a festival devoted to Django Reinhardt in France and the cool rock clubs of Boston.
I counter-suggested a couple of other stories from Europe, because I was afraid he had some image in his mind about Berlin that the city can't live up to, but no, he was only interested in Berlin.
Now, Berlin does not have much of a live rock scene at this point, for a number of reasons. Some of them are similar to any European city's (ie, the density of population makes it impossible to run a small club with electric music because there's always someone living upstairs) and some of them are less tangible (like, the pall of depression that hangs over this place). There's plenty of rock history, on the other hand, and I dutifully collected a series of addresses of where things used to be (David Bowie's old apartment on Hauptstr., the Amiga recording studio where all the DDR's approved bands recorded), because Berlin's big on the "where things used to be" tip.
I put it all together, told him I was aware this might not have been what he was looking for, but it was, alas, the truth, and I sent it off.
And that's where we were the other day when I posted. I was waiting, two months after the fact, for a reply. Yesterday, I got one:
Hi Ed,
Sorry it's taken some time. There was delay in getting a consensus. And that
is: The Berlin piece doesn't work for us, I'm afraid. So I'm going to send
you a kill fee of 25%. Thanks in any case for your interest in Tracks.
Sincerely,
[name deleted]
Now, if you're not a professional journalist, this may not seem strange to you, but let me parse this a bit so you can see why it made me (and several people I forwarded it to) so mad.
To begin with, it was his idea originally. I didn't suggest it, so the responsibility for the idea is his. Second, I have no idea what the words "there was a delay in getting a consensus" mean, but saying "The Berlin piece doesn't work for us" tells me exactly nothing. In what way? Can it, perhaps, be fixed? After all, it's a common courtesy to the writer to try at least one rewrite to bring something up to snuff. And it's not like I put everything I knew into the piece. It's hard to write about a place from inside it, because you always make assumptions about what people do and don't know. Had I, perhaps, done that? Was there a format I failed to follow? Did he think he knew something about the subject that I didn't touch on?
But no, he didn't want it made better, he wanted it to go away. There's no room for maneuvering in this situation, because it would appear that this guy is one of the editors writers dread most: the "I don't know what I want, but I'll know when you give it to me" kind. Most often, they make you do rewrite after rewrite and return comments like "this isn't quite right yet" or the like. Actually, given that tendency I got off easy here: I might have gone through three or four rewrites of what was a bad idea to start with only to come to the same place.
And here's another interesting thing. Nobody I know in the U.S. who isn't a rock journalist has ever heard of this magazine. It has apparently had no impact whatever. Little wonder: would you think a magazine with a picture of Sting on the cover was aimed at you? The rock journalists, though, are aware of it because it pays a dollar a word. Just for comparison, most of the music magazines I'm currently working for pay 10% of that. And now, with the dollar at an all-time low against the Euro, that's really not good news.
What's really sad is that there's a market for an intelligently-written music magazine with a diverse spectrum of music, new and old, being covered, aimed at an audience of people over 30 years old, the "fifty-quid man," as the Guardian put it in an article way back in March. These are the people who are driving the market, who are buying Mojo at whatever exorbitant import price it commands, and buying it a month late, at that, in most parts of the country. They also buy other significant things, like cars and computers and booze and other high-dollar advertising targets. If the best attempt to serve them is Tracks, then Mojo is going to own the market until someone comes up with competition for them.
And that's probably not about to happen. Right at the moment, I sense a real fear running through the media. Some of this is, of course, due to the repression being rained down on broadcast media by the current administration. Some of it is also doubtless the result of people waiting to see if there'll be regime change in twelve days. It's my guess that if Kerry prevails, there will be a gigantic exhalation of held breath and things will loosen up considerably -- including purse-strings. But right now is not the time to start anything, as far as the overall mood is concerned. Hell, there are too many people applying for passports and investigating expatriation in Canada and New Zealand. The idea that America might have a future would do us all some good.
Anyway, my main disappointment is that this article would have bought me at least a month's rent, and now that's not going to happen. And I was wrong in my last post: I have five cents, not four. And I have enough food to last me through tomorrow evening. After that, though, if there isn't any money around, I'm going to be fasting this weekend. Involuntarily.
As I mentioned, Tracks Magazine was one of the ones I was waiting to hear about. Now, Tracks was launched with high hopes about a year ago, under a much-respected former editor of Spin, with some apparently good financing and a stated aim to become the American competition for Mojo, which was a good idea because although Mojo sells well in the U.S., filling a market niche no other music magazine does, it's also quite hostile to American writers.
Naturally, I pursued Tracks, because as someone who'd written a lot for Mojo before they'd become well-known (and hostile), I thought I'd be a natural, particularly because I was already getting a lot of the stuff they were going to write about. Or so I thought.
A first issue with a cover photo of Sting did nothing to increase my confidence, but what really made me scratch my head was when the editors showed up at SXSW in March. As far as I could tell, there was no promotion for this new magazine at an event that was almost custom-made for them to promote it. When I finally got to sit down with the editor, I pitched him an idea I had for a regular column, which I thought he'd go for because I'm already well-known thanks to the spots I do on Fresh Air. He blinked a couple of times and said "I really don't see where there'd be any place for that at the moment." Well, then, I said, at least put me in touch with your record-review editor; I could be of real service there. He gave me the guy's name, but no way to contact him. Interestingly, he didn't even have business cards himself.
Then it really got weird. I was standing talking to a couple of friends and another guy for about ten minutes when the editor came out of an interview he'd been leading with Joan Baez (in which, I was told, he'd agreed not to rehash her past once again but instead talk about the stuff she was doing now -- and then went ahead and spent the rest of the time rehashing her past, to her growing annoyance) and said "Oh, I see you've found our record review editor." It was the guy I didn't know. Curiously enough, he didn't have a card, either, although after I gave him mine, he promised to be in touch.
I went looking for the magazine. They made a great fuss out of the fact that they target record and book stores over newsstands for their distribution, and Borders was a big outlet for them. And yet not only did the mini-Borders in the SXSW trade show not have it (nor had they received a request to stock it, as they had other magazine titles and books by authors appearing at the conference), neither did any record store or book store I went to in Austin.
When I got back here, I wrote followup e-mails to both of them, and, although I tried a couple of times more, never heard a word. What was going on here, anyway?
A couple of months later, another editor, whom I'd never met, e-mailed me out of the blue. He was editing their travel section, he said, and wanted a story on Berlin. It took a couple of reminders, but he finally mailed me a package of the next few issues of the magazine, and I saw stories on a festival devoted to Django Reinhardt in France and the cool rock clubs of Boston.
I counter-suggested a couple of other stories from Europe, because I was afraid he had some image in his mind about Berlin that the city can't live up to, but no, he was only interested in Berlin.
Now, Berlin does not have much of a live rock scene at this point, for a number of reasons. Some of them are similar to any European city's (ie, the density of population makes it impossible to run a small club with electric music because there's always someone living upstairs) and some of them are less tangible (like, the pall of depression that hangs over this place). There's plenty of rock history, on the other hand, and I dutifully collected a series of addresses of where things used to be (David Bowie's old apartment on Hauptstr., the Amiga recording studio where all the DDR's approved bands recorded), because Berlin's big on the "where things used to be" tip.
I put it all together, told him I was aware this might not have been what he was looking for, but it was, alas, the truth, and I sent it off.
And that's where we were the other day when I posted. I was waiting, two months after the fact, for a reply. Yesterday, I got one:
Hi Ed,
Sorry it's taken some time. There was delay in getting a consensus. And that
is: The Berlin piece doesn't work for us, I'm afraid. So I'm going to send
you a kill fee of 25%. Thanks in any case for your interest in Tracks.
Sincerely,
[name deleted]
Now, if you're not a professional journalist, this may not seem strange to you, but let me parse this a bit so you can see why it made me (and several people I forwarded it to) so mad.
To begin with, it was his idea originally. I didn't suggest it, so the responsibility for the idea is his. Second, I have no idea what the words "there was a delay in getting a consensus" mean, but saying "The Berlin piece doesn't work for us" tells me exactly nothing. In what way? Can it, perhaps, be fixed? After all, it's a common courtesy to the writer to try at least one rewrite to bring something up to snuff. And it's not like I put everything I knew into the piece. It's hard to write about a place from inside it, because you always make assumptions about what people do and don't know. Had I, perhaps, done that? Was there a format I failed to follow? Did he think he knew something about the subject that I didn't touch on?
But no, he didn't want it made better, he wanted it to go away. There's no room for maneuvering in this situation, because it would appear that this guy is one of the editors writers dread most: the "I don't know what I want, but I'll know when you give it to me" kind. Most often, they make you do rewrite after rewrite and return comments like "this isn't quite right yet" or the like. Actually, given that tendency I got off easy here: I might have gone through three or four rewrites of what was a bad idea to start with only to come to the same place.
And here's another interesting thing. Nobody I know in the U.S. who isn't a rock journalist has ever heard of this magazine. It has apparently had no impact whatever. Little wonder: would you think a magazine with a picture of Sting on the cover was aimed at you? The rock journalists, though, are aware of it because it pays a dollar a word. Just for comparison, most of the music magazines I'm currently working for pay 10% of that. And now, with the dollar at an all-time low against the Euro, that's really not good news.
What's really sad is that there's a market for an intelligently-written music magazine with a diverse spectrum of music, new and old, being covered, aimed at an audience of people over 30 years old, the "fifty-quid man," as the Guardian put it in an article way back in March. These are the people who are driving the market, who are buying Mojo at whatever exorbitant import price it commands, and buying it a month late, at that, in most parts of the country. They also buy other significant things, like cars and computers and booze and other high-dollar advertising targets. If the best attempt to serve them is Tracks, then Mojo is going to own the market until someone comes up with competition for them.
And that's probably not about to happen. Right at the moment, I sense a real fear running through the media. Some of this is, of course, due to the repression being rained down on broadcast media by the current administration. Some of it is also doubtless the result of people waiting to see if there'll be regime change in twelve days. It's my guess that if Kerry prevails, there will be a gigantic exhalation of held breath and things will loosen up considerably -- including purse-strings. But right now is not the time to start anything, as far as the overall mood is concerned. Hell, there are too many people applying for passports and investigating expatriation in Canada and New Zealand. The idea that America might have a future would do us all some good.
Anyway, my main disappointment is that this article would have bought me at least a month's rent, and now that's not going to happen. And I was wrong in my last post: I have five cents, not four. And I have enough food to last me through tomorrow evening. After that, though, if there isn't any money around, I'm going to be fasting this weekend. Involuntarily.
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Becalmed
The best-laid plans and all...
There was a point when I was going to post here daily, and now it's become more like weekly. I didn't want it to happen, but there's a decided listlessness around here these days. Some of it I'll gladly lay at the feet of that damn cold, which is still a tiny bit in evidence. But there's also the fact that writing begets writing, and there were days not so long ago when I'd spend three or four hours working on an article, then come over here and post.
Well, that hasn't happened in a while. I can even see the downward spiral: in late August, I was beginning to get some meaningful work for the first time in a long while, work that went beyond my regular Fresh Air pieces, which only run occasionally. There was the rush to do all the Ars Electronica stuff, and the intellectual exercise that attending that event gave me led to my finally writing a huge piece on the future of the record industry as I saw it. It's a wonderful piece, and I'm very proud of it, and if the guy who commissioned it had edited it when I sent it to him we would have been on the web (it's a subscription-only web magazine) at the same time as Wired magazine's "long tail" article, an article on Nonesuch Records in the New York Times which made a similar point, and another article in the L.A. Weekly, which also bears on the topic. As it is, it's been a month since I sent it to him, and he keeps saying he'll get back to me and he doesn't. It'll be quite dated by the time he gets back to me, even if that happens tomorrow.
Plus, of course, I don't get paid until it's accepted.
Same with another magazine, which has had my article since Aug. 31. They wouldn't do business until I signed a writer's agreement. I asked them not to send it, since they were FedExing it, until I got back from Ars Electronica. So of course they sent it that weekend, and after three delivery tries, FedEx lost the damn thing. It took another three weeks to get another copy (the secretary wouldn't risk FedEx again, for some reason), another week to get it to them, signed, and now...silence.
And I don't get paid by them, either, until the editor gets back to me.
So right now I have four cents in my pocket, a promise of an international money order on its way from England (and good luck cashing that!), and, fortunately, enough food to last me through Thursday morning. I just finished a Fresh Air piece which I'll record tomorrow, so I'll get paid for that within a week, most likely, and I've got dribs and drabs to do, but sheesh, is it any wonder I don't get excited about waking up and writing? Once again, my life gets reduced to hunter-gatherer status, as I have to restrict my focus to the very most basic necessities of life: finding food, maintaining shelter.
It's bad enough that every penny I make other than what I need to feed myself goes to my landlord -- no chance for travel or recreation -- but with the horizons constricted, it's hard to dream, to come up with ideas for stuff I could be writing. When you spend two weeks writing a piece like my music-industry piece, filled with some fairly radical theorizing and lots of big ideas, and then it just sits there getting old, well, you don't have to be Pavlov to figure out where that kind of feedback gets you.
This is not a way to make a living. If you've ever fantasized doing it, forget it and find something useful to do. I'm about to turn 56 and I'm still writing for a dime a word. What a waste of whatever talent I may possess.
And see, this is another reason I haven't posted here much of late. I don't really think there's much to be gained by my whining about my life and work, when I should be writing stuff about what I see around me and how I feel about it, a supplement to the other stuff I'm writing for pay. So, confronted with that, I just don't post anything.
A sort of promise: I've been invited to the opening of the new Berlinische Galerie on Friday. Assuming they got my faxed RSVP, I'm going to take my notebook along and take notes -- if I can get close enough to any of the art to see it, of course, since these events tend to be packed -- and post the notes here over the weekend.
Wish me luck not starving to death before then.
There was a point when I was going to post here daily, and now it's become more like weekly. I didn't want it to happen, but there's a decided listlessness around here these days. Some of it I'll gladly lay at the feet of that damn cold, which is still a tiny bit in evidence. But there's also the fact that writing begets writing, and there were days not so long ago when I'd spend three or four hours working on an article, then come over here and post.
Well, that hasn't happened in a while. I can even see the downward spiral: in late August, I was beginning to get some meaningful work for the first time in a long while, work that went beyond my regular Fresh Air pieces, which only run occasionally. There was the rush to do all the Ars Electronica stuff, and the intellectual exercise that attending that event gave me led to my finally writing a huge piece on the future of the record industry as I saw it. It's a wonderful piece, and I'm very proud of it, and if the guy who commissioned it had edited it when I sent it to him we would have been on the web (it's a subscription-only web magazine) at the same time as Wired magazine's "long tail" article, an article on Nonesuch Records in the New York Times which made a similar point, and another article in the L.A. Weekly, which also bears on the topic. As it is, it's been a month since I sent it to him, and he keeps saying he'll get back to me and he doesn't. It'll be quite dated by the time he gets back to me, even if that happens tomorrow.
Plus, of course, I don't get paid until it's accepted.
Same with another magazine, which has had my article since Aug. 31. They wouldn't do business until I signed a writer's agreement. I asked them not to send it, since they were FedExing it, until I got back from Ars Electronica. So of course they sent it that weekend, and after three delivery tries, FedEx lost the damn thing. It took another three weeks to get another copy (the secretary wouldn't risk FedEx again, for some reason), another week to get it to them, signed, and now...silence.
And I don't get paid by them, either, until the editor gets back to me.
So right now I have four cents in my pocket, a promise of an international money order on its way from England (and good luck cashing that!), and, fortunately, enough food to last me through Thursday morning. I just finished a Fresh Air piece which I'll record tomorrow, so I'll get paid for that within a week, most likely, and I've got dribs and drabs to do, but sheesh, is it any wonder I don't get excited about waking up and writing? Once again, my life gets reduced to hunter-gatherer status, as I have to restrict my focus to the very most basic necessities of life: finding food, maintaining shelter.
It's bad enough that every penny I make other than what I need to feed myself goes to my landlord -- no chance for travel or recreation -- but with the horizons constricted, it's hard to dream, to come up with ideas for stuff I could be writing. When you spend two weeks writing a piece like my music-industry piece, filled with some fairly radical theorizing and lots of big ideas, and then it just sits there getting old, well, you don't have to be Pavlov to figure out where that kind of feedback gets you.
This is not a way to make a living. If you've ever fantasized doing it, forget it and find something useful to do. I'm about to turn 56 and I'm still writing for a dime a word. What a waste of whatever talent I may possess.
And see, this is another reason I haven't posted here much of late. I don't really think there's much to be gained by my whining about my life and work, when I should be writing stuff about what I see around me and how I feel about it, a supplement to the other stuff I'm writing for pay. So, confronted with that, I just don't post anything.
A sort of promise: I've been invited to the opening of the new Berlinische Galerie on Friday. Assuming they got my faxed RSVP, I'm going to take my notebook along and take notes -- if I can get close enough to any of the art to see it, of course, since these events tend to be packed -- and post the notes here over the weekend.
Wish me luck not starving to death before then.
Monday, October 11, 2004
Fall Again
I was talking (actually iChatting) with my friend Bob in California a couple of weeks ago, and he opined that it must look rather nice around here. Actually, at that moment, it was still pretty green, and we wound up having a couple of more days of warmish weather, but I remembered one October when a friend was visiting from America and we rented a car, and sort of drove off at random, winding up in Fürstenwalde, which, as its name implies, is surrounded by woods. There's definitely a foliage drive to be taken in Brandenburg, the province which surrounds Berlin, and we managed to hit this place at exactly the right time. It was already exotic, what with the stork nests on the church steeples and some bright, newly-restored old buildings, and although I understand that the city is something of a hotbed of neo-nazi activity, it was nice to drive through it.
Fall is when I first got to know Berlin, thanks to Berlin Independence Days, the music conference that (combined with the girlfriend) got me to visit here in the first place. Somehow it always managed to get held around this time of year, and what I got to see of Berlin was cold, grey, and rainy. That's how I thought of the place until I decided to move here and came that May and was shocked to see the streets shaded with large green trees. They're denuded so much of the year that it's easy to forget.
But I see by today's weather forecast that we're due for an overnight low of 30F, which is the first freeze. Some of the trees outside my windows have been turning yellowish, and this ought to accelerate the process of change. Lord knows, my poor basil, yellowish as it is, probably won't survive, and I'm torn between harvesting it all tonight and making some pesto or just letting it die. The one plant that actually got six inches high suddenly shed all of its leaves a couple of nights ago, and I wonder if the stuff is even healthy to eat.
More ominously, this marks the beginning of the next six months, which will be, for all intents and purposes, winter. It won't be long until it's pitch dark at 4pm, not light until just after 9, and all of my friends start to suffer from serious depression. Me, too, actually; with such a short photoperiod, it's hard not to be depressed, especially when what's around you is Berlin. I'm never prepared for how quickly this all comes on, either; just a week or so ago, I was debating whether or not to wear a jacket, or whether to throw on a Levi jacket. Now I know that's too thin, and I use a windbreaker, but even that won't provide protection for very long, and I'm going to have to start wearing the winter coat. And buy some new gloves: I had a marvellous pair I got from Land's End for years, but they disappeared last year, and nothing in the stores here comes close. I have to have gloves: we can let the psychologists debate what damage I inherited from my mother, but it's a stone fact that bad circulation in my hands is one of her gifts to me. Winter is six months of never having warm hands.
There's also something attractive about Berlin's constant penumbral state during this time, the sidewalks and streets always wet and reflecting the lights. Also, cold air magnifies cooking smells, so a Sunday afternoon can be an anthology of approaches to pork roast as you sniff your way down the block. The berries so beloved of the Germans vanish from the shops, but the pumpkins come in, and not just the kind used in that johnny-come-lately holiday which suddenly appeared here a couple of years ago, Halloween. No, these are ugly, lumpy things, cheap at the market, and subject to all kinds of interesting uses, and I'm determined to figure some of them out this year.
What hasn't happened yet is the first super-cold rain. We don't get all that much snow -- perhaps all the water in the rivers and canals here has something to do with that -- but we certainly do get more rain than anyone needs, which is yet another factor in the widespread depression. In fact, the sun is shining now, and I'm feeling bad about sitting at the computer, having done all the work that's due today and, with America not yet awake and at its desks, there's a hole in the middle of the afternoon that just cries for me to head outdoors and do something. And, with what'll be the normal weather starting next week or the week after and continuing through April, it's stupid to waste such nice days.
Maybe I'll take the camera out. Because although the leaves aren't falling from the trees, we've already lost two trees in my neighborhood, the ones in the picture below. For no discernable reason, they were scraped off of their site a few days ago. If the artist did it (I know where there are some more, so I can check), then hey, it's art. If not, it's a mystery. Still, seeing the fragments of paper on the ground did, somehow, seem to be a harbinger of fall. And now it's here.
Ex-trees.
Fall is when I first got to know Berlin, thanks to Berlin Independence Days, the music conference that (combined with the girlfriend) got me to visit here in the first place. Somehow it always managed to get held around this time of year, and what I got to see of Berlin was cold, grey, and rainy. That's how I thought of the place until I decided to move here and came that May and was shocked to see the streets shaded with large green trees. They're denuded so much of the year that it's easy to forget.
But I see by today's weather forecast that we're due for an overnight low of 30F, which is the first freeze. Some of the trees outside my windows have been turning yellowish, and this ought to accelerate the process of change. Lord knows, my poor basil, yellowish as it is, probably won't survive, and I'm torn between harvesting it all tonight and making some pesto or just letting it die. The one plant that actually got six inches high suddenly shed all of its leaves a couple of nights ago, and I wonder if the stuff is even healthy to eat.
More ominously, this marks the beginning of the next six months, which will be, for all intents and purposes, winter. It won't be long until it's pitch dark at 4pm, not light until just after 9, and all of my friends start to suffer from serious depression. Me, too, actually; with such a short photoperiod, it's hard not to be depressed, especially when what's around you is Berlin. I'm never prepared for how quickly this all comes on, either; just a week or so ago, I was debating whether or not to wear a jacket, or whether to throw on a Levi jacket. Now I know that's too thin, and I use a windbreaker, but even that won't provide protection for very long, and I'm going to have to start wearing the winter coat. And buy some new gloves: I had a marvellous pair I got from Land's End for years, but they disappeared last year, and nothing in the stores here comes close. I have to have gloves: we can let the psychologists debate what damage I inherited from my mother, but it's a stone fact that bad circulation in my hands is one of her gifts to me. Winter is six months of never having warm hands.
There's also something attractive about Berlin's constant penumbral state during this time, the sidewalks and streets always wet and reflecting the lights. Also, cold air magnifies cooking smells, so a Sunday afternoon can be an anthology of approaches to pork roast as you sniff your way down the block. The berries so beloved of the Germans vanish from the shops, but the pumpkins come in, and not just the kind used in that johnny-come-lately holiday which suddenly appeared here a couple of years ago, Halloween. No, these are ugly, lumpy things, cheap at the market, and subject to all kinds of interesting uses, and I'm determined to figure some of them out this year.
What hasn't happened yet is the first super-cold rain. We don't get all that much snow -- perhaps all the water in the rivers and canals here has something to do with that -- but we certainly do get more rain than anyone needs, which is yet another factor in the widespread depression. In fact, the sun is shining now, and I'm feeling bad about sitting at the computer, having done all the work that's due today and, with America not yet awake and at its desks, there's a hole in the middle of the afternoon that just cries for me to head outdoors and do something. And, with what'll be the normal weather starting next week or the week after and continuing through April, it's stupid to waste such nice days.
Maybe I'll take the camera out. Because although the leaves aren't falling from the trees, we've already lost two trees in my neighborhood, the ones in the picture below. For no discernable reason, they were scraped off of their site a few days ago. If the artist did it (I know where there are some more, so I can check), then hey, it's art. If not, it's a mystery. Still, seeing the fragments of paper on the ground did, somehow, seem to be a harbinger of fall. And now it's here.
Ex-trees.
Monday, October 04, 2004
More Miscellaneous
A couple of unrelated items to add today.
First, on both Saturday and Sunday, there were more anti-Harz IV marches. The first one drew 50,000 people, the second, apparently, considerably fewer. The second was advertised as a "Sternmarsch," or a "star-march," with several different starting points. That may have been too hard for the hard-core hungover unemployed, or else maybe everyone was pooped from marching the day before.
The ultimate reason for this is that Saturday is going to be a national holiday, perhaps the most hated one of all: the Day of German Unity, guaranteed to spawn a riot or two, and a lot of ill-will around the still unhealed wound between East and West. It's a good day to either leave town or else stay indoors. But they seem to be celebrating it all week, since there's a Ferris wheel set up at the Brandenburg Gate, and a lot of bratwurst stands.
***
The graffiti scene here continues to get wilder. From scrawling on a flat surface, to using a stencil, to pasting a sheet of paper, now we have the crochet graffitists! I'll have to post a picture of these, because they're just too weird to believe. A long, green, stemlike structure is anchored in a flower pot, leaves are meticulously added, and various stuff is integrated into this sort of vine-like plant of string. I've seen two so far, only formally similar, enough so that you can tell they're the work of the same person or people. I should photograph them before the inevitable vandal comes along.
***
And I don't want to leave the impression that I didn't get anything out of PopKommm, either. Taking the S-Bahn there in the mornings, I finally saw the huge Centro Italiano, the wholesale market for the Italian restaurant and deli trade, with retail prices for the rest of us. I went there today and was fairly impressed. Easy to get to from here, too.
The other thing I got:
A cold.
Off to honk some more.
First, on both Saturday and Sunday, there were more anti-Harz IV marches. The first one drew 50,000 people, the second, apparently, considerably fewer. The second was advertised as a "Sternmarsch," or a "star-march," with several different starting points. That may have been too hard for the hard-core hungover unemployed, or else maybe everyone was pooped from marching the day before.
The ultimate reason for this is that Saturday is going to be a national holiday, perhaps the most hated one of all: the Day of German Unity, guaranteed to spawn a riot or two, and a lot of ill-will around the still unhealed wound between East and West. It's a good day to either leave town or else stay indoors. But they seem to be celebrating it all week, since there's a Ferris wheel set up at the Brandenburg Gate, and a lot of bratwurst stands.
***
The graffiti scene here continues to get wilder. From scrawling on a flat surface, to using a stencil, to pasting a sheet of paper, now we have the crochet graffitists! I'll have to post a picture of these, because they're just too weird to believe. A long, green, stemlike structure is anchored in a flower pot, leaves are meticulously added, and various stuff is integrated into this sort of vine-like plant of string. I've seen two so far, only formally similar, enough so that you can tell they're the work of the same person or people. I should photograph them before the inevitable vandal comes along.
***
And I don't want to leave the impression that I didn't get anything out of PopKommm, either. Taking the S-Bahn there in the mornings, I finally saw the huge Centro Italiano, the wholesale market for the Italian restaurant and deli trade, with retail prices for the rest of us. I went there today and was fairly impressed. Easy to get to from here, too.
The other thing I got:
A cold.
Off to honk some more.
Sunday, October 03, 2004
Pop's Komm and Gone
Not that it's safe to walk the streets of Berlin again, but at least you can do it without bumping into some record-biz guy who's here visiting PopKomm, which closed its doors Friday evening. I know I said I was going to blog live from the event -- which would have been fun -- but although there were two wireless networks available, only one was available to event-goers for a price of (gasp) €350 for the event, more than I pay for a year of DSL service!
I got to attend thanks to the good folks at SXSW, who show up because it's a good opportunity for them to discuss next year's plans with the various national bodies which promote European countries' popular music. They all show up at PopKomm because it's the biggest event of its sort in Europe's biggest record market, and getting a toehold in the so-called GAS Territories (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) means you sell a lot more records and make a lot more from touring.
On the other hand, these bodies tend to be as conservative as any other governmental body, and they tend to play politics as much as any other governmental body. I've sat through hours of discussions about both the Danish and the Dutch organizations, mostly because I know performers in those countries who either are or aren't getting on with them, and, thus, are either getting to go to events like SXSW or not. I'm of two minds as to whether these organizations promote mediocrity or not. I have to say, I've yet to hear a first-rate band on any of the sampler CDs I've gotten from Finland, Holland, Denmark, and so on over the years, although I've heard first-rate bands from each of those countries. Sort of like the avant-garde music that the Staalplaat label releases, much of which is subsidized by the Dutch government. Subsidizing rock and roll, which is one of the most capitalist of all art-forms, is an inherent contradiction, isn't it? Subsidizing the avant-garde certainly is. (On the other hand, I've gotten tipped to a lot of good folk music from these agencies, but folk music isn't in quite the same situation).
Germany, though, doesn't have one, which may be one reason that PopKomm's been so successful. The main reason, up until recently, has been that it's been a love-fest for the German major labels, few of whom have to do anything more than just rubber-stamp decisions made in L.A. and London and sell Anglo-American rock music to the GAS territories. They put out a few home-brewed albums a year, but the real money comes from Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, Norah Jones, and the usual suspects. Sure, in the next 60 days, the usual German rock stars will put out their annual albums and do their annual tours, but mostly people here buy what people buy everywhere there's Western pop music.
This year, though, PopKomm was a bit different. For one thing, the partners who founded it years ago in Cologne finally gave up on it and sold the name and the concept to Messe Berlin, the Berlin city organization which puts on the other trade fairs here: Grüne Woche, the big food show; the IFA, the biennial consumer electronics show; the ITB, the annual travel fair. It makes sense for the thing to be here, since Berlin is where Universal, the world's largest record company, has its German headquarters. (Sony did have its headquarters here, but moved to Munich after the merger with Bertelsmann, and I think they'd have to nuke Hamburg to get Warner's to leave there).
Lord knows if anything actually got done, although the first day was marked by an announcement (recounted here and here and here) that discussions were about to open to set a quota of German-language music on radio stations here.
This is exactly the kind of boneheaded thing I've come to expect from the industry giants who come to PopKomm. I remember one year I was walking past a fence, and there were a bunch of posters declaring that if you copied CDs on your computer for your friends, you were committing an illegal act. At that moment, I realized that PopKomm had ended the previous weekend. The fact is, setting a German-language quota isn't going to do much. There are already too many other sources of music around, so the radio has started to decline in importance, for one thing. For another, the example of France that's given in these arguments is off. The French weren't so much concerned about the language as about the local recording industry, so that a lot of the "French content" on the radio is made by immigrants: lots of hip-hop in French and other languages, Algerian singers, Moroccan singers, and all the many wonderful African acts who get sold as "world music" outside France. This has not only lifted the French record biz out of mediocrity (people still laugh at French rock music, but not at Angelique Kidjo or Khaled or Youssou N'Dour), it's also provided an image-polishing opportunity for the country to advertise itself as truly multicultural. Whether that's the case or not, that's the image.
But the conservative forces in Germany would never stand for that. At some point very, very soon, a European-based teen idol is going to emerge singing in Turkish. It's inevitable, with the number of Turks in Europe, and the increasing wealth they possess -- not to mention that there's now a third generation of European-born Turks growing up in European cities. The natural place for our Mehmet Superstar to emerge would be Germany, and the natural route would be his getting his singles played on German pop radio thanks to a quota like the French one. But if you restrict it to German-language records, he's not going to have a chance. (Of course, if he lives in Germany, he's also never going to be able to vote, despite the fact that his father and his grandfather both lived here and his father was born here: German citizenship is based on blood.) German teens are already comfortable enough with Turks to buy this record, and I'm certain MTV Europe would play the video. My money is on the label being Dutch, though.
Other than that, I'm not completely sure what, if anything, happened at PopKomm. I do know that the SXSW crew reported that they couldn't use their registration badges to get into showcases in the evening, even though the clubs weren't nearly full (good to see that some old PopKomm traditions made it over from Cologne!), but the majority of people who come to PopKomm aren't much interested in seeing showcases. A lot of the exhibitors in the trade show, where I spent my time at the SXSW booth, were support industries: manufacturers and the like. Very few indie labels exhibited, but then, they figured out long ago that they were just barely tolerated at this shindig. The best booking agent I know of in Germany, Berthold Seliger, boycotted it.
But one thing I can say for certain: having a Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker right up front on our stand brought us a lot of smiles from passers-by.
I got to attend thanks to the good folks at SXSW, who show up because it's a good opportunity for them to discuss next year's plans with the various national bodies which promote European countries' popular music. They all show up at PopKomm because it's the biggest event of its sort in Europe's biggest record market, and getting a toehold in the so-called GAS Territories (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) means you sell a lot more records and make a lot more from touring.
On the other hand, these bodies tend to be as conservative as any other governmental body, and they tend to play politics as much as any other governmental body. I've sat through hours of discussions about both the Danish and the Dutch organizations, mostly because I know performers in those countries who either are or aren't getting on with them, and, thus, are either getting to go to events like SXSW or not. I'm of two minds as to whether these organizations promote mediocrity or not. I have to say, I've yet to hear a first-rate band on any of the sampler CDs I've gotten from Finland, Holland, Denmark, and so on over the years, although I've heard first-rate bands from each of those countries. Sort of like the avant-garde music that the Staalplaat label releases, much of which is subsidized by the Dutch government. Subsidizing rock and roll, which is one of the most capitalist of all art-forms, is an inherent contradiction, isn't it? Subsidizing the avant-garde certainly is. (On the other hand, I've gotten tipped to a lot of good folk music from these agencies, but folk music isn't in quite the same situation).
Germany, though, doesn't have one, which may be one reason that PopKomm's been so successful. The main reason, up until recently, has been that it's been a love-fest for the German major labels, few of whom have to do anything more than just rubber-stamp decisions made in L.A. and London and sell Anglo-American rock music to the GAS territories. They put out a few home-brewed albums a year, but the real money comes from Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, Norah Jones, and the usual suspects. Sure, in the next 60 days, the usual German rock stars will put out their annual albums and do their annual tours, but mostly people here buy what people buy everywhere there's Western pop music.
This year, though, PopKomm was a bit different. For one thing, the partners who founded it years ago in Cologne finally gave up on it and sold the name and the concept to Messe Berlin, the Berlin city organization which puts on the other trade fairs here: Grüne Woche, the big food show; the IFA, the biennial consumer electronics show; the ITB, the annual travel fair. It makes sense for the thing to be here, since Berlin is where Universal, the world's largest record company, has its German headquarters. (Sony did have its headquarters here, but moved to Munich after the merger with Bertelsmann, and I think they'd have to nuke Hamburg to get Warner's to leave there).
Lord knows if anything actually got done, although the first day was marked by an announcement (recounted here and here and here) that discussions were about to open to set a quota of German-language music on radio stations here.
This is exactly the kind of boneheaded thing I've come to expect from the industry giants who come to PopKomm. I remember one year I was walking past a fence, and there were a bunch of posters declaring that if you copied CDs on your computer for your friends, you were committing an illegal act. At that moment, I realized that PopKomm had ended the previous weekend. The fact is, setting a German-language quota isn't going to do much. There are already too many other sources of music around, so the radio has started to decline in importance, for one thing. For another, the example of France that's given in these arguments is off. The French weren't so much concerned about the language as about the local recording industry, so that a lot of the "French content" on the radio is made by immigrants: lots of hip-hop in French and other languages, Algerian singers, Moroccan singers, and all the many wonderful African acts who get sold as "world music" outside France. This has not only lifted the French record biz out of mediocrity (people still laugh at French rock music, but not at Angelique Kidjo or Khaled or Youssou N'Dour), it's also provided an image-polishing opportunity for the country to advertise itself as truly multicultural. Whether that's the case or not, that's the image.
But the conservative forces in Germany would never stand for that. At some point very, very soon, a European-based teen idol is going to emerge singing in Turkish. It's inevitable, with the number of Turks in Europe, and the increasing wealth they possess -- not to mention that there's now a third generation of European-born Turks growing up in European cities. The natural place for our Mehmet Superstar to emerge would be Germany, and the natural route would be his getting his singles played on German pop radio thanks to a quota like the French one. But if you restrict it to German-language records, he's not going to have a chance. (Of course, if he lives in Germany, he's also never going to be able to vote, despite the fact that his father and his grandfather both lived here and his father was born here: German citizenship is based on blood.) German teens are already comfortable enough with Turks to buy this record, and I'm certain MTV Europe would play the video. My money is on the label being Dutch, though.
Other than that, I'm not completely sure what, if anything, happened at PopKomm. I do know that the SXSW crew reported that they couldn't use their registration badges to get into showcases in the evening, even though the clubs weren't nearly full (good to see that some old PopKomm traditions made it over from Cologne!), but the majority of people who come to PopKomm aren't much interested in seeing showcases. A lot of the exhibitors in the trade show, where I spent my time at the SXSW booth, were support industries: manufacturers and the like. Very few indie labels exhibited, but then, they figured out long ago that they were just barely tolerated at this shindig. The best booking agent I know of in Germany, Berthold Seliger, boycotted it.
But one thing I can say for certain: having a Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker right up front on our stand brought us a lot of smiles from passers-by.
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