The Hip 'n' Edgy Update

I'm big enough to admit when the New York Times gets it right, and it seems that a couple of weeks ago, that's just what they did with their recent article on Brunnenstr. as the new art district of Berlin. Actually, it's one of several, and the more serious one is down on Zimmerstr. by Checkpoint Charlie where the big guns have huge spaces inside some kind of old warehouse. And I'd say there's a reason that the Times used a picture of a cute beagle instead of any of the art on display, because most of what I saw on a recent walk up the street from Rosenthaler Platz to Bernauer Str. was pretty boring. I'd say that the Brunnenstr. galleries are sort of an arts lab, where talent can be developed.

And it's kind of not fair for Peter Herrmann to have moved his exquisite gallery for African antiquities, currently showing some astonishing Ife bronzes from Nigeria, onto the block. It just makes the other galleries' daubings and scrapings look sick. Definitely worth a visit, though. (Interestingly, I've been in that building before, since it once held the Amiga recording studios, the place where all the DDR's pop acts recorded for the state label. A friend was recording a DDR dissident band called Die Vision there, as the tea-ladies cringed.)

But what's really not fair on Brunnenstr. is the blatant move by Sony to co-opt Berlin street art. A few weeks ago, I mentioned in passing that I'd noticed a lot of broken windows around town recently, one of them in the old Beate Uhse shop at the start of Brunnenstr next to the collection of greasy spoons. A little research shows why this has happened. First, we started seeing brown-paper circles that said www.dont-forget-the-game. com all over the place. When you go there, the first thing you come upon is a blog, which purports to discuss street art. Fine, but click on the photo gallery link and it gets more insidious.

It's an ad. In fact, if you go down to Brunnenstr. to the old Beate Uhse place, there's a bilingual sheet of paper posted there bragging that Sony has gotten Berlin street-artists to cooperate with them in promoting the new PlayStation Portable System (PSP) device. So we have a huge number of stencilled brown-paper women caressing huge PSPs, many of which have been defaced by street-artist 6, and everywhere you look, someone's stuck a PSP-shaped sticker with their custom design on it. Other "artists" have made PSP-shaped art which is on display around the corner on Torstr. in a fake art gallery.

Now I understand the rocks through the windows. And it's depressing to walk around and have to wonder if the latest piece of street art is, in fact, some lame-ass viral marketing campaign. I wonder how they enlisted these guys. Just handed 'em a PSP? Was money involved? I have to say, I saw one of these in action when I flew to America last month, and although the game being played was that moronic car-crash one, the graphics were extremely impressive. I wouldn't mind having one (well, if there were a game that could hold my interest for more than ten minutes, anyway, which there rarely are on these systems), but would I viral-write an article about it for one? I don't think so.

So boo to the supposed "street artists" who let themselves be pimped by Sony, hooray to the ad-busting graffiti artists who are sabotaging the campaign, and, like that car whose ads were everywhere a couple of monts ago -- what was it called again? -- may this fade from view as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, a bit of street art from Brunnenstr. that I really find impressive:

Rollo Banks, RIP

The e-mail came last night at quarter of midnight: "Rollo died two days ago from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was a few days shy of turning 65 and been in bad health for a long time." It wasn't even signed, but it didn't have to be; the sender was a long-time friend.

Rollo came into my life, and those of my friends, when he married Margaret Moser, Austin's queen of the groupies, and a talented journalist whose career I'd helped get started. Thinking back on it, I have no idea how they ever met, but they made a great couple, two larger-than-life people who'd collided and stuck together. I thought it was fate: Margaret's a large woman, and Rollo was a tattoo artist. "He must see a canvas waiting for a masterpiece," I kidded her. Actually, she replied, Rollo wasn't at all turned on by tattooed women.

To say he was a "tattoo artist," though, diminishes him in these days when every teenager has some blob of ink on his or her skin. Rollo (whose real name was Mike Malone, and who was born in Fairfax, in Marin County, suburban San Francisco) was the designated heir of Sailor Jerry, whose China Sea Tattoo was the pioneering studio in Honolulu's Chinatown. Jerry opened in the 1930s, and developed a huge number of designs in what might be called the American Classic mode: anchors, mermaids, the "battle in the sun" showing two eagles fighting in mid-flight, skulls and dice, cocktail glasses. These designs were first worked out on paper, where they were called "flash," and Jerry was astute enough to copyright them. This, of course, didn't keep lesser artists from stealing them, and counterfeit or unattributed Sailor Jerry flash is rife in the world's tattoo studios. Jerry was also something of a chemist, and developed several new colored inks that were safe. Purple, in particular, had been a problem, as I remember Rollo telling the story. There was a studio in Hong Kong that used a particularly brilliant purple, which was admired by all except for the unfortunate fact that it eventually gave you blood poisoning.

China Sea prospered because of its location: sailors love tattoos, and Honolulu is mid-point for the Pacific Fleet. Sailors on leave get drunk, drunk sailors get tattoos. Sailor Jerry did great work, and his fame spread. How young Rollo came to apprentice with him I'm not sure, but I do know that his first experience with humans (as opposed to potatoes, which is what tattoo artists traditionally learn on, leading to the disparaging description of someone who'll let you ink anything on them as a "potato") was inking people's names on them. This was something the "local boys" liked, and Rollo quickly came to loathe: "They'd ask me, 'Hey, boy, you got plenny many alphabet?' which was their way of letting me know they had one of those incredibly long Hawaiian names." He also made them write the name down, every time. "I now how to spell Jim, but if you write it wrong, that's your responsibility, not mine." And in this respect, he'd tell a story about a tattoo artist he'd known in England who'd had a particularly inebriated young man come into his shop demanding to be tattooed -- in really big, black, thick letters -- with the name of his new idol, an American pop star who'd just taken England by storm, and whose name sounded odd to the artist, who'd never heard of him. He made him repeat it several times, but wasn't sure how to spell it. Finally the customer passed out, and the artist, thinking he had it, went to work. The young man woke up to see his brand-new tattoo, huge block letters praising ELVES.

Stories: the pit is full of them. Rollo used to encourage me to try to sell a book of tattoo artists' stories. Thanks to him, I spent a lot of time around some of America's greatest tattoo artists, and he was right: besides a steady hand and a flair for color, it seems that having the genes for being a natural raconteur was part of the package. Since tattooing is an incredibly slow practice, talking to the customer is part of the service, and given how colorful the customers were before tattooing became a teenage fad, you got great stories back in exchange.

Sailor Jerry passed China Sea Tattoo on to Rollo, who himself eventually took on protegés. Over the years, Rollo got plenty of tattoos himself, a whole body suit, as they're called, mostly in classical Japanese style, from what I could see. Unlike today's exhibitionists, Rollo kept his tattoos covered, because, like Rembrandt drawings, they fade with exposure to light. Nowadays, in the summer, I'll see some kid with thousands of dollars' worth of work on him running around with his shirt off, and remember Rollo talking about how that not only faded the colors, but smeared the black outlines, turning the work into one huge multicolored blotch in just a few years. Rollo had too much respect for the masters who'd worked on him, one of whom, Horiochi, was considered Japan's greatest master, the latest in a centuries-old lineage.

And although the American Classic designs (not only on people, but as flash, which people buy and trade for good money) paid the bills, Rollo also paid attention to the Japanese masters. After he moved to Austin to be with Margaret, he set up shop near the Austin Chronicle offices, and that drew musicians and other scenesters to the little house with the China Sea shingle out front. Among the people drawn there was a local eccentric who owned Atomic City, a shop selling Japanese monster-movie figurines and other Japanese pop culture artifacts. The guy's name was Jim, but everyone in town knew him as the Royal Hawaiian Prince, or Prince, for short. He swore he was what his name said, a member of the Hawaiian royal family, although that seemed really unlikely. But he was flamboyant, and had some tattoos, and wanted Rollo to create a masterpiece on him. Rollo rose to the challenge, and admirably: over a year in the making, Prince's back-piece was the culmination of everything Rollo had learned about classical Japanese tattoo art -- with a twist. It showed Godzilla destroying Tokyo as airplanes swirled around him. Waves in the style of Hokusai broke behind Godzilla, exquisitely stylized flames leapt from the broken skyscrapers, and tiny people writhed in the monster's hands. In the bottom left corner, three Japanese characters spelled Go Ji Ra. When it was finished, Prince, Rollo, Margaret, and I went to the National Tattoo Convention, held that year in New Orleans, and, as I reported in the Wall Street Journal, they took home a prize.

Austin loved Rollo, who did a number of covers for the Chronicle, particularly for Chinese New Year, and Rollo loved Austin. I cooked for several Thanksgiving parties at Rollo and Margaret's house, and I remember one where Rollo, rather sozzled, yelled my name. "Ward! I want you to know something. There are people who I just know are going to get tattoos. There are people who are thinking about it, and might do it and might not. And then there are people who, if they're going to get tattooed, they wouldn't come to me, they'd go to some art faggot like Don Ed Hardy [Rollo's purported arch-rival, master of the classic Japanese style, with a Master's degree from the San Francisco Art Institute, who'd been written up in several high art magazines]. Now, you, you'd probably go to Hardy if you were gonna do it. But I don't think you're ever going to get a tattoo. And I just want you to know that that's ALL RIGHT WITH ME! I got enough work! I don't have to tattoo everyone in the world. So it's okay that you're not going to get a tattoo." And he was right: if I was ever going to consider it, I probably would have gone to Hardy -- Rollo, I believe, had. But he was also right: as much as I was fascinated with the world of tattoo artists, thanks to the entrée Rollo had given me, I wasn't going to be anybody's potato.

Eventually, Rollo and Margaret put their heads together. China Sea wasn't doing all that well in Austin (this was, as I said, well before the fad began) and the home shop on Army Street in Honolulu's Chinatown needed shaping up. The couple moved to Hawaii, and Margaret got a job with a firm which produced those freebie tourist magazines which clog up free space in hotel lobbies down there. It wasn't very demanding work, but it paid well enough, and she loved Hawaii. I pitched a story on traditional Hawaiian music to an airline magazine, and they bit. Margaret set up the hotel and rental car end, and offered to research where I could find slack-key guitarists and falsetto singers. It was a week filled with adventures off the Hawaiian tourist trail, as I interviewed the Samoan-Hawaiian slide guitarist Tau Moe about his 40-year tour which had only recently ended, found Hank Williams' former steel guitarist Jerry Byrd teaching in a small music store in a corner of Honolulu, visited a high-end ukulele factory, and, in fact, managed to do everything except find a slack-key gig, although Margaret ransacked the local media for clues.

One of the most magical days, though, came towards the end of the trip. Rollo had wanted to show me around Chinatown, as much to dispel the guidebooks' characterization of the neighborhood as insanely dangerous as anything else. So I met him at 6:30 one morning and we toured the place. There was the all-night dancehall, where a motley orchestra played sleazy music and you could really rent an Okinawan girl for 50 cents per dance, although the real attraction was the little pavilions off to one side where the same girl would give you a blow-job for considerably more. I remember the orchestra's drummer was sound asleep, although still playing with one hand, while the other picked a scab behind his ear. We went to a strange antiques/curiosa store, filled with dusty Chinese stuff, open, for some reason, at that odd hour. We met a Samoan lawyer who'd just come back from burying another of his brothers whom his father had shot in an ongoing dispute about some land. And, finally, we visited the wholesale market, where they were wheeling in tuna for the inspection of the local sushi chefs. (Actually, I've already mentioned this trip in my post about bánh mi a couple of months ago). When we got back to the shop, there was a line down the block because the fleet was in. I don't know what I did for the next few hours, but Margaret had, at long last, found a gig, by the amazing slack-key guitarist and singer Ledward Ka'apana at a locals-only club, where we sat for a couple of hours mesmerized by his voice and by the table full of lesbians next to us who were well-versed in traditional hand-hula and were performing for each other -- and their mother, this being Mother's Day. The only reason we left was that Margaret realized she had both sets of house keys, and Rollo was trapped at the shop, unable to close and go home. By the time we got there, he was exhausted and he quickly chased everyone out of the studio and shut it. As he got in my rental car, he handed something to Margaret. "Put this in your purse," he said. "I got no way to carry it." It was his wallet, so stuffed with $20 bills that it was bursting its seams and incapable of folding. Fleet's in.

Margaret and Rollo didn't last. She came back to Austin and got her old job at the Chronicle back, and the grapevine had it that Rollo had started using other kinds of needles. Another wife apparently helped him get clean, but I lost track of him after I moved to Berlin. But I remember the stories and the characters he'd introduced me to, and always felt a lot of affection for him for doing that.

When I was back in the States last month, I noticed a lot of kids wearing t-shirts with Sailor Jerry flash on them. The words "Sailor Jerry" and "China Sea" were on the shirts, and I thought, hey, great! Rollo's licensed the flash now that tattoos are so popular, so maybe he's making some money. I don't know if he was or not, or what the details of the deal might have been, but whatever happened, it apparently wasn't enough to keep the darkness away.

I can only hope that he's gone somewhere where the colors never fade, there's always a cold beer at hand, and there's always someone to listen to the stories and tell some more. And the fleet comes in only when you need the cash.

Happy Ending (Pretty Much)

And so it came to pass that a consortium of Berlin bloggers purchased Jim's Adlon gift-certificate for the full price. I took possession of the cash on Sunday.

And then I did an incredibly stupid thing: I put it, and some money I had in my pocket, in the bank.

Monday I got up, wrote a transfer-slip to the Obergerichtsvollsieher, and took it to the bank. On a whim, I checked my balance. The €220 I'd deposited twelve hours before had turned into €150 and change.

I hiked back home, picked up the receipt for the deposit, and went back to the bank. €74 and change had been taken out that morning, the woman told me. A few more clicks on her computer disclosed the culprit: Deutsche Telekom.

I have no idea how this happened. I have never authorized them to do this. I'm not completely sure how they got my account number, although it's been the same since before I moved here (I got it when I did a short-lived "Letter From America" for the late Radio For You station here).

So I was still short.

Fortunately, this morning, a notoriously undependable magazine I write for deposited $300 in my American account, so in a few minutes, I'm removing more than enough to pay this guy when he shows up on Thursday. I'm not taking any more chances.

And today I picked up three hours' proofreading work on a newsletter and brochure from a German sausage-seasoning company. Not what I want to be doing with my time, but it's work.

My Mistake

There are times when things are so bad that I think the worst mistake I ever made was moving to Germany in 1993. But then I reflect that, for a while, at least, I had a very exciting life as a writer for the Wall Street Journal Europe who got to travel all over the place and write about art and culture. I also had a radio show which I really enjoyed, as did my many listeners, some of whom still remember it seven years later.

There are other times when I think the worst mistake I ever made was loaning a great deal of money to a friend who has still not paid me back, and who may never do so. But neither of us could have forseen that the sure thing would be cancelled when some people flew planes into the World Trade Center. I mean, what civilian could have predicted that?

But two years ago I made a mistake which has finally caught up with me, and which has cancelled any remaining affection I may have had for living in Germany. It's a mistake anyone living here might make, so let me explain.

When I was whizzing around Europe for the Journal, I nearly always took the train. My territory was central Europe and Scandinavia, so it made sense: one day going there, one day reporting the story, one day back -- and the story would inevitably get written subconsciously on that return journey. So it made sense for me to obtain a Bahn Card, the discount card you can buy from Deutsche Bahn. Back then, there was only one kind of Bahn Card: it gave you 50% off of every ticket, and it had a Rail Plus supplement, which gave you half off of tickets on rail lines in a number of other countries. It wasn't cheap, but, as I once realized, one round-trip ticket to Copenhagen paid for it.

I bought one in 2004, but that was around when the work started to fall off spectacularly. My editor at the Journal had been replaced, and suddenly I wasn't getting any work at all from them. Or, for that matter, from anyone else, at least not the kind of work that required me to travel. I missed travelling -- I still do. But when 2005 came around, I realized I had better uses for what little money I had than a Bahn Card.

Nonetheless, although I hadn't ordered one or renewed it on the website as I'd usually done, one came in the mail. Then Deutsche Bahn tried taking the money out of my bank account, but failed, because there wasn't enough. They sent me a notice. I replied that I didn't want the card and wasn't going to pay for it or use it. And that, I thought, was the end of it.

I didn't pay for it, and I didn't use it. At the end of April, 2006, I got a stern warning from them ordering me to pay them. I wrote back and repeated that I had not requested the card, and had not used it. And that, I thought, was the end of it yet again.

It wasn't. Shortly thereafter I started getting bills from lawyers. The €64 Bahn Card debt was now encumbered with legal fees, fees for, as far as I could tell, writing me a letter. And they were big fees, too. Now, I'd gotten letters like this before from mysterious phone companies who thought I owed them money. I ignored them, and they went away. That's what I decided to do with these letters.

Big mistake. In October, they told me I owed €116.42. In November, it was suddenly €169.70. In December, it was €185.67. On December 7, I was found guilty of indebtedness by a court in Baden-Baden and a judgement was mailed to me in a jaundice-colored yellow envelope.

Now, in America, this would be a black spot on your credit record. My credit here is already terrible. For one thing, I am considered very unstable because I don't have a regularly occurring income. I live in a country where nobody is self-employed, where if you don't draw a regular salary, there's only one bank (the one I use, of course) which will allow you an account. (I once knew a guy who was hired on a freelance basis to come to Germany to teach corporate communications to a major bank. After he was ordered to close his account with them because he wasn't making regular deposits, he asked his clients what kind of message they thought they were sending. They shrugged and told him to go to another bank. He had plenty of clients in the States, so he just up and left instead.)

So I didn't think anything more of this until last week. That was when I got a letter from an Obergerichtsvollzieher, one of those words whose individual components you have to look up in the dictionary, but which eventually revealed itself to be "high court bailiff." I mentioned this to someone and was told "You are in terrible trouble. You're going to have to hide your computer and all your CDs. You're going to have to empty out your apartment. They have the right to seize everything you own in payment of the debt -- and they will. They can take your bed. They can take your silverware. They have unlimited license." I thought this was paranoia.

It's not.

They really can do all of these things. No matter if the value of the goods seized is many times the value of the debt. They will do it because they can. Can they deprive you of your means of making a living? In the United States, the law is very clear about this: you can't impound a violinist's violin, or a mechanic's tools. But in Germany, you can.

A couple of friends rushed over to help. They perused the letters, made notes, hemmed and hawed. "You know," one of them mused, "when it comes to stuff like this, Kafka was a documentarian." No kidding.

Making it worse was the fact that it was Easter weekend. One of my friends wrote a letter for me to send to the bailiff explaining things. I had a copy of the letter to Deutsche Bahn. I faxed both to the bailiff, and got ready to call him during office hours. Or should I say hour: he is available for one hour, two days a week. And my last chance for any mercy was to reach him on Tuesday.

It took thirty minutes, but I got him on the phone. Miraculously, he spoke a little English, enough to tell me that there was nothing he could do to mitigate my guilty sentence and that all I could do was pay him before April 19. Oh, and the price, which now included his fee, which was nowhere in any of the paperwork in my hands, was now €225.

A couple of weeks ago, when I got back from Texas, I found yet another note that the postal customs people had seized yet another package of the CDs people send me for review. I've taken to letting them send them back, because in most cases it'll be yet another singer-songwriter I'll wind up tossing after a couple of tracks, and the Postzollamt is way the hell down in Wilmersdorf. But this was from a label that puts out stuff I like, so I schlepped down there to rescue it. I was confronted with a sign stating that, due to a lack of personnel, waiting times had increased significantly, and that after registering, I was to wait in the new, utterly undecorated, waiting room next door. Which I did, for over an hour, a fourfold increase in their previous record. When I finally had my name called, the woman with the package asked me to open it. I told her (and pointed out on the customs label, which never does any good) that these were promotional items, that I was a journalist, and so on. She grabbed one of the CDs and pointed to the bar-code. "This has to be blacked out so that this item can't be sold!" she yelled. I told her I wasn't the one who'd sent it. "You tell them that they have to do this!" She seemed genuinely angry. Or maybe it was just the stress of working somewhere where you knew everyone you met hated you.

What these incidents drove home for me was that there are two Germanies. One is occupied by the people who are my friends and my friends' friends and husbands and wives, the ones I met when I had the (German) girlfriend who led to my moving here, the ones I hung out with when I did move, the ones I've worked with and for. Then there are the ones who run the place, obsessed with a perverted, rigid, narrow need for "Ordnung," which translates directly as "order," but is much, much more. Ordnung is conformity; Ordnung is submission; Ordnung is the petty regulations that don't let you recycle glass on Sunday, that make all onions the same size; Ordnung is why I've stopped listening to music, because I have to use headphones after 10pm no matter what, or my neighbors next door will call the police. Not because they're disturbed by it. No: because they can.

Thinking about Ordnung leads to a lot of other places I'm not going to go right now, mostly because it's a nice day and I'm trying very hard not to slip down the slope of depression that is almost inevitable when I think of what I could be doing with that €225 I'm going to be parting with soon. I've already been for a long walk (my CD player stopped working, so I went to Alexanderplatz to price a new one: looks like about €60 goes out the window on that one) and although my landlord's mother (one of the Ordnung Germans if there ever was one, as the bitter gurn that suffices for her face makes clear) is here, so far I've avoided contact with her. If the checks come in on time, I'll have the money in time for the bailiff, and -- in one of those too-good-to-be-true coincidences -- there's even a possibility that Jim's Mistake will pay for My Mistake in part.

But I'm very, very tired of Ordnung, and very, very tired of living here. I gave a lot to this city, and I never got a whole hell of a lot back. It's time to move on, to somewhere with just a little bit less Ordnung and a lot more capacity for fun.

Jim's Mistake

In 1970, I lived in Sausalito, which is the town that's at the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Despite what the town is now, back then there were still little enclaves of funk, and my apartment, needless to say, was one of them. It was set on a steep hill, so that although it was technically a basement, there was still a nice view of Richardson Bay, the fishing fleet (yes, there was still a fishing fleet), and Mt. Tamalpais.

One person I'd always inevitably get to know would be my mailman, because back then I was inundated with free records, and, less frequently, books. The records would come sometimes in outrageous boxes with promo trinkets in them, the books were always heavy, and so there was always a lot of mail at my house. At one point, my mailman was a jolly young guy with wire-framed glasses, who seemed too smart to be in this for a career -- you saw a lot of folks like that working in the Post Office in those days. This one's name was Jim, and sometimes he'd stop to chat for a moment. Nice guy.

But one day he showed up and announced that he was quitting. "Yup. I've saved up enough money and me and my girlfriend are going to do something we've always wanted to do: go to Africa." Now, this was a surprise, especially since Jim was white (and I presumed his girlfriend was, too). There was something of a vogue for middle-class black Americans to visit Africa back then, but you didn't get many white tourists from the States. It was also a surprise because I'd gotten a book in the mail called Bright Continent, by Susan Blumenthal, an American woman who'd done the same thing and published a guidebook to sub-Saharan Africa. Remember, this was in the days before Lonely Planet and so on -- it was 1974 or so, and books like this just didn't exist. I'd taken a look in it and gotten hooked; it was not only useful as a guide, but it was fun to read.

So I mentioned this to Jim, and he said sure, he'd love to look at it. "Take it with you," I suggested. "Bring it back when you get back."

And he did. It remains one of my treasures: beat up, bookmarked with odd bus tickets and harissa-can labels, annotated with corrections and amplifications. I've never been to sub-Saharan (or super-Saharan, for that matter) Africa, but I've got a book that has.

I'm not sure what happened next, but I lost track of Jim and eventually moved to Texas.

Fast forward.

Last year, I heard from Jim again. He'd found this blog, and was bemoaning the fact that he'd been in Berlin some months earlier, and hadn't known I was here. He was in Portland, Oregon now, selling real estate and hoping to find something else to do, but loving Oregon and hoping I could visit. Well, that was sort of out of the question, but it sure was good to hear from him, and yes, it was too bad that he hadn't known I was here. But, I said in my e-mail back to him, I had a friend in Eugene, Oregon, who constantly fantasized about moving to Portland but didn't seem to be doing anything about it. Not only that, I figured Jim would like this guy and maybe he could kick his butt gently enough so that he'd move and realize his dream while putting a couple of bucks in Jim's pocket.

And that's just what happened: Brett and his wife Carole had dinner with Jim one evening when they were in town for some musical event and Jim wound up showing them a place that they wound up buying. Everybody's happy: Brett's doing a lot more good work and is much happier being out of the decaying hippie/university surroundings he was in, Carole's doing fine with her artwork and other innumerable projects, and Jim's got a couple of people he likes to hang out with.

I like happy endings, myself, but there's more. To thank me for sending him customers, Jim sent me a gift. It's a €200 gift certificate redeemable at the restaurant Quarré or the "gourmet restaurant" Lorenz Adlon at the Hotel Adlon. It expires on April 19 and cannot be renewed.

And when I saw it, my heart sank. I knew he meant well, and yet the Adlon pretty much represents a huge hunk of what I don't like about this city. It's got a horrible reputation as a place to stay: I once helped an editor for Conde Nast Traveller research a story on Berlin, and he was staying there, went for a walk, and was refused re-entry because he wasn't wearing a jacket. He finally convinced the doorman to accompany him to the front desk, where they conceded that he was, indeed, a guest. Then there was the young African woman who was fired for wearing her hair in an "unconventional" style, albeit one traditional to her people -- and hardly outrageous. The stories go on and on; the high-end travellers I know avoid the place.

The idea that I could get into one of their restaurants without a jacket and tie, too, is ludicrous. That's not the way I dresss, nor is it the way you have to dress in most restaurants here. One nice thing about Berlin is that, outside of government circles, anyway, it's very informal. I don't want to eat where the Bonners eat anyway, so they can have their jackets and ties.

Jim was, understandably, distressed that I was upset by this gift. Why, he said, he'd been to the Adlon and it didn't seem like that kind of place. And couldn't I borrow a jacket and tie? (Answer: no. From whom? Nobody I know has one either!)

I've tried not thinking about this for a while, but it occurred to me recently that the clock was ticking on this gift, so I took it down the other day and saw the date. I honestly don't know what to do. I don't think they check ID when you cash it in, so maybe I should sell it. But I don't know anyone who'd want to buy it, either. Should I hit Craigslist? Just let it expire quietly in its folder here by my desk? It's only eight days away.

Some day, I hope, I'll visit Portland. I also hope I'll have enough money to take Jim out to dinner and explain the cultural nuance behind all of this. Meanwhile, I've got a white elephant with a Quadriga on it making me feel guilty.

Wallbunnies

The other day, I made a hasty decision to leave the S-Bahn at the Wedding station due to an expired ticket, and figured that, since it was almost a nice day, I'd just walk home. Reaching the former East-West border, I was gratified to see that one of my favorite bits of unknown Berlin was still intact. The last time I was around it, the sidewalk was under construction, and I figured that, being unauthorized, this delightful installation was probably long gone.

But no. And since it's Easter weekend, I went back to shoot it today.



This little fellow is set in the pavement just beyond this familiar marker:



In fact, that's why he's there. He and his brothers and sisters decorate a swath of sidewalk where Chausseestr. meets Liesenstr. -- a pretty obscure corner of town occupied by not much:



This patch of earth was a no-man's land. Now, as all Berliners know, and few outside of town do, there were two Walls. There was the big, thick one with the rounded bits stuck on top, and, some dozens of meters away, there was a thinner one with less fortification. Inbetween was no-man's land, with a path down its middle. This area was filled with all manner of impediments, with the aim of making an escape over the thin wall, across the bare area, and over the big wall to West Berlin, impossible. As we know, it was pretty effective, and it not only sealed Berliners out, but it sealed the no-man's land in.

And that's where the rabbits come in. I remember my first visit to Berlin in 1988, and climbing one of those observation towers at the edge of the Tiergarten, from which I could see the area which had once held Potsdamer Platz, the lonely scrap of a once-grand hotel the sole witness to what had stood there before the War. Inbetween, dust, rocks, scraggly shrubs and weeds, and rabbits. Lots of rabbits.



Given that I saw the Wall as a symbol of terror, as a structure which had added immeasurably to world tensions, as a (literally) concrete representation of the Communist Threat back then, it was unnerving to look over it and see...cute.

"Oh, yeah," said one of the friends who were showing me around, "they got in there somehow, and since there's nothing to threaten them, they, well, they did what rabbits do."

The Berlin Wall. And lots of rabbits. Apparently they were everywhere.

It's not that there were no threats, though. There were trip-wires attached to automatic firing devices. Hip hop hip trip, KABOOM. One less bunny.



And what about the guard dogs who patrolled with the guards? They must not have had a lot of fun: if they caught a skinny East German trying to defect, they had to give him to the humans. And since Germans love dogs -- even the brutal youth who were conscripted for guard duty on this extremely unpopular assignment must have loved dogs, being German -- who could begrudge faithful Odin a rabbit now and again?



Mmmmm! Bunny sushi!

And that's how the rabbits got in the sidewalk. After discovering them for the first time, I mentioned them to a friend who told me that an artist -- an American woman, as I remember -- had installed them in memory of the rabbits who used to live between the Walls, and who, of course, vanished as soon as the Wall was dismantled. When I first saw them, they were a bright coppery color, but as you can see, they've tarnished. There's no signature, no tag, no nothing. Just rabbits. (And just today, this friend said she had no knowledge of the rabbits or the artist, so my information may not be correct, although it's what I remember from four or five years ago). I love that this group exists in a place almost nobody has any reason to visit, on the edge of a garbage-strewn lot, on the corner of a street nobody lives on.

Not that Liesenstr. is without interest: maybe nobody lives there, but there are a bunch of graveyards, one of which has a French chapel, a French war memorial for soldiers who died in defense of the "King of Paris," and the gravestone of Theodor Fontane. I once collected some big pieces of Wall in this graveyard, and still have them in storage in Texas.

And, at the end of Liesenstr., where it stops at Gartenstr., there are two rotten railroad bridges and, recently stripped of its protective coating of vegetation, a rather large remnant of the Wall:



And, at night, rabbits. Maybe.

Last Crumbs From The Trip

The highlight of my SXSW this year was getting to interview Joe Boyd, the legendary record producer, on-stage as part of the panels program. I do wish he'd read less from his book (hey, it was on sale right there in the Convention Center; whet the audience's appetite so they'll buy!) and given me more time to ask him about stuff that wasn't in the book (and about his next one, which'll cover his years as a world music pioneer), but it was an enjoyable time, and he mentioned that he'd be in San Francisco at the same time I was in Marin, so we agreed to hook up at Village Music, the great and soon-to-be-defunct record store.

Which we did, on Tuesday morning. Showing remarkable self-control, Joe only bought a small stack of records and arranged to have them shipped to his house in London. Then, in one of those remarkable coincidences that happen all the time at Village Music, in walked an old friend of his, the woman who'd given him the biggest hit of his career, Maria Muldaur! She scampered back to her house to get him an advance copy of her new record, and Joe and I went for some coffee at a nearby shop. She met us there, and I got to snap a pic:



After we went our separate ways, I sped over to Berkeley to meet my friend Jaan for lunch at the remarkable Vik's Chaat Corner, a place I'd heard about but never gone to. It's basically a South Indian snack bar, and I was numbed into indecision by the choice. I finally settled on Bel Puri for myself, a dish I'd read about in countless Indian novels.



Described in the takeaway menu I picked up as "Crisp puffed rice mixed with onions, cilantro and potatoes with tamarind, mint, and garlic chutnies," it wasn't as exciting as it sounds, as perhaps the photo hints. Jaan, though, went for the Dahi Batata Puri, which rocked:



The description on the menu is "crisp puffed puris stuffed with potatoes and garbanzos covered with spices, yoghurt, and tamarind chutney," and it was one of those great South Indian things that balances a whole lot of different disparate elements perfectly. Afterwards, we hit the grocery store next door, and I marvelled at how much fresher the spices in there were than the ones at the Indian markets here. I also picked up a couple of those tiny Indian regional cookbooks (I'm a sucker for them, always have been) and once I decode them (ingredients often have Hindi names, but I'm getting better at them) I see some great meals in my future.

* * *

Probably the best discovery at SXSW was that Bobby Patterson, a legendary Dallas soul singer, is alive and performing. He was on the Ponderosa Stomp showcase, but went on at 1:30, which is too late for me, but the Stomp also had a day party on 6th St., so I made it over for that. The man is in top form, he had a great little band, and his between-song comments, delivered in rapid-fire surrealistic jive, made me want to hear his radio show. I managed to get a few performance shots, one of which even came out!



My old pal John T. Davis took two pix of me and Bobby afterwards, but I forgot to show him where the zoom button was, so I'll spare you those. It doesn't look, from the current Ponderosa listing, as if Patterson's playing this year's show, which is a shame, but I have to say, the lineup is, with the exception of the previously-unknown-to-me Jay Chevalier (a man with no discernable talent except for irritating the audience), absolutely incredible. If I were going to be in New Orleans on May 2 (and I'm not), I'd be there!

Another great singer and songwriter who won't be Stomping closed out SXSW for me: a rare performance by the enigmatic Swamp Dogg, who, I'm glad to say, is still in rare form. He's got a new album out, Resurrection, which I haven't listened to yet, but at least one of the songs, "They Crowned An Idiot King," is as angry as the Swamp Dogg of old. "It's 1970 and he's mad again," enthused Art Fein, who's been pushing the Swamp Dogg cause for years. I'll be doing a Fresh Air piece on him shortly. Swamp, I mean, not Art.

* * *

There were other highlights, musical, culinary, and social, and as always SXSW was overwhelming enough that I was glad for the week after so I could come down and do something else, even if that something else was an almost equally frantic trip to California. Everywhere I went, people asked me the same questions, so I felt like passing out a FAQ card:

* I thought you were moving to France. So did I; I'd anticipated selling my book proposal, but the woman who helped me develop it misrepresented herself as an agent. She wasn't, so I fired her. I'm now on my fifth agent, and he told me just before I left that he doesn't get it, either.

* So what's keeping you from moving? At the moment, €12,441.57, which, at today's Euro-Dollar exchange rate, is $16,569.65. That figure includes paying back debts, paying all my back rent, getting a new apartment in France, moving, and buying a new washing machine and couch.

* That doesn't seem like a whole lot. I hear you on Fresh Air. Don't you have any other work? Actually, no. Most editors no longer even answer queries. There's almost no work out there that I can see. That's why I'm trying to sell the book.

* Yeah, I know what you mean. I lost a lot of work this year, too. Thank heavens my wife has a job. Thank heavens you have a wife. With a job. Wouldn't mind having one of those myself.

Okay, it's Monday, New York's almost awake. Time to start moving that book forward again. One thing the past few days of being back here brought to my attention is that I don't want to be here any more. Thus, better start dealing with the cure.

John

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




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

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

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

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

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

I Might Have Dreamed This

But I'm pretty sure I didn't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

Las Migas de Austin y Califas

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

The Magic Question

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

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

Well, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And posting on my blog.

Which doesn't pay.

Las Migas de Austin, Part 1

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

* * *

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

Yet Another Decent Interval

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

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

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

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

More History Gone

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


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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crumbs From Behind The Wall

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

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

* * *

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



* * *

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

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

* * *

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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



And here's the wall on the rear building:



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

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