The Telekom wars continue, although I've found the program I want to use. The bad news is, Deutsche Telekom owns the wires going into the house, so you still have to give them €14.50 a month for the use of them. I can live with that, but not with the reported month's delay in switching over the service, which they are obliged by law to do immediately. This is typical of them: back when I was getting my first telephone number here, they pretended there was an 8-to-10-week delay in obtaining the number because there weren't enough to go around. Yeah, sure.
***
Summer is upon us, no doubt about that. If you can't tell by the temperature, you can tell by the broken glass -- beer bottles -- in the street.
I was just in Neukölln, a very heavily Turkish part of town, and there was a fruit stand on every street-corner. I can tell you just by walking past them that the apricots, peaches, and strawberries are ripe. What was odd, though, was the lack of vegetables. Germans just have no use for vegetables (except for the sacred asparagus, which is over), so while I'll have lots of access to fruit over the next weeks, I'll still have to search out vegetables.
***
One side-effect of summer is that people take off their clothes. I don't mean the famous FKK (Freikörperkultur), or public nudity, which you see in parks and beaches. (I heard an unverified story that the Munich City Council had to pass a law making it mandatory for sunbathers returning to work after a sunbathing lunch in the city's English Garden to put their clothes back on before getting on public transportation). They just wear less. This is mostly a disaster around here. There are acres of flesh exposed which should be left covered for esthetic reasons. The worst offenders are people with tattoos. My old pal Rollo Banks, one of America's leading tattoo artists, used to go ballistic over the quality of European tattooing. He had even set himself up in business in Hamburg with a buddy once, and was appalled at the work being done by European artists. The other thing that he was adamant about was keeping good tattoo work covered. Suntan and sunburn cause the edges of the work to blur, and that sort of thing is very difficult to repair. Not that I think any of the sunburned folks I see walking around with appalling tattoos that would send Rollo screaming particularly care. Hell, if they cared, they'd never have allowed those hideous designs on their flesh in the first place. As always, the worst offenders are men, but the bulky women with bizarre tattoos which are suddenly exposed in summertime -- and there are a lot of them -- make me wonder what race of mutants I'm living among here.
***
Another oddity of German summertime is movies. A guy I used to know in the film business said that only an idiot -- or an adamant Hollywood studio -- would dare open a new film in the summertime because people just don't go to the movies then around here. So yeah, we're getting Batman Begins and War of the Worlds, but they won't rake in the bucks the way the fall films will. People here get little enough time outdoors, and when the weather's like this, they grab the opportunity. I like to joke that Germans start hanging out outdoors as soon as the ice stops forming on the puddles on the sidewalk, and that's almost accurate. But now, the beer gardens are full, people eat outdoors on the sidewalk at restaurants (and the Berlin Police walk from restaurant to restaurant with clipboards of documents showing how much of the sidewalk each restaurant is allowed to claim and tape-measures, eager to fine someone who's a centimeter or so over the limit), and the parks are jammed during sunny days with people just zoning out in the sun. Like the strawberries, the sun is almost a seasonal drug that needs to be consumed in large quantities while it's available. And hey, just walking around, I've been doing my bit.
Friday, June 24, 2005
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Payback
I have been offered liberation. Alice wants to rescue me.
Trouble is, I don't know if I'm going to take her up on it. See Alice is a telecom, one of dozens who are now competing for Germans' business. After what I just went through -- and have been through numerous times in the past year with an increasingly intolerant Deutsche Telekom -- I've vowed to switch telecom providers. And that's turning into a headache.
Oh, everyone wants my business. I used to have to dodge phone pitchsters all day -- including ones from Alice -- because they couldn't believe that a man my age, at home at 2pm, was actually working: I should be retired and getting my pension. So I wound up in the database, and, Germany's supposed iron-clad privacy laws notwithstanding -- the same ones that won't allow Telekom to send you an itemized phone bill (true!) -- I get hit about three times a week.
But how to thread through the competing and conflicting pitches and claims? There are some things I already know. Number one, Deutsche Telekom and I are through. They don't want my business. Number two, Arcor is out. A few years ago, a guy showed up at my front door and told me Arcor would do all kinds of things for free that Telekom was charging me for. I signed up for a trial run, only to discover the next day that each and every thing he had said to me was a lie, and that Arcor was going door-to-door targeting foreigners with poor German skills who, they realized, would have trouble with the fine print on the contracts if they bothered to read it. I sent them a registered letter, they backed off. I have since heard other stories of severe problems with them.
But that only eliminates two players. All I need is a telephone and DSL service. I don't want a cell phone or anything connected with it. I have a cell phone for travel only (or I think I do: Carl mailed it back to me from Japan, so I hope it doesn't get destroyed as a terrorist device), and the rest of the time my trusty answering machine takes messages. You'd think that was easy.
Yesterday I auditioned three players. I picked up a brochure from a storefront that's opened in the neighborhood for Versatel, and I see they offer me three programs, with three different download speeds. Since I don't do much MP3 downloading and no video downloading, how much do I need? And then there's the telephone tariffs. Yup: we pay for local calls here, and it's expensive. Another of the attractions of the new telecoms is cheaper calling. Versatel has a very complicated calling structure, and I haven't heard anything good or bad about them, their advertising blitz notwithstanding.
I looked at Alice's website yesterday, and their offers seem attractive enough -- especially the calling. Three drawbacks, though. One, I hear it takes a month to get hooked up, and I want to get hooked up yesterday. Two, I hear they're owned by Italian Telecom, and have you ever owned any technical product from Italy that, like, worked? And three, there's Alice "herself," the rather blowsy model who is everywhere around Berlin on multi-story ads tacked onto the sides of buildings, on subway posters, in-store displays, and magazine ads, all in really uncomfortable-looking poses. Check out the website, you'll see more of her than you want. I have no idea why this should make me feel negatively about the company, but there you are.
Then there's 1+1, who I'd never heard of, but whose website is unsexy, all business, and has a lot of nice-sounding offers I'm going to have to spend some time with over a hot dictionary. From what I can make out, they'd require me to get a new phone, at the very least, so I could do DSL telephony. Losing the one I have wouldn't exactly be a great tragedy. But...is 1+1 The One?
One thing, though. A friend who's made the switch reports that these companies really do care if their customers are happy. That's gotta spell doom for Deutsche Telekom somewhere down the line...
Trouble is, I don't know if I'm going to take her up on it. See Alice is a telecom, one of dozens who are now competing for Germans' business. After what I just went through -- and have been through numerous times in the past year with an increasingly intolerant Deutsche Telekom -- I've vowed to switch telecom providers. And that's turning into a headache.
Oh, everyone wants my business. I used to have to dodge phone pitchsters all day -- including ones from Alice -- because they couldn't believe that a man my age, at home at 2pm, was actually working: I should be retired and getting my pension. So I wound up in the database, and, Germany's supposed iron-clad privacy laws notwithstanding -- the same ones that won't allow Telekom to send you an itemized phone bill (true!) -- I get hit about three times a week.
But how to thread through the competing and conflicting pitches and claims? There are some things I already know. Number one, Deutsche Telekom and I are through. They don't want my business. Number two, Arcor is out. A few years ago, a guy showed up at my front door and told me Arcor would do all kinds of things for free that Telekom was charging me for. I signed up for a trial run, only to discover the next day that each and every thing he had said to me was a lie, and that Arcor was going door-to-door targeting foreigners with poor German skills who, they realized, would have trouble with the fine print on the contracts if they bothered to read it. I sent them a registered letter, they backed off. I have since heard other stories of severe problems with them.
But that only eliminates two players. All I need is a telephone and DSL service. I don't want a cell phone or anything connected with it. I have a cell phone for travel only (or I think I do: Carl mailed it back to me from Japan, so I hope it doesn't get destroyed as a terrorist device), and the rest of the time my trusty answering machine takes messages. You'd think that was easy.
Yesterday I auditioned three players. I picked up a brochure from a storefront that's opened in the neighborhood for Versatel, and I see they offer me three programs, with three different download speeds. Since I don't do much MP3 downloading and no video downloading, how much do I need? And then there's the telephone tariffs. Yup: we pay for local calls here, and it's expensive. Another of the attractions of the new telecoms is cheaper calling. Versatel has a very complicated calling structure, and I haven't heard anything good or bad about them, their advertising blitz notwithstanding.
I looked at Alice's website yesterday, and their offers seem attractive enough -- especially the calling. Three drawbacks, though. One, I hear it takes a month to get hooked up, and I want to get hooked up yesterday. Two, I hear they're owned by Italian Telecom, and have you ever owned any technical product from Italy that, like, worked? And three, there's Alice "herself," the rather blowsy model who is everywhere around Berlin on multi-story ads tacked onto the sides of buildings, on subway posters, in-store displays, and magazine ads, all in really uncomfortable-looking poses. Check out the website, you'll see more of her than you want. I have no idea why this should make me feel negatively about the company, but there you are.
Then there's 1+1, who I'd never heard of, but whose website is unsexy, all business, and has a lot of nice-sounding offers I'm going to have to spend some time with over a hot dictionary. From what I can make out, they'd require me to get a new phone, at the very least, so I could do DSL telephony. Losing the one I have wouldn't exactly be a great tragedy. But...is 1+1 The One?
One thing, though. A friend who's made the switch reports that these companies really do care if their customers are happy. That's gotta spell doom for Deutsche Telekom somewhere down the line...
Friday, June 17, 2005
Free Willie!
I don't know how many of you readers share my passion for the music of Austin songwriter Jon Dee Graham, but I find his songwriting so compelling, so passionate, and so adult that I try to go see him every chance I get, either by himself or with his stuperstar companions the Resentments. There's just something about his stage presence and quiet wit that is endlessly entertaining and thought-provoking. It was at a Resentments gig here about a year and a half ago that I finally decided to move to France, and at the one I saw in Austin this March, there was a hilarious bit where Jon Dee's son, Willie, came up to the stage to request that his dad do "Big Sweet Life," one of his best songs.
Willie's been a presence on Jon Dee's albums for as long as he's been solo. As I understand it, it was Willie who suggested that the first album be called Escape From Monster Island, which it is, although there's no song by that name or with that theme anywhere on the disc. Like many Austin father-musicians, Jon Dee also arranges touring schedules around his family's needs, and shows up at a lot of the Dads Who Rock shows.
So I was horrified to read yesterday, in an e-mail from my pal M, that Willie's got a problem. I'll turn the floor over to her:
Here's what I found about the benefit on June 24 at the Continental and Saxon; donation info is below:
Jon Dee Graham's son Willie has developed Legg Perthes, a rare childhood form of avascular necrosis of the hip. For reasons unknown, the head of the femur loses its blood circulation and dies. The Graham family lost insurance coverage when their insurance provider filed Chapter 11. Now Willie's condition is considered pre-existing by other companies, making him uninsurable. They may be looking at several years of treatment, physical therapy and surgery.
The music community is responding with a benefit on Friday, June 24 at The Continental Club. Doors open at 6pm and the show begins at 6:30pm with The Resentments, Matt The Electrician & Beaver Nelson, Walter Tragert, Troy Campbell, Kathy McCarty, Steve Poltz, Bob Schneider, Shawn Colvin, The New Hot Damn (Trish Murphy, Kacy Crowley, Renee Woodward, Honky, Ian McLagan & The Bump Band, James McMurtry, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Alejandro Escovedo & Charlie Sexton & Jon Dee Graham in that order.
The evening will be recorded by Oscar & Grammy-winning engineer/producer Chet Himes for a benefit CD to be released by Freedom Records.
A silent auction will also take place that evening from 6 p.m. - 12:30 a.m. in the space formerly occupied by Gomi at 1313 S. Congress, next door to The Continental Club and upstairs from Southside Tattoos.
There will be a companion benefit at the Saxon Pub on the same night, with Steve Poltz, The Skunks, Standing Waves, Stephen Bruton and more to be confirmed!
Can't make it to the show, but still want to help out? Contributions can be made payable to the Willie Graham Legg Perthes Fund and mailed to: The Willie Graham Legg Perthes Fund, c/o RajiWorld, 1810 Airole Way, Austin TX 78704.
A PayPal account has been set up now, so if you have PayPal you can make an online donation using the payment address of jondeeco@earthlink.net. A clickable PayPal icon will soon be available at Jon Dee Graham.com, RajiWorld.com and our website. Advance tickets will go on sale at The Continental Club and Waterloo Records on Wednesday, June 14. The tickets
will be $25 in advance and $30 at the door.
***
As of today, the PayPal address is going to change, but if you go to Jon Dee's website, which I linked to above, there's more up-to-date info available.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: one thing the Europeans recognize that Americans can't seem to get their brains around is that health care is a right, not a privilege. It's tragic that Willie Graham has to find this out at this particular moment in his life, but thanks to the PayPal address, we can all make a small contribution to help. I'm going to, not only to help out one of my favorite performers, but because stories like this PISS ME OFF.
Willie's been a presence on Jon Dee's albums for as long as he's been solo. As I understand it, it was Willie who suggested that the first album be called Escape From Monster Island, which it is, although there's no song by that name or with that theme anywhere on the disc. Like many Austin father-musicians, Jon Dee also arranges touring schedules around his family's needs, and shows up at a lot of the Dads Who Rock shows.
So I was horrified to read yesterday, in an e-mail from my pal M, that Willie's got a problem. I'll turn the floor over to her:
Here's what I found about the benefit on June 24 at the Continental and Saxon; donation info is below:
Jon Dee Graham's son Willie has developed Legg Perthes, a rare childhood form of avascular necrosis of the hip. For reasons unknown, the head of the femur loses its blood circulation and dies. The Graham family lost insurance coverage when their insurance provider filed Chapter 11. Now Willie's condition is considered pre-existing by other companies, making him uninsurable. They may be looking at several years of treatment, physical therapy and surgery.
The music community is responding with a benefit on Friday, June 24 at The Continental Club. Doors open at 6pm and the show begins at 6:30pm with The Resentments, Matt The Electrician & Beaver Nelson, Walter Tragert, Troy Campbell, Kathy McCarty, Steve Poltz, Bob Schneider, Shawn Colvin, The New Hot Damn (Trish Murphy, Kacy Crowley, Renee Woodward, Honky, Ian McLagan & The Bump Band, James McMurtry, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Alejandro Escovedo & Charlie Sexton & Jon Dee Graham in that order.
The evening will be recorded by Oscar & Grammy-winning engineer/producer Chet Himes for a benefit CD to be released by Freedom Records.
A silent auction will also take place that evening from 6 p.m. - 12:30 a.m. in the space formerly occupied by Gomi at 1313 S. Congress, next door to The Continental Club and upstairs from Southside Tattoos.
There will be a companion benefit at the Saxon Pub on the same night, with Steve Poltz, The Skunks, Standing Waves, Stephen Bruton and more to be confirmed!
Can't make it to the show, but still want to help out? Contributions can be made payable to the Willie Graham Legg Perthes Fund and mailed to: The Willie Graham Legg Perthes Fund, c/o RajiWorld, 1810 Airole Way, Austin TX 78704.
A PayPal account has been set up now, so if you have PayPal you can make an online donation using the payment address of jondeeco@earthlink.net. A clickable PayPal icon will soon be available at Jon Dee Graham.com, RajiWorld.com and our website. Advance tickets will go on sale at The Continental Club and Waterloo Records on Wednesday, June 14. The tickets
will be $25 in advance and $30 at the door.
***
As of today, the PayPal address is going to change, but if you go to Jon Dee's website, which I linked to above, there's more up-to-date info available.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: one thing the Europeans recognize that Americans can't seem to get their brains around is that health care is a right, not a privilege. It's tragic that Willie Graham has to find this out at this particular moment in his life, but thanks to the PayPal address, we can all make a small contribution to help. I'm going to, not only to help out one of my favorite performers, but because stories like this PISS ME OFF.
Potato Soup
I spent about four hours at this office yesterday, catching up on all the stuff I hadn't been able to deal with at home because my phone was cut off (I got the next month's bill in the mail yesterday, which means I wasn't even a month overdue when they cut me off -- wonder if this is legal?), and some of the time was spent chatting with another of the journalists, a science reporter who'd just transcribed an interview with the author of a book on the physics of soccer.
Turned out we left at about the same time and were headed in the same direction, me to my house, and he to lunch. "I've found a very nice place that nobody knows about," he said. "It's in the Theaterhaus Berlin," which building houses rehearsal spaces, and where my friend the dancer has worked. "Most of the stuff around the office is just sandwiches and fast food." Oh, I said, but that's not all true. There's a really good Vietnamese place up another block... "Ah, but who wants to eat Vietnamese all the time?" he interrupted. "Here, you can get really good food every day for a good price. They always have potato soup!"
And here, I reflected later, is an immutable fact about Germans and German food: no one wants to eat foreign cuisines if they can help it (not that it's any different in France) and German cuisine does not recognize the seasons. Oh, it does to an extent: there's asparagus season (after which arbitrary date you can no longer buy asparagus anywhere), and strawberry season (currently on as, I believe, asparagus season is waning), and pumpkin season (in the fall). But day to day, Germans eat the same stuff. I remember being shocked in my first apartment one Sunday when it was in the mid-80s (F) outside and the whole building smelled of pork roast. And another sultry August, when I lived across from a supermarket, I saw them advertising this week's special: Eisbein, the fatty pig's trotter so emblematic of Berlin cooking.
Just last week the bakery at my supermarket introduced a new product, a large, doughnut-shaped loaf called the Sommerloch, which is pretty funny, considering. (Sommerloch is a German term for that part of the summer when nothing happens because everyone's on vacation: it means summer hole, so you see where the bread gets its name). To advertise it, they'd photographed a loaf sitting on a pretty checkered tablecloth on a picnic table, with some greenery to be seen in the surrounding and there, on the table with it, was a butter knife and a tub labelled Party Schmalz. That's right, folks: lard. Lard with crisp-fried onions, to be sure, but lard just the same.
It's easy enough to see how this cuisine has become so omnipresent here, given that about nine months out of the year, it's pretty cool, if not downright cold. There's something satisfying about a nice bowl of potato soup...in December. I don't much care for Eisbein (and yes, I've tried it), but one of those nice pork roasts like a Krustenbraten goes down well on a wet, wintry day. But for heaven's sakes, celebrate the summer when it's here! And by this, I don't mean the ubiquitous Grillparty, where someone fires up a tiny grill with some of the ultra-fast-burning charcoal they seem to sell here (after, of course, getting the permission of 100% of one's neighbors and positioning it so that no smoke will blow in the noses of anyone who's likely to call the cops on you based on the Food Odor Laws) and warms up some sausages which were probably all ready to eat cold. I'm thinking of a range of cold dishes, of seasonal vegetables, of lighter fare.
But they don't do that here. At least not in Berlin; I can't say what goes on elsewhere in this country, but the food here is unremittingly monochrome, seasoned only with too much salt and the odd dash of nutmeg. It's like we don't have seasons, just plod along day after day, each day the same. No wonder so many of the people in the street look defeated and unhappy. The seasons change, but their senses are only slightly aware of it. And this, I think, is one of the more interesting discoveries I've made about why I'm not happy here: people repress their senses. There is no sensuality to life here, no letting go. Cold, repressed Protestantism is the way things have been here for hundreds of years, interspersed with discipline and war. What a legacy! What a waste of human potential!
Turned out we left at about the same time and were headed in the same direction, me to my house, and he to lunch. "I've found a very nice place that nobody knows about," he said. "It's in the Theaterhaus Berlin," which building houses rehearsal spaces, and where my friend the dancer has worked. "Most of the stuff around the office is just sandwiches and fast food." Oh, I said, but that's not all true. There's a really good Vietnamese place up another block... "Ah, but who wants to eat Vietnamese all the time?" he interrupted. "Here, you can get really good food every day for a good price. They always have potato soup!"
And here, I reflected later, is an immutable fact about Germans and German food: no one wants to eat foreign cuisines if they can help it (not that it's any different in France) and German cuisine does not recognize the seasons. Oh, it does to an extent: there's asparagus season (after which arbitrary date you can no longer buy asparagus anywhere), and strawberry season (currently on as, I believe, asparagus season is waning), and pumpkin season (in the fall). But day to day, Germans eat the same stuff. I remember being shocked in my first apartment one Sunday when it was in the mid-80s (F) outside and the whole building smelled of pork roast. And another sultry August, when I lived across from a supermarket, I saw them advertising this week's special: Eisbein, the fatty pig's trotter so emblematic of Berlin cooking.
Just last week the bakery at my supermarket introduced a new product, a large, doughnut-shaped loaf called the Sommerloch, which is pretty funny, considering. (Sommerloch is a German term for that part of the summer when nothing happens because everyone's on vacation: it means summer hole, so you see where the bread gets its name). To advertise it, they'd photographed a loaf sitting on a pretty checkered tablecloth on a picnic table, with some greenery to be seen in the surrounding and there, on the table with it, was a butter knife and a tub labelled Party Schmalz. That's right, folks: lard. Lard with crisp-fried onions, to be sure, but lard just the same.
It's easy enough to see how this cuisine has become so omnipresent here, given that about nine months out of the year, it's pretty cool, if not downright cold. There's something satisfying about a nice bowl of potato soup...in December. I don't much care for Eisbein (and yes, I've tried it), but one of those nice pork roasts like a Krustenbraten goes down well on a wet, wintry day. But for heaven's sakes, celebrate the summer when it's here! And by this, I don't mean the ubiquitous Grillparty, where someone fires up a tiny grill with some of the ultra-fast-burning charcoal they seem to sell here (after, of course, getting the permission of 100% of one's neighbors and positioning it so that no smoke will blow in the noses of anyone who's likely to call the cops on you based on the Food Odor Laws) and warms up some sausages which were probably all ready to eat cold. I'm thinking of a range of cold dishes, of seasonal vegetables, of lighter fare.
But they don't do that here. At least not in Berlin; I can't say what goes on elsewhere in this country, but the food here is unremittingly monochrome, seasoned only with too much salt and the odd dash of nutmeg. It's like we don't have seasons, just plod along day after day, each day the same. No wonder so many of the people in the street look defeated and unhappy. The seasons change, but their senses are only slightly aware of it. And this, I think, is one of the more interesting discoveries I've made about why I'm not happy here: people repress their senses. There is no sensuality to life here, no letting go. Cold, repressed Protestantism is the way things have been here for hundreds of years, interspersed with discipline and war. What a legacy! What a waste of human potential!
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Summer Arrives...Maybe
Monday, I decided to give myself a treat and go across town to the Centro Italia, the big Italian-food wholesale market. I was out of pasta (they sell Voiello, Barilla's professional line, and it's absolutely the best), anchovies, and wanted some good olive oil, and so I budgeted €30 for a trip.
One other thing, I realized as the train sped around the Ring, was salsiccie, what Americans call "Italian sausage," but which is not quite the same thing. On Mondays, Centro Italia had told me, they get it from Italy. So I hit the meat counter first, and asked the guy if he had any. "In summer," he said, and then broke off. He gestured towards the outdoors. "In summer, which the calendar tells us is happening now, we get salsiccie on Wednesdays."
I knew what he meant. After a small heat wave, right about when I hit the road in France, we were in for more mid-50s (F) rainy weather. I began to despair: there's a side-effect of global climate change which affects the Gulf Stream, and those who think we're in for rough times, climatically speaking, note that if the Gulf Stream changes course as a result of this phenomenon, the mean temperature of Northern Europe will drop dramatically, severely affecting agriculture here. It was coming on to mid-June, and as yet there was no heat!
But then everything changed. It's turned very, very livable here, with sun, warm but not hot temperatures, and pretty much everybody feeling good.
I walked down Friedrichstr. yesterday, in fact, and saw two great things in the street. The first was a Jamaican kid who had a chessboard set up on the sidewalk. Posters surrounding him announced that his father in Jamaica had prostate cancer, and he wanted to go back to give him emotional support. "I need 800 [crossed out] 350 [crossed out] 200 Euros to pay for the plane ticket." The deal was, he played 3-minute chess. The rules were posted on another poster. He was hard at work with another player when I chanced upon him, and each banged the clock after making a move. A huge crowd had gathered around to watch, and in a dramatic swoop, the Jamaican guy slid his queen to his opponent's king, picked the king up, tossed it over his shoulder and caught it. The crowd erupted in applause, and he shook the other guy's hand. "Thanks a lot. You're better than anyone else I've played. Want another game?" The other guy, in his early 20s, from the looks of it, was rattled and begged off. People were tossing coins in the box he'd set up. I'm no chess fan, but this, I thought, was great street theater.
Then, barely two blocks later, I came upon two guys, a fiddle and a hand drum, playing haunting, weird music. They were both brown-skinned, but I couldn't quite figure out where they were from, based on either their faces or their music. The violin case had a couple of CDs in them, but they were labelled "World Music," which, duhh, yeah, I guess it was. There were Cajun strains, some odd voicings, and an oddly halting rhythm being tapped out on the drum. Something felt odd, and I realized I was standing in front of a small film crew who were taping them, so I walked on.
So things would be ideal if Telekom, in its wisdom, hadn't turned me off again for being a month and a day late with my payment. Sorry, guys, I was on the road, and returned to discover that a magazine I did some work for over a month ago still hadn't paid me. The magazine? Invest in Germany.
Like that would be a good idea.
So I'm posting from an office I'm able to use temporarily, and hoping I get on before the middle of next week. I can't use the office on weekends, either. Nor can I negotiate with Telekom. A friend just got turned off, and asked a German friend of hers to intercede. "She can't work unless her DSL is on," her friend told the Telekom person. "We don't care," was the reply.
Gotta love 'em. At least they're consistent.
One other thing, I realized as the train sped around the Ring, was salsiccie, what Americans call "Italian sausage," but which is not quite the same thing. On Mondays, Centro Italia had told me, they get it from Italy. So I hit the meat counter first, and asked the guy if he had any. "In summer," he said, and then broke off. He gestured towards the outdoors. "In summer, which the calendar tells us is happening now, we get salsiccie on Wednesdays."
I knew what he meant. After a small heat wave, right about when I hit the road in France, we were in for more mid-50s (F) rainy weather. I began to despair: there's a side-effect of global climate change which affects the Gulf Stream, and those who think we're in for rough times, climatically speaking, note that if the Gulf Stream changes course as a result of this phenomenon, the mean temperature of Northern Europe will drop dramatically, severely affecting agriculture here. It was coming on to mid-June, and as yet there was no heat!
But then everything changed. It's turned very, very livable here, with sun, warm but not hot temperatures, and pretty much everybody feeling good.
I walked down Friedrichstr. yesterday, in fact, and saw two great things in the street. The first was a Jamaican kid who had a chessboard set up on the sidewalk. Posters surrounding him announced that his father in Jamaica had prostate cancer, and he wanted to go back to give him emotional support. "I need 800 [crossed out] 350 [crossed out] 200 Euros to pay for the plane ticket." The deal was, he played 3-minute chess. The rules were posted on another poster. He was hard at work with another player when I chanced upon him, and each banged the clock after making a move. A huge crowd had gathered around to watch, and in a dramatic swoop, the Jamaican guy slid his queen to his opponent's king, picked the king up, tossed it over his shoulder and caught it. The crowd erupted in applause, and he shook the other guy's hand. "Thanks a lot. You're better than anyone else I've played. Want another game?" The other guy, in his early 20s, from the looks of it, was rattled and begged off. People were tossing coins in the box he'd set up. I'm no chess fan, but this, I thought, was great street theater.
Then, barely two blocks later, I came upon two guys, a fiddle and a hand drum, playing haunting, weird music. They were both brown-skinned, but I couldn't quite figure out where they were from, based on either their faces or their music. The violin case had a couple of CDs in them, but they were labelled "World Music," which, duhh, yeah, I guess it was. There were Cajun strains, some odd voicings, and an oddly halting rhythm being tapped out on the drum. Something felt odd, and I realized I was standing in front of a small film crew who were taping them, so I walked on.
So things would be ideal if Telekom, in its wisdom, hadn't turned me off again for being a month and a day late with my payment. Sorry, guys, I was on the road, and returned to discover that a magazine I did some work for over a month ago still hadn't paid me. The magazine? Invest in Germany.
Like that would be a good idea.
So I'm posting from an office I'm able to use temporarily, and hoping I get on before the middle of next week. I can't use the office on weekends, either. Nor can I negotiate with Telekom. A friend just got turned off, and asked a German friend of hers to intercede. "She can't work unless her DSL is on," her friend told the Telekom person. "We don't care," was the reply.
Gotta love 'em. At least they're consistent.
Monday, June 13, 2005
Teacup Shot
I mentioned recently that Chuck Krall had taken the first pictures of the Wailers in America, and that his picture of Bob Marley with a teacup in his hand was pretty iconic. Chuck was good enough to send me a (defaced, but hey, there are pirates out there) copy of that photo, so I thought I'd post it. Any of you out there who want to get in touch with Chuck about a print can e-mail me, okay?
Tour Notes #4: Bourges And Beyond
June 1-4
From Strasbourg, we had a challenging drive to get to Bourges. One of the big problems with France is that it's so damn Paris-centric. Paris, for instance, is the center of the whole rail system, unlike in Germany, where there are regional hubs like Frankfurt, Berlin, Cologne, and Hannover. In France, to get from A to B, no matter where A and B are, you go through Paris if you're using the fast trains. This is particularly annoying to Strasbourgians, who manufacture the TGV trains just outside of town, but won't get a TGV line until 2007, making it hard to get anywhere from Strasbourg.
We got to see the factory early the next morning, in fact, because we were using Mappy, which seems at first glance, to be an extraordinary service: door-to-door driving (or walking!) directions throughout Europe. Most of the time, it functions well, but you'd be strongly advised to check anything it tells you to do against a map, as Carl found out in Montreuil, when, walking around where we were, he noticed that Mappy was sending us down one-way streets the wrong way. On the whole, it works well, but there are bugs, as we discovered.
Once we got turned around, we had a really uneventful time for several hours. I was exhausted: the tension from losing my passport and driving around Strasbourg, which is not made for driving in (not that that stops anyone), had wrecked me, and I let Carl take the first shift. Gradually, we grew closer to the Cote d'Or, where the road signs read like a trip through the higher-priced section of an upscale wine store: Nuits-St.-Georges, Chablis, Chateauneuf (although not de Pape, which is elsewhere). All the great names of red and white Burgundy. Past Beaune, we climbed into the hills, and castles and monasteries began to appear on the hilltops. This part was all done at freeway speed, and lunch at a freeway stop was memorably bad.
After lunch, though, Mappy had us get off the freeway, and at that point, things got really interesting as we threaded our way through mind-blowingly picturesque French countryside, the Mourvan, a district of Burgundy which informed the cooking at my favorite restaurant in Dijon, Coum' Chez Eux, which I see is now gone, dammit. Anyway, we turned off the freeway at Avallon, and quickly hit Vézelay, which might have been created by the French Tourist Board, having been a fairly important settlement back in the 1100s and seemingly untouched since then, except for the cars. Mappy insisted -- and I saw no alternative -- that we follow the Tonne River to Clamecy, and then get on a two-lane road all the way to Charité-sur-Loire and thence straight into Bourges.
Bourges itself is pretty colorful, dominated by a gigantic cathedral and with plenty of buildings from every epoch of its history. We were originally going to stay in a hotel by the railroad station with the appealing name Arcane Hotel, but our hosts looked at the advanced sales and put us in a very strange apartment which looked like a combination of a dormitory and a jail (albeit one with lace curtains depicting clowns), with metal bunk beds in all the rooms and huge locks on their doors. But it was better located than the Arcane, a five-minute walk from the gig at the School of Fine and Applied Art, which itself is a former convent. The promoters were nice folks, who had a sort of collective endeavor in a former factory on the outskirts of town which included an exhibition space, currently hosting a Michael Snow piece, a circus school, a print works, and who nows what else. Clearly idealists, they had forgotten to note that the date they'd booked Carl and the ladies for was right in the middle of exam week, thereby guaranteeing that despite free admission for the art students, nobody would come. (They also listed Min Xiao-Fen as being from Japan, which didn't please her much, needless to say). In fact, most of the audience seemed to be members of the collective, although they mostly enjoyed the show.
Still, there were two sets, with a solo from each person, followed by a performance of Lauburu, which I thought went very well. Afterwards we trooped out to the factory for dinner. I'd joked with Carl that there were two possibilities here: either there were a couple of gay boys out there sorry to miss the show but working their tails off on some fantastic local cuisine, or we were going to enjoy that old standby of jokes on the Well, Hearty Lesbian Sludge. I asked him if he'd ever seen The Young Ones, the legendary BBC comedy show, with Neil The Hippie constantly cooking lentils, but he'd never heard of it. I still managed to give him a good enough idea that the expression on his face when he walked into the communal dining room and saw a huge bowl of lentils there was worth photographing. Not that I did. The sincerity went into the cooking, which was nearly tasteless, but plentiful. I socked back some wine, and we all went to see the Michael Snow installation, which was fun, but we all pled exhaustion (not that it was too hard) and went back to the clown jail and crashed.
The next day, we split up. We had a day off, and the idea was to go back to Paris, but we'd been warned that there would probably be a 24-hour warning strike by the rail workers, so we decided to stay in cheap, pretty Bourges if we could score another day at the apartment and just hang out. Carl, though, had to drive to Aix-en-Provence, where there was sure to be good food (there was), and a conference of some sort where he was appearing on a panel. Thus, I had to show the ladies Bourges, see if we could score tickets for the next day, and chill some. We got to stay at the apartment, which was good, and after breakfast, I set out to orient the ladies, who mostly wanted to shop. Since the Cathedral was the obvious way to orient yourself, being on a hilltop with two main roads running from it, I took them there to demonstrate that, and we lucked out by hitting it at noon, when the justifiably-famous stained glass windows from the 12th Century were all algow in the brilliant summer sunshine. (It was also cool in there: Bourges was in the middle of a heat wave, which wasn't entirely a bad thing).
Once I had them sorted out, I wandered around the streets of the tourist district, and found the covered market, which wasn't open. We'd agreed to meet back at the apartment in mid-afternoon, but I got back early, having done some shopping of my own, which included an industrial-strength French dictionary, something I'd been looking for for years, and a wireless mouse to use with my laptop, because I just can't get the hang of the trackpad.
That evening, we dined outdoors, which was nice, at a restaurant where the waiter was absolutely intolerant of two Oriental females wanting soup (in the summer? I tried to explain, but...) and not being familiar with French cuisine. I'd have disliked him more if the food hadn't been good, but it was, and if he hadn't forgotten to charge me for the bottle of Sancerre I drank (except for the bit Yumiko drizzled on the black cherry sorbet I'd ordered for dessert: gal's a born improvisor, I tell ya). In fact, I think he pushed a bunch of wrong buttons on the computer, he was so eager to get rid of us. And this also reminded me that the memory of the food one eats can be altered by the circumstances: I think of this as a bad meal, because of all the tension this guy generated at our table, but if I remember just the amazing foie gras paté and rabbit dish I had, it's another matter entirely.
The next day we caught a train to Paris, where we hogged most of a compartment with our instruments and luggage, although a lanky Malian guy and a chubby Malian woman (who didn't know each other until sitting down) squeezed in. The guy was really friendly, wondering what we were all doing, and very happy to hear that he was among musicians. Outside the window, the heat wave dissipated into drizzle, though, and I have to say the countryside we passed through didn't look so hot, either. We reached the Gare d'Austerlitz after what had obviously been a hard shower, and waited 30 minutes for a cab to show up, weirdly enough. I'd have thought there'd be a huge line of them.
Back in Montreuil, back at the Instances Chavirés, it felt like old home week. The ladies were going to do solos and improvised duets, and there was also the duo of a French guy playing hurdy-gurdy and a Japanese guitarist. Fortunately, the ladies opted to open the show. I say fortuntely because the hurdy-gurdy guy was awful, and the Japanese guy wound up doing a solo set after their duet and played ear-searingly loud guitar. We finally got out of there at about midnight, and headed back to say our good-byes. Yumiko was off to the airport at 7am, I was off to the Gare du Nord at 9:30, and Xiao-Fen had a day off, which didn't please her much. I hope she found something to do.
Riding back to Berlin on the train, I realized that, with all the madness and frustration and boredom and heat and wet, it had been a fantastic week, and that I enjoyed being in France a lot more than I did Germany. People's body language is just different somehow, and as Germans began to get on the train, they were obvious from the second I saw them. There was a stiffness, and an air of tentativeness to their demeanor, although there was aggression there, too. I don't have any illusions about not cursing out the French after a few days' living there, but I think their faults may well be more in line with mine. At any rate, I'm trying like hell to get some work going now. I want to go back and stay.
From Strasbourg, we had a challenging drive to get to Bourges. One of the big problems with France is that it's so damn Paris-centric. Paris, for instance, is the center of the whole rail system, unlike in Germany, where there are regional hubs like Frankfurt, Berlin, Cologne, and Hannover. In France, to get from A to B, no matter where A and B are, you go through Paris if you're using the fast trains. This is particularly annoying to Strasbourgians, who manufacture the TGV trains just outside of town, but won't get a TGV line until 2007, making it hard to get anywhere from Strasbourg.
We got to see the factory early the next morning, in fact, because we were using Mappy, which seems at first glance, to be an extraordinary service: door-to-door driving (or walking!) directions throughout Europe. Most of the time, it functions well, but you'd be strongly advised to check anything it tells you to do against a map, as Carl found out in Montreuil, when, walking around where we were, he noticed that Mappy was sending us down one-way streets the wrong way. On the whole, it works well, but there are bugs, as we discovered.
Once we got turned around, we had a really uneventful time for several hours. I was exhausted: the tension from losing my passport and driving around Strasbourg, which is not made for driving in (not that that stops anyone), had wrecked me, and I let Carl take the first shift. Gradually, we grew closer to the Cote d'Or, where the road signs read like a trip through the higher-priced section of an upscale wine store: Nuits-St.-Georges, Chablis, Chateauneuf (although not de Pape, which is elsewhere). All the great names of red and white Burgundy. Past Beaune, we climbed into the hills, and castles and monasteries began to appear on the hilltops. This part was all done at freeway speed, and lunch at a freeway stop was memorably bad.
After lunch, though, Mappy had us get off the freeway, and at that point, things got really interesting as we threaded our way through mind-blowingly picturesque French countryside, the Mourvan, a district of Burgundy which informed the cooking at my favorite restaurant in Dijon, Coum' Chez Eux, which I see is now gone, dammit. Anyway, we turned off the freeway at Avallon, and quickly hit Vézelay, which might have been created by the French Tourist Board, having been a fairly important settlement back in the 1100s and seemingly untouched since then, except for the cars. Mappy insisted -- and I saw no alternative -- that we follow the Tonne River to Clamecy, and then get on a two-lane road all the way to Charité-sur-Loire and thence straight into Bourges.
Bourges itself is pretty colorful, dominated by a gigantic cathedral and with plenty of buildings from every epoch of its history. We were originally going to stay in a hotel by the railroad station with the appealing name Arcane Hotel, but our hosts looked at the advanced sales and put us in a very strange apartment which looked like a combination of a dormitory and a jail (albeit one with lace curtains depicting clowns), with metal bunk beds in all the rooms and huge locks on their doors. But it was better located than the Arcane, a five-minute walk from the gig at the School of Fine and Applied Art, which itself is a former convent. The promoters were nice folks, who had a sort of collective endeavor in a former factory on the outskirts of town which included an exhibition space, currently hosting a Michael Snow piece, a circus school, a print works, and who nows what else. Clearly idealists, they had forgotten to note that the date they'd booked Carl and the ladies for was right in the middle of exam week, thereby guaranteeing that despite free admission for the art students, nobody would come. (They also listed Min Xiao-Fen as being from Japan, which didn't please her much, needless to say). In fact, most of the audience seemed to be members of the collective, although they mostly enjoyed the show.
Still, there were two sets, with a solo from each person, followed by a performance of Lauburu, which I thought went very well. Afterwards we trooped out to the factory for dinner. I'd joked with Carl that there were two possibilities here: either there were a couple of gay boys out there sorry to miss the show but working their tails off on some fantastic local cuisine, or we were going to enjoy that old standby of jokes on the Well, Hearty Lesbian Sludge. I asked him if he'd ever seen The Young Ones, the legendary BBC comedy show, with Neil The Hippie constantly cooking lentils, but he'd never heard of it. I still managed to give him a good enough idea that the expression on his face when he walked into the communal dining room and saw a huge bowl of lentils there was worth photographing. Not that I did. The sincerity went into the cooking, which was nearly tasteless, but plentiful. I socked back some wine, and we all went to see the Michael Snow installation, which was fun, but we all pled exhaustion (not that it was too hard) and went back to the clown jail and crashed.
The next day, we split up. We had a day off, and the idea was to go back to Paris, but we'd been warned that there would probably be a 24-hour warning strike by the rail workers, so we decided to stay in cheap, pretty Bourges if we could score another day at the apartment and just hang out. Carl, though, had to drive to Aix-en-Provence, where there was sure to be good food (there was), and a conference of some sort where he was appearing on a panel. Thus, I had to show the ladies Bourges, see if we could score tickets for the next day, and chill some. We got to stay at the apartment, which was good, and after breakfast, I set out to orient the ladies, who mostly wanted to shop. Since the Cathedral was the obvious way to orient yourself, being on a hilltop with two main roads running from it, I took them there to demonstrate that, and we lucked out by hitting it at noon, when the justifiably-famous stained glass windows from the 12th Century were all algow in the brilliant summer sunshine. (It was also cool in there: Bourges was in the middle of a heat wave, which wasn't entirely a bad thing).
Once I had them sorted out, I wandered around the streets of the tourist district, and found the covered market, which wasn't open. We'd agreed to meet back at the apartment in mid-afternoon, but I got back early, having done some shopping of my own, which included an industrial-strength French dictionary, something I'd been looking for for years, and a wireless mouse to use with my laptop, because I just can't get the hang of the trackpad.
That evening, we dined outdoors, which was nice, at a restaurant where the waiter was absolutely intolerant of two Oriental females wanting soup (in the summer? I tried to explain, but...) and not being familiar with French cuisine. I'd have disliked him more if the food hadn't been good, but it was, and if he hadn't forgotten to charge me for the bottle of Sancerre I drank (except for the bit Yumiko drizzled on the black cherry sorbet I'd ordered for dessert: gal's a born improvisor, I tell ya). In fact, I think he pushed a bunch of wrong buttons on the computer, he was so eager to get rid of us. And this also reminded me that the memory of the food one eats can be altered by the circumstances: I think of this as a bad meal, because of all the tension this guy generated at our table, but if I remember just the amazing foie gras paté and rabbit dish I had, it's another matter entirely.
The next day we caught a train to Paris, where we hogged most of a compartment with our instruments and luggage, although a lanky Malian guy and a chubby Malian woman (who didn't know each other until sitting down) squeezed in. The guy was really friendly, wondering what we were all doing, and very happy to hear that he was among musicians. Outside the window, the heat wave dissipated into drizzle, though, and I have to say the countryside we passed through didn't look so hot, either. We reached the Gare d'Austerlitz after what had obviously been a hard shower, and waited 30 minutes for a cab to show up, weirdly enough. I'd have thought there'd be a huge line of them.
Back in Montreuil, back at the Instances Chavirés, it felt like old home week. The ladies were going to do solos and improvised duets, and there was also the duo of a French guy playing hurdy-gurdy and a Japanese guitarist. Fortunately, the ladies opted to open the show. I say fortuntely because the hurdy-gurdy guy was awful, and the Japanese guy wound up doing a solo set after their duet and played ear-searingly loud guitar. We finally got out of there at about midnight, and headed back to say our good-byes. Yumiko was off to the airport at 7am, I was off to the Gare du Nord at 9:30, and Xiao-Fen had a day off, which didn't please her much. I hope she found something to do.
Riding back to Berlin on the train, I realized that, with all the madness and frustration and boredom and heat and wet, it had been a fantastic week, and that I enjoyed being in France a lot more than I did Germany. People's body language is just different somehow, and as Germans began to get on the train, they were obvious from the second I saw them. There was a stiffness, and an air of tentativeness to their demeanor, although there was aggression there, too. I don't have any illusions about not cursing out the French after a few days' living there, but I think their faults may well be more in line with mine. At any rate, I'm trying like hell to get some work going now. I want to go back and stay.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Tour Notes #3: Strasbourg
May 31
Xiao-Fen and Yumiko were along on this trip because of Carl's piece Lauburu, which they were going to perform twice, in Strasbourg and Bourges. The piece goes like this: Carl has a series of events which he's composed, and put onto a guide CD. He transferred the material on the CD onto a pair of iPods, which the two women would wear. They would hear the material, and react to it with voice and/or instruments, individually or in duos, according to the score. Meanwhile, Carl transformed the material -- which the audience would never hear in its original form -- on his laptop.
Strasbourg was a full six-hour drive from Montreuil, broken only by a lunch-stop at a rest stop with an excellent salad bar/buffet, which turned out to be the third-best meal on the trip. Because of the time, and because the three hadn't rehearsed the piece yet, there was some anxiety about getting it right and doing the sound-check, so we drove straight to the Contemporary Art Museum, where we parked the huge beast of a Hyundai 7-seater.
What followed would have been a comedy of errors if time hadn't been so crucial: the iPods refused to start where they were supposed to. Everyone was on the verge of tearing their hair out: every time Carl counted down to the point where they were to start by pressing the buttons, each performer got different tracks. At some point, the soundman walked out: it was dinner-time for him, and nothing would interrupt that sacred moment, so Carl had to keep jumping up and running hither and yon in the room to hear what was happening. As for me, I gave my feedback, and finally things worked well enough so that they were able to run through the piece a couple of times. With only an hour to show-time, it was decided not to check into the hotel until after the concert and the dinner afterwards.
Carl was wiped, and went into the dressing room to crash. The ladies got made up. I wandered around and changed into better clothes, because I knew I'd be selling CDs after the show. I also checked the art museum's shop, because I'd forgotten to pack any t-shirts. Not that I need more t-shirts, but I was pretty stinky after the heat, and a fresh one seemed like a good idea. I am now able to report that the Strasbourg Contemporary Art Museum is the only museum in the Western world that does not sell t-shirts of any kind. Go figure.
Opening the show was a duo from Strasbourg called La P'tite Maison, who had spread two tables on stage with a bewildering variety of electronic equipment and toys and gadgets, which usually is a neat warning of a group without much to say, but plenty of junk to say it with. Nope. They held me rapt for their nearly hour-long set, starting by turning on an oscillating fan, with a mike at one side, so that the drone came and went. What they had in common with Carl's music was a sense of musicality: there were no tricks here at all, and what looked like gimmicks were for the most part seamlessly integrated into their explorations of calm, lush soundscapes. I sat rapt for their entire hour-long set. Take a bow, Jérome Pergolesi and Philippe Petitgenet!
I don't know if it was because the afternoon's maddening technical problems had made everyone hyper-aware, but the performance of Lauburu was stunning, crackling with energy as everyone attacked their parts with vigor. The audience, which nearly filled the 160-seat auditorium, loved it, and the applause afterwards was sincere and strong. I was probably the only person there, though, who detected a "Whew" from the three performers.
The museum's musical curator, Patrick Javault, hopped into the van with us and I drove a very meandering route through the medieval streets of Strasbourg to the restaurant where we were going to have our dinner. Unfortunately, once we got there, it had already closed. No matter, there was another. It, too, was closed. Finally, we hit an Alsatian restaurant (Strasbourg is in Alsace, of course, and this means the food is very close to German -- something I'd been hoping to avoid, since I was getting out of Germany for a week), Au Coin des Pucelles on the rue des Pucelles. Wags had kept knocking off the "I" from the restaurant's sign, so now they leave it off permanently. The meal was fine: I had a terrine with three cold salads, while others had choucroute (that's sauerkraut to me) and the part of a pig's foot they call Eisbein here in Berlin.
Finally, we made it to the hotel, the only one on the trip, as it turned out, the mis-named Comfort Inn. When I got to my microscopic room, I discovered my passport was missing. This, along with the charcuterie trying to digest in my stomach, made for a restless night. Just as I was settling off to sleep at last, my toilet kit fell off of the tiny shelf in the bathroom and the contents hit the floor with an alarming sound. Ah, well, it could have been worse: the stuff could have fallen in the toilet. And the passport showed up the next day, right where it should have been.
***
I'm alarmed to note that when I tried to download the pictures I took of this trip -- specifically some of the soundcheck -- my computer no longer recognizes that there are pictures in the camera. If I can fix this glitch, I'll come back and insert pictures in this post. I blame iPhoto.
Xiao-Fen and Yumiko were along on this trip because of Carl's piece Lauburu, which they were going to perform twice, in Strasbourg and Bourges. The piece goes like this: Carl has a series of events which he's composed, and put onto a guide CD. He transferred the material on the CD onto a pair of iPods, which the two women would wear. They would hear the material, and react to it with voice and/or instruments, individually or in duos, according to the score. Meanwhile, Carl transformed the material -- which the audience would never hear in its original form -- on his laptop.
Strasbourg was a full six-hour drive from Montreuil, broken only by a lunch-stop at a rest stop with an excellent salad bar/buffet, which turned out to be the third-best meal on the trip. Because of the time, and because the three hadn't rehearsed the piece yet, there was some anxiety about getting it right and doing the sound-check, so we drove straight to the Contemporary Art Museum, where we parked the huge beast of a Hyundai 7-seater.
What followed would have been a comedy of errors if time hadn't been so crucial: the iPods refused to start where they were supposed to. Everyone was on the verge of tearing their hair out: every time Carl counted down to the point where they were to start by pressing the buttons, each performer got different tracks. At some point, the soundman walked out: it was dinner-time for him, and nothing would interrupt that sacred moment, so Carl had to keep jumping up and running hither and yon in the room to hear what was happening. As for me, I gave my feedback, and finally things worked well enough so that they were able to run through the piece a couple of times. With only an hour to show-time, it was decided not to check into the hotel until after the concert and the dinner afterwards.
Carl was wiped, and went into the dressing room to crash. The ladies got made up. I wandered around and changed into better clothes, because I knew I'd be selling CDs after the show. I also checked the art museum's shop, because I'd forgotten to pack any t-shirts. Not that I need more t-shirts, but I was pretty stinky after the heat, and a fresh one seemed like a good idea. I am now able to report that the Strasbourg Contemporary Art Museum is the only museum in the Western world that does not sell t-shirts of any kind. Go figure.
Opening the show was a duo from Strasbourg called La P'tite Maison, who had spread two tables on stage with a bewildering variety of electronic equipment and toys and gadgets, which usually is a neat warning of a group without much to say, but plenty of junk to say it with. Nope. They held me rapt for their nearly hour-long set, starting by turning on an oscillating fan, with a mike at one side, so that the drone came and went. What they had in common with Carl's music was a sense of musicality: there were no tricks here at all, and what looked like gimmicks were for the most part seamlessly integrated into their explorations of calm, lush soundscapes. I sat rapt for their entire hour-long set. Take a bow, Jérome Pergolesi and Philippe Petitgenet!
I don't know if it was because the afternoon's maddening technical problems had made everyone hyper-aware, but the performance of Lauburu was stunning, crackling with energy as everyone attacked their parts with vigor. The audience, which nearly filled the 160-seat auditorium, loved it, and the applause afterwards was sincere and strong. I was probably the only person there, though, who detected a "Whew" from the three performers.
The museum's musical curator, Patrick Javault, hopped into the van with us and I drove a very meandering route through the medieval streets of Strasbourg to the restaurant where we were going to have our dinner. Unfortunately, once we got there, it had already closed. No matter, there was another. It, too, was closed. Finally, we hit an Alsatian restaurant (Strasbourg is in Alsace, of course, and this means the food is very close to German -- something I'd been hoping to avoid, since I was getting out of Germany for a week), Au Coin des Pucelles on the rue des Pucelles. Wags had kept knocking off the "I" from the restaurant's sign, so now they leave it off permanently. The meal was fine: I had a terrine with three cold salads, while others had choucroute (that's sauerkraut to me) and the part of a pig's foot they call Eisbein here in Berlin.
Finally, we made it to the hotel, the only one on the trip, as it turned out, the mis-named Comfort Inn. When I got to my microscopic room, I discovered my passport was missing. This, along with the charcuterie trying to digest in my stomach, made for a restless night. Just as I was settling off to sleep at last, my toilet kit fell off of the tiny shelf in the bathroom and the contents hit the floor with an alarming sound. Ah, well, it could have been worse: the stuff could have fallen in the toilet. And the passport showed up the next day, right where it should have been.
***
I'm alarmed to note that when I tried to download the pictures I took of this trip -- specifically some of the soundcheck -- my computer no longer recognizes that there are pictures in the camera. If I can fix this glitch, I'll come back and insert pictures in this post. I blame iPhoto.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Tour Notes #2: The Fringe
May 29-31
Montreuil is an eastern suburb of Paris, the city which does not grow. Years ago, they drew a circle, defined everything inside it as Paris, and everything outside as "banlieu," or suburb. This hasn't kept the suburbs from expanding, but Montreuil is close enough in that at one point I was walking down the street in a straight line and kept entering and leaving Paris.
It's also home to the Instants Chavirés, a small but wonderful performance space on a back street whose name translates as "overturned lawsuits," for which there must be a reason. And it was there I was headed after arrival, on time, at the Gare du Nord, or, rather, to its offices. Although the Instants weren't promoting Carl's concert on Monday night, they were providing the space for Satoko, the actual promoter, to present the show, and they were kind enough to offer us three small rooms, each with two beds, which are used to put up performers on the floor above the office.
I wasn't sure where to go as I stepped off the train at the Metro station Robespierre, but as I was walking down the platform to the exit, someone called my name. It was Carl and another guy, Charles, a musician who played the avant-garde circuit and had been sent to the airport to fetch him, winding up on the same train as me. Good thing, too, because I never would have found the place myself, even with the map they'd provided. Nor would I have had a clue how to arouse someone within.
Soon, we were in our rooms, and the next question was getting some dinner. Montreuil's Rue de Paris, which we were right off of, was a string of döner kebab and halal lamburger places, but I wanted French food, and was determined to introduce Carl, all of whose pieces are named after restaurants, to my favorite place in Paris, Chez Paul. The weather had broken, and it was raining intermittently, and Carl seemed sure I didn't know where I was going, but this place is like a beacon in my mind, and after making sure we were headed the right way down the rue de Charonne, we eventually got there.
Not reserving is not a good idea at Chez Paul, incidentally, even though they've added a huge downstairs room since I was there in January. It took about 15 minutes for a table to clear, and maybe I'm flattering myself, but I think the reason we were told to wait and others were turned away was because the lady behind the bar recognized me. Great duck wing rillettes, great rabbit terrine, and great pieces of beef with accompanying potatoes -- Parisian comfort food -- awaited us, along with a fine bottle of Bordeaux at a reasonable price. Man, I thought, I was going to have fun on this trip! I was, fortunately, blissfully unaware that it was the last but one edible meal I'd have the entire week.
The next day, we awoke at about the same time, scored croissants at the bakery across the street, and I made strong coffee. After it hit, we headed off to the Gare du Nord to pick up the rental car, since I'd been unable to arrange a more convenient pickup place. Thus began an extremely frustrating day: we arrived at Europcar only to discover that I'd forgotten my passport and Carl had forgotten his license. By this time it was time to head to Charles de Gaulle airport to pick up the first of Carl's accompanying musicians, Min Xiao-Fen, who plays the pipa, a Chinese lute. Fortunately, the train to CDG leaves from the Gare du Nord. Unfortunately, we got on the wrong one, because the signboard was busted. Off in the middle of nowhere at the end of the line -- and not even at the station, but out in a yard -- we were discovered by a train worker who told us how to get on a train back to the junction where we could get on the right train. Carl was very worried we'd be late, but it looked to me like there was plenty of time.
There was: Xiao-Fen's plane was three hours late. Carl handed me the cell phone and told me to wait at the airport, which was jammed with Americans undergoing the ultra-strict security check that American airlines, and no others, demand. I have never seen lines like that at an airport. I sat in the deserted smoking section and read every word in the Herald Tribune, then sauntered around the eating area looking for something edible. I'd actually had a wonderful meal at CDG once, but it must have been another terminal, so I went to the cafeteria and got the grease-and-salt plate, aka charcuterie, When I emerged and walked back to the arrivals board, Xiao-Fen's plane had miraculously picked up 30 minutes, and before long, we were headed towards the Metro, on our way to meet Carl at the Europcar place.
The one non-idiotic moment of the whole pre-concert period happened when I, a Westerner with an Asian woman, met a Westerner with an Asian woman and a baby, and they asked me if we were headed into Paris. I said yes, and they gave us two Paris Visit tickets, good for unlimited Metro travel. Ordinarily, these aren't considered a very good investment, but they'll take you to CDG -- which is a 7-Euro trip -- and to Montreuil, so I was very happy to have them. They'd nipped in for a look at the city between planes, and were flying out.
Then came the comedy of errors. I had the cell phone and was expecting to hear from Carl, but it remained silent. We got to Gare du Nord, and he wasn't at Europcar. We called the Instances, and they told us he was out to lunch at a kebab place. We told them we were at the Gare du Nord, and Xiao-Fen decided to have a sandwich. About 30 minutes later, I called Instances again, and they said they didn't know where he was. Well, where he was was at Europcar, waiting for us, but we didn't think to look there because Xiao-Fen was tired and wanted to go to the house. So we did, found no Carl, and, checking my watch, I saw I had to go get our second musician, Yumiko Tanaka. So I turned on my heel, got the Paris Visit ticket from Xiao-Fen, and went back, this time to CDG 1, which involves taking an unmarked shuttle bus from the Metro station. Yumiko's plane had already landed, but the passengers took forever getting into the terminal. By 6 or so we were in Montreuil, and I was already exhausted. Carl, though, was livid: where had I been? He'd waited three hours at Europcar and finally rented the thing himself! As it turned out, much later we found that there was some weird problem relating to calling the cell phone from a regular phone, but at this point, we didn't know that.
The Instances people had decided that it'd be a treat to have a real home-cooked meal, so we had polenta, some sort of eggplant thing, and hard-cooked pork chops. Also present was the opening act, a Greek guy living in Barcelona, who performed in a tent, for some reason. At least the wine was okay.
And Carl's solo concert went very well. He improvises, using samples and software he's written, but, unlike many laptop performer-composers, he's musical. Which is not to say catchy, hummable melodies, but there's an immersion in sound and a sense of structure -- which may be entirely illusory -- that's deeply engaging. At some times, the sounds are easier to take than at others, but he's been doing this, one way or another, for a couple of decades, and the experience shows. Yet, like most laptop performer-composers, he's most frequently heard in tiny rooms like the Instances, where there were about 30 people in the audience, and makes his money teaching at a technical university near Nagoya, in Japan.
The van was parked near the office. The next day, we'd drive to Strasbourg, all the way across France to the German border.
Montreuil is an eastern suburb of Paris, the city which does not grow. Years ago, they drew a circle, defined everything inside it as Paris, and everything outside as "banlieu," or suburb. This hasn't kept the suburbs from expanding, but Montreuil is close enough in that at one point I was walking down the street in a straight line and kept entering and leaving Paris.
It's also home to the Instants Chavirés, a small but wonderful performance space on a back street whose name translates as "overturned lawsuits," for which there must be a reason. And it was there I was headed after arrival, on time, at the Gare du Nord, or, rather, to its offices. Although the Instants weren't promoting Carl's concert on Monday night, they were providing the space for Satoko, the actual promoter, to present the show, and they were kind enough to offer us three small rooms, each with two beds, which are used to put up performers on the floor above the office.
I wasn't sure where to go as I stepped off the train at the Metro station Robespierre, but as I was walking down the platform to the exit, someone called my name. It was Carl and another guy, Charles, a musician who played the avant-garde circuit and had been sent to the airport to fetch him, winding up on the same train as me. Good thing, too, because I never would have found the place myself, even with the map they'd provided. Nor would I have had a clue how to arouse someone within.
Soon, we were in our rooms, and the next question was getting some dinner. Montreuil's Rue de Paris, which we were right off of, was a string of döner kebab and halal lamburger places, but I wanted French food, and was determined to introduce Carl, all of whose pieces are named after restaurants, to my favorite place in Paris, Chez Paul. The weather had broken, and it was raining intermittently, and Carl seemed sure I didn't know where I was going, but this place is like a beacon in my mind, and after making sure we were headed the right way down the rue de Charonne, we eventually got there.
Not reserving is not a good idea at Chez Paul, incidentally, even though they've added a huge downstairs room since I was there in January. It took about 15 minutes for a table to clear, and maybe I'm flattering myself, but I think the reason we were told to wait and others were turned away was because the lady behind the bar recognized me. Great duck wing rillettes, great rabbit terrine, and great pieces of beef with accompanying potatoes -- Parisian comfort food -- awaited us, along with a fine bottle of Bordeaux at a reasonable price. Man, I thought, I was going to have fun on this trip! I was, fortunately, blissfully unaware that it was the last but one edible meal I'd have the entire week.
The next day, we awoke at about the same time, scored croissants at the bakery across the street, and I made strong coffee. After it hit, we headed off to the Gare du Nord to pick up the rental car, since I'd been unable to arrange a more convenient pickup place. Thus began an extremely frustrating day: we arrived at Europcar only to discover that I'd forgotten my passport and Carl had forgotten his license. By this time it was time to head to Charles de Gaulle airport to pick up the first of Carl's accompanying musicians, Min Xiao-Fen, who plays the pipa, a Chinese lute. Fortunately, the train to CDG leaves from the Gare du Nord. Unfortunately, we got on the wrong one, because the signboard was busted. Off in the middle of nowhere at the end of the line -- and not even at the station, but out in a yard -- we were discovered by a train worker who told us how to get on a train back to the junction where we could get on the right train. Carl was very worried we'd be late, but it looked to me like there was plenty of time.
There was: Xiao-Fen's plane was three hours late. Carl handed me the cell phone and told me to wait at the airport, which was jammed with Americans undergoing the ultra-strict security check that American airlines, and no others, demand. I have never seen lines like that at an airport. I sat in the deserted smoking section and read every word in the Herald Tribune, then sauntered around the eating area looking for something edible. I'd actually had a wonderful meal at CDG once, but it must have been another terminal, so I went to the cafeteria and got the grease-and-salt plate, aka charcuterie, When I emerged and walked back to the arrivals board, Xiao-Fen's plane had miraculously picked up 30 minutes, and before long, we were headed towards the Metro, on our way to meet Carl at the Europcar place.
The one non-idiotic moment of the whole pre-concert period happened when I, a Westerner with an Asian woman, met a Westerner with an Asian woman and a baby, and they asked me if we were headed into Paris. I said yes, and they gave us two Paris Visit tickets, good for unlimited Metro travel. Ordinarily, these aren't considered a very good investment, but they'll take you to CDG -- which is a 7-Euro trip -- and to Montreuil, so I was very happy to have them. They'd nipped in for a look at the city between planes, and were flying out.
Then came the comedy of errors. I had the cell phone and was expecting to hear from Carl, but it remained silent. We got to Gare du Nord, and he wasn't at Europcar. We called the Instances, and they told us he was out to lunch at a kebab place. We told them we were at the Gare du Nord, and Xiao-Fen decided to have a sandwich. About 30 minutes later, I called Instances again, and they said they didn't know where he was. Well, where he was was at Europcar, waiting for us, but we didn't think to look there because Xiao-Fen was tired and wanted to go to the house. So we did, found no Carl, and, checking my watch, I saw I had to go get our second musician, Yumiko Tanaka. So I turned on my heel, got the Paris Visit ticket from Xiao-Fen, and went back, this time to CDG 1, which involves taking an unmarked shuttle bus from the Metro station. Yumiko's plane had already landed, but the passengers took forever getting into the terminal. By 6 or so we were in Montreuil, and I was already exhausted. Carl, though, was livid: where had I been? He'd waited three hours at Europcar and finally rented the thing himself! As it turned out, much later we found that there was some weird problem relating to calling the cell phone from a regular phone, but at this point, we didn't know that.
The Instances people had decided that it'd be a treat to have a real home-cooked meal, so we had polenta, some sort of eggplant thing, and hard-cooked pork chops. Also present was the opening act, a Greek guy living in Barcelona, who performed in a tent, for some reason. At least the wine was okay.
And Carl's solo concert went very well. He improvises, using samples and software he's written, but, unlike many laptop performer-composers, he's musical. Which is not to say catchy, hummable melodies, but there's an immersion in sound and a sense of structure -- which may be entirely illusory -- that's deeply engaging. At some times, the sounds are easier to take than at others, but he's been doing this, one way or another, for a couple of decades, and the experience shows. Yet, like most laptop performer-composers, he's most frequently heard in tiny rooms like the Instances, where there were about 30 people in the audience, and makes his money teaching at a technical university near Nagoya, in Japan.
The van was parked near the office. The next day, we'd drive to Strasbourg, all the way across France to the German border.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Tour Notes #1: Schulz
May 29
I don't know where he came from and I don't know where he went, which is fine with me.
As I predicted, there wasn't a single unreserved seat on the train from Berlin to Cologne, four hours' journey in a high-speed InterCityExpress train. I've done this before, and wound up hurting all over. The curves are taken at speed, and your body reacts by leaning into them, but if you don't have something to hold onto, you stagger and, often, fall. Also, the only place to stand is between cars, and that part isn't air conditioned.
Karen told me the thing to do was to head straight into the restaurant car, grab a seat, and order a juice. I should have listened to her; as it was, I went from one end of the train to the other looking for a seat and not finding one. The World Church Days was on in Cologne, there was a rumor the Pope was going to be there, and the football finals had just ended in Berlin, which drew another sort of crowd, so the train was packed with people you'd ordinarily cross the street to avoid.
I wound up in the bar, which was packed with football fans and their wives celebrating the discovery of Deutsche Bahn's Weekend Special: a coke, mineral water, or Warsteiner for €1.85. Naturally, theirs was Warsteiner. There must have been 40 people, all drinking, all chain-smoking, in that end of the car. The other end had tables, and they were completely full.
So the little guy with the battered bag stood out. He walked in, took a look around, and then leaned against the wall, his bag between his feet. I'd guess he was around my age, with hangdog eyes, thinning hair, and skin the color of clay. The expression on his face was clearly that of someone who'd been told he could never have another drink again. He'd obeyed, but he didn't like it. He took his jacket off and lit a cigarette.
The bar continued to fill up with people buying things to take back to their seats and people from the non-smoking section who'd gone in there to smoke. My eyes were stinging. The guy next to me put his cigarette out and draped his jacket over his bag, then squatted.
We came to a station, and nobody got off, but some people got on. Among them was an Indian couple who didn't appear to have reservations. The little guy saw them come into the restaurant end of the car and his eyes tightened. They had two big bags, and were dragging them along, this middle-aged couple with the air of bewilderment I see on a lot of Indians here: why on earth did we come to Germany, they seem to be saying. It was real tight getting into the bar, and as they squeezed through the corridor linking the bar to the restaurant, the Indian guy's shoe touched the jacket.
"Hey, nigger! That jacket's clean!" the little man barked with a ferocity I'd never have credited him with. I'm not sure the Indian guy even understood. At any rate, he didn't register a thing and moved on.
At Bielefeld, about half-way to Cologne, some people got off, and one table in the restaurant cleared out. The little guy made a beeline for it, and, after a moment's reflection, I did, too. A young woman was picking at a breakfast, and a skinny guy with too much cologne on was reading a newspaper, underlining bits of it, and making notes in the margins. I sat next to the woman, and the little guy sat next to the other guy, who occasionally took out a notepad on which he was writing a numbered list.
Man, it was good to sit down. I ordered a Pepsi (Coke has been usurped on Deutsche Bahn) and nursed it like crazy, since it was one of the little Weekend Special glasses. Not only was I sitting, but there was no smoke. I took out my precious New Yorker, which had cost me €10.50 despite a $4.95 Canada/Foreign cover price, and started to read. The little guy pulled out a cell phone and dialled. "Uwe? Schulz! I'm on the train. Hallo? Hallo?" He stared at it, then clicked it off and put it back in his pocket. Meanwhile, the list-maker and the young woman were conversing, she, it seemed to me, reluctantly. As we drew into a station, she made a move to leave, packing her stuff up. I hadn't heard any of their conversation, but he drew out a card and handed it to her. "Perhaps you will have need of my services," he said, and I could hear the "Uhhh, sure" tone in her voice as she thanked him. I scooted over into her place. Schulz took out the phone again. "Uwe? Schulz! I'm on the train. Hallo? Hallo?"
Another guy sat down. He, it developed, was a liturgical choreographer, which fascinated the list-maker, and, naturally, precipitated a torrent of conversation from the choreographer. I read the New Yorker.
It was getting greyer outside. I knew it'd have cooled off by the time I got to Paris, and that it'd probably be raining. There would be a reserved seat on the Thalys, the Dutch/Belgian/French train that would take me from Cologne to Paris Nord. There wouldn't be any liturgical choreographers, either.
And no Schulz. He finally managed to hang on to the connection with Uwe long enough to tell him the train was on time. Then he got up, adjusted his precious jacket, picked up his funky suitcase, and shuffled away.
I found myself entertaining a fantasy. The Indian was a doctor. At some time in the not-too-distant future, whatever condition had mandated Schulz's sobriety would act up and send him to the hospital. The doctor would save his life, which, after all, is his job. And Schulz would go on living, pissed that he would now have to endure a few more miserable years on this earth.
Good-bye, Schulz.
I don't know where he came from and I don't know where he went, which is fine with me.
As I predicted, there wasn't a single unreserved seat on the train from Berlin to Cologne, four hours' journey in a high-speed InterCityExpress train. I've done this before, and wound up hurting all over. The curves are taken at speed, and your body reacts by leaning into them, but if you don't have something to hold onto, you stagger and, often, fall. Also, the only place to stand is between cars, and that part isn't air conditioned.
Karen told me the thing to do was to head straight into the restaurant car, grab a seat, and order a juice. I should have listened to her; as it was, I went from one end of the train to the other looking for a seat and not finding one. The World Church Days was on in Cologne, there was a rumor the Pope was going to be there, and the football finals had just ended in Berlin, which drew another sort of crowd, so the train was packed with people you'd ordinarily cross the street to avoid.
I wound up in the bar, which was packed with football fans and their wives celebrating the discovery of Deutsche Bahn's Weekend Special: a coke, mineral water, or Warsteiner for €1.85. Naturally, theirs was Warsteiner. There must have been 40 people, all drinking, all chain-smoking, in that end of the car. The other end had tables, and they were completely full.
So the little guy with the battered bag stood out. He walked in, took a look around, and then leaned against the wall, his bag between his feet. I'd guess he was around my age, with hangdog eyes, thinning hair, and skin the color of clay. The expression on his face was clearly that of someone who'd been told he could never have another drink again. He'd obeyed, but he didn't like it. He took his jacket off and lit a cigarette.
The bar continued to fill up with people buying things to take back to their seats and people from the non-smoking section who'd gone in there to smoke. My eyes were stinging. The guy next to me put his cigarette out and draped his jacket over his bag, then squatted.
We came to a station, and nobody got off, but some people got on. Among them was an Indian couple who didn't appear to have reservations. The little guy saw them come into the restaurant end of the car and his eyes tightened. They had two big bags, and were dragging them along, this middle-aged couple with the air of bewilderment I see on a lot of Indians here: why on earth did we come to Germany, they seem to be saying. It was real tight getting into the bar, and as they squeezed through the corridor linking the bar to the restaurant, the Indian guy's shoe touched the jacket.
"Hey, nigger! That jacket's clean!" the little man barked with a ferocity I'd never have credited him with. I'm not sure the Indian guy even understood. At any rate, he didn't register a thing and moved on.
At Bielefeld, about half-way to Cologne, some people got off, and one table in the restaurant cleared out. The little guy made a beeline for it, and, after a moment's reflection, I did, too. A young woman was picking at a breakfast, and a skinny guy with too much cologne on was reading a newspaper, underlining bits of it, and making notes in the margins. I sat next to the woman, and the little guy sat next to the other guy, who occasionally took out a notepad on which he was writing a numbered list.
Man, it was good to sit down. I ordered a Pepsi (Coke has been usurped on Deutsche Bahn) and nursed it like crazy, since it was one of the little Weekend Special glasses. Not only was I sitting, but there was no smoke. I took out my precious New Yorker, which had cost me €10.50 despite a $4.95 Canada/Foreign cover price, and started to read. The little guy pulled out a cell phone and dialled. "Uwe? Schulz! I'm on the train. Hallo? Hallo?" He stared at it, then clicked it off and put it back in his pocket. Meanwhile, the list-maker and the young woman were conversing, she, it seemed to me, reluctantly. As we drew into a station, she made a move to leave, packing her stuff up. I hadn't heard any of their conversation, but he drew out a card and handed it to her. "Perhaps you will have need of my services," he said, and I could hear the "Uhhh, sure" tone in her voice as she thanked him. I scooted over into her place. Schulz took out the phone again. "Uwe? Schulz! I'm on the train. Hallo? Hallo?"
Another guy sat down. He, it developed, was a liturgical choreographer, which fascinated the list-maker, and, naturally, precipitated a torrent of conversation from the choreographer. I read the New Yorker.
It was getting greyer outside. I knew it'd have cooled off by the time I got to Paris, and that it'd probably be raining. There would be a reserved seat on the Thalys, the Dutch/Belgian/French train that would take me from Cologne to Paris Nord. There wouldn't be any liturgical choreographers, either.
And no Schulz. He finally managed to hang on to the connection with Uwe long enough to tell him the train was on time. Then he got up, adjusted his precious jacket, picked up his funky suitcase, and shuffled away.
I found myself entertaining a fantasy. The Indian was a doctor. At some time in the not-too-distant future, whatever condition had mandated Schulz's sobriety would act up and send him to the hospital. The doctor would save his life, which, after all, is his job. And Schulz would go on living, pissed that he would now have to endure a few more miserable years on this earth.
Good-bye, Schulz.
From The Misty Past
This gem appeared in the e-mail the other day, and I've been staring at it ever since. I don't actually remember listening to Marley play the guitar, because my major memory of this evening was of various Wailers and hangers-on getting me extremely stoned and then pulling a quick room switch to get rid of me. Marley always seemed to have a visceral dislike for me, but he also gave me one of the most amazing evenings of my life.
The picture dates from 1973, and besides me, on the bed in the cheap hotel the band was staying at on Lombard and Van Ness in San Francisco, we have Chuck Krall shooting a photo, and a gentleman in a tie, whom I can't identify. I met Chuck through Lenny Kaye, who at the time was merely a journalist, not the linchpin of the Patti Smith Band, because Lenny knew I was interested in reggae -- I'd been the first person to write about it in an American magazine, Creem, in 1971 -- but I knew very little about it. Chuck was a boyhood friend of Lenny's, a veteran of the dancefloor on American Bandstand who later told me there was rampant sex in the cloakroom there, and he'd spent a couple of years in the Peace Corps in Jamaica. He also had a rare booklet, a study of Rastafarianism which had been suppressed after publication, and laid out its tenets in rather neutral prose, which was unusual given the Jamaican government's feelings about the religion.
Chuck listened to the records I was getting in the mail from Trojan in London, and was able to decode a lot of the patois and odd references on them, although not always correctly: the biggest gaffe he made was in telling me that Rastas considered the British to be their oppressors (true enough), and I could hear them referring to England as "bobby-land" on the records (uhh, that'd be "Babylon," Chuck: I'm pretty sure he figured that out after a while). He also regaled me with stories of his time in Jamaica, and when I finally got to go there in 1975, his memories were indispensable in helping me figure out where I was and what I was doing.
Lenny lived in New York, but Chuck lived in San Francisco, which was convenient, and, since he was shooting rock photos, we became good friends, and I used him for stories I did for Creem and elsewhere. We hung out quite a bit at Winterland, which kindly allowed journalists backstage, and he must have a hell of a collection of negatives documenting that era.
Anyway, when the Wailers came to San Francisco on their first tour, we made sure we had access. The band was little-known and reggae itself was mostly a cult phenomenon based around people who'd seen The Harder They Come, which had premiered in San Francisco. After the debacle which followed this photo, Chuck went back the next day without me, and shot a picture which has been reproduced a lot of Marley standing on the balcony of the motel with a teacup in his hand. At the time his dreads were quite short, but it's recognizably him. As I remember, they played at a club in North Beach somewhere, and I wasn't impressed; I still maintain that the Jamaican records were slowed down some for their American release, and certainly the original Tuff Gong singles sound peppier to me. I also had a much larger aural database of reggae to draw from, thanks to Waxie Maxie and the folks at Trojan, and I frankly thought there were other performers who were just as interesting, if not more so, like the Maytals.
On that 1975 trip, I was there ostensibly to report on a Wailers reunion at the National Sports Stadium in Kingston that was part of an event which also included a tennis tournament, a screening of a Joe Frazier match, and this concert, which would feature the Wailers, Stevie Wonder, and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, who never showed up. During a rare moment of rapprochement, Rolling Stone assigned me the story, and the shady black organization which had organized it provided me with the ticket and accommodations in the Sheraton, although I later moved to the Pegasus, next door. The whole trip was filled with amazing moments, including being chased down an alley by a gunman and interviewing Big Youth pooslide at the Sheraton, much to the doorman's disdain. "There's a Mr. Buchanan here who says he's your guest," he'd said over the phone. "I don't think he is." Oh, I said, Augustus Manley Buchanan? Tell him to go to the pool; I'll be right there.
But the outstanding moment was sitting on the dirt floor of the slave quarters at 10 Hope Road, the ancestral Blackwell mansion Island Records head Chris Blackwell had given Marley, watching the entire band rehearse the show for the next night. Present as an audience were me, Malcolm, my photographer, and Mark Jacobson, who was writing the event up for New York magazine. Just the three of us. Marley gave us the runaround, of course, and I was frustrated: I was moonlighting for a brand-new magazine which was starting up in San Francisco called Mother Jones, and doing a story on reggae without a quote or two from the only artist in the genre anyone in America would recognize was going to be tough. As I had back in '73, though, I was comforted by Aston "Family Man" Barrett, the Wailers' bassist: "Bob, 'im sometimes like dat." Same thing he'd said back then, and still true.
The other notable quote from back then was one I still hold is the reason I never much liked the Wailers' records, along with the slowed tempos. At one point, Bunny Wailer saw me with my notebook, and, although he doesn't much like white folks, came over and asked if I was writing a story. I told him I was, and he said "Den tell dem dis: dem t'ree Wailers! T'ree! Is Bunny, Peter...and Bob. T'ree." But, as far as Island Records were concerned, there weren't.
Now Bob's dead, Peter's dead, 10 Hope Road is a weird sort of commune, the Marley estate is in confusion, and Bob's image is on the box of tissues I'm currently blowing my nose on as part of Zewa's "Legenden" campaign (the other images are Elvis and Marlene Dietrich). Chuck, however, has just turned 60, and the good news was splashed across the bottom of that picture he sent me: Chuck Krall Still Photographs. Good for him. And, I have to say, he still looks the same. Here he is with Lenny a few weeks ago:
Thursday, May 26, 2005
It Can Be Done
I may or may not be absent here next week, because I've signed on to sort of road-manage Carl Stone's mini-French tour. We start with a Carl solo concert at Instants Chavirés in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris, Monday evening, and then, with pi'pa player Min Xiao-Fen and shamisen player Yumiko Tanaka, we jump into a van we'll be renting and blast off for Strasbourg, where the trio will do a concert Tuesday night at the Modern Art Museum there. Then, the next day, a six-hour drive to Bourges, where I don't think I've ever been before (I did a rather frenetic driving trip about nine years ago and should have kept notes), for a concert at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des arts de Bourges. After that the trip gets somewhat unfair: I get to escort the ladies back to Montreuil on the train, and Carl gets to drive to Aix-en-Provence, where he'll surely get the best meal of the whole tour. (It's also not at all far from Montpellier).
But I have stuff to do here, including actual paying work, so I have to come back Saturday night. Anyway, once I move to France, Aix is, as I noted, just down the road.
Meanwhile, if we think back to my previous encounter with Deutsche Bahn, the following tale is interesting. I have to get to Paris on Sunday, and it's a 9-hour train ride from here, changing trains in Cologne. Unfortunately, as seems to be happening all too much these days, a huge amount of money I was owed took its sweet time getting here. It arrived yesterday, so I scurried down to the station to buy a ticket.
"Paris, on Sunday," I said to the lady behind the counter, and she looked up. "Are they giving something away in France these days? Because practically all the business I've had today is people going to France. Ah, well. Want to take a night train?" Well, no, I did that once, and been there, have the chiropractic bill, you know. Just a regular train, leaving about 10am would be fine. And there it was. "I can't get you the Sparpreis, I'm sorry," she said, looking at the screen in front of her. (This was the very bit of information the last woman failed to mention). "Yeah," I said, "I'm booking late." "Exactly. And when do you want to return?" I told her Saturday, and she typed in some more stuff. "Oh, this is bad," she said. "There are no more reservations available to Cologne." "But I can get a ticket." "Yes, but no seat." "No seat? Does that mean I have to stand?" "It's World Church Days, and everyone's going to Cologne," she said. "So the train's full." "But," I pressed her, "does that mean I have to stand?" "Maybe, I really can't say." (Today I found out that the attraction isn't so much ecumenical fellowship as that the new Pope is rumored to be attending, and he being German, everyone wants a look at him).
She wrapped things up, and even checked to see if paying €50 more for a first-class ticket to Cologne would get me a seat (answer: no), and then actually said "Sorry about the Sparpreis and the reservation. Have a good trip anyway."
Now, besides the obvious difference in attitudes, what was the difference between this woman and the old bat who'd sold me my last ticket to Paris? Easy: this one had an East German accent as thick as Griebenschmalz on a Schmalzstulle (the attraction of a slice of brown bread with lard spread on it continues to escape me, one of several reasons I've figured out I don't belong in this society). The other one was from the west.
Why should one be polite and efficient and the other hostile and dismissive? Easy: one lived in a society that took her for granted for at least the first half of her life. The second one had the postwar economic miracle providing a soft cushion for her capacious hind end and was resentful that she had to have a job. Or that's how I read it.
I'll try to log on from the road, and I'm taking my camera and connecting cable, just in case, so you can expect pictures.
And, in the chaos of departure, yesterday Et Et sent me some URLs and I did some window shopping. The Pope of Mope met him at a party, and he's an architecture student here for a year from his university...in Montpellier. Anyway, these were real-estate search sites, and I checked on the move-in prices for some apartments in Montpellier. €5-7000 ought to do it: the sites list the move-in cost. This concrete information is now stored in my head.
Now to figure out how to raise the money.
But I have stuff to do here, including actual paying work, so I have to come back Saturday night. Anyway, once I move to France, Aix is, as I noted, just down the road.
Meanwhile, if we think back to my previous encounter with Deutsche Bahn, the following tale is interesting. I have to get to Paris on Sunday, and it's a 9-hour train ride from here, changing trains in Cologne. Unfortunately, as seems to be happening all too much these days, a huge amount of money I was owed took its sweet time getting here. It arrived yesterday, so I scurried down to the station to buy a ticket.
"Paris, on Sunday," I said to the lady behind the counter, and she looked up. "Are they giving something away in France these days? Because practically all the business I've had today is people going to France. Ah, well. Want to take a night train?" Well, no, I did that once, and been there, have the chiropractic bill, you know. Just a regular train, leaving about 10am would be fine. And there it was. "I can't get you the Sparpreis, I'm sorry," she said, looking at the screen in front of her. (This was the very bit of information the last woman failed to mention). "Yeah," I said, "I'm booking late." "Exactly. And when do you want to return?" I told her Saturday, and she typed in some more stuff. "Oh, this is bad," she said. "There are no more reservations available to Cologne." "But I can get a ticket." "Yes, but no seat." "No seat? Does that mean I have to stand?" "It's World Church Days, and everyone's going to Cologne," she said. "So the train's full." "But," I pressed her, "does that mean I have to stand?" "Maybe, I really can't say." (Today I found out that the attraction isn't so much ecumenical fellowship as that the new Pope is rumored to be attending, and he being German, everyone wants a look at him).
She wrapped things up, and even checked to see if paying €50 more for a first-class ticket to Cologne would get me a seat (answer: no), and then actually said "Sorry about the Sparpreis and the reservation. Have a good trip anyway."
Now, besides the obvious difference in attitudes, what was the difference between this woman and the old bat who'd sold me my last ticket to Paris? Easy: this one had an East German accent as thick as Griebenschmalz on a Schmalzstulle (the attraction of a slice of brown bread with lard spread on it continues to escape me, one of several reasons I've figured out I don't belong in this society). The other one was from the west.
Why should one be polite and efficient and the other hostile and dismissive? Easy: one lived in a society that took her for granted for at least the first half of her life. The second one had the postwar economic miracle providing a soft cushion for her capacious hind end and was resentful that she had to have a job. Or that's how I read it.
I'll try to log on from the road, and I'm taking my camera and connecting cable, just in case, so you can expect pictures.
And, in the chaos of departure, yesterday Et Et sent me some URLs and I did some window shopping. The Pope of Mope met him at a party, and he's an architecture student here for a year from his university...in Montpellier. Anyway, these were real-estate search sites, and I checked on the move-in prices for some apartments in Montpellier. €5-7000 ought to do it: the sites list the move-in cost. This concrete information is now stored in my head.
Now to figure out how to raise the money.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Joe Nick Remembers
I alerted Joe Nick Patoski to yesterday's post about Leon Eagleson, and he replied with an e-mail so filled with the memory of Austin in the time just before I arrived there that I felt I had to share it with you. I've edited out some incriminating info, but here's pretty much what he said:
"You triggered several memories: the joke that the name of his place was really OK Book and Records because the one book left in the place when it became a collectors' record store instead of a thrift shop was some ol' porno rag that Rockin' Dopsie and all his Twisters used to pore over in the back of the store whenever they weren't smoking 'cat dick', their description for marijuana cola buds, or shooting craps.
"All the stars hung out there sooner or later. And whenever things were slow, there was always Antone's on one side, the porno peeps, Moma's Money, Benny's Tavern (the last men-only beer bar on Sixth) and Catman's Shine Parlor. Something was always going on at Catman's.
"The parade through the store was constant -- street people like El Paso Slim ("I wish I was your age and knew what I know now" and "If I had your hand, I'd throw mine away"), the great East Austin floating-heads-on-store-windows artist Joseph Henderson who carried a funk that forced the windows down and the door open, some burly guy who grumbled unintelligibly, Cleveland "Big Cat" Williams, former champion heavyweight boxer for a spell. So-called regular people like [the late] Clyde Woodward and N_____ F_____ who had hustler and con written all over them from the git go and you still loved hanging with 'em anyhow.
"That was the hubbingest half-block I've ever known. Oddly enough, that very same real estate had a historical marker dedication last week, noting that the site of the parking garage and mini mall was once the Bremond block, which was one of the oldest buildings in Austin when it was torn down in 1979, forcing Antone's and OK to move, taking all the fun with it."
What he's remembering here is an Austin I never knew. When I first started going there in the early '70s, I hung with the "progressive country" crowd, who, while they certainly didn't have anything against black and Mexicans, didn't hang out with them, either. And that's who was on 6th Street back then. Yup, the very same 6th Street that's lined with clubs and shot bars and frat-boy hangouts today, the Bourbon-Street-like "live music capitol of the world" centerpiece. This strip of 6th Street goes all the way east to Interstate 35, which has always been the racial dividing line for central Austin: east of the line it's solidly black and Mexican, west it's pure white.
Chasing out the dime-a-dance bars like La Plaza and the Green Spot, which closed around 6pm because their clientele was basically Mexican workers who had to be up early, and routing wild places like Scotty's Bar-B-Q, home to strange is-she-or-isn't-he hookers, was essential if the area was going to be made frat-boy friendly, and when I moved to Austin in October, 1979, that change was already underway. Moma's Money, a fake Cajun seafood place that was a front for something, although I never did figure out what, was one of the first incursions of the new scene, but there were still blues bars which opened occasionally and closed just as fast when I first started going there.
When I first visited OK Records, the one I wrote about yesterday, it was on East 7th, in the Webberville area, and the blues bar I mentioned that was just up the hill, Joe Nick says, was Marie's Tearoom #2, although I remember another one with the word "chicken" in the title -- not Ernie's Chicken Shack, though.
There's a school of thought which says that American likes to excise this sort of funk like it's a tumor instead of an essential part of its soul, and I admit I was in thrall to that when I wrote Joe Nick yesterday, but he replied that people seem to like Austin pretty well these days the way it is, and I have to admit there's still plenty of soul there if you know where to find it. After all, 6th Street was still a secret, despite being right downtown, when I first got there, and that secret has just moved. A lot of what produces the whole blues culture is stuff you wouldn't want to raise your family in, and this year when I was in Austin, I stayed on the East Side for the first time in my life, and was really jazzed by the pride the residents there -- black, brown, and white -- expressed in their neighborhood. Real estate sharks are a fact of life anywhere, and they've been particularly predatory in Austin, but there seems to be a heightened awareness of that on the East Side these days, and maybe this movie has played enough times that it'll have a different outcome this time.
Or, to put it another way, it's perfectly possible to have great barbeque and well-equipped health clinics, lovingly-restored 19th century wooden houses and minority-owned neighborhood-serving businesses, and maybe, just maybe that's what's happening there.
What a strange place for Leon's death to lead me to. Thanks, Joe Nick.
"You triggered several memories: the joke that the name of his place was really OK Book and Records because the one book left in the place when it became a collectors' record store instead of a thrift shop was some ol' porno rag that Rockin' Dopsie and all his Twisters used to pore over in the back of the store whenever they weren't smoking 'cat dick', their description for marijuana cola buds, or shooting craps.
"All the stars hung out there sooner or later. And whenever things were slow, there was always Antone's on one side, the porno peeps, Moma's Money, Benny's Tavern (the last men-only beer bar on Sixth) and Catman's Shine Parlor. Something was always going on at Catman's.
"The parade through the store was constant -- street people like El Paso Slim ("I wish I was your age and knew what I know now" and "If I had your hand, I'd throw mine away"), the great East Austin floating-heads-on-store-windows artist Joseph Henderson who carried a funk that forced the windows down and the door open, some burly guy who grumbled unintelligibly, Cleveland "Big Cat" Williams, former champion heavyweight boxer for a spell. So-called regular people like [the late] Clyde Woodward and N_____ F_____ who had hustler and con written all over them from the git go and you still loved hanging with 'em anyhow.
"That was the hubbingest half-block I've ever known. Oddly enough, that very same real estate had a historical marker dedication last week, noting that the site of the parking garage and mini mall was once the Bremond block, which was one of the oldest buildings in Austin when it was torn down in 1979, forcing Antone's and OK to move, taking all the fun with it."
What he's remembering here is an Austin I never knew. When I first started going there in the early '70s, I hung with the "progressive country" crowd, who, while they certainly didn't have anything against black and Mexicans, didn't hang out with them, either. And that's who was on 6th Street back then. Yup, the very same 6th Street that's lined with clubs and shot bars and frat-boy hangouts today, the Bourbon-Street-like "live music capitol of the world" centerpiece. This strip of 6th Street goes all the way east to Interstate 35, which has always been the racial dividing line for central Austin: east of the line it's solidly black and Mexican, west it's pure white.
Chasing out the dime-a-dance bars like La Plaza and the Green Spot, which closed around 6pm because their clientele was basically Mexican workers who had to be up early, and routing wild places like Scotty's Bar-B-Q, home to strange is-she-or-isn't-he hookers, was essential if the area was going to be made frat-boy friendly, and when I moved to Austin in October, 1979, that change was already underway. Moma's Money, a fake Cajun seafood place that was a front for something, although I never did figure out what, was one of the first incursions of the new scene, but there were still blues bars which opened occasionally and closed just as fast when I first started going there.
When I first visited OK Records, the one I wrote about yesterday, it was on East 7th, in the Webberville area, and the blues bar I mentioned that was just up the hill, Joe Nick says, was Marie's Tearoom #2, although I remember another one with the word "chicken" in the title -- not Ernie's Chicken Shack, though.
There's a school of thought which says that American likes to excise this sort of funk like it's a tumor instead of an essential part of its soul, and I admit I was in thrall to that when I wrote Joe Nick yesterday, but he replied that people seem to like Austin pretty well these days the way it is, and I have to admit there's still plenty of soul there if you know where to find it. After all, 6th Street was still a secret, despite being right downtown, when I first got there, and that secret has just moved. A lot of what produces the whole blues culture is stuff you wouldn't want to raise your family in, and this year when I was in Austin, I stayed on the East Side for the first time in my life, and was really jazzed by the pride the residents there -- black, brown, and white -- expressed in their neighborhood. Real estate sharks are a fact of life anywhere, and they've been particularly predatory in Austin, but there seems to be a heightened awareness of that on the East Side these days, and maybe this movie has played enough times that it'll have a different outcome this time.
Or, to put it another way, it's perfectly possible to have great barbeque and well-equipped health clinics, lovingly-restored 19th century wooden houses and minority-owned neighborhood-serving businesses, and maybe, just maybe that's what's happening there.
What a strange place for Leon's death to lead me to. Thanks, Joe Nick.
Saturday, May 21, 2005
Leon's Gone
Spent the tail-end of a dull Saturday afternoon checking up on some blogs, including the one by noted Texas writer Joe Nick Patoski, and was shocked to read that our old friend Leon Eagleson was dead. Joe Nick's post evokes Leon far better than I ever could, although it did bring back the memory of my visit to his mother's house in Nederland once he'd moved back there, where I watched some of the most pathological interaction possible between two people. I remember at one point, she'd been silent for a while (not, most likely, because of Leon's constant refrain of "Shut up, Momma") and Leon mentioned that Nederland once really did have a sign that said "Nigger, don't let the sun set on you here," and she sat up ramrod-straight in her chair and crowed "And I wisht it still did!" which, of course, provoked another "Shut up, Momma."
Later, we went to the barn or garage where his astonishing record collection was, and he challenged me to ask for any record. I'd never seen a Robert Johnson record in the flesh before, so I asked him if he had one. "Shit," he said, "I thought you were gonna ask somethin' hard," and then asked which one I wanted to see. And he really did have just about everything, from the country blues down to obscure Texas and Cajun sides that were great, even if nobody'd ever heard of them but him.
Even later, we somehow wound up driving to Port Arthur, still drinking, which we'd been doing all afternoon, and my only memories are a pretty much boarded-up downtown and us pissing on the grave of Harry Choates, the man who allegedly (and I do mean allegedly) wrote "Jolie Blonde" and died in the Austin jail, where he'd been hauled on child-support charges. I was still working at the Austin American-Statesman at that point, and I'd begun looking into the allegations that Choates had been beaten to death by an Austin policeman who was angry at all the noise he was making in the cell. The best information I got was from another drunk who was in the tank with Choates that night, and claimed that Choates was so drunk he slipped and fell and cracked his head on the bench in the cell, no cops in sight. Anyway, Leon and I agreed that Harry was probably thirsty and would welcome even our recyclings.
OK Records, Leon's store, was a frequent after-work hangout for me and Joe Nick. We'd head down there and hang out, watching Leon banter with the customers and hear him tell stories. I vividly remember one afternoon when some young black teenager was in there talking about how he was going into a life of crime because it was so cool. Leon impassively reeled off a graphic, detailed description of what happens to young boys his age when they get tossed into the general jail population, including a warning that involved a Folger's coffee can (I'll spare you). The kid, to his credit, kept up his bravado, but you could already see the second-thoughts forming across his brow.
When the first hip-hop records started coming out, there was no way in hell to get them in Texas, and I think this, as much as anything else, is what made Leon close the store. I'd hear of something and ask him if he could get it and it would take a month, if he could get it at all. By the time it became evident that this was the new thing, and that the impromptu Blue Monday jam sessions at the shacky bars just up the hill from OK Records were going to fade away, I think he'd made the decision to do likewise, and one day he just wasn't there. His part-time helper Huggy Bear made the transition more smoothly, but it was clear Leon wasn't interested. And now he's gone and faded away his own self.
Joe Nick said it better, but RIP, Leon. It was good knowing you.
Later, we went to the barn or garage where his astonishing record collection was, and he challenged me to ask for any record. I'd never seen a Robert Johnson record in the flesh before, so I asked him if he had one. "Shit," he said, "I thought you were gonna ask somethin' hard," and then asked which one I wanted to see. And he really did have just about everything, from the country blues down to obscure Texas and Cajun sides that were great, even if nobody'd ever heard of them but him.
Even later, we somehow wound up driving to Port Arthur, still drinking, which we'd been doing all afternoon, and my only memories are a pretty much boarded-up downtown and us pissing on the grave of Harry Choates, the man who allegedly (and I do mean allegedly) wrote "Jolie Blonde" and died in the Austin jail, where he'd been hauled on child-support charges. I was still working at the Austin American-Statesman at that point, and I'd begun looking into the allegations that Choates had been beaten to death by an Austin policeman who was angry at all the noise he was making in the cell. The best information I got was from another drunk who was in the tank with Choates that night, and claimed that Choates was so drunk he slipped and fell and cracked his head on the bench in the cell, no cops in sight. Anyway, Leon and I agreed that Harry was probably thirsty and would welcome even our recyclings.
OK Records, Leon's store, was a frequent after-work hangout for me and Joe Nick. We'd head down there and hang out, watching Leon banter with the customers and hear him tell stories. I vividly remember one afternoon when some young black teenager was in there talking about how he was going into a life of crime because it was so cool. Leon impassively reeled off a graphic, detailed description of what happens to young boys his age when they get tossed into the general jail population, including a warning that involved a Folger's coffee can (I'll spare you). The kid, to his credit, kept up his bravado, but you could already see the second-thoughts forming across his brow.
When the first hip-hop records started coming out, there was no way in hell to get them in Texas, and I think this, as much as anything else, is what made Leon close the store. I'd hear of something and ask him if he could get it and it would take a month, if he could get it at all. By the time it became evident that this was the new thing, and that the impromptu Blue Monday jam sessions at the shacky bars just up the hill from OK Records were going to fade away, I think he'd made the decision to do likewise, and one day he just wasn't there. His part-time helper Huggy Bear made the transition more smoothly, but it was clear Leon wasn't interested. And now he's gone and faded away his own self.
Joe Nick said it better, but RIP, Leon. It was good knowing you.
Friday, May 20, 2005
Dom-Da-Dom-Dom
Okay, I've had my exercise today. A friend is helping put together the next edition of the Dorling-Kindersley guide to Berlin, and, since I've been frozen out of the Time Out Guide, it felt good to take the old notebook and cruise around the neighborhood for facts and figures. I did one on the galleries in my neighborhood (although it's not as important as it once was, with a number of the better galleries moving to Zimmerstr. once the real-estate sharks moved in on them), and today I knocked off pieces on the Berlinische Galerie, the New Synagogue, and the Berliner Dom.
I'd been to the first two recently enough that I could do them off the top of my head (I reportred the opening of the Berlinische Galerie here last fall), but the only time I'd been to the Dom, the central Lutheran church of the city of Berlin, was some years ago when I went to see the Tallis Scholars play there and felt like I was in a live Phil Spector production, there was so much echo. That hardly enhanced the performance, and they were visibly struggling. So was I, seated below scowling visages of Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Calvin, and a couple of Hohenzollerns, not to mention the overwrought sacred mosaics based on paintings by one Anton von Werner; I felt like I was being judged while the Tallises were trying to stay on pitch with their acappela Tudor church music.
This time, though, I was there to look, not to listen, and although I really hate the Wilhelmine style in general (except the Neptune Fountain, which is just too silly to hate, with its rampaging lobsters and putti), I had to gather facts and figures. So I even launched myself up the 267 steps (there's a sign warning the prospective visitor -- I sure didn't count them myself) to the balcony surrounding the Dom's dome, which is open in nice weather (and today was a sizzling 68 degrees F!) so you can get a panorama of this almost totally hill-less city. Had the thing not been jammed with tourists, I would have lingered, using the steeple-spotting method (always the best way to navigate a European city, something I learned on my first visit to Brussels) to spot landmarks. As it was, I could see, off in the distance, the Rathaus Schöneberg, where Kennedy gave his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, and, in the other direction, the riverside warehouses of Friedrichshain.
In the basement, on the other hand, is the crypt, and there you get to see what must be a hundred sarcophagi of various Hohenzollerns, the family which ruled Berlin as Electors, and then Germany as Kaisers, for several centuries. (There are also a couple more upstairs, including one guy who died in the 1500s, which I think is the oldest one in the batch -- definitely the coolest, with its sculpture of him on the lid). There are also many tiny coffins, belonging to children born dead -- one Elector in the early 18th Century seems to have had really terrible luck producing children -- and, of course, less ornate ones for the wives. There's one marked for Frederick the Great, although I always understood that he's actually buried in Potsdam with his beloved dogs, and, all by itself, gated off from the rest, the last Hohenzollern, dead at the age of three in 1915.
There's something creepy about the people who were hanging around, and it wasn't because of a fascination with death, but, rather, a fascination with royalty. A gymnastics tournament is in town at the moment, and it seems like hundeds of Turnvereine are here competing, all teenagers with their parents in tow, and a lot of the more rural ones were gasping over the crypt. I had a grandmother who was sort of a royalty groupie, but it's quite strange to encounter these people in the flesh in the 21st Century, especially in Germany, where the royals gave up long ago and most titled people (like the Countess in my building) don't have a great deal of money.
Anyway, I did the tour, took the notes, and came back and wrote the entry, but one sign I transcribed didn't make it into the book. I like it anyway, an old enameled sign from the late 1800s that says "Entrance for royal household, diplomats, members of the Bundesrat, Reichstag, House of Lords, and House of Commons, and high-ranking civil servants." Sad to say, they didn't have a reproduction of that in the gift shop or I would have bought one and stuck it on my door.
I'd been to the first two recently enough that I could do them off the top of my head (I reportred the opening of the Berlinische Galerie here last fall), but the only time I'd been to the Dom, the central Lutheran church of the city of Berlin, was some years ago when I went to see the Tallis Scholars play there and felt like I was in a live Phil Spector production, there was so much echo. That hardly enhanced the performance, and they were visibly struggling. So was I, seated below scowling visages of Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Calvin, and a couple of Hohenzollerns, not to mention the overwrought sacred mosaics based on paintings by one Anton von Werner; I felt like I was being judged while the Tallises were trying to stay on pitch with their acappela Tudor church music.
This time, though, I was there to look, not to listen, and although I really hate the Wilhelmine style in general (except the Neptune Fountain, which is just too silly to hate, with its rampaging lobsters and putti), I had to gather facts and figures. So I even launched myself up the 267 steps (there's a sign warning the prospective visitor -- I sure didn't count them myself) to the balcony surrounding the Dom's dome, which is open in nice weather (and today was a sizzling 68 degrees F!) so you can get a panorama of this almost totally hill-less city. Had the thing not been jammed with tourists, I would have lingered, using the steeple-spotting method (always the best way to navigate a European city, something I learned on my first visit to Brussels) to spot landmarks. As it was, I could see, off in the distance, the Rathaus Schöneberg, where Kennedy gave his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, and, in the other direction, the riverside warehouses of Friedrichshain.
In the basement, on the other hand, is the crypt, and there you get to see what must be a hundred sarcophagi of various Hohenzollerns, the family which ruled Berlin as Electors, and then Germany as Kaisers, for several centuries. (There are also a couple more upstairs, including one guy who died in the 1500s, which I think is the oldest one in the batch -- definitely the coolest, with its sculpture of him on the lid). There are also many tiny coffins, belonging to children born dead -- one Elector in the early 18th Century seems to have had really terrible luck producing children -- and, of course, less ornate ones for the wives. There's one marked for Frederick the Great, although I always understood that he's actually buried in Potsdam with his beloved dogs, and, all by itself, gated off from the rest, the last Hohenzollern, dead at the age of three in 1915.
There's something creepy about the people who were hanging around, and it wasn't because of a fascination with death, but, rather, a fascination with royalty. A gymnastics tournament is in town at the moment, and it seems like hundeds of Turnvereine are here competing, all teenagers with their parents in tow, and a lot of the more rural ones were gasping over the crypt. I had a grandmother who was sort of a royalty groupie, but it's quite strange to encounter these people in the flesh in the 21st Century, especially in Germany, where the royals gave up long ago and most titled people (like the Countess in my building) don't have a great deal of money.
Anyway, I did the tour, took the notes, and came back and wrote the entry, but one sign I transcribed didn't make it into the book. I like it anyway, an old enameled sign from the late 1800s that says "Entrance for royal household, diplomats, members of the Bundesrat, Reichstag, House of Lords, and House of Commons, and high-ranking civil servants." Sad to say, they didn't have a reproduction of that in the gift shop or I would have bought one and stuck it on my door.
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Har Har
Just to show you that I haven't completely lost my sense of humor, a couple of things that have come my way.
First, the first major change in Catholic liturgy under the new pope:
Thanks, Brett!
And another one which you'll have to get out your German dictionaries for or, just as easily, check out Leo, the always-wonderful online German-English dictionary.
I'm pretty sure this happens a lot these days. Sad to say.
First, the first major change in Catholic liturgy under the new pope:
Thanks, Brett!
And another one which you'll have to get out your German dictionaries for or, just as easily, check out Leo, the always-wonderful online German-English dictionary.
I'm pretty sure this happens a lot these days. Sad to say.
Monday, May 16, 2005
A Different History
I've had several e-mails asking me if I'd gone to the new Holocaust Memorial (or the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, to give it its official title), and so, since DJ F.K. is currently entertaining me with Disko '82's endless repetition of bad German disco hits and AFN-style country (it's Whit Monday, or Pfingstenmontag, a holiday, today, and he's back), I figured I'd essay a few thoughts about it and other related stuff to see what comes out.
The first thing is an anecdote about my friend Andrew, who wrote that Guide to Jewish Berlin I mentioned a couple of posts ago (out of print at the moment, but he'll be here at the end of June to do some preliminary research for the next edition). He'd just published it, and the Jüdischer Gemeinschaft (Jewish Community) was having a street-fair on Tucholskystr. so he rented a booth to sell and promote it, and, since that's just down the street, I went down there to keep him company and see what was going on. At one point, a German guy came up and asked him what he thought about the then-unbuilt and uncertain monument. "It's not for me," he said. "I'm an American." The guy was flabbergasted. "But...you're a Jew," he said. "Yes," Andrew said patiently, "but I'm an American Jew."
His point, I thought, was solid. This was to be a monument built by the people who committed the atrocities, to remind themselves that it had happened, and must never happen again. Of course this is commendable, but it's got little to do with him and his history, and even less to do with mine. By the time World War II had happened, his father's family had been in the U.S. for a couple of generations. (His mother is British, and was a nurse in England when his father met her during the war). His father was doing what he could about the situation: fighting the Germans (and, for that matter, doing as much as he could, too, since America behaved rather shamefully towards immigrant Jews fleeing the Holocaust: go look it up). Being American, he had his own issues to deal with in terms of being Jewish, since anti-Semitism was still rife in his country. But it's important to remember: he was neither murderer nor murdered.
For me, the Holocaust is even more distant. I grew up knowing about it, read lots about it in books, heard survivors tell their tales, and saw films and still pictures of the camps, both before and after their liberation. But I, too, am American, and I'm also not Jewish. I know about anti-Semitism because my parents were both openly anti-Semitic, and the town I lived in was very heavily Jewish. But to be honest, World War II was never a particular interest of mine. To the extent that I was interested in European history, it tended to be much older segments of it. Hell, most of the kids I grew up with had fathers who'd fought in the war, although my father's partial deafness kept him out of the Army.
So I neither need to be convinced that the Holocaust happened, nor reminded of how awful it was. Upon coming to Germany, I was naturally very interested to see how Germans themselves were dealing with it, with the history that had happened on their soil, and for the most part, I was very impressed, particularly with the people I knew, who tended to be in their 20s and 30s, and had integrated it into a worldview that was coherent and sane, including a burning desire to see that such a thing never happened again. From time to time I'd be out with a mixed bunch of Americans and Germans, and a couple of times, an American (albeit not one who lived here) would bring up the Nazis and the Jews, only to be slapped down by a German saying "Please tell us when your government apologizes to the American Indians."
Killing fields are not my thing. Although our family took long driving vacations in the summertime and my father was really interested in history, I never was much interested in battlefields. I have no desire to visit the Little Big Horn, and I remember climbing that huge hill in Waterloo, Belgium, and looking out over the farms, trying to make sense out of the diagrams on the plaques up there. "You can just see it happening," a tourist said to his wife. Well, I couldn't.
And my feeling also extends to killing fields where the killing was one-sided, as in Cambodia or here in Germany, at the camps. Yes, I was near Auschwitz when I was in Krakow, yes, there's even a streetcar in Munich which goes to Dachau (which is a suburb -- not that that makes the streetcar sign any less creepy), yes, I could have gone to Buchenwald when I was in Weimar on assignment, and hell, I could get on the subway right now and go to Sachsenhausen, although I guess it would be closed today.
It's not my story. I know the story, and yet I'm far more interested in how the Nazis came to power than I am in what they did when they assumed it. I'm far more interested in the story I've been part of, the integration of the former East Bloc into Europe, particularly because that story includes the very neighborhood I live in. I know that the story of the Holocaust remains important, because, as Serbia and Rwanda have shown, there are still people who haven't learned its lesson.
I do, however, know that there's still a fascination with the Nazis among certain Germans. I've seen neo-fascist newspapers, which were spread around the seats of a train I was riding on once (probably by the German cops who were on the train and ripped up my passport, but that's another story). I know there is a tiny number of neo-Nazis running around this country, and in fact a couple of them just got sent to jail for trying to blow up a Jewish monument. So I know that the reminder still has to be visible. I visited the documentation center in Nuremberg a few years ago when it opened, right in one of the buildings where the great rallies were staged, and I thought it was very well done. It, too, is for Germans: a police academy class was there hearing a lecture the day I visited, and schoolchildren were being led through by docents.
But I'll tell you something else, and that it's really, really wearying being surrounded by this every day. Unlike Nuremberg or Munich, just about the only history Berlin has is the history of Prussian militarism (see: Franco-Prussian War, World War I) followed by the Nazis, and, after them, the Cold War. There are no beautiful old buildings to look at as contrast or relief, no public art from a more innocent time -- hell, very little public art that doesn't have a Message, for that matter. The streets of my neighborhood, as anyone who's taken my walking tour knows, are filled with reminders and memorials, be they the small brass Klopfensteine (stumbling blocks) a German artist has hammered into the sidewalks in front of houses of Jews sent to the camps, or the Transportation Memorial on Grosse Hamburger Str., or the bombed facade of the New Synagogue or the plaques on house walls memorializing resistance fighters (read: Communists), or the few remaining houses pocked with bullet holes from the Battle for Berlin, or the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate just a few minutes' walk from my place, or the signs lining Unter den Linden which talk about each building's history, or even the innocent-looking playground in the housing project not far from the Brandenburg Gate, under which, I happen to know, lie the remains of Hitler's bunker. Then there's Daniel Libeskind's famous Jewish Museum, to which I have no desire to return. No matter where you go in this city, you are reminded of this stuff, at least if you're the slightest bit observant and the slightest bit cognizant of history.
It's the Burden of History, folks, that reoccurring character -- perhaps the reoccurring character -- in every single story that's written about Berlin. It's here, and there's nothing we can -- or should -- do about it.
But, like all burdens, it's wearying. It never stops. It's always there. And it's not my burden, but I'm living in the middle of it.
So maybe you can see why I'm not in a big hurry to walk down to Pariser Platz and see the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe. You can see why I was so happy to read Amos Elan's magisterial The Pity of It All, a history of the Jews in Germany that stops in 1933: it was about something other than the Burden of History -- or, rather, it contextualized it and evenhandedly dealt with the fair and decent Germans -- who, make no mistake, also existed, as they do today, obviously.
And maybe you can figure out why, after being trapped in someone else's nightmare for the past eleven and a half years, I want so desperately to shed the Burden of History and move on to another place.
The first thing is an anecdote about my friend Andrew, who wrote that Guide to Jewish Berlin I mentioned a couple of posts ago (out of print at the moment, but he'll be here at the end of June to do some preliminary research for the next edition). He'd just published it, and the Jüdischer Gemeinschaft (Jewish Community) was having a street-fair on Tucholskystr. so he rented a booth to sell and promote it, and, since that's just down the street, I went down there to keep him company and see what was going on. At one point, a German guy came up and asked him what he thought about the then-unbuilt and uncertain monument. "It's not for me," he said. "I'm an American." The guy was flabbergasted. "But...you're a Jew," he said. "Yes," Andrew said patiently, "but I'm an American Jew."
His point, I thought, was solid. This was to be a monument built by the people who committed the atrocities, to remind themselves that it had happened, and must never happen again. Of course this is commendable, but it's got little to do with him and his history, and even less to do with mine. By the time World War II had happened, his father's family had been in the U.S. for a couple of generations. (His mother is British, and was a nurse in England when his father met her during the war). His father was doing what he could about the situation: fighting the Germans (and, for that matter, doing as much as he could, too, since America behaved rather shamefully towards immigrant Jews fleeing the Holocaust: go look it up). Being American, he had his own issues to deal with in terms of being Jewish, since anti-Semitism was still rife in his country. But it's important to remember: he was neither murderer nor murdered.
For me, the Holocaust is even more distant. I grew up knowing about it, read lots about it in books, heard survivors tell their tales, and saw films and still pictures of the camps, both before and after their liberation. But I, too, am American, and I'm also not Jewish. I know about anti-Semitism because my parents were both openly anti-Semitic, and the town I lived in was very heavily Jewish. But to be honest, World War II was never a particular interest of mine. To the extent that I was interested in European history, it tended to be much older segments of it. Hell, most of the kids I grew up with had fathers who'd fought in the war, although my father's partial deafness kept him out of the Army.
So I neither need to be convinced that the Holocaust happened, nor reminded of how awful it was. Upon coming to Germany, I was naturally very interested to see how Germans themselves were dealing with it, with the history that had happened on their soil, and for the most part, I was very impressed, particularly with the people I knew, who tended to be in their 20s and 30s, and had integrated it into a worldview that was coherent and sane, including a burning desire to see that such a thing never happened again. From time to time I'd be out with a mixed bunch of Americans and Germans, and a couple of times, an American (albeit not one who lived here) would bring up the Nazis and the Jews, only to be slapped down by a German saying "Please tell us when your government apologizes to the American Indians."
Killing fields are not my thing. Although our family took long driving vacations in the summertime and my father was really interested in history, I never was much interested in battlefields. I have no desire to visit the Little Big Horn, and I remember climbing that huge hill in Waterloo, Belgium, and looking out over the farms, trying to make sense out of the diagrams on the plaques up there. "You can just see it happening," a tourist said to his wife. Well, I couldn't.
And my feeling also extends to killing fields where the killing was one-sided, as in Cambodia or here in Germany, at the camps. Yes, I was near Auschwitz when I was in Krakow, yes, there's even a streetcar in Munich which goes to Dachau (which is a suburb -- not that that makes the streetcar sign any less creepy), yes, I could have gone to Buchenwald when I was in Weimar on assignment, and hell, I could get on the subway right now and go to Sachsenhausen, although I guess it would be closed today.
It's not my story. I know the story, and yet I'm far more interested in how the Nazis came to power than I am in what they did when they assumed it. I'm far more interested in the story I've been part of, the integration of the former East Bloc into Europe, particularly because that story includes the very neighborhood I live in. I know that the story of the Holocaust remains important, because, as Serbia and Rwanda have shown, there are still people who haven't learned its lesson.
I do, however, know that there's still a fascination with the Nazis among certain Germans. I've seen neo-fascist newspapers, which were spread around the seats of a train I was riding on once (probably by the German cops who were on the train and ripped up my passport, but that's another story). I know there is a tiny number of neo-Nazis running around this country, and in fact a couple of them just got sent to jail for trying to blow up a Jewish monument. So I know that the reminder still has to be visible. I visited the documentation center in Nuremberg a few years ago when it opened, right in one of the buildings where the great rallies were staged, and I thought it was very well done. It, too, is for Germans: a police academy class was there hearing a lecture the day I visited, and schoolchildren were being led through by docents.
But I'll tell you something else, and that it's really, really wearying being surrounded by this every day. Unlike Nuremberg or Munich, just about the only history Berlin has is the history of Prussian militarism (see: Franco-Prussian War, World War I) followed by the Nazis, and, after them, the Cold War. There are no beautiful old buildings to look at as contrast or relief, no public art from a more innocent time -- hell, very little public art that doesn't have a Message, for that matter. The streets of my neighborhood, as anyone who's taken my walking tour knows, are filled with reminders and memorials, be they the small brass Klopfensteine (stumbling blocks) a German artist has hammered into the sidewalks in front of houses of Jews sent to the camps, or the Transportation Memorial on Grosse Hamburger Str., or the bombed facade of the New Synagogue or the plaques on house walls memorializing resistance fighters (read: Communists), or the few remaining houses pocked with bullet holes from the Battle for Berlin, or the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate just a few minutes' walk from my place, or the signs lining Unter den Linden which talk about each building's history, or even the innocent-looking playground in the housing project not far from the Brandenburg Gate, under which, I happen to know, lie the remains of Hitler's bunker. Then there's Daniel Libeskind's famous Jewish Museum, to which I have no desire to return. No matter where you go in this city, you are reminded of this stuff, at least if you're the slightest bit observant and the slightest bit cognizant of history.
It's the Burden of History, folks, that reoccurring character -- perhaps the reoccurring character -- in every single story that's written about Berlin. It's here, and there's nothing we can -- or should -- do about it.
But, like all burdens, it's wearying. It never stops. It's always there. And it's not my burden, but I'm living in the middle of it.
So maybe you can see why I'm not in a big hurry to walk down to Pariser Platz and see the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe. You can see why I was so happy to read Amos Elan's magisterial The Pity of It All, a history of the Jews in Germany that stops in 1933: it was about something other than the Burden of History -- or, rather, it contextualized it and evenhandedly dealt with the fair and decent Germans -- who, make no mistake, also existed, as they do today, obviously.
And maybe you can figure out why, after being trapped in someone else's nightmare for the past eleven and a half years, I want so desperately to shed the Burden of History and move on to another place.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
Neat Trick
I just registered (twice, because their submit form was wonky) at The Berlin Blogplan, a subway map of Berlin which, when you pass your cursor over it, shows you the nearest blog. I'm apparently sharing space with another American, Radio Free Mike, who seems to enjoy Saul Bellow more than I do.
I'm going to go play with this thingamajig a bit more. Who knew there were so many of us?
I'm going to go play with this thingamajig a bit more. Who knew there were so many of us?
Saved From Disco Hell, And Other Crumbs
I just came back from walking around the block, because there have been sirens all afternoon. This is the 60th anniversary of the Germans' acceptance of the Allied peace terms, and I know that, among other bodies, the PDS, the hard-left party here, has been planning celebrations, but none in my neighborhood. All I saw was massive numbers of police cars and wagons directing traffic away from a number of streets, so what I suspect is that the Chancellor or someone else of similar importance is doing something at the New Synagogue. If I find out what's going on later, I'll let you know.
***
No question, though, that the festive season is upon us. One notable celebration missing in action (so to speak) this year was the annual Mayday riot. I didn't hear a single siren, although I did notice a few trucks of out-of-town policemen arriving the day before. The riot is used as a training situation for various police departments these days, and it would be wonderful to think that the crazies' response this year was to just do nothing, thereby frustrating the cops. But I'm afraid that's imputing too much intelligence to them, since there's not much to the content of these riots these days except a meeting of testosterone and beer. Still, interesting that it had such a low profile.
One celebration that definitely didn't disappear was the one on Thursday, which is Ascension Day, or Christi Himmelfahrt, a day whose German name has always made me think of a stuck-up cheerleader (who would have spelled it Kristi). Himmelfahrt does double duty, though, as Father's Day, which is basically an excuse for men to get drunk. And boy, do they ever. You see them in groups, sometimes riding around in an open vehicle of some sort, singing, wearing odd clothes, and drinking and drinking and drinking, and I must say that that night there were sirens well into the evening. In Dresden, apparently, a bunch of right-wingers used it as an excuse to have some sort of demonstration which ended up in a riot.
But the thing I hate most about Himmelfarhrt is that there's a restaurant with a large beer garden in my back yard, and a chill went through me when I saw a white van with Disko '82 emblazoned on the side pull up. Sure enough, a guy started unloading a mobile disco unit, complete with flashing lights, to be set up there. I was wandering around doing this and that, so by the time I got back from my errands, he was set up, blasting music at a single table with a man and a woman sitting at it.
I've always said that Germans will drink outdoors as soon as the ice breaks on the puddles in the gutter, and so seeing these people out there wasn't too surprising, but I suspected that Mother Nature had the winning card this time. After a short spell of mid-70s weather, we had some hard rains and since then it's been brightly sunny and barely 50 degrees. Not even standing in the sun is particularly warming (at least it isn't today), and as I sat here in the apartment working on this and that, I had a feeling that the endless Stars On 45-style medleys of ABBA songs and Boney M hits, interspersed with the DJ's patter, wouldn't last as long as they had in previous years. I was right; by the end of the day, I'm sure any drinkers at the restaurant had moved inside, and Disko '82 had packed up and departed to whatever Satanic hole it had crawled out of.
That said, it'd sure be nice if it actually did warm up a bit more. I like to sit outdoors in a beer garden myself from time to time myself.
***
My favorite beer garden, though, the Pratergarten up the hill in Prenzlauer Berg, had some unwelcome visitors the other evening, as did a number of other clubs around town. Ever eager to eliminate cool places before the flood of summer student tourism gets here, immigration police raided a number of premises Wednesday night looking for "black workers," ie, those engaged in illegal work. They caught a literally black worker at the Prater, some poor African with a forged passport, who was arrested and will probably be deported. The CCCP club, a Russian-themed place just down Torstr. where a lot of the Russian chic types hang out, also got raided and apparently 100% of their employees were illegal, so I hear they're in big trouble. And White Trash Fast Food, on the corner, got raided (of course: it caters to foreigners), but it screens its employees very well and the cops left empty-handed. Which isn't to say they're not in trouble, too: apparently some building inspector type showed up recently and told them they had to spend €6000 on a new ventilation system. So, more good news: it looks like they'll be abandoning this particular property in a month or two.
Look for more raids throughout the summer, particularly in illegal bars, which, although premises for them are getting harder to find, still exist. And if you're coming here as one of the student tourists, don't worry: you won't be arrested or deported for drinking in an illegal bar.
***
Thanks to Snippy for sending me, several weeks ago, the link to the BBC story from mid-April headlined "Germany's new 'great depression.'" According to the story, cases of depression among Berliners have risen by 70% since 1997, based on research by a national health insurance company. They surveyed 2.6 million employed Germans -- employed ones, mind you -- including 90,000 Berliners, so I'd venture to say the results are statistically sound. Some of the depression, apparently, was linked to the huge unemployment here, and the uncertainty as to whether the respondents' jobs would actually last much longer. The survey said they were more likely to blow off a day of work because of depression than for any other reason.
I wonder, though, if the depression might not be for reasons the insurance guys never even thought of. For instance, the fact that this city is dirty (if dog-shit were a commercially-viable crop, the city wouldn't be broke), with graffiti covering just about every flat surface. Or perhaps the fact that, with the unemployment numbers rising and the city treasury being depleted, the cultural life here has nosedived. Or the fact that ever since the government got here five years ago, the blue-noses have been doing things like raiding nightspots looking for illegal workers, putting a damper on the milieu in which the very creative people who are supposed to be making this the hip, vibrant place the New York Times says it is are doing their socializing and networking. Or maybe this is just the culmination of the culture of negativity which rules here, the impulse to say no first thing when people bring up new ideas.
I'm depressed here most of the time, so I don't see why others shouldn't be. Both visually and socially, this is a very depressing place to live. Maybe this survey is just acknowledging that with facts and figures.
***
Several people have asked where they can get the Goldapple Guide to Jewish Berlin, which I mentioned in the last post. I'm working on it, folks. There is, I think, a way to order it so that the authors make the most money on it, and, while it's not 100% up to date, it's still the best book on the subject available. Andrew? Kevin? You reading this? I need some info! Get in touch!
***
No question, though, that the festive season is upon us. One notable celebration missing in action (so to speak) this year was the annual Mayday riot. I didn't hear a single siren, although I did notice a few trucks of out-of-town policemen arriving the day before. The riot is used as a training situation for various police departments these days, and it would be wonderful to think that the crazies' response this year was to just do nothing, thereby frustrating the cops. But I'm afraid that's imputing too much intelligence to them, since there's not much to the content of these riots these days except a meeting of testosterone and beer. Still, interesting that it had such a low profile.
One celebration that definitely didn't disappear was the one on Thursday, which is Ascension Day, or Christi Himmelfahrt, a day whose German name has always made me think of a stuck-up cheerleader (who would have spelled it Kristi). Himmelfahrt does double duty, though, as Father's Day, which is basically an excuse for men to get drunk. And boy, do they ever. You see them in groups, sometimes riding around in an open vehicle of some sort, singing, wearing odd clothes, and drinking and drinking and drinking, and I must say that that night there were sirens well into the evening. In Dresden, apparently, a bunch of right-wingers used it as an excuse to have some sort of demonstration which ended up in a riot.
But the thing I hate most about Himmelfarhrt is that there's a restaurant with a large beer garden in my back yard, and a chill went through me when I saw a white van with Disko '82 emblazoned on the side pull up. Sure enough, a guy started unloading a mobile disco unit, complete with flashing lights, to be set up there. I was wandering around doing this and that, so by the time I got back from my errands, he was set up, blasting music at a single table with a man and a woman sitting at it.
I've always said that Germans will drink outdoors as soon as the ice breaks on the puddles in the gutter, and so seeing these people out there wasn't too surprising, but I suspected that Mother Nature had the winning card this time. After a short spell of mid-70s weather, we had some hard rains and since then it's been brightly sunny and barely 50 degrees. Not even standing in the sun is particularly warming (at least it isn't today), and as I sat here in the apartment working on this and that, I had a feeling that the endless Stars On 45-style medleys of ABBA songs and Boney M hits, interspersed with the DJ's patter, wouldn't last as long as they had in previous years. I was right; by the end of the day, I'm sure any drinkers at the restaurant had moved inside, and Disko '82 had packed up and departed to whatever Satanic hole it had crawled out of.
That said, it'd sure be nice if it actually did warm up a bit more. I like to sit outdoors in a beer garden myself from time to time myself.
***
My favorite beer garden, though, the Pratergarten up the hill in Prenzlauer Berg, had some unwelcome visitors the other evening, as did a number of other clubs around town. Ever eager to eliminate cool places before the flood of summer student tourism gets here, immigration police raided a number of premises Wednesday night looking for "black workers," ie, those engaged in illegal work. They caught a literally black worker at the Prater, some poor African with a forged passport, who was arrested and will probably be deported. The CCCP club, a Russian-themed place just down Torstr. where a lot of the Russian chic types hang out, also got raided and apparently 100% of their employees were illegal, so I hear they're in big trouble. And White Trash Fast Food, on the corner, got raided (of course: it caters to foreigners), but it screens its employees very well and the cops left empty-handed. Which isn't to say they're not in trouble, too: apparently some building inspector type showed up recently and told them they had to spend €6000 on a new ventilation system. So, more good news: it looks like they'll be abandoning this particular property in a month or two.
Look for more raids throughout the summer, particularly in illegal bars, which, although premises for them are getting harder to find, still exist. And if you're coming here as one of the student tourists, don't worry: you won't be arrested or deported for drinking in an illegal bar.
***
Thanks to Snippy for sending me, several weeks ago, the link to the BBC story from mid-April headlined "Germany's new 'great depression.'" According to the story, cases of depression among Berliners have risen by 70% since 1997, based on research by a national health insurance company. They surveyed 2.6 million employed Germans -- employed ones, mind you -- including 90,000 Berliners, so I'd venture to say the results are statistically sound. Some of the depression, apparently, was linked to the huge unemployment here, and the uncertainty as to whether the respondents' jobs would actually last much longer. The survey said they were more likely to blow off a day of work because of depression than for any other reason.
I wonder, though, if the depression might not be for reasons the insurance guys never even thought of. For instance, the fact that this city is dirty (if dog-shit were a commercially-viable crop, the city wouldn't be broke), with graffiti covering just about every flat surface. Or perhaps the fact that, with the unemployment numbers rising and the city treasury being depleted, the cultural life here has nosedived. Or the fact that ever since the government got here five years ago, the blue-noses have been doing things like raiding nightspots looking for illegal workers, putting a damper on the milieu in which the very creative people who are supposed to be making this the hip, vibrant place the New York Times says it is are doing their socializing and networking. Or maybe this is just the culmination of the culture of negativity which rules here, the impulse to say no first thing when people bring up new ideas.
I'm depressed here most of the time, so I don't see why others shouldn't be. Both visually and socially, this is a very depressing place to live. Maybe this survey is just acknowledging that with facts and figures.
***
Several people have asked where they can get the Goldapple Guide to Jewish Berlin, which I mentioned in the last post. I'm working on it, folks. There is, I think, a way to order it so that the authors make the most money on it, and, while it's not 100% up to date, it's still the best book on the subject available. Andrew? Kevin? You reading this? I need some info! Get in touch!
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Hide The Synagogue!
Okay, kids, want to play a neat game? Fine! With the cooperation of the City of Berlin, and of course the necessary backing of the Burden Of History, let's play Hide the Synagogue!
I owe this to my pal Ina, editor of the estimable Neid magazine, your basic average hiphop feminist art magazine. Ina has become fascinated with Berlin's Jewish sites, although she's not Jewish herself, and one day last year we went to an exhibition in the New Synagogue of architectural models of German synagogues. There was also an exhibition of various furnishings from Berlin synagogues, including a couple of tapestries from the Old Synagogue. Now, I knew we were in the New Synagogue, which had been built in 1866, so I asked Ina where the old one was.
"Your're kidding," she said. "It's in your back yard. It's on Rosenstr., just a short walk from Hackescher Markt."
I was astonished. It was virtually in my back yard. I mean, I knew Rosenstr., and had walked down it a few times, but since it was just a short street that didn't go anywhere in particular, I wasn't there too often. What I knew it for was a particularly hideous bit of public sculpture which memorialized a brave bit of resistance to the Nazis. It was made into a film in 2003, but, like most German films, it barely played in America. What happened was, in 1943 the Nazis raided a bunch of factories and seized Jewish men who were working there, taking them to a top-secret prison they had improvised in the Jewish Community administration building on Rosenstr. Word got out almost immediately, and some non-Jewish women who were married to some of the detainees started a demonstration in front of this building. At the end of a week, there may have been as many as a thousand women in the street chanting "Murderers!" and "Give us our men back!" Ultimately, the Nazis were humiliated into releasing the prisoners, even 25 they'd already shipped to Auschwitz! In 1995, a really, really ugly stone monument was erected in the lot opposite the former prison on Rosenstr., and that was all I knew about the place.
I mentioned this to Ina, and she agreed that this was the place. "It's got a historic marker sign and everything, though. Trust me, it's there."
So I went looking. And walked right past it. Walked clear out the other end of Rosenstr. and onto Karl-Liebknecht-Str. Then I turned around and walked back. And this, more or less, was what I saw.
Now, knowing what I know today, I can see the synagogue and the historical marker. And no, it's not the red pile on the left; that's the Frauenbloc -- Women's Bloc -- monument. I didn't want to singe your eyes with a full shot of it.
See the synagogue? I didn't think so. Here, let's see if this helps.
Ah, yes, over there in the corner! The sign! Alas, there's no synagogue to be seen, because it got hit with a bomb in World War II, and thanks to the DDR, ever ready to promote Judaism as a culture, not a religion, the remaining bits were knocked down rather than restored, even though the building dated from 1714, which is pretty old by Berlin standards. Also, due to an idiosyncracy of German-Jewish relations, most of the synagogue was still intact despite the damage: it was forbidden for Jews to build buildings higher than German ones, so many synagogues had the majority of their space below ground. A simple little building could conceal a gorgeous sanctuary. (This law was off the books by 1866, when the New Synagogue was built, obviously).
So now that we've walked into the corner of the park and noticed the sign with its back turned to the public, we can check out the remains of the foundation and read the sign:
You can see the Frauenbloc monument in the distance, and you can tell from the buildings across the street where Rosenstr. is. Here's a closer look at the foundation.
So we found it, kids! Despite the best efforts of the city of Berlin to hide it, we found the synagogue where Moses Mendelssohn, Salomon Maimon, David Friedländer, Henriette Herz, Rahel Levin, and thousands of less famous Jews worshiped for over 150 years (and, of course, some stayed on after the new one went up), where some of the intellectual lights of Berlin professed their faith and went through the rituals of life and death.
Hey, at least, unlike at the Rosenthaler Tor, there's acknowledgement that it was there. But there are no signs pointing to it, and no other hints that it's there. That I managed to pass it so many times without even seeing the sign is testament to how well hidden it is. Once again, faced with a positive monument in the city's history, the city chooses to celebrate the incident which will cause Berliners to reflect on the shame their city was guilty of and ignore a site of which it could deservedly be proud.
And speaking of Rosenthaler Tor, I think I've found a solution to the non-commemoration of that, too. But I'll have to hike up the hill some nice day and get a shot of it, so that'll have to wait for another day.
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Almost forgot: much of the historical information on both the Old Synagogue and the Frauenbloc monmument came from the excellent Goldapple Guide to Jewish Berlin by Andrew Roth and Michael Frajman. Maybe Andrew's still reading this blog and can e-mail me with details as to how my other readers can get a copy of this invaluable resource.
I owe this to my pal Ina, editor of the estimable Neid magazine, your basic average hiphop feminist art magazine. Ina has become fascinated with Berlin's Jewish sites, although she's not Jewish herself, and one day last year we went to an exhibition in the New Synagogue of architectural models of German synagogues. There was also an exhibition of various furnishings from Berlin synagogues, including a couple of tapestries from the Old Synagogue. Now, I knew we were in the New Synagogue, which had been built in 1866, so I asked Ina where the old one was.
"Your're kidding," she said. "It's in your back yard. It's on Rosenstr., just a short walk from Hackescher Markt."
I was astonished. It was virtually in my back yard. I mean, I knew Rosenstr., and had walked down it a few times, but since it was just a short street that didn't go anywhere in particular, I wasn't there too often. What I knew it for was a particularly hideous bit of public sculpture which memorialized a brave bit of resistance to the Nazis. It was made into a film in 2003, but, like most German films, it barely played in America. What happened was, in 1943 the Nazis raided a bunch of factories and seized Jewish men who were working there, taking them to a top-secret prison they had improvised in the Jewish Community administration building on Rosenstr. Word got out almost immediately, and some non-Jewish women who were married to some of the detainees started a demonstration in front of this building. At the end of a week, there may have been as many as a thousand women in the street chanting "Murderers!" and "Give us our men back!" Ultimately, the Nazis were humiliated into releasing the prisoners, even 25 they'd already shipped to Auschwitz! In 1995, a really, really ugly stone monument was erected in the lot opposite the former prison on Rosenstr., and that was all I knew about the place.
I mentioned this to Ina, and she agreed that this was the place. "It's got a historic marker sign and everything, though. Trust me, it's there."
So I went looking. And walked right past it. Walked clear out the other end of Rosenstr. and onto Karl-Liebknecht-Str. Then I turned around and walked back. And this, more or less, was what I saw.
Now, knowing what I know today, I can see the synagogue and the historical marker. And no, it's not the red pile on the left; that's the Frauenbloc -- Women's Bloc -- monument. I didn't want to singe your eyes with a full shot of it.
See the synagogue? I didn't think so. Here, let's see if this helps.
Ah, yes, over there in the corner! The sign! Alas, there's no synagogue to be seen, because it got hit with a bomb in World War II, and thanks to the DDR, ever ready to promote Judaism as a culture, not a religion, the remaining bits were knocked down rather than restored, even though the building dated from 1714, which is pretty old by Berlin standards. Also, due to an idiosyncracy of German-Jewish relations, most of the synagogue was still intact despite the damage: it was forbidden for Jews to build buildings higher than German ones, so many synagogues had the majority of their space below ground. A simple little building could conceal a gorgeous sanctuary. (This law was off the books by 1866, when the New Synagogue was built, obviously).
So now that we've walked into the corner of the park and noticed the sign with its back turned to the public, we can check out the remains of the foundation and read the sign:
You can see the Frauenbloc monument in the distance, and you can tell from the buildings across the street where Rosenstr. is. Here's a closer look at the foundation.
So we found it, kids! Despite the best efforts of the city of Berlin to hide it, we found the synagogue where Moses Mendelssohn, Salomon Maimon, David Friedländer, Henriette Herz, Rahel Levin, and thousands of less famous Jews worshiped for over 150 years (and, of course, some stayed on after the new one went up), where some of the intellectual lights of Berlin professed their faith and went through the rituals of life and death.
Hey, at least, unlike at the Rosenthaler Tor, there's acknowledgement that it was there. But there are no signs pointing to it, and no other hints that it's there. That I managed to pass it so many times without even seeing the sign is testament to how well hidden it is. Once again, faced with a positive monument in the city's history, the city chooses to celebrate the incident which will cause Berliners to reflect on the shame their city was guilty of and ignore a site of which it could deservedly be proud.
And speaking of Rosenthaler Tor, I think I've found a solution to the non-commemoration of that, too. But I'll have to hike up the hill some nice day and get a shot of it, so that'll have to wait for another day.
++++++++
Almost forgot: much of the historical information on both the Old Synagogue and the Frauenbloc monmument came from the excellent Goldapple Guide to Jewish Berlin by Andrew Roth and Michael Frajman. Maybe Andrew's still reading this blog and can e-mail me with details as to how my other readers can get a copy of this invaluable resource.
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