Rock Star!

Clannnnggg! Man, you can just about hear the power chord this grrrl's just hit! Actually, it's Erato, the muse of Music from the front of the Jules Scalles Gallery, the municipal art museum in Nimes, where I spent the better part of last week. This building was right across from my deeply funky hotel, but wouldn't you know? I never had time to walk in the front door.

Starting a magazine is every bit as time-consuming and nerve-shredding as giving birth (although, to be honest, I've never given birth), and Thursday through Sunday, Laurence, Jackie, and I zig-zagged around the Languedoc delivering the newly-printed copies of the Languedoc Sun to the places that agreed to distribute them, most of which were very excited to see the magazine. In the process, I got to see a lot of the countryside in the northeastern part of the area, known, after the river that flows through it, as the Gard, as well as return to Montpellier, mooch around Avignon, and see a number of small villages.

The bad news, though, was that it rained nearly the whole time, and even snowed in Alès and Uzès, which is a rare event. On Sunday, as we headed down to Pézenas to drop some copies off at the tourist bureau there, the rain was particularly severe, with police trying to persuade truckers not to hit the motorway as we left Nimes. Actually, it wasn't too bad, although there were strong winds and there were vineyards completely under water past Montpellier, and rivers overflowing their banks all along the way. Some villages were cut off from the main road by the flooding, and all of the water was weirdly tinted with pink mud. And, in a final irony, I wound up with publisher Laurence Boxall's cold, which has had me down ever since Monday. Lots of fun doing those 12-hour train rides with your head feeling like it's going to explode.

I'm going to attempt a more thorough post about this trip -- although it might not happen, depending on how the work schedule lines up in the next couple of days -- and I'll definitely post some of the 66 pictures I took on Flickr and provide a link.

Meanwhile, ever unable to resist cliches, here's another photo from Nimes, of the Maison Carrée, the remarkably well-preserved temple from 5 AD that was built so people could worship Julias Caesar's kids. It's quite amazing to see it looming up just down the street like this, but it's gorgeous lit up at night, which was mostly when I was able to walk around Nimes, usually in search of food. Which I found.

Anyway, maybe tomorrow; the residual blah feeling from the cold has me still, and I want to do this justice.

This Month's Decent Interval

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for a week in France. Given that I woke up this morning and goggled at the temperature being 1 degree Fahrenheit (that's -17 and change Celsius), I'm not at all unhappy about this. Good lord, it's cold out there! I went to the dancer's house last night for dinner, and just walking to and from the subway almost killed me. I know some people reading this live in places like Alaska where you're very likely scoffing at me, but man, this is crazy. Although, on the other hand, it does bode well for the local farmers, many of whose crops -- especially fruit trees -- need a hard frost to bear properly in the summer.

At any rate, this trip will not be based in Montpellier (home of Europe's latest bird-flu scare) -- although of course we'll go there -- but, rather, to Nimes, where I'll be staying near a Roman amphitheater which is currently used for bullfights. Yes, the French also have bullfights.

The reason for this is that I've been working on a project which I've had to keep secret: an English-language magazine for the Languedoc region, which includes Montpellier. It'll be free, and it's going to be distributed over a wide geographical range -- by me and the publisher! That's right: Thursday and Friday will find me in her car zooming hither and yon, handing off copies to shops and tourist bureaus, and anyone else who wants them.

The first issue is available as a pdf download here, and, while it's no masterpiece, it's definitely got potential. And once I'm living down there, I'm quite sure I can attract writers, photographers, and other support personnel to make it a model of a regional magazine.

But first we have to get them out to the folks who need them. I'm definitely taking the camera this time, and there'll be pix here and on Flickr for those who'll want to see them.

And, because the journey's so long, I'm breaking it coming and going with an overnight stay in Paris. Tomorrow, dinner at Chez Paul! Yet another thing to look forward to.

Back here late in the evening of the 31st. See you then.

Best of 2005, Part Two: The Past

Thanks to my gig with Fresh Air, I get far better service from reissue labels than from labels putting out new stuff. This is, of course, as it should be: record labels aren't charities, and they only send press things they think will get publicity. And it must be admitted, this was a great year for reissues.

Biggest news of the year was Motown Select's Internet-only release of three volumes of the complete Motown singles in deluxe packaging with a copy of a vintage Motown 45 slipped into the cover of each one. The landscape this opens up is much wider and more diverse than you'd think, although the real treat is the scores of lost soul acts like the Velvettes and the Contours who recorded for Motown. Motown Select also reissued three of Eddie Kendricks' solo albums, which, although dotted with missteps like many Motown albums of the '70s, go a long ways towards proving my long-held contention that the "disco" era wasn't the arid stretch of musical history so many people believe it is. It'd be stretching it to say that "Keep On Truckin'" is worth the forty bucks alone, but his attempt to clone Marvin Gaye's What's Going On with his album People...Hold On is a very pleasant revelation.

It was a great year for folk fanatics, thanks to Legacy's Charlie Poole box, which, remarkably, doesn't attempt to present Poole's recordings in a straightahead chronological fashion, but, rather, to show the records which influenced Poole and the ones he influenced, thereby proving that this marginally insane drunken banjo player was a force in country music similar to Robert Johnson in blues. An exemplary document, even if the packaging is a bit fragile.

Equally fascinating and welcome as a cultural touchstone is Good For What Ails You, Old Hat's collection of medicine show music, black and white, which was incredibly influential in the days before radio became widespread among rural Americans. Sure, what the "doctors" were selling was, for the most part, booze (as if you couldn't figure that out by some of the performances here), but the music itself came from traditional wellsprings and went into the folk process, too. A great example is "The Mysterious Coon," a song which seems pretty racist from its title (and, by our standards, is), but which invests the "coon" of the title with superpowers any rapper would envy when it comes to standing up to the law. Don't be surprised if you find yourself entertained by this; it was, after all, intended as entertainment.

And the weirdest of all the folk reissues from the era of the 78 rpm record is Revenant's American Primitive, Vol. 2, the last collection curated by the late John Fahey, filled with his love of the odd and singular, and with performances both completely bizarre and breathtakingly moving, often in the same song. It's worth having for the complete (known) works of the mysterious Delta blueswoman Geeshie Wiley, whose "Last Kind Favor" is up there wtih Richard "Rabbit" Brown's "James Alley Blues" and Skip James' "Devil Got My Woman" for expressing something dark and deep that we all recognize, even if we've never encountered it before.

The British reissue label Ace (which also reissues soul on Kent) got an American deal this year for distribution, and acquired an American publicist, thereby making it easier for U.S. music fans to finally hear thousands of tracks they've never been aware of. The list of great Ace reissues is too long to post here, but this year's had some killers in it.

Ace has a deal to reissue the King label, which has always stood with Atlantic and Modern in my mind as one of the groundbreaking postwar independents, and in a way, greater than them because it also issued some great country music. Proof positive comes on Fifty Miles to Travel, a collection of the Delmore Brothers' original master recordings from the late 1940s and early 1950s, whose clear sound and impeccable guitar pyrotechnics could get you hooked on this duo who were an important link between the '30s brother duets and rock and roll. The King deal also means finally having clean copies of recodings by two almost forgotten rockabilly masters, Charlie Feathers and Mac Curtis, both of whom did their best work for King.

And, naturally, it means that my all-time forgotten doo-wop group, the "5" Royales, get a "hits and rarities" album, It's Hard But It's Fair, which, because the box set I helped curate for Rhino is long out of print, is the best place to find out why I venerate this group, whose co-lead singer, Johnny Tanner, passed away this year.

Another deal Ace has been working on for the past couple of years has been leasing the Modern catalogue, which has not only been out of print forever, but has been sloppily curated on the reissue front. The biggest news out of this deal was the B.B. King box set which came out a couple of years ago, and the reissues of his albums for Kent with original covers and half again as many tracks as the originals. But it's also meant that the likes of Richard Berry and Jesse Belvin are back in print, and this year saw a great double of Etta James' Modern and Kent singles, which will blow your socks off.

Moving into the '60s, Ace also put out two great pop masterpieces. Many of you will be familiar with Jack Nitzche, the arranger and producer who showed up practically everywhere, from Phil Spector sessions to working with the Buffalo Springfield, but until this year he never got the career overview he deserved. Go look for my Fresh Air piece on this if you want a taste of how great it is. And if you like that kind of dramatic pop music, The Best of Reparata and the Delrons will send you to heaven. Fresh Air piece on this one is coming up.

In fact, if girl group pop is to your liking, the mammoth Rhino collection, One Kiss Can Lead To Another, will be a treasure worth finding. Assembled by a British fanatic, a female British fanatic, at that, it's got almost no tracks which duplicate other collections, and yet from the perverse to the pretty, it's as good a summation of this era as you'll find.

Speaking of mammoth Rhino collections, the words "sumptuous packaging" almost fails to describe Pure Genius, which is nothing less than Ray Charles' complete works for Atlantic, down to the famous "rehearsal tape" of Ahmet Ertegun singing the words to "The Mess-Around" as he teaches it to Ray. There's also a mindblowing DVD of an appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, a hardback book, and the whole thing is packaged to simulate a vintage portable record player.

The '60s have been mined so thoroughly that there's little rock left to explore -- or so you'd think. Rhino Handmade scored a coup by turning out Magic Hollow, a four-disc celebration of San Francisco's "lost" band. It's inconceivable to me that a group this good could have fallen between the cracks, especially during the whole Haight-Ashbury hoo-hah, but they did. Their version of "One Too Many Mornings" cuts Dylan's to shreds, and yet it never got higher than 95 on the national charts. Warning, though: my copy of this doesn't seem to play all the way through each disc, despite the fact that there doesn't seem to be any physical defect. No idea what's going on with it, but there you go. I'm certain Rhino will exchange defective ones.

And, of course, speaking of Herr Zimmerman, there was the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese's documentary, which I have yet to see. The double disc stands on its own, though, especially the second one, which shows Dylan developing things we all know by heart in the studio, as well as two incendiary performances from That Tour.

What killed the '60s, as everyone knows, was the Stooges. Rhino has reissued, as double albums, both their first and their second albums, with disc two in each case featuring alternate versions and outtakes. Most importantly, the sound, for the first time, is perfect, and you can hear history being made in all its trashy glory. Annotator Ben Edmonds, who clearly has read too much of what the Brits have to say, still doesn't get it about my Rolling Stone review of the first album, where I pronounced it "loud, boring, tateless, unimaginative and childish," adding that it was proof that rock and roll was bad for you, just like your parents said, and concluding the sentence with the words "I kind of like it." Ben's irony meter is obviously defective, but Iggy's always understood, and that's what counts with me.

What the Stooges didn't destroy, Patti Smith did. Okay, that's also supposed to be humorous, but this year's 30th anniversary reissue of her first album, Horses, with the album remastered on one disc and then played at a recent concert on a second one, is a fascinating document of an artist's coming to fully inhabit her art. I know Ms. Smith's not for everyone, but this is solid. (Oh, and I understand my article on her Incredible Shrinking Tour from November has just come out in Paste, so run down to the newsstand today!)

There weren't as many country reissues as I'd have liked to have seen this year, but I do find the Johnny Cash collection, The Legend, to be extremely well-curated. I haven't yet seen the liner notes, but the music, although arranged thematically, is, of course, right on the money.

And speaking of Nashville, three Nashville soul collections came out this year which are well worth your notice. The first is the second volume of the Country Music Foundation's Night Train to Nashville, exploring Nashville's heretofore badly-documented R&B and soul scenes. Extra bonus with this set is a picture of Jimi Hendrix on stage with The Imperials, a show band he spent some time with in his early days. And Sundazed has come out with two more discs, neither of which duplicates anything from either of these collections. The first, Shake What You Brought!, is a collection from the SSS International label run by Shelby Singleton, with tracks by Peggy Scott, Jo Jo Benson, and Bettye LaVette (although, curiously, none of the Scott and Benson duets), and the second, My Goodness, Yes!, is all about his Silver Fox label, which I missed entirely, with Robert Parker, more Bettye LaVette, and (gasp) Hank Ballard, he of the "Annie" trilogy and the original recording of "The Twist," singing Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Coming Down." Both are highly recommended.

Finally, bringing us almost to the present day, is something which looks like a ripoff, but, in fact, isn't at all. The Talking Heads Brick may look like a triumph of art direction over utility (and, in that the albums aren't labelled on their spines, is), but it presents each of the band's albums, meticulously remastered by the band's own Jerry Harrison, on one side of each dual disc, and, on the other side, the whole thing in DVD-A sound (for those of you with players for such things) and a wealth of videos. Not all that many outtakes until you get to the later albums, but the sketches for some of the funkier stuff, especially the experiments which were abandoned, are very much worth checking out.

I'm sure that as soon as I post this I'll think of a couple of others, but this should keep you happy until I do my next one, which, for those of you looking for Christmas presents, I'll try to post before Dec. 25 of this year.

No promises, though. The past, after all, is a big place.

Best of 2005, Part One

Like I did last year, I've been meaning to put down a list of my favorite records from last year, but I've actually had so much work it's been impossible to find the time, since this project involves my putting down a lot of links. So today I'm taking a break from writing my book proposal to jot some notes about the best new records I heard last year. A second, much longer, post will deal with the reissues.

There's a major problem, though, about writing about new stuff. I hardly heard any. I don't think there's been a year in my adult life when I listened to less music. I've been puzzling over this and there are a few reasons which come to mind. First, I hardly have any place to write about music any more. There are virtually no "general" music magazines left, and the ones which exist want formulaic, short reviews with no criticism. I find it risible that so many writers call themselves "rock critics" which they don't do a lick of criticism, and concentrate instead on description. Some of them are very good at it, but it's still a recitation of feelings or technical observations with no attempt to link them to any higher purpose or broader context. The majority of my writing this year was done for specialty, ie, genre-driven, music magazines: No Depression, Harp, and the oddly-named Paste. All lean towards the "Americana" label (although No Depression has gone through a salutary re-evaluation, and Paste is more an "adult" rock mag than a purely "Americana" one), and so the few makers of new music who send me stuff tend to be in that area.

Which leads to the second reason I haven't listened to much. Back before cultural overproduction killed off any possibility of being a musical generalist, I'd have listening sessions when I'd grab a given kind of music and play a bunch of related records. One night it might be jazz, another night some kind of oddball pop, another singer/songwriter stuff, another hard rock, another some kind of acoustic quiet stuff. Almost all of this was stuff that came in the mail to me as a reviewer/writer. But without those choices, my evenings now tend to be "Do I want to listen to Americana or not" kinds of affairs. There is, on the newly-made music front, an appallingly monochromatic set of choices in front of me. So, as often as not, I just opt for silence.

Which leads to the third reason I haven't listened to much. I tend to get up late and work late, because nearly all the business I transact is with the United States, which is from six to nine hours behind Central European Time. Thus, at 10 pm, which is when I tend to quit for the day, it's still only 1 pm out on the West Coast. After that there's dinner, and then the traditional time I spend reading and listening to stuff. But there's a law here that there can be no noise after 10pm. For years I paid it no heed. I don't listen to music very loud, and much of what I play is pretty quiet anyway, but as soon as the building next to me changed hands a few years back and became an ownership building instead of a rental one, the two women on the other side of the wall -- a double wall, it should be emphasized -- informed me that they would tolerate no noise after 10, since they're both sensitive artists who need to paint during the daylight hours. So this means that my listening has to be done through headphones. And I hate headphones. Hate 'em! Music, for those of you who are so iPod'd out that you don't remember, should be played into an acoustic space, be it a room or a concert hall. Not inside your head.

So you add it all together, and I'm listening, when I'm listening, to a kind of music which tends towards the personal and confessional, sung by people inside my head, which is much too close, on records which basically kind of sound alike. No wonder I'm opting out.

There's also the fact that I've now been away from the American mainstream so long that there's tons and tons of best-selling, cultural-touchstone stuff that I've just never heard. White Stripes? Nope. Coldplay? Nope. (Although that may be a blessing). Strokes? Uh-uh. Arcade Fire? One track on a compilation that came with Word, the only general music mag I can think of, and probably the best music magazine out there. But it made no impression. And I've just given up trying to seek it out. It would mean buying tons of CDs I'd read raves about, but never heard, and that, I know from long experience of listening to stuff I got free that I'd read raves about, is an experience which would lead to inevitable disappointments.

Is it okay not to care? I do care, somewhat, but I've gotten a lot more passive about seeking stuff out. Yeah, I could download stuff from websites (legally, of course!), but I find it deeply ironic that we've just spent 100 years learning how to reproduce the natural sound of musical instruments as closely as possible to the original, only to enter into the drab world of compressed MP3 fidelity. And (sorry Dr. Jon) I spend enough time in front of my computer all day without wanting to stare at the screen while I play music, too.

So I'm losing interest in new music. Big deal. I've been writing about it since I was 16, had a job where I was out at least five nights a week for five years seeing it live, met and interviewed some of the top people on the scene (and cooked dinner for a bunch of 'em, too!), and now, well, there are other things to engage me. Yes, I'll be going to SXSW again this year, and yes, I'll be trying to catch as much good stuff as I can, but I'm not anticipating any epiphanies.

There's a larger essay here, if anyone's interested (and don't all e-mail me at once, of course...), but I've got other things to write and other stuff to do. Meanwhile, here's the new stuff from this year.

***

My big discovery this year was a guy from St. Louis named Jon Hardy, whose album Make Me Like Gold is a disturbing, catchy, haunting melange of influences filtered through a very distinctive personal style. I guess the nearest touchstone is Neil Young, but that's actually not very accurate. I'm still waiting (albeit not as tensely as he must be) to find out if he's been accepted at SXSW, because I really, really want to see this band live. If you live around the midwest, you've got a shot at seeing them. If not, the record's only eleven bucks from his website, and I think it'd be a real good investment.

My other big discovery this year, which kind of unsettles me, is that I'm beginning to like some jam band music. I always hated the Grateful Dead, and the genre's other antecedents, from latter day Little Feat to post-Duane Allman Brothers, did nothing for me, either. But when fearless publicist Ken Weinstein sent me the North Mississippi Allstars' new album Electric Blue Watermelon, I remembered going out one evening in Memphis with Jim Dickinson and his wife to hear his boys play in an awful grunge/metal band called DNA and found myself wondering what they're doing now. This is what they're doing now, and I find it more rooted than most jam music -- and in fact didn't snap to the fact that it even was jam music until I heard their previous record, Hill Country Revue and realized what was going on. Anyway, I'm watching these guys.

A band I caught at SXSW this year which really impressed me, although they have a ways to go, is the Heartless Bastards, whose debut record (on blues label Fat Possum, no less), Stairs and Elevators, doesn't quite capture their live show. Frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom, however, is a force of nature, and I'm very curious to see where they go from here, not to mention whether they get sued by James McMurtry, whose band has been using that name for a couple of years now.

I usually hate superstar records, where a bunch of "guest vocalists" come in to sing on a track, but all rules are off for Los Super 7, who are only sometimes a band and exist mainly as a project that's a vehicle for just such records. At any rate, this year's celebration of Texas border radio music from them, Heard It On The X, is a sheer pleasure right up to its final track, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown singing Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," which has nothing to do with what preceded it, but was probably the song the cantankerous old man insisted on recording and nobody could talk him out of it. Did he have a premoniton that he'd die last year? Eerie. The rest of the record celebrates the wild mixture of R&B, rock and roll, and Mexican border music the "X" stations broadcast. Of particular note: Raul Malo's rendition of Doug Sahm's classic-to-be "The Song of Everything."

While we're on the cross-cultural tip, it seems appropriate to mention Ry Cooder's much raved-about Chavez Ravine, which has everything going for it: great story-line, performances by Mexican-American legends like Little Willie G, Lalo Guerrero, and Don Tosti, and impeccable production. Trouble is, I find it a chore to listen to. Cooder can no longer sing, nor can Bla Pahinui, who's brought in for the album's pentultimate number, "3rd Base, Dodger Stadium." A lot of people enjoy the recording of the Coasters' "Three Cool Cats" here, saying how it brought out the Latin rhythms, but they're there on the original, which is better sung. I'm going to play this a few more times, but if it's still hard going, I'll file and forget it, and relegate it to the category of stuff critics all like but I don't. It sort of brings back memories of those awful Latin Playboys albums that spun off of Los Lobos some while ago.

One band I was happy to see come back this year was the Go-Betweens, even if that long-legged blonde drummer of theirs has retired. Still, on the evidence of this year's album Oceans Apart and the half-concert I saw in July, Robert Forster and Grant McLennan -- who are the Go-Betweens -- are still writing amazing songs which sound almost effortless, and still performing them brilliantly. Their back catalogue, too, is worth exploring.

Another band which re-formed this year kinda sorta is Son Volt, and although I haven't played it as much as I should have (I lost it: record companies send me advance copies in plastic sleeves, and they just get lost on the shelves: guys, I do want production copies, too!), their new album Okemah and the Melody of Riot shows that Jay Farrar isn't quite as limited melodically as his solo albums would have you believe. (He's no Brian Wilson, either, of course). This year also saw the old Son Volt's Best of, A Retrospective, for which I wrote the liner notes, which involved interviewing the usually taciturn Mr. Farrar. I still haven't seen a copy of this. Thanks, Reprise!

And as far as reunions go, howzabout that Cream? Yeah, I know, it's a guilty pleasure, but their recorded reunion at the Royal Albert Hall definitely had its moments. Inessential, but fun.

Outside of rock, or whatever you file the above under, I really didn't hear much new that was worth crowing about. One exception (which might need to go under reissues, but the originals were barely issued in the first place) was Numero Records' reanimation of the Belize pop scene of the 1970s, Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up. No indigenous musical tradition to turn into world-pop? No problem! Steal liberally from others and make the rest up off the top of your head! This may be the year's goofiest album. It'll sell dozens, but it deserves more.

Finally, one jazz album. One. Jason Moran ruined SXSW for me this year by playing a set on the first night that set the musical bar so high none of the poor rockers I saw afterwards came anywhere near. Moran's not always easy to listen to, but boy, does he have ideas, and boy, does he have the skills to express them. He also has a killer band, and some very modern ideas about what to do with samples. At any rate, one day when I found a little extra cash in my pocket, I bought the album he excerpted that evening, Same Mother, and was blown away, as I thought I would be. Too bad, though, that it has such an astonishing amount of copy protection that my portable CD player, the machine on which I listen to everything, doesn't recognize the disc.

But that, again, is another rant for another day. That's just barely ten records there, too. Gone are the days when I'd submit four different top ten lists to four different magazines because of the embarrassment of riches I'd heard that year.

Still, ten good records is ten good records.

Reissues later, okay?

January Crumbs

Had a couple of beers last night with yet another person who's giving up on Berlin -- or so he thinks -- and returning to New York at least through the end of the World Cup. (Incidentally, he's trying to sublet his apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, so if you're interested, toss me an e-mail).

He says that in recent months, nine of his close friends here have left. Nine. "And how many close friends do you have at any given time?" He can't seem to make a living, although I'm not sure how hard he's tried, but the stuff he's doing to pay the rent disgusts him, so he's reached a sort of career impasse.

One does hate to see someone in such misery, but I do take some sort of comfort in the fact that I'm not at all alone in this.

Now if I could figure out what that stuff the bartender made us drink before he'd let himself be paid, I'd be okay. It sure wasn't a good dessert for Bohemian black beer, I'll tell you that.

***

Yes, folks, there is a German sense of humor. One separate from the usual crude slapstick and excrement jokes. Heard today:

"Why do neo-nazis make such lousy DJs?"

"They can't tell the difference between '33 and '45."


***

It's hit me. In four months I'll be gone, if all goes as planned. It makes it hard to look around the apartment and think, I'm going to have to either pack or get rid of a lot of this stuff. It makes it hard to concentrate on the book proposal I'm writing about my time here. It occasionally give me a twinge of melancholy as I look at something and think "next year, I'll be looking at something else." For instance, the Grüne Woche, the big food trade fair that's been a landmark, a sort of start-of-the-year tradition for me for the years I've been here, opens tomorrow, and I'm making plans to go, but it'll be my last unless chance catches me visiting Berlin when it happens again. I guess I'll be settling for Vinisud from now on. And pining for a Berliner Pilsner.

Cold

The dancer was over the other night, trying to look on the bright side of the weather. "At least today we had one whole hour of sun," she said. Indeed, I know when that happens: the sun shines straight into the window of one of the buildings across the way, which then reflects it straight into my eyes as I sit here at the desk trying to work. "But at least when it's really cracking cold like this, it doesn't snow and we get sun."

I like that. No idea if it's a German idiom she translated or not, but that exactly describes the current weather, down in the teens at night, but fortunately not with a serious wind. It can still be painful to walk in, though, and no matter how good your gloves are, your hands ache for a while after you get back into the warmth.

Still, we cracked out into the night last night for a concert: a viol consort named Labyrinto at the Kammermusiksaal of the Philharmonie, playing 17th century German repertoire. Several of the players seemed to be moonlighting from regular Berliner Philharmoniker gigs (including one guy who'd been with the orchestra since 1970), and several numbers were sung by the disconcerting male alto of Michael Chance.

I'm not sure about my reaction to this performance. My consort experience has been limited to listening to the English repertoire (and one wonderful concert by Jordi Savall and Hesperion XX), and it could be that what I perceived as an over-Romanticizing of the music -- dramatic dynamic effects, lots of legato -- is authentic to the German repertoire. Two of the composers on deck, Johann Rosenmüller and Franz Tunder, I'd never even heard of, and I'm an old music buff, but there was a full compliment of Sch's: Scheidt, Schütz, and Schein.

I also wish I could have seen them play. The Kammermusiksaal is part of what I've always thought of as one of the ugliest buildings in Berlin, and it turned out to be as confusing inside as it is unappealing outside. The good news is that, for chamber music, the performers are in the round. The bad news is, it's not exactly round, it's polygonal, and there's definitely a direction in which the performers face. "Tickets on that side were fully twice what they are for these," the dancer told me, and while the sound was good (I assume it was mostly the natural sound: boy, is that room rigged with "clouds" and other acoustic jiggery-pokery), when the ensemble took its bows, we mostly got to watch their asses.

That said, this was my first live music since Bob Dylan came to town in October, and live music of a sort I rarely get to see. I'm hoping that more off-the-wall stuff like this plays Montpellier because it's more of a backwater and doesn't have the self-importance that Berlin's cultural establishment seems to feel it has to display. For that matter, Jordi and the boys and girls are just a few hours away, so maybe some spinoffs of all that Hesperion energy will make themselves manifest.

On our way out, a woman was handing out cards advertising forthcoming concerts. "More old music," she said, "next weekend." I didn't look at the card til I got home, but it was advertising Bach cantatas. Sorry, to me Bach's not "old."

Hairy Beans and Liquid Asparagus

One thing about holiday feasting around here is that it's never going to be too good. I was reminded of this just recently when I unexpectedly got a big check. Oh, sure, I was going to spend most of it on rent and other silly necessities, but there's always an element of celebration when you find a wad of money you hadn't been expecting sitting in your account.

So I went to the Italian wholesale place to replenish the supplies of good olive oil and professional-grade pasta and discovered that it was salsiccie day. Now, Americans can just go into the supermarket and buy "Italian sausage," but it's a distinct rarity around here, so I got a kilo. The rest of the stuff I wanted was also there, and I got off with only €50 worth of damage, 13 of which was the sausage.

When I got back home, I tossed all but two links into the freezer and, with the super-cheap white cannellini beans I'd gotten, I realized that I could take two of these fresh links and make pastafazool, a kind of bean, sausage, and pasta stew. But...what to have with it?

Well, the local supermarket was in the throes of holiday fever, and lo and behold, they had green asparagus, another rarity in a land where only white asparagus, fibrous and devoid of any vitamin content, is considered fit to eat. True, it was €3.99, but I was celebrating! So I tossed it into my basket and got the rest of what I needed and went to the checkout.

Back home, everything went well. I cut the sausage into coins and fried them, prepared the tomato-based stew base/sauce, and set it all bubbling and perfuming the house. I was looking forward to this meal, after which I'd sit and read a good George Pelecanos book I'd found on sale. Time to start steaming the asparagus, since I was already melting butter and infusing it with garlic.

Now, the way this asparagus is sold, it's wrapped in paper right up to the tips. I don't know why this is, but the packer in Greece does it this way. Sometimes it hides old stems, but on the rare occasions when I've found it, there have never been any problems. So I popped the paper and found...decay. I'm talking about greyish stems, oozing liquid, and a stench.

I kicked myself. The reason I'd seen the asparagus in the first place was that it was prominently displayed. Under lights. Hot lights.

And I knew about this, and should have realized right from the start that there was going to be something wrong. I was just so euphoric about what the rest of the day had brought that I zoned it out completely. And it's not like I haven't bought bad vegetables there before.

Germans don't eat much greenery, at least not in this part of the country, where it's historically been hard to raise. Around here, there are all kinds of root vegetables, and there are pumpkins in season, but a lot of the other stuff comes from Italy, Spain, and Greece. Mid-winter there's always a crop of green beans from Egypt, which I think is cool, and on the rare occasion you can get authentic Haas avocados, the only ones I'll consider, they come from Kenya. But the stores do carry a limited number of green vegetables, and I, of course, buy as many as I can. I'm just not into big radishes or parsnips.

But, although I'm completely certain that the stuff arrives from these exotic lands in decent shape, the idiots who run the supermarket here don't seem to get it. Okay, the stuff's not cooled at all, which is one big mistake, but needn't be fatal. But the bright halogen lights? They're cooking them right on the shelves. Once, you could buy as much or as little as you wanted, which meant that you could actively reject the rotted stuff, but no longer: everything gets packed in these plastic panniers, and then wrapped in cellophane. Then, under the bright lights, moisture evaporates from the vegetables and sits on them. And this, in turn, encourages mold and rot. Many is the pannier of 500g of green beans I've bought, only to discover that, in the center, they've turned to a black liquid mass surrounded by other beans sprouting white fuzzy hair.

I could have taken the asparagus back, if I'd wanted to walk back to the store, if it weren't past 8pm when the store closes, and if I'd thought I'd have a chance in hell of getting anything out of it but grief. But you have to factor in the German "the customer is always wrong" attitude. You should have looked more closely before you bought it. How do we know you bought this here? How do we know you bought this today? Anyway, the guy who could take care of this, if you're not lying, which you almost certainly are, isn't here.

Instead, I carefully trimmed the tips and ate what remained of the 500g bundle as buttered asparagus tips. I don't remember what they tasted like, because I was so pissed off at myself for not realizing I was about to be ripped off when I bought them in the first place.

At least Pelecanos delivered.

First Crumbs of the Year

New Year's wasn't so bad at all, which led the Krautmeister to ask in an e-mail whether this reflected the state of the German economy. I think it's partially that -- who wants to spend substantial quantities of money on stuff that just goes bang when money's tight, after all? -- but there also seemed to be a technological shift taking place this year.

In previous years, there were mostly really loud explosions, but from what I could hear, these bombs have been refined. There was one which seemed to make a huge splashing noise after the explosion, and another that seemed to be a composite, where there was hissing, then a lot of tiny explosions and then a few big ones: sssssssskkkkkkkkkktttttktktktktktkABOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Presumably there was a visual display with this as well. But by far, the majority of what I heard until I went to bed about 1:30 in the morning were whistlers. The night sounded like thousands of suicidal canaries were about.

And the next morning there were fewer red sidewalks. What inevitably happens on New Year's evening is that at some point the snow starts to melt, and the cheap dyed paper wrapping the fireworks falls into the water and the cheap cardboard holding the powder is blown up and it all turns into mush. The tubular firecracker corpses become indistinguishable from the tubular leavings of our doggie friends, so red sidewalks are best avoided.

Anyway, it's over until next year, at which point I hope to be annoyed at citizens of an entirely different country.

And this year's dead guy was Buhaina Art Blakey. The classic Blue Note period, but also the 1958 album of his band with Thelonious Monk. A great way to usher in the New Year.

***

Strange English of the month has to go to the Volksbühne, Berlin's beloved hard-core lefty theater, which has been presenting a play with the enigmatic title Life Is The New Hard. What, for heaven's sake, was the old hard?

***

The odd business called Mörder (murderer) has opened a few doors away. Very hard to tell what goes on in there, although it seems to sell wine, Gummi Bears, and soda. On the first, it was offering pickles and aspirin. Ah, well. At least it's not White Trash Fast Food -- or likely to become a draw like they were.

***

Thanks to Natalie for this article from the Berliner Zeitung (and, thus, in German), which states the amazing fact that the best selling records in Germany last year were...German! This may not seem like much, but it's actually a pretty ground-breaking event. Pop music in postwar Europe has, for years, been all about colonization by first the Americans, and then, after the Beatles, the British. When I first moved here, German divisions of the major labels signed German acts as tax-losses to offset the profits from their Rod Stewart and Tina Turner releases, and you'd almost never hear anyone singing in German on a pop station. The Hamburg band Element of Crime were considered radicals for making pop music in German, and they were about the only big-selling band that did so.

All in all, I think this is a healthy development. Pop music in Europe is multilingual, so that we get the occasional world music number or tune in another language on the charts. Germans have avoided their own pop and folk culture and language because of the residual memory of the uses Hitler and company made of them, but maybe those days are over. Certainly the days of the major labels are over, and the next few years in what the record industry calls the GAS Territories -- Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the German-speaking market, which is the second-largest in the world -- should be very interesting to watch.

Another New Year's Ritual

I'd like to thank Joe for sending me this link to a story from Slate about a New Year's custom here I'd forgotten about, mostly because nobody I know indulges in it. I failed to mention it in last year's roundup of German New Years customs, but this article does a great job of summing things up and an excellent job of analyzing its popularity. (Good to know that, their dismissive e-mails to me notwithstanding, Slate is now printing stories from Germany about somsething other than Nazis and Jews!)

You can watch the whole thing here if you don't live in Germany or somewhere else where Google's video service is disabled. Not realizing the whole film was only ten minutes and fifty seconds, I'd never seen it myself -- and, thanks to Google, still haven't. Maybe some day I'll find out why Google Video isn't available to me, but meanwhile, you can watch, wonder, and maybe enjoy yourself.

As for me, I'm staying in tonight, cooking enchiladas with the last of the leftover turkey from Sunday night and the last tortillas from my freezer (time for some more visitors from America!), then slapping on the headphones (or maybe not -- it's New Year's Eve, after all) and listening to music by (as yet unchosen) dead people.

In other words, same procedure as last year.

Gute Rutsch, y'all!

Here It Comes!

Dang Germans can't get anything right, can they? A number of us got together last night for a nice (if I do say it myself, having cooked it) Christmas turkey dinner and stimulating conversation, but did we get Irving Berlin's legendary white Christmas? No!

Then I wake up this morning, and this is the view out the back window.

To be fair, it may not be Christmas where you are, but it still is here where I am. Christmas in Germany is a two and a half day affair, beginning with the gift-giving on the 24th (Heiligabend -- Holy Evening), then the feasting on the 25th (erste Weihnacht), and, presumably, dyspepsia and hangover on the 26th (zweite Weihnacht). So that meant that when I woke up to this sight, I just shrugged. I wasn't planning to leave the house anyway; the closest I came was opening the back door to shoot this photo.

The first snow always gives me a nice warm feeling, but I expect it'll have dissipated in a couple of days when the stuff turns to sludge, refreezes, and becomes sort of the base of all the sidewalks and roads. In a couple of months the sight of snow falling when I wake up will provoke a groan. By late April, I'll be downright angry, except I think that this April I'll be moving instead. But you get the picture.

By now, of course, it's been dark for over an hour, and last I noticed the snow was still falling. And tomorrow's another day, but one in which the winter will have settled in for its four-month residency, now replete with all the furnishings.

Christmas Card '05

From last night's trip to the Christmas markets. There are a couple more at my Flickr account, if you're interested. What we have here is a crowd of Rauchermännchen, little smoking-men. You twist them at the waist and they come apart, revealing a place where you can put a cone of incense. Then, after you put them back together, they puff smoke through the round hole.

Anyway, I associate them with Christmas here, so they make a good motif for this year's Berlin Christmas card.

Daddio On The Raddio

Wow, I hope not too many of you tuned in to that streaming radio broadcast the other night! A complete and total disaster, but not the fault of anyone involved.

The venue was very odd indeed, a dusty old pub in Prenzlauer Berg, presided over by a guy with long silver hair who used to be a top DJ in the DDR. Various very primitive electric guitars had been nailed to the wall and ceiling, and in the corner of the bar next to the front window, two laptops were delivering Rockradio, while the moderator walked around with a wireless mike. I didn't really see where we were going to put the two CD players Natalie had brought, nor the suitcase full of CDs I'd schlepped up there, but they cleared off a stool and we stuck the players up there. I was then walled in with a table on which I put the CDs.

The big problem was the players. Unlike many you get these days, they had a display, but it was useless: it had this thing that looked like a wheel on it, but no place to display the track number! Who builds these things? (Answer: the Chinese). Who buys them? (Answer: people who don't want to spend a lot on a player for DVDs, MP3s, and all of that). So in order to cue up a track, I had to put my hand on the CD player, and press the forward button, feeling the head move each time until I'd counted up to the right track.

And even then it didn't necessarily work right. Half the show was my trying to cope with the wrong tracks, or the over-helpful engineer, Jörg, who, admittedly, was only trying to make things easier, but didn't, really, except when he held the mike for me to talk into.

The patrons were mostly guys in their late 40s and early 50s who sat around nursing beers, but most of the clientele seemed to be in the pool room in the back. One guy, clad in biker vest and denim, rushed out of that room after I played "Your Mind And I You Belong Together" by Love, attracted by the guitar solo, but that was the only clue I had that anyone there was paying attention.

Fortunately, I was able to stumble through it, and Natalie did a great job of seeing that I got passed the right CDs, and I also appreciate her bringing along some of the modern stuff, although we didn't get much of a chance to play it.

Best technical note of the evening was that as we left, the tram pulled up and took us right back to the 'hood, where I alit barely ten minutes later. But yikes, what a mess!

Weekend Crumbs

Yup, it's that time of year again. This was just shot down at the Sophienstr. Christmas market, which is the "Bio" one, where everything's supposed to be organic. True, they did have Neuland organic Bratwurst for sale, but most of it was tchotchkes from foreign lands, no doubt supported by charitable foundations who have the people over there churning this stuff out for these very markets. I came away disappointed, but that's because I went there looking for something specific from a vendor who wasn't there. Still, it's nice to stroll among the crowds of folks who are doing their level best to spend that Christmas bonus (in some cases, a full month's salary) before the day arrives.

I've got a date with the dancer to go to the more mainstream ones on Thursday, though, and should have some more pictures to go with that.

***

Monday night between 8 and 10pm, I'll be spinning discs and doing whatever you do to MP3s as part of a project I'm still not terribly clear on, but which is being put on by a group my friend Natalie belongs to. Last year they did a pretty good exhibition on "Ostrock," the rock created in East Germany for the teens there, and this year it's something about black rockers, so Natalie and I will be playing two hours of black rock at Speiche's Rock und Blues Kneipe, Raumerstr. 39, in Prenzlauer Berg. Just in case you're not in the area, you'll simultaneously be able to pick this up on Rockradio's website, but only streaming in real time, since this isn't going to be archived there. Working title for it is "50 Years of Black Rock," and yes, Esquerita will be honored.

***

One piece of public-transportation sauerkraut the Master neglected in yesterday's list: the ticket machines. It's bad enough that they take so long to print your ticket that I suspect there are tiny monks chained to scriptoria up inside the damn thing, but there always seems to be people standing in front of them trying to figure out how to work them. Folks, that touch-screen can deliver the goods in about six different languages, so just do it! The weird thing is, though, that most of the dumbfounded people who are keeping me from my ticket are German, staring at the screen trying to figure out what in the world is going on there. It's simple: for €2.10 it'll sell you a ticket. Now get out of the way and I'll demonstrate! Or did you just ride in on a horse-drawn wagon from Bavaria?

***

And, because this is the season, another gift from the mighty Nike, which went up a couple of weeks ago just outside that hipsters' hangout Caffe Burger on Torstr.



Stuff like this appearing almost makes enduring the crappy galleries here worthwhile.

***

More news as it happens!

Master Of Sauerkraut

Okay, I've met my match. A guy contacted me the other day and we started corresponding, and it turns out that not only has he been around here nearly as long as I have, he's also got pretty much the same complaints. In fact, he sent me a long e-mail so drenched in sauerkraut that I'm going to be posting it here, bits at a time.

What set this all off was his comment about how people here shop in pairs, so that one stands in line while the other dashes back and forth putting stuff in the shopping cart. As far as I can tell, this is the only good reason people form couples in this country; it makes this maneuver easier. Many's the time I've gotten in line behind some guy with four things in his cart, only to watch the number swell to forty by the time his girlfriend's added the rest of the shopping and he finally reaches the till.

Further shopping sauerkraut from The Master, with my comments underneath.

1. Massive carts block access to entire categories of food while the workers stock the shelves during shopping hours.

This is because nobody works a second past closing time. Nobody. That's why, back in the old days when a 7pm closing was mandatory (Federal law, and 2pm closing on Saturdays), stores would close at 6 instead, so that their employees would have time to shop and shut the place down. I was once blocked by a huge woman at the door to a supermarket because it was 5:55. I knew what I wanted -- a liter of milk, which I could see past her underarm hair -- but she refused to let me in. Anyway, they have to stock the store sometime, so it's during peak shopping hours.

2. One check-out line will be very very long while the next will be bizarrely short (the ones in the long line are herding)

Germans love to stand in lines. I don't know why this is, but it's definitely true. One Saturday I saw a guy look around until he found the longest line at the grocery store. After joining it, he reached in his pocket and produced a newspaper, which he began to read. Me, I'd rather get out of there and read the paper at home, but I don't fit in around here, as you may have noticed.

3. When it comes time to pay for the purchases, Germans behave as though they aren't quite certain they'd have to pay this time, taking forever to dig out their wallets/purses; taking forever to find the exact change; then taking forever to bag their things after paying (oblivious to the logjam they generate this way)...and THEN come back to dispute the cost of some item (a difference of 5 cents) 70% of the time.

Amen to this. They stand there while the clerk rings up dozens of items and then, presented with the total, they reach behind them, take off the backpack, untie the compartment, unzip the pocket, reach into it, and produce the wallet, out of which invariably comes a card of some sort. This is a novelty, using plastic at the store, and boy, do people like to do it. This means that the signature has to be scrutinized heavily by the cashier, too. After the receipt prints out, the tape gets handed to the consumer, who, as the Master notes, will stand there and tot up every item on it, after which comes the five-cent complaint (and it's almost invariably wrong).

The Master then passes on to the matter of cafes and bakeries, two places I don't spend much time in.

1. If a German lunch companion miraculously picks up the tab at a cafe he will NOT leave a tip; and if YOU then leave one in embarrassment he will pocket it with the comment that the service wasn't THAT good (I've had this happen twice)

And you're now 70 cents down. I should, however, say that overtipping is something I see Americans do a lot of here, and it's almost impossible to convince them that the server's making a decent living without the tips. Really: dinner cost €38? Leave 40. Nobody'll get angry, really.

2. You're sitting at your tiny table, minding your own business...and a stranger takes a seat at it (after asking if it's all right...50% of the time); the table does NOT come with the price of your purchase, no matter how small it is.

Meanwhile the other three tables in the place are empty.

3. Bees all over your future bakery purchases in the summer (no technology for closed cases); counter help hands all over your future bakery purchases all year round.

Technically, those are yellow jackets or wasps, but I was completely grossed out by this the first time I saw it: there were dozens of them in this pastry display at an outdoor market. Bad enough these beasts can't stay away from you when you're eating outdoors in summertime (although they seem not to like alcohol), but why people put up with them all over the cakes and so on I can't say. And yeah, sanitation isn't a big deal in bakeries, is it?

Journey with us now as the Master steps onto our fabled public transportation system!

1. Talent with a moderately in-tune instrument, or being able to sing at all, are mere formalities in the mind of the German busker.

Hate to break this to you, buddy, but those buskers aren't German. The Russian Mob has a monopoly on buskers -- the licensed ones, at least -- because they have a deal that they pick up the daily permits at 6:30am or whatever hideous hour they're handed out. The illegal ones in the summertime seem to all come from Romania, even the ones trying to play "Lady of Spain" as a tango.

2. German beggars are exasperated at your grotesque unwilligness to shell out; small contributions are considered a provocation; they are never cute or witty about it; they represent your CONSCIENCE.

Which makes me wonder: doesn't the German social net cover these people? That said, I once knew a woman who got so tired of beggars that she went out and tried it herself for a day, just to see how much they could make. She came home four hours later, with DM 25 in her pocket. Along Friedrichstr. of late there've been some Middle-Eastern-looking guys with identical laminated computer-printed cards with their supposed malady and sad situation printed on them. Organized beggars? Can you say Fagin?

3. The s-bahn is absolutely packed to the limit: jam that bicycle in ANYway (because you have a right to)...there's no reason that YOU should have to look for an emptier wagon or even wait four minutes for the next train (if you're German, that is: let some Ausländer try to cram in there and see the looks given...).

One more reason I'm glad I don't own a bike, although my main complaint is that I somehow always manage to land on the train about 2pm, right as school lets out. I think they should have separate cars on the trains for children and teenagers, and ones for human beings...errr, I mean adults.

4. If you're German, run to the front or back of the train before entering because the station exit at your destination is nearer the front or back of the train and this will save valuable time later; do this even if the train is seconds from leaving the station and you're far from the wagon you want...it is imperative!

I'm guilty of this to some extent, because trains are long and who wants to buck crowds headed in the opposite direction once you get into the station, but I don't make it stress me out. But this phenomenon you've noticed may actually be an expression of the superstition that the controllers, the guys who check the tickets (you just buy them and stick 'em in your pocket here, folks, on the honor system, and sometimes guys with laminates whip them out and ask for them, but usually not), never ride in the first or last car. I've had this repeated to me as gospel many times, along with a similar superstition that they quit at 5pm. Nope.

5. Germans react to scary crypto-fascist packs of soccer hooligans rocking the train with loud songs and deafening chants with shared glances of boys-will-be-boys bemusement; if you are uncomfortable with this, it's because you are weak and must die.

My worst encounter along these lines was in Hamburg, when the train stopped on a bridge over the harbor, and the, uh, sports fans who'd been bellowing out their team song started jumping up and down in unison. It's always a lot of fun to be in one of these situations with an American friend who still believes that Hitler's ghost is lurking around somewhere, because the volume and the vehemence with which these songs get delivered can be pretty intense. Best advice: stay off of trains running to the Olympic Stadium. And leave town before the World Cup gets here in June!

6. Kebabs

"You are going on U-Bahn? I give you extra onions, no charge!" Passive aggression against his oppressor by the wily Turk? Or simply a sad reflection of the small number of fast-food choices here. It could be worse: it could be Asiapfanne.

And some miscellany:

Exits, entrances, escalators, aisles, sidewalks:

Germans like blocking them.

On the money.

At least once in your life, a German with a few years of English under his or her belt WILL attempt to gainsay your knowledge of...English.

Happened to a friend of mine who was reduced to writing for the old Tourismus & Marketing handout Berlin/Berlin, their allegedly bilingual quarterly what's-going-on mag. This woman had a long journalism career behind her in the States, and was working for a couple of prestigious publications as their Berlin stringer, but somehow her copy didn't please the German woman who was editing her. She was finally asked not to contribute any more because her knowledge of English was so bad. I wish I had a copy of Berlin/Berlin handy so I could quote some good English from it. They had some howlers in there, but I think the thing's been discontinued.

If you want a German girl to respect you, dump her first; THEN have sex with her

After all these years I find out what I've been doing wrong.

If you're German, and something is not illegal, but merely anti-social, you have a perfect right to do it...and complain about it bitterly when others follow suit.

See what I mean? This guy -- errr, I promised confidentiality, so by no means should you assume that this person is male, incidentally -- has obviously been here, as claimed, for ten years.

I feel better, cleansed by sauerkraut. Now there's the question of whether or not I should go out into the world and gather some more material for more, or just rest on the accomplishment that the Master has given us for today's meditation.

Obligatory Lennon Post

Yes, it's the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's shooting, and yes, I remember quite clearly where I was at the time because I was a newspaper reporter and that was my beat: pop music.

The weird thing was, I knew Yoko Ono before I knew John Lennon. I used to scour the Village Voice for weird art and performance and music happenings when I was a junior high school student, and through that I wound up at the New York Avant-Garde Festival, held at Judon Hall, every year. I think it was curated by Charlotte Moorman, the "topless cellist," and I got to see a lot of fabulous performances there. Yoko I remember as a quiet, short woman selling books in the part of the hall where artists could sell their stuff (I signed up for the Fluxus Newsletter there, and still have a few of them), including a book called Grapefruit and also snippets from a reel of recording tape labelled "Snow Falling In Kyoto." She was selling it by the inch.

The two announced their partnership while I was at Rolling Stone, causing the first of what were to be many problems between me and editor/publisher/boy genius Jann Wenner. We were having an editorial meeting and he announced "I have news from London that John Lennon's going out with someone named Yoko Ono." I burst out "Yoko Ono's going out with John Lennon?" and Wenner sneered at me "Oh, I suppose you know who she is." I, being the naive 21-year-old I was, immediately launched into a description of her art and her background and so on, which I babbled out and then encountered a truly frosty silence from the boss. Some months later, the happy couple, smashed on heroin, visited the offices, and Wenner showed them around, introducing us to them, as in "and this is..." They were so out of focus, I'm still not convinced John actually saw me, or Yoko, either. I said hi, but he just grunted.

Ten years later, I was in Austin, Texas, working at the Austin American-Statesman, the local daily. The big issue in my pop music world at that point was a very delicate issue. Armadillo World Headquarters, the local psychedelic dungeon (a former National Guard armory), one with a really amazing booking policy, was going to be demolished to make way for...well, maybe a hotel. Actually, nobody knew. There was amazing opposition in the community, but I was under strict orders not to editorialize about it, probably because there was some corrupt connection between the owners of the paper and the developers who were grabbing the land. Instead, I made sure I covered it as thoroughly as I could and tried to slant my coverage in a way that I quoted others saying what I felt about this destruction of an important local cultural institution.

The Armadillo, though, was doomed by December, 1980, and had booked its last month of concerts, and I was out covering an Asleep At The Wheel/Charlie Daniels Band show when someone found me in the crowd and told me that Lennon had been shot. I think I was waiting to interview Charlie Daniels, but I remember going backstage and making excuses to someone, and telling Asleep At The Wheel's Ray Benson what I'd heard. Then I jumped in my car, went to the newsroom, and watched the feed coming in off the wires. When it appeared they had the shooter in hand and had locked him up, I went home, grabbed a couple hours' sleep, and then commenced telephoning people I knew in England to get comments.

My first victim was my old pal Pete Frame, he of Rock Family Trees fame, and after he got over his shock, he gave me some phone numbers of people who should know. I called a number of people in Liverpool, and managed to find Echo and the Bunnymen's bassist, Les Pattinson, who gave me a really good, moving quote as to how Liverpool's younger generation felt about Lennon as both a figure they resented and rejected, but also someone who, after they got their feet a bit wet in the music business, they came to admire. I ran into work with my notebook bulging, made a few more calls, and wrote up what I thought was a first-rate story. What did the paper do? They hid it way in the back pages, and didn't even put it out on the wires. That may have been the day I decided that busting my butt for those people was, perhaps, a losing proposition, a conclusion I'd certainly reached a couple of years later.

As for me, I wasn't so much devastated by Lennon's death -- I'd long considered him a self-indulgent songwriter on his own, and one who certainly wouldn't have had as much attention paid to him if he hadn't been an ex-Beatle -- as I was by the way it went down. By then, I'd been around the pop business long enough to know plenty of obsessives, pepole who maybe weren't right in the head, but had their useful side when it came to finding out stuff about whichever personality they were obesessed by, even though you tried to get the info and get the hell away before their vibe leached off onto you. I'd never met one with a gun before, and that was the part that got to me.

I've mellowed slightly in my feelings about Lennon, but I remain firm in believing that groups are more than the sum of their parts, and leaving for a solo career, nine times out of ten, means that the quality of your art is about to go down precipitously. None of the ex-Beatles were close to what they'd been as Beatles. That includes John, his posthumous deification notwithstanding. And since I know that's going to piss people off, I invite the pissed-off to examine their relationship to nostalgia, the most destructive and limiting way to look at art you've experienced, since it usually means you've found a way to seal yourself off from the reality of both the art of the past and of the present.

Beware geeks with guns, and remember John by going to a show or buying a record by someone who's following in his footsteps right now. I think he'd appreciate it.

Getting Meta

Lord, that last post was bad.

I mean, I got a lot of what I wanted into it, but because I've set myself this write-and-edit-in-an-hour goal, and because wading through all those noisy Flash beer-company websites took so long, I didn't come down the stretch very gracefully. I've been doing a lot of that recently; I sent in a column to Paste on Ace Records' 30th anniversary, and tried to cram too much into the small space they allotted me. Not real happy about it, because that record company has provided me with a lot of valuable resources for Fresh Air and other places.

So this time, trying to play beat the clock, I shoehorned a bunch of stuff together -- Germany's maddening lack of sense of seasonal cooking, the corporate movements of the German beer industry, the increasing homogenization of culture (at least in Berlin), and the overwhelming depression around here -- into a lumpy, indigestable stew.

At some point, I may revisit this and rework it. I'm sorry for readers who got confused trying to read it.

Anyway, this entry took me five minutes to write, and took a couple of days to think out. There's a lesson for me in there somewhere.

Beer Crisis

I've often remarked that the Germans, at least in this part of the country, have no sense whatever of seasonal cuisine. Many's the summer when, broiling in my apartment, I've left to take a walk on a Sunday afternoon and smelled the halls redolent with roasting pork -- the same roast pork as you'd get on a Sunday like today. There are times of the year when things are traditionally eaten, of course: St. Martin's Day, Nov. 12, is when you eat roast goose and red cabbage, and New Year's sees people in this part of the country eating (shudder) carp, but it's not like you can't get those things year round. To the extent that a Berliner observes the seasons' changing on the table, it's to the extent that that Berliner eats Italian food, which is very much the thing with a certain age cohort here.

So when there's a fabulous seasonal product, I want it. Especially when it seems to go well with the dictates of the current season, being warming and compatible with the kind of food I tend to eat in cold weather. I'm referring to dark bock beer.

Now, when I first moved here, this was no problem. The supermarkets had dozens of brands of beer, and when dark bock season came, they'd have special displays to let the customers know they were here. This was in marked contrast to the way things were when the city was divided: back then, West Berlin had a reputation for awful beer, and it was well-deserved. You had your choice between Schultheiss, which was awful, and Berliner Kindl, which wasn't any better, although they made a premium brand called Jubiläums Pilsener that was barely acceptable. (There was also a brand called Engelhardt Charlottenburger Pilsner that was only available on draft and was totally undrinkable, by which I mean you'd probably never take a second sip).

One thing adventurous travellers knew when they crossed the Wall, however, was that the East Berlin Schultheiss and Kindl actually tasted good: the Communists had just taken over the brands and continued to make them the way they'd always been made, while the rocket scientists in the West were trying out marketing strategies and tinkering with the recipes. So when the city was reunited, the two biggies grabbed the cross-town rivals: Schultheiss took over Berliner Pilsner over on the colorfully-named Indira-Ghandi-Str. and Kindl zoomed in on Berlin's oldest brewery, Berliner Bürgerbräu. So most of the year, I enjoy the crisp, dry, hoppy flavor of BP, but in the winter, I look for this:



True, it's not the best bock I've had since I've been here, but the best one was from the Bärenpils brewery, which used to exist in a tiny town northeast of Berlin, and has now been gobbled up as a brand by Kindl. (The very best German bock of all, as most people will agree, comes from just outside Munich, where the medieval monastery of Andechs makes an astonishing dark bock, along with many other great beers). Schultheiss claims it still makes a bock, although I've never seen it for sale, and I do remember Kindl's being way too sweet and giving me a powerful headache after one bottle.

So (are you thirsty yet?) once I realized that Bürgerbräu was available at the market across the street, there'd be a day each year when I'd just switch, and that's what I'd be drinking, for the most part, between Thanksgiving and sometime in March, since it would always have vanished from the shops by the time I got back from my annual visit to SXSW. It's nice and malty, not very sweet at all, a bit thin on the finish compared to Andechs, perhaps, but hey, it's cheap, it's local, and it's from a really nice place.



That picture of the brewery on the lake is no joke: it snuggles up to the shore of the Müggelsee, and is attached to Friedrichshagen, which I think is the latest of all the Bezirke (boroughs) to be added to Berlin: the Communists just grabbed the little village one day so they could have more Bezirke than the West had. It's still a charming corner of Berlin, particularly when Bürgerbräu has its brewery-fest: you get off the S-Bahn and walk down the long main street, which is lined with the peculiar village architecture of this part of Germany, with subdued Italianate houses -- can't have too much ostentation! -- and tall-roofed farm buildings still evident among the usual clutter of Döner Kebap stands and so on. At the end of the street is the brewery, and I'm told that the restaurant built into its walls is one of the best traditional German restaurants in town. Unfortunately, when the weather's right for that kind of thing, I find it a rather long ride -- about 40 minutes from Friedrichstr. -- so I've never tried it. But during the festival, there are tables all over the place and light snacks available as you slug down some of the local product. The brewery even has a sign on the gate leading out of it, for departing workers and guests: "Be true to Friedrichshagen: buy Bürgerbräu beer!"

But I'm wondering if something's happened down there. Bürgerbräu is no longer listed among Kindl's holdings on its website, and looks to have gone independent again. Perhaps this is why it's also vanishing from the stores: the place across from me no longer carries any of their beers, and virtually none of the Turkish stores and kiosks and the like have it. My supermarket, on the other hand, carries the pils and the Rotkelchen, but it hasn't added the bock this year. I've only found one place in my whole neighborhood -- ironically, another branch of the much bigger supermarket I usually go to -- which carries it.

Now, one weird thing about Germany's economic system is that consumer demand doesn't always reflect itself in the retail sector. Someone figured out that people will buy stuff if you have it out for them, even if it's not exactly what they want, and in turn, people passively consume what they're offered and don't complain. So I don't know if Bürgerbräu is being frozen out of the market, or if people here have been drinking less and less dark bock in the winter. If so, it's another disturbing whiff of the alienation and depression I'm picking up from people in the streets here, a kind of trudging fatalism that isn't so much seasonal as, at this point, endemic.

I still vote with my pocketbook, though, so the "little brewery in the greenery" will be getting my vote this winter as long as I'm able to cast it.

News Of The Hood

Whew, I just walked down Friedrichstr. to Galleries Lafayette to pick up some supplies for dinner, so I hope you don't mind if I warm my fingers up by typing some before I have to go out and buy the rest of the ingredients.

Somehow, winter lowered the hammer while I was in Amsterdam. One day I was there, the headlines in the Dutch papers said the whole country had been paralyzed by a gigantic snowstorm, and sure enough, as I rode back on Monday, the ground around the Dutch-German border was thick with newfallen snow. There was even some on the ground here when I got back, but it's long vanished. I guess I can't complain. It is, after all, December. Which means that it'll soon be time to go out to make a scientific survey of all the local Christmas markets (Weihnachtsmärkte) which seem to cover every square meter of otherwise-uninhabited land. I saw some today: there's a bunch of little sheds by the Westin Grand Hotel on Friedrichstr., one of which was offering "Gluh Kirschbier," which must be warm, spiced, kriek, an idea that does not appeal. Another offered big hunks of fatty pork, which was slightly more appealing.

But the real news is in the wasteland between the Palast der Republik and Humboldt University, where Vodafone has opened a skating rink and there seems to be a Weinachtsmarkt with a huge ferris wheel. Anyway, the dancer has served notice that we will, very soon, undertake this systematic study, and I'm looking forward to it. One thing the Germans do right is Christmas. And yeah, I'll try to take photos.

***

Another discovery I made on this walk is that the Bode Museum is open again. I'm not sure what's in it anymore, since they've shifted all the collections around to "rationalize" them in the wake of the city's reunification, but it would appear to be the collection of Byzantine and pre-Renaissance art, which makes it a priority for me. Plus, of course, it's the closest city museum to my house, and it's nice to have the forbidding domed thing unswathed with scaffolding for the first time in five years. (In fact, every time I looked at the scaffolding I got a nice feeling of schadenfreude. Back when I was trying to start my magazine, there was this odd guy who used to hang around at meetings but never seemed to want to do anything. Turned out he was spying on us, trying to learn how to get a magazine going, and get one going before we did. His "magazine" turned out to be a single sheet of paper folded in quarters, and the first -- and last -- issue was all about what to do in Berlin that summer, tops of which was a visit to the Bode Museum, which had been advertising for six months that it was about to shut for five years for renovation and rationalization of the collection, and, in fact, was closed by the time his pitiful pamphlet hit the streets.)

This will, in fact, make a nice project for the months before I leave: visit these newly-opened museums here and see what's in 'em. Since I'm not a 9-to-5er, going on a Tuesday afternoon in the winter often means having these places pretty much to myself.

***

Even closer to home, Tucholskystr.'s worst gallery, the Squares Of Color gallery (not its actual name, but there was a period of about three years when all the shows there were simply that: squares of color in various arrangements; the silly end was obviously coming when one artist, an American woman, displayed a wall full of those potholders kids make from loops of fabric), finally went out of business, so another eyesore on the way to the S-Bahn has been eliminated. What's replacing it until the end of the year is, according to the sign they put up a "Konked-Out X-Shop," which tells me nothing except that Germans should have to pass an exam before using English on signs. (Another candidate is the guy who's just opened a coffee-shop on Chausseestr. and has carefully etched into the window glass the fact that he serves "muffin's" and "bagel's.") Anyway, I've walked past this place a dozen times and, except for some clothes on hangars, I can't tell you what the concept is or what they're selling.

***

A reader in Italy wrote me an e-mail to ask what the story was with White Trash Fast Food, because apparently a guy she wants to go see was playing there on New Year's Eve. Their website said nothing except that they were reopening, but yesterday a friend came by and mentioned that he'd been to their opening party last week. They've relocated into one of Berlin's worst locations, a mammoth place just up from Torstr. on Schönhauser Allee that opened first as an Irish pub, then turned into another Irish pub, and then was four or five other things before it sat dark for a year or so. The pub area is large enough, but there's a huge club area downstairs: the place can easily hold 1000 people, which sort of puts into question the club's infamous exclusivity. Anyway, the website puts the official opening as tonight. Sorry I won't be able to report on it. I have other plans, and anyway, I'm sure I'd never get past the doorman. I sure hope so, anyway.

***

Okay, fingers are warm, so it's time to freeze 'em off again. More news as it happens.