Gastronomically speaking, this was one of the best trips I've taken lately. Partially, that was due to the presence of Carl Stone, composer and insatiable gourmet, who is always ready to blast off to uncharted new dimensions, in Austin at the beginning of the trip. With the cry of "Let's have another" ringing in your ears, it's hard to resist.
Thus, my first day in Austin ended with dinner at Madras Pavillion, the South Indian vegetarian restaurant I discovered a few years ago, but this time, we avoided the combo plates and ordered this and that from the a la carte meu -- a great idea, as it turned out. Among the great things we got were "Chinese" iddlis (the menu there realizes that a lot of the Indians who eat at the place come with their kids, and those kids are bored with Indian food, so it has several odd fusion dishes, including an Italian dosa I'm scared of), which were nice and fiery, a semolina-based dish tempered with roasted dal and spices, and a number of other things I"ve forgotten. There was a pink dipping sauce I've got to see if I can find in my books, too, along with the usual rasam. If you live in Austin and haven't been to this place, you're missing one of its great treasures.
In fact, India seems to be making a strong showing in Austin -- thanks, high-tech folks! -- and another worthy place is the funky Shalimar far up on N. Lamar. There was a Pakistani wedding going on in their back room the night I visited, which I took for a good sign, and the place is properly Pakistani rather than Indian, not that there's that much difference between Pakistani and Northern Indian, thanks to the Mughal influence. I had a beef dish that was cooked almost to the point where the meat dissolved in the unctuous green sauce, and, since it was on the menu, mattar panir, which I love. This was the best I've ever had in a restaurant (I've made slightly better at home). Creamy, with nicely made fresh panir, and -- the big difference -- cashew nuts which brought out not only the nuttiness of the sauce, but also the panir flavor. And made with frozen peas, not canned. I'm sure restaurants are finally catching on to this trick, but dang, it took them a long time. Zero atmosphere, television tuned to a sports channel, and super-low prices.
Mexico, however, is not to be slighted, at least not while I'm in town. The find this time was La Michoacana Meat Market on East 7th St., thanks to a tip from my old pal George Leake, who resurfaced via e-mail just before I left Berlin and mentioned this place as being a place where his co-workers at the restaurant he cooks at recommended as somewhere you could get stuff as good as their grandmothers and mothers make. In the center of the store there's a counter with a steam-table and a big flat space on which to toast tortillas, as well as a fryolater for the gorditas and huaraches they also sell there (both bases for the toppings from the steam-table). You go in, decide what you want, then go stand in line at one of the cash registers and tell them what type of thing you're going to order ("three corn tacos," for instance). Then you go back to the counter, hand over the receipt the cashier's given you, and order. The lady will have your tacos ready in seconds: big, fat, two-tortilla ones. She'll then ask you if you want onions and cilantro with them (correct answer: yes), and hand them over. There's an amazing red picante sauce in squeeze bottles on the tables surrounding the counter, or they'll put some in little containers for a to-go order. Oh, and did I mention that each of these beauties costs $1.49? That's less than a Euro! Over several days, I managed to sample chile verde, picadillo, al pastor, barbacoa, rajitas con queso, and, one morning for breakfast, egg and potato, ham and egg, and chorizo and egg tacos. Every single one of them was stunning. Carl got a plato, with rice and beans, on our visit, with the chile verde, for, I think, less than four bucks. Asking around various long-time Austinites, I got an almost unanimous "I've driven past that place" reaction, but, besides George, I didn't meet anyone who'd been there. Big mistake, folks. Plus, the grocery section is a trip: everything you need to set yourself up to cook Mexican, including, duh, meat cut for fajitas and so on.
Seven years ago, on a cold day, I found an odd Mexican restaurant on S. 1st that specialized in lamb, only to have it vanish without trace. Recently, I discovered that it had re-appeared on S. Congress just north of Ben White. El Borrego de Oro is at 3900 S. Congress, and well worth the visit. I had the birria plate ($9.50), which was a stupefying quantity of lamb stewed with tomato and onion, with which you get handmade tortillas and pico de gallo. They also have a lamb soup with hunks of corncob floating in it, but it wasn't that cold this time. They also do seafood, including cocktels, which are good. I also note on the menu I took away that there's a cabrito soup and various other unusual dishes, including a chicken breast stuffed with chorizo, mushroom, and cheese that sounds pretty good.
Carl and I also found a place on Cesar Chavez that advertised itself as "el catedral de mariscos," and, while it was more of a parish church than a cathedral, it partially satisfied my jones for Mexican seafood. Someday I'll find a place that does calamares rellenos, small squid with the bodies stuffed with rice and peas and then covered with ranchero sauce, like a joint called Lucy's Mariscos in Santa Monica did in the '70s. Hell, maybe it exists in Austin: far north Lamar seems to be the new ethnic gourmet gulch, and if I'd had more time, I'd have explored the Chinese seafood place I saw, not to mention a few of the Mexican places, and I'd also have rampaged through the Chinatown center, the new Vietnamese shopping mall at 10900 N. Lamar (a number that surely didn't exist when I first came to Austin), although I noticed that a banh mi place was going in there, so that'll be waiting for me next year.
About midway into the Austin segment of the trip, I got a cold which shut down my taste-buds, but fortunately they revived in time for me to have two great meals at Madam Mam's, which still makes the best Thai food I've ever had. The major discovery this time was a so-called appetizer of beautifully grilled marinated pork served with various vegetables and an insanely delicious sauce. You wrap the pork in the romaine lettuce leaves that come with it, dip it in the sauce, and experience bliss. But you'd better have at least one other person at the table if you want to order a main course; this is a serious quantity of food!
And no trip to Austin would be complete without a visit to Gene's for an oyster po-boy (Carl was so in need of one he got to Austin, picked up his rent car, and drove to Gene's for one before he checked into his hotel, so you can see he has his priorities straight!). The only thing wrong with Gene's is that it closes at 8pm, and I don't like heavy lunches, so I've never tried his jambalaya or fried chicken because I rarely eat dinner too early. Gene promised me he's working on later opening hours, so I hope he has that worked out before next year. Or I'll comprimise my principles. It's worth it, I bet.
In other news, Hoover's is now open for breakfast daily, which is very good news indeed, since you can get garlic cheese grits for breakfast and dinner now. A bunch of us No Depression writers got together to buy Peter and Grant breakfast in thanks for the ones they'd bought us over the years, and although the occasion was sad, the food made up for it as much as it could.
Wait! What about barbeque? Well, with Carl in town, you can bet at least one trip was made, and we headed to Lockhart for a Smitty's versus Kreuz showdown. Comparison of the brisket and pork chop at both places proved Kreuz the winner this time out, and their cheese-jalapeno sausage was a surprise new hit, too. I was stuffed, though, to an almost unpleasant degree, so it was a good thing I was driving, because when Carl said "But what about Black's?" I could just ignore him and drive out of town.
* * *
My trip ended with a marathon journey that went Austin to Newark, Newark to Paris, and then Paris to Montpellier on the TGV train. It was a complete change of scene, but a great one; I can't wait to start cooking down there. Meanwhile I had to make do with eating at restaurants, and can report that you can get a superb slice of terrine and a great steak with a Roquefort sauce and a half-liter of wine at the Bistrot d'Alco for twenty Euros (the place is an old favorite of mine there), which is what I did as soon as I'd taken a nap to burn off some of the jet-lag. The new discovery came courtesy of Bart Calendar, an American blogger/writer who's been in Montpellier for a number of years, after we started talking about cassoulet (not really native to the immediate area, but, seeing as how it was cold, something that sounded damn good) in the Bar Vert Anglais. Several names were proposed, and I intend to research them some day, but La Chêneraie won the toss. The place isn't without problems -- the bread was very substandard for a town with superb bakeries, and the cheese course was meager and way too cold -- but the cassoulet was excellent and only €17.90 on the menu, and the half-bottle of Chateau de Fourques from St. Georges d'Orques, a little-known Languedoc appellation, was a revelation: spicy and fruity, revealing new mixtures of the two with each sip.
* * *
Tomorrow, various notes and miscellenea from Austin and Montpellier, including further news on the move.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Monday, March 31, 2008
SXSW '08: What Happened
I think it's very telling that the question people ask most when they hear you've been to SXSW is "What music did you hear?" Increasingly, that's the only reason people attend the music segment of the event, and maybe it's my preoccupations of the past couple of months, but it does seem, in a way, to be whistling past the graveyard.
I saw music. Not much, but I saw some. Some was good, some was not.
The first night, for instance, was almost a total disaster. As it turned out, the two main acts I wanted to see, the Slits and Charanga Cakewalk, were on at the same time. This is business for usual at SXSW for me; it's inevitable. I calculated that the Slits might be overcrowded and/or not so good, and Michael Ramos' Charanga Cakewalk record has remained one of my faves since it came out a couple of years ago. Trouble was, there was nothing I actually knew anything about happening before then. I parked my car (tip for those with autos at SXSW: the official Convention Center parking lot is only seven bucks, you get three ins and outs, and you can get your car any time of the night or day
although these signs are a little disconcerting), and set about finding the Rio, the club where Ramos would perform.
I found it, and a Danish "world music" band, Afenginn, was performing some grim fusion of musics they didn't seem to understand. The blond-dreadlocked frontman was particularly earnest. I did a U-turn and left. What now? There was an hour and a half to kill. Moping along to Congress Avenue, I decided to see what the Intuitive Music Orchestra from Moscow was all about. The Copa, the club where they were performing, was sort of dingy, and on stage a motley crew of time-warped hippies was surrounded by hundreds of "little instruments," basically noisemakers of various sorts. They were in the process of picking them up, tinkling or rattling them, blowing into flutes, and so on. Clearly this wasn't, as advertised, "world music," but instead something far worse: "free improvisation," a genre of music that can be fun to play, but pretty trying to listen to. Still, sometimes it rewards sticking with it for a while in case inspiration strikes.
Inspiration didn't strike. Inspiration seemed to be fleeing as fast as it could. Soon, so was I.
Soon, I was back at the Rio. Rupa and the April Fishes, a band whose CD I'd gotten shortly before leaving, was on. I hadn't had time to listen to the CD, but the premise seemed interesting. Rupa is a waif-like young woman of East Indian extraction who grew up in Iceland and France and was currently based in San Francisco. The band on the album was a nicely-mixed bunch of oddballs, so this could be interesting. But it wasn't. For one thing, only two of the band had made it to SXSW, a drummer and a cello-player. Rupa herself strummed the guitar and breathily intoned new-agey platitudes while the cello shrieked glissandos. I lasted a couple of songs, then went outside to await Charaga Cakewalk. Standing there, I found myself in the odd position of having various people walk up and show me their badges, thinking I was a doorman.
Finally Rupa & Co. left the stage to a smattering of applause, and I went in. Walking over the floor, I saw a wad of bills lying there. As I reached for it, a guy turned around, patting his pocket, and we both realized it was his. I fell into conversation with the guy, who told me he was in the cleaning fluids business back in England, but had used his profits to get into the music business, coming to Austin frequently and finding bands to manage. He was also a journalist. I sort of envied him, especially when a very attractive Texan woman joined him. They'd met accidentally the night before, and had hooked up. Some guys have all the luck.
Ramos had far more equipment than anyone else, which figured, due to his electro-goes-TexMex approach, and it took him a long time to set up. I wish I could say that the stage show matched the record, but while workmanlike, it wasn't particularly inspirational. Or maybe I was just tired or something; at any rate, I left after he performed because it was getting late, knowing that I'd be fried if I waited for 1am, when 17 Hippies were going to play. They had another showcase the next night, anyway, so I'd see them then.
And I did. There were some other acts I half-heartedly wanted to see on Thursday, but logistics were against me. Uncle Monk, the bluegrass duo Tommy Erdyeli of the Ramones is half of these days, was on, but the word later was they were terrible. There was also an Americana group, the Wilders, which I missed because they were on at the same time as the Hippies (who, being friends and neighbors, I didn't want to miss), and I also missed Susan Cowsill (who's usually great live) and a reunion of her family's band, the Cowsills, which was intriguing, but alas, both were on too early for someone who, like me, sees SXSW as an opportunity to grab a good dinner as often as possible.
The Hippies, I gotta say, were great. I got to the venue too early, and had to suffer through a guy named Vinicio Capossela from Milan, who embodied everything I dislike about Tom Waits in a relentless, over-adrenalized set. I thought he'd never stop, although once the Hippies took the stage with their own brand of enthusiasm, the mood lightened considerably. The Hippies' music is almost impossible to define -- world music from a yet-undiscovered world, folk music from a decidedly odd group of folk -- but they can win over audiences in an instant. Poor Christopher took a hit for the crew, getting bashed in the face by an accordion while dodging in their bluegrass-band-like microphone choreography, and bled from a wound above his eye for half the set. At the end, the band and the audience were both exhausted, and everyone was talking about them for the rest of the conference, which bodes well for their summer U.S. tour.
Friday's main attraction was the Ponderosa Stomp, which ran all night at the Continental Club. This is a praiseworthy event, which is held in April in New Orleans, run by a bunch of maniacs led by a guy named Dr. Ike, who find performers from the 1950s and '60s -- soul, country, and the odder corners of rock -- and present them in a huge all-day, all-night concert. They publicize it at SXSW with a mini-Stomp, with short sets by participating artists, and it's usually pretty good. Unfortunately, I only caught the end of Ralph "Soul" Jackson's set, which I heard was pretty good, and saw Barbara Mason, whose voice has never been great, and is still much like it always has been. I'd have stayed for more, but the "Flaming Arrows Mardi Gras Indians," who followed, were dire, not least because Dr. Ike's wife had somehow become a member. Lost for anything else to see, I headed back to the hotel, missing Little Freddie King, who followed the Indians, and who I heard was pretty good.
One of the problems that's plagued SXSW has been the trend towards various entities putting on parties during the day, only a few of which are aligned with the conference, but all of which drain attendance at the panels and interviews (about which more in a minute). I rarely attend them, but this year I had a good reason to: Jon Hardy and the Public, with whom I'd had dinner the night before, and who've applied two or three times to SXSW and never been accepted, were playing a party sponsored by his home town of St. Louis' big roots festival, Twangfest. I didn't envy them, driving all the way from St. Louis for a 45-minute set on what turned out to be a 90-degree-plus afternoon, but they acquitted themselves well. I'm not as fond of Hardy's current material, informed as it is by the breakup of his marriage ("Lotta competition there," said a friend. "Blood on the Tracks, Shoot Out the Lights..."), as I am of his absolutely unique, more surrealistic earlier stuff, and I hope he finds healing in what he's doing next and re-introduces more elements of what I think is his major gift as time goes on, but I certainly wasn't unhappy with the performance, held outdoors at Jovita's, South Austin's funky Tex-Mex restaurant.
That evening, I had dinner with Jason Gross and his friend Tim Broun, and, in keeping with Jason's usual manic schedule, wound up seeing the flavor-of-the-month, Duffy, a young woman from Wales who's burning up the British charts. It sounded like your basic MOR to me, lending credence to my suspicion that this isn't a very good year for music, although her single is okay -- but just okay. Leaving there, I caught the end of Andre Williams' set at the Continental Club, predictably raunchy, and then settled in for a set by Jon Dee Graham, an always reliable, always enjoyable performer.
And that was it for the music.
As for the panels, I'll be brief, because this post is already too long. The keynote by Lou Reed was downright weird, with him declaring "I've got a BA in dope, but a Ph.D. in soul!" at one point (um, perhaps we have different definitions of soul...), hyping his new DVD of Berlin to the teeth, and then going on a great rant about how we've all come to accept unacceptably low fidelity as the default. He was jeered in the press by this, but dammit, he's right. Sorry.
Immediately afterwards, the highlight of my SXSW: Thurston Moore interviewing Steve Reich. Moore did a phenomenal job of keeping the conversation going, and Reich was as personable as can be, parrying questions with great good humor, keeping things on a basic enough level that the curious non-classical majority of the audience could follow what he was saying, and making it utterly impossible for me to believe he's 71 years old. I really regret having missed the concert of his stuff Thursday evening, but there was no program available, and I wanted to cherry-pick what I heard. Also, because it wasn't his own group performing his works and because what was performed was earlier stuff, it somehow didn't seem as urgent to go hear it. I'd heard what I wanted from Reich that afternoon, and for that I congratulate Thurston Moore.
Jason did a great job with his blog panel, which I walked into just to let him know I was there, and stayed to bring myself up to speed on the "new rock press," which, unfortunately or not, blogs are. (Unfortunate because, as I've said earlier, they don't much allow for long-form writing and of course they don't pay). Just after that was a really inspiring panel entitled Boomer Power, from which I didn't expect much despite Bill Bentley's being the moderator, but which turned out to be incredibly thought-provoking. The thoughts it provoked will emerge in subsequent posts, I promise. Doug Mosurock also had a great panel on the revival of vinyl, although once again, I just showed up because I had a message for him and stayed to learn a lot. And finally, Margaret Moser predictably did a great job with her panel on 16 Magazine and the Birth of Music Journalism, in which we got to hear not only from former editor (and, among other things, Ramones discoverer) Danny Fields, but also former teen idols Susan Cowsill and Taylor Hanson, both of whom had hilariously scary stories about being marketed to young girls.
But one piece of wisdom I'm going to follow next year was voiced by musician/rights administrator Andrew Halbreich (aka George Carver), with whom I check in every year for a little nachas. "You know, " he mused, "music has for a long time defined itself as a counter-culture, but what I find interesting is that the Interactive conference -- where you didn't attend any panels, and you should have -- is much more of a proto-culture." He's right, and I'm going to need to bend my focus towards that next year. SXSW's directors have long been saying the whole thing is involved in a complex convergance, and I believe that to be true.
But there's always next year.
Next up: food and other follies in Austin and Montpellier.
I saw music. Not much, but I saw some. Some was good, some was not.
The first night, for instance, was almost a total disaster. As it turned out, the two main acts I wanted to see, the Slits and Charanga Cakewalk, were on at the same time. This is business for usual at SXSW for me; it's inevitable. I calculated that the Slits might be overcrowded and/or not so good, and Michael Ramos' Charanga Cakewalk record has remained one of my faves since it came out a couple of years ago. Trouble was, there was nothing I actually knew anything about happening before then. I parked my car (tip for those with autos at SXSW: the official Convention Center parking lot is only seven bucks, you get three ins and outs, and you can get your car any time of the night or day
although these signs are a little disconcerting), and set about finding the Rio, the club where Ramos would perform.
I found it, and a Danish "world music" band, Afenginn, was performing some grim fusion of musics they didn't seem to understand. The blond-dreadlocked frontman was particularly earnest. I did a U-turn and left. What now? There was an hour and a half to kill. Moping along to Congress Avenue, I decided to see what the Intuitive Music Orchestra from Moscow was all about. The Copa, the club where they were performing, was sort of dingy, and on stage a motley crew of time-warped hippies was surrounded by hundreds of "little instruments," basically noisemakers of various sorts. They were in the process of picking them up, tinkling or rattling them, blowing into flutes, and so on. Clearly this wasn't, as advertised, "world music," but instead something far worse: "free improvisation," a genre of music that can be fun to play, but pretty trying to listen to. Still, sometimes it rewards sticking with it for a while in case inspiration strikes.
Inspiration didn't strike. Inspiration seemed to be fleeing as fast as it could. Soon, so was I.
Soon, I was back at the Rio. Rupa and the April Fishes, a band whose CD I'd gotten shortly before leaving, was on. I hadn't had time to listen to the CD, but the premise seemed interesting. Rupa is a waif-like young woman of East Indian extraction who grew up in Iceland and France and was currently based in San Francisco. The band on the album was a nicely-mixed bunch of oddballs, so this could be interesting. But it wasn't. For one thing, only two of the band had made it to SXSW, a drummer and a cello-player. Rupa herself strummed the guitar and breathily intoned new-agey platitudes while the cello shrieked glissandos. I lasted a couple of songs, then went outside to await Charaga Cakewalk. Standing there, I found myself in the odd position of having various people walk up and show me their badges, thinking I was a doorman.
Finally Rupa & Co. left the stage to a smattering of applause, and I went in. Walking over the floor, I saw a wad of bills lying there. As I reached for it, a guy turned around, patting his pocket, and we both realized it was his. I fell into conversation with the guy, who told me he was in the cleaning fluids business back in England, but had used his profits to get into the music business, coming to Austin frequently and finding bands to manage. He was also a journalist. I sort of envied him, especially when a very attractive Texan woman joined him. They'd met accidentally the night before, and had hooked up. Some guys have all the luck.
Ramos had far more equipment than anyone else, which figured, due to his electro-goes-TexMex approach, and it took him a long time to set up. I wish I could say that the stage show matched the record, but while workmanlike, it wasn't particularly inspirational. Or maybe I was just tired or something; at any rate, I left after he performed because it was getting late, knowing that I'd be fried if I waited for 1am, when 17 Hippies were going to play. They had another showcase the next night, anyway, so I'd see them then.
And I did. There were some other acts I half-heartedly wanted to see on Thursday, but logistics were against me. Uncle Monk, the bluegrass duo Tommy Erdyeli of the Ramones is half of these days, was on, but the word later was they were terrible. There was also an Americana group, the Wilders, which I missed because they were on at the same time as the Hippies (who, being friends and neighbors, I didn't want to miss), and I also missed Susan Cowsill (who's usually great live) and a reunion of her family's band, the Cowsills, which was intriguing, but alas, both were on too early for someone who, like me, sees SXSW as an opportunity to grab a good dinner as often as possible.
The Hippies, I gotta say, were great. I got to the venue too early, and had to suffer through a guy named Vinicio Capossela from Milan, who embodied everything I dislike about Tom Waits in a relentless, over-adrenalized set. I thought he'd never stop, although once the Hippies took the stage with their own brand of enthusiasm, the mood lightened considerably. The Hippies' music is almost impossible to define -- world music from a yet-undiscovered world, folk music from a decidedly odd group of folk -- but they can win over audiences in an instant. Poor Christopher took a hit for the crew, getting bashed in the face by an accordion while dodging in their bluegrass-band-like microphone choreography, and bled from a wound above his eye for half the set. At the end, the band and the audience were both exhausted, and everyone was talking about them for the rest of the conference, which bodes well for their summer U.S. tour.
Friday's main attraction was the Ponderosa Stomp, which ran all night at the Continental Club. This is a praiseworthy event, which is held in April in New Orleans, run by a bunch of maniacs led by a guy named Dr. Ike, who find performers from the 1950s and '60s -- soul, country, and the odder corners of rock -- and present them in a huge all-day, all-night concert. They publicize it at SXSW with a mini-Stomp, with short sets by participating artists, and it's usually pretty good. Unfortunately, I only caught the end of Ralph "Soul" Jackson's set, which I heard was pretty good, and saw Barbara Mason, whose voice has never been great, and is still much like it always has been. I'd have stayed for more, but the "Flaming Arrows Mardi Gras Indians," who followed, were dire, not least because Dr. Ike's wife had somehow become a member. Lost for anything else to see, I headed back to the hotel, missing Little Freddie King, who followed the Indians, and who I heard was pretty good.
One of the problems that's plagued SXSW has been the trend towards various entities putting on parties during the day, only a few of which are aligned with the conference, but all of which drain attendance at the panels and interviews (about which more in a minute). I rarely attend them, but this year I had a good reason to: Jon Hardy and the Public, with whom I'd had dinner the night before, and who've applied two or three times to SXSW and never been accepted, were playing a party sponsored by his home town of St. Louis' big roots festival, Twangfest. I didn't envy them, driving all the way from St. Louis for a 45-minute set on what turned out to be a 90-degree-plus afternoon, but they acquitted themselves well. I'm not as fond of Hardy's current material, informed as it is by the breakup of his marriage ("Lotta competition there," said a friend. "Blood on the Tracks, Shoot Out the Lights..."), as I am of his absolutely unique, more surrealistic earlier stuff, and I hope he finds healing in what he's doing next and re-introduces more elements of what I think is his major gift as time goes on, but I certainly wasn't unhappy with the performance, held outdoors at Jovita's, South Austin's funky Tex-Mex restaurant.
That evening, I had dinner with Jason Gross and his friend Tim Broun, and, in keeping with Jason's usual manic schedule, wound up seeing the flavor-of-the-month, Duffy, a young woman from Wales who's burning up the British charts. It sounded like your basic MOR to me, lending credence to my suspicion that this isn't a very good year for music, although her single is okay -- but just okay. Leaving there, I caught the end of Andre Williams' set at the Continental Club, predictably raunchy, and then settled in for a set by Jon Dee Graham, an always reliable, always enjoyable performer.
And that was it for the music.
As for the panels, I'll be brief, because this post is already too long. The keynote by Lou Reed was downright weird, with him declaring "I've got a BA in dope, but a Ph.D. in soul!" at one point (um, perhaps we have different definitions of soul...), hyping his new DVD of Berlin to the teeth, and then going on a great rant about how we've all come to accept unacceptably low fidelity as the default. He was jeered in the press by this, but dammit, he's right. Sorry.
Immediately afterwards, the highlight of my SXSW: Thurston Moore interviewing Steve Reich. Moore did a phenomenal job of keeping the conversation going, and Reich was as personable as can be, parrying questions with great good humor, keeping things on a basic enough level that the curious non-classical majority of the audience could follow what he was saying, and making it utterly impossible for me to believe he's 71 years old. I really regret having missed the concert of his stuff Thursday evening, but there was no program available, and I wanted to cherry-pick what I heard. Also, because it wasn't his own group performing his works and because what was performed was earlier stuff, it somehow didn't seem as urgent to go hear it. I'd heard what I wanted from Reich that afternoon, and for that I congratulate Thurston Moore.
Jason did a great job with his blog panel, which I walked into just to let him know I was there, and stayed to bring myself up to speed on the "new rock press," which, unfortunately or not, blogs are. (Unfortunate because, as I've said earlier, they don't much allow for long-form writing and of course they don't pay). Just after that was a really inspiring panel entitled Boomer Power, from which I didn't expect much despite Bill Bentley's being the moderator, but which turned out to be incredibly thought-provoking. The thoughts it provoked will emerge in subsequent posts, I promise. Doug Mosurock also had a great panel on the revival of vinyl, although once again, I just showed up because I had a message for him and stayed to learn a lot. And finally, Margaret Moser predictably did a great job with her panel on 16 Magazine and the Birth of Music Journalism, in which we got to hear not only from former editor (and, among other things, Ramones discoverer) Danny Fields, but also former teen idols Susan Cowsill and Taylor Hanson, both of whom had hilariously scary stories about being marketed to young girls.
But one piece of wisdom I'm going to follow next year was voiced by musician/rights administrator Andrew Halbreich (aka George Carver), with whom I check in every year for a little nachas. "You know, " he mused, "music has for a long time defined itself as a counter-culture, but what I find interesting is that the Interactive conference -- where you didn't attend any panels, and you should have -- is much more of a proto-culture." He's right, and I'm going to need to bend my focus towards that next year. SXSW's directors have long been saying the whole thing is involved in a complex convergance, and I believe that to be true.
But there's always next year.
Next up: food and other follies in Austin and Montpellier.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Last Death (For A While)
I don't want to get too obsessively focussed on this topic, and I'm going to want to post some stuff about my stay here in Texas, but one thing that happened after SXSW had already started was that Harp magazine died. The poor bastards had already paid for a SXSW party, too, which must have been like going to your own wake.
I'll admit it: although I wrote for them a few years back, I never really got a handle on Harp, which seemed to me to be a No Depression wannabe without any of the latter magazine's intellectual firepower. The fact that they paid a whopping five cents a word might well have had something to do with that. As an Austin-based colleague commented to me the day the news got out "My first review, in 1973, I sold to Circus (long-gone mediocre rock mag of the '70s -- ed.) for $15. My last review for Harp I got $15 for. Only difference is what you can get for that fifteen bucks these days."
But over on the Crazed by the Music blog, Jason Gross of Perfect Sound Forever has posted the official statement about the magazine's shut-down (one which, to be honest, is at a slight variant from other stories I've heard from trusted sources), and the money paragraph is here:
"However, according to Glenn Sabin, Guthrie’s CEO, the publication struggled to become profitable. 'We purchased Harp in 2003, and it quickly became a first class product that was highly acclaimed for its often irreverent editorial approach and strong graphical package. Unfortunately, Harp’s critical acclaim never translated into sustaining commercial success. Harp’s lifecycle was ill timed with the precipitous decline of the music software industry, coupled with the consolidation of the consumer magazine newsstand business and rising paper and postage costs.'"
I'm having a little trouble with that last bit. Oh, the "music software business" means "records" or "CDs" or whatever, and the paper and postage complaint was also part of No Depression's problems. But what does this guy mean by "consolidation of the consumer magazine newsstand business?" I'm not disputing him; I'd really like to know what this phrase means. Not living in the U.S., yet attempting to write for its readers, I don't necessarily see the same things you do.
And a passing thought: if Harp had paid people a decent wage -- not a lot, but up to what other magazines paid -- might they not have attracted a larger readership for better writing and stood out from the crowd a bit more? Because I have to say, I stopped reading Harp long before they stopped sending it to me. It just wasn't very interesting. More interesting, perhaps, than Blender (also rumored to be in trouble) or Spin, but that's not saying much.
Anyway, one thing that came out of the various discussions and panels at SXSW was that there really isn't a consumer music magazine left, at least not one that pays. Maybe I really am better off writing this blog for free. That's a chilling thought...
I'll admit it: although I wrote for them a few years back, I never really got a handle on Harp, which seemed to me to be a No Depression wannabe without any of the latter magazine's intellectual firepower. The fact that they paid a whopping five cents a word might well have had something to do with that. As an Austin-based colleague commented to me the day the news got out "My first review, in 1973, I sold to Circus (long-gone mediocre rock mag of the '70s -- ed.) for $15. My last review for Harp I got $15 for. Only difference is what you can get for that fifteen bucks these days."
But over on the Crazed by the Music blog, Jason Gross of Perfect Sound Forever has posted the official statement about the magazine's shut-down (one which, to be honest, is at a slight variant from other stories I've heard from trusted sources), and the money paragraph is here:
"However, according to Glenn Sabin, Guthrie’s CEO, the publication struggled to become profitable. 'We purchased Harp in 2003, and it quickly became a first class product that was highly acclaimed for its often irreverent editorial approach and strong graphical package. Unfortunately, Harp’s critical acclaim never translated into sustaining commercial success. Harp’s lifecycle was ill timed with the precipitous decline of the music software industry, coupled with the consolidation of the consumer magazine newsstand business and rising paper and postage costs.'"
I'm having a little trouble with that last bit. Oh, the "music software business" means "records" or "CDs" or whatever, and the paper and postage complaint was also part of No Depression's problems. But what does this guy mean by "consolidation of the consumer magazine newsstand business?" I'm not disputing him; I'd really like to know what this phrase means. Not living in the U.S., yet attempting to write for its readers, I don't necessarily see the same things you do.
And a passing thought: if Harp had paid people a decent wage -- not a lot, but up to what other magazines paid -- might they not have attracted a larger readership for better writing and stood out from the crowd a bit more? Because I have to say, I stopped reading Harp long before they stopped sending it to me. It just wasn't very interesting. More interesting, perhaps, than Blender (also rumored to be in trouble) or Spin, but that's not saying much.
Anyway, one thing that came out of the various discussions and panels at SXSW was that there really isn't a consumer music magazine left, at least not one that pays. Maybe I really am better off writing this blog for free. That's a chilling thought...
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
The Magazine Of The Future?
I dumped out the contents of my goody bag from SXSW Interactive, and Hell fell out. I don't mean the deluge of swag -- one expects that -- but a large, glossy magazine. A travel magazine. A vision of Hell.
Everywhere, it's called. "The New Travel Magazine Made by You." I knew it was trouble the minute I saw that cover line.
Inside, my worst nightmares were fulfilled in spades. Oh, it's pretty. It's glossy. It even has a few ads. But my heart sank, and it's remained sunk. This thing is evil. The explanation is right there only page 8. Read along with me and see if you don't get creeped out, too:
How Everywhere works.
1) See the world
Visit wonderful places, have fun, take lots of pictures.
2) Document your trip
Select your best photos and tell us about where you went.
3) Upload
Contribute your travel tales and photos to Everywheremag.com.
4) Peer review
The community votes on travel stories, photos, and favorite places.
5) Final selection
Our editors curate each issue from the best of the best.
6) Publication
Published contributors get $100 and a free subscription.
In other words, it's a blog. On paper. A very pretty blog on paper. And if it catches on, someone's going to be making crazy money.
Now, let me take a minute to explain why this is a very bad idea. This strikes to the heart of the whole neophilia thing I've been raving about, and I can just imagine Grant Alden's reaction when he reads this. I already know the reaction I got from a professional travel writer who's doing work she hates because she can't make a living being a travel writer. She's ready to pass out torches and meet me in the streets of San Francisco while we storm the Everywhere headquarters.
She and I, it turns out, had an identical vision at about the same time, before we were in e-contact: a travel magazine aimed at how the people we know travel. Not the "Paris on $5000 a Day" crowd that Conde Nast Traveler seems to target, but real people going to interesting places who want to learn about other interesting places to go. Superficially, Everywhere would seem to be that magazine, but it's not.
As I learned a long time ago, pure democracy is a very bad thing in the magazine business. There not only has to be a hierarchy, but there also has to be something of a dictatorship if the thing is going to work. This seems evil, but really it's not: nobody is an expert on everything. If you need your house rewired, you could, theoretically, do it yourself, but if you're not an electrician, my guess is you'll defer to an electrician's expertise and pay for it. And if you're an accountant, you might do your electrician's taxes. There's nothing wrong with this, is there?
There's something about writing, though, that makes anyone capable of creating a sentence think they can do it. They can't, any more than anyone can take a picture by pushing a button. You can write a sentence and snap a picture, but is either any good? So accountants account, electricians electrish, writers write, and photographers photograph. The writers and photographers put out a magazine, the electrician and the accountant buy it, and they rewire our houses and do our taxes.
Putting together an article is a very complex thing. While turning the pages of Everywhere, I came up with an example of how this works so I can show you what I perceive as the biggest problem with the admittedly seductive idea it puts forth, that a magazine "created by the world's smartest experts -- our readers" is doomed to mediocrity.
A few years ago, I did a story on Cracow. Let us say that a magazine or newspaper wanted me to go back there and do another one. Okay, first we have to come to an agreement: I'll lay out the dough for the travel, the hotel, the meals, and get receipts and send them to the magazine, who'll pay me back. In return, I'll give them a travel story about Cracow based on what I already know and what I'm going to learn about how it's changed since I've been there. Now, it's not ethical to take freebies from folks you're writing about, but the first thing I'd do would be to contact the Cracow Tourist Office and tell them what I was planning to do and when I was planning to do it. This opens some doors: I might be able to get a room -- which I'd pay for -- in a hotel I might ordinarily not have been able to get into. Cracow is dominated by a huge castle. Only a small number of tickets to it are available every day. I wouldn't hesitate to use my article to push my way to the top of the line on the day I needed to visit it if the travel folks could help, because it's the main tourist attraction and I'd have to report it. I'd want to see the brochures they put out, so I could see how they perceived the city, which would give me a foil for how I would see it. I wouldn't hesitate to ask them to make something available to me, to set up an interview (and provide a translator) for various important people, to give me an unfair advantage over the ordinary tourist -- that guy over there, sort of wandering around, who's going to upload his trip to Everywhere, for instance.
If you go to Cracow, you're going to see some unpleasant stuff. For one thing, right nearby -- your hotel can arrange a bus-tour -- is Auschwitz. There's no way I'd write a comprehensive travel story for an American travel magazine about Cracow without mentioning Auschwitz -- if only because for a lot of Americans who lost family there, it's a place of remembrance and prayer. I wonder if Everywhere would do a spread on Auschwitz. Or the controversy (now, I believe, settled) with the religious people adjoining it, hyper-conservative Catholics who were trying to hijack the site for their own purposes a few years ago. I couldn't not mention that, myself, because it has a larger resonance in contemporary Poland, which remains a place of pretty upfront anti-Semitism. On a somewhat lesser note, there are poor peasant women who come in from the countryside and sell cheeses out of baskets. They're everywhere, and you can tell at a glance that they're impoverished. I didn't even know what they were selling until I asked a Cracow resident, and he was embarrassed I'd seen them. But I'd want to report that, too.
Writing the article, I'd want to get in history, the major sites, places to eat, practical information, things to do and things to avoid, and then season this with some attitude. When I was there a few years ago, there were loads of tourist stalls in the Cloth Hall in the central square selling wooden statues of sad-eyed Jews, which appalled me because at that time there were only 300 real Jews living in the whole city. There were more wooden Jews than that in two stalls in the Cloth Hall! With Auschwitz nearby, a Jewish section of Cracow that was enthusiastically emptied under the Nazis, and the residual anti-Semitism, there's a rather sharp edge that any observant person's going to see, and needs to understand. It's part of the experience.
It's also nuanced. Everywhere's articles are tiny bites. The "big" ones take up maybe a page of type spread out over two pages, with pix. You don't get the impression that anyone who wrote them did a lot of research, because most people don't research their vacations, even when they do want to know a little more about what they're seeing. That's what I'd want this article to do, and you just can't do it in that amount of room.
The whole Facebookian "community" thing, too, is scary. Wooden Jews, Auschwitz, threadbare grandmothers selling cheese in the park...a bummer! So what you'd get from these folks would be a smiley-face story about the castle, the churches, and the pretty square. Maybe the good restaurants in the reconstructed Jewish quarter. The pictures would definitely pass: Cracow is stunningly beautiful. But the content would be, um, very superficial.
And so it turns out to be: without professionals -- except for a few who put together the section on Stuff and the Gridskipper ripoff section, and they work in the home office -- you get what you pay for. And you pay $100 and get a story that's worth just that. Not, likely enough, to pay for even a night at the hotel the writer stayed at, let alone the cost of getting where they were going. But who needs professionals? We're all professionals now! We have blogs instead of magazines, You Tube instead of television. The diminution of quality isn't even commented on.
So my travel-writing friend and I are out of jobs. As far as I can tell, my career is essentially over, by some sort of mandate I wasn't allowed to vote in. This (and its sister publication, a photo magazine called JPG) is the wave of the future: poorly informed people talking to each other. Ignorance will snowball, and nobody will care.
No, it's not going to happen that way. I'm going to resist, and I hope others do, too. The travel magazine I want to do may not happen (or maybe it will: I'll happily correspond with any professional interested in developing it, since I've sure thought about it enough), but I think the coming economic collapse in the United States may wake some people -- the right people -- up to the fact that you can't have amateurs in charge of things, whether they're foreign policy or magazines, and that the only way to turn things around is to let experts do what they do, even if it's only entertain and inform you. That's all I want to do, and I think I've proven over the years that I can do it. It's worth paying for (my Cracow story made me $1000 plus expenses, and it wasn't even as long as this post; someone like Conde Nast Traveller would pay substantially more), just as any expert's expertise is worth paying for.
A word to the wise, Everywhere: doing something doesn't make you an expert. And a hundred bucks is chump change.
Everywhere, it's called. "The New Travel Magazine Made by You." I knew it was trouble the minute I saw that cover line.
Inside, my worst nightmares were fulfilled in spades. Oh, it's pretty. It's glossy. It even has a few ads. But my heart sank, and it's remained sunk. This thing is evil. The explanation is right there only page 8. Read along with me and see if you don't get creeped out, too:
How Everywhere works.
1) See the world
Visit wonderful places, have fun, take lots of pictures.
2) Document your trip
Select your best photos and tell us about where you went.
3) Upload
Contribute your travel tales and photos to Everywheremag.com.
4) Peer review
The community votes on travel stories, photos, and favorite places.
5) Final selection
Our editors curate each issue from the best of the best.
6) Publication
Published contributors get $100 and a free subscription.
In other words, it's a blog. On paper. A very pretty blog on paper. And if it catches on, someone's going to be making crazy money.
Now, let me take a minute to explain why this is a very bad idea. This strikes to the heart of the whole neophilia thing I've been raving about, and I can just imagine Grant Alden's reaction when he reads this. I already know the reaction I got from a professional travel writer who's doing work she hates because she can't make a living being a travel writer. She's ready to pass out torches and meet me in the streets of San Francisco while we storm the Everywhere headquarters.
She and I, it turns out, had an identical vision at about the same time, before we were in e-contact: a travel magazine aimed at how the people we know travel. Not the "Paris on $5000 a Day" crowd that Conde Nast Traveler seems to target, but real people going to interesting places who want to learn about other interesting places to go. Superficially, Everywhere would seem to be that magazine, but it's not.
As I learned a long time ago, pure democracy is a very bad thing in the magazine business. There not only has to be a hierarchy, but there also has to be something of a dictatorship if the thing is going to work. This seems evil, but really it's not: nobody is an expert on everything. If you need your house rewired, you could, theoretically, do it yourself, but if you're not an electrician, my guess is you'll defer to an electrician's expertise and pay for it. And if you're an accountant, you might do your electrician's taxes. There's nothing wrong with this, is there?
There's something about writing, though, that makes anyone capable of creating a sentence think they can do it. They can't, any more than anyone can take a picture by pushing a button. You can write a sentence and snap a picture, but is either any good? So accountants account, electricians electrish, writers write, and photographers photograph. The writers and photographers put out a magazine, the electrician and the accountant buy it, and they rewire our houses and do our taxes.
Putting together an article is a very complex thing. While turning the pages of Everywhere, I came up with an example of how this works so I can show you what I perceive as the biggest problem with the admittedly seductive idea it puts forth, that a magazine "created by the world's smartest experts -- our readers" is doomed to mediocrity.
A few years ago, I did a story on Cracow. Let us say that a magazine or newspaper wanted me to go back there and do another one. Okay, first we have to come to an agreement: I'll lay out the dough for the travel, the hotel, the meals, and get receipts and send them to the magazine, who'll pay me back. In return, I'll give them a travel story about Cracow based on what I already know and what I'm going to learn about how it's changed since I've been there. Now, it's not ethical to take freebies from folks you're writing about, but the first thing I'd do would be to contact the Cracow Tourist Office and tell them what I was planning to do and when I was planning to do it. This opens some doors: I might be able to get a room -- which I'd pay for -- in a hotel I might ordinarily not have been able to get into. Cracow is dominated by a huge castle. Only a small number of tickets to it are available every day. I wouldn't hesitate to use my article to push my way to the top of the line on the day I needed to visit it if the travel folks could help, because it's the main tourist attraction and I'd have to report it. I'd want to see the brochures they put out, so I could see how they perceived the city, which would give me a foil for how I would see it. I wouldn't hesitate to ask them to make something available to me, to set up an interview (and provide a translator) for various important people, to give me an unfair advantage over the ordinary tourist -- that guy over there, sort of wandering around, who's going to upload his trip to Everywhere, for instance.
If you go to Cracow, you're going to see some unpleasant stuff. For one thing, right nearby -- your hotel can arrange a bus-tour -- is Auschwitz. There's no way I'd write a comprehensive travel story for an American travel magazine about Cracow without mentioning Auschwitz -- if only because for a lot of Americans who lost family there, it's a place of remembrance and prayer. I wonder if Everywhere would do a spread on Auschwitz. Or the controversy (now, I believe, settled) with the religious people adjoining it, hyper-conservative Catholics who were trying to hijack the site for their own purposes a few years ago. I couldn't not mention that, myself, because it has a larger resonance in contemporary Poland, which remains a place of pretty upfront anti-Semitism. On a somewhat lesser note, there are poor peasant women who come in from the countryside and sell cheeses out of baskets. They're everywhere, and you can tell at a glance that they're impoverished. I didn't even know what they were selling until I asked a Cracow resident, and he was embarrassed I'd seen them. But I'd want to report that, too.
Writing the article, I'd want to get in history, the major sites, places to eat, practical information, things to do and things to avoid, and then season this with some attitude. When I was there a few years ago, there were loads of tourist stalls in the Cloth Hall in the central square selling wooden statues of sad-eyed Jews, which appalled me because at that time there were only 300 real Jews living in the whole city. There were more wooden Jews than that in two stalls in the Cloth Hall! With Auschwitz nearby, a Jewish section of Cracow that was enthusiastically emptied under the Nazis, and the residual anti-Semitism, there's a rather sharp edge that any observant person's going to see, and needs to understand. It's part of the experience.
It's also nuanced. Everywhere's articles are tiny bites. The "big" ones take up maybe a page of type spread out over two pages, with pix. You don't get the impression that anyone who wrote them did a lot of research, because most people don't research their vacations, even when they do want to know a little more about what they're seeing. That's what I'd want this article to do, and you just can't do it in that amount of room.
The whole Facebookian "community" thing, too, is scary. Wooden Jews, Auschwitz, threadbare grandmothers selling cheese in the park...a bummer! So what you'd get from these folks would be a smiley-face story about the castle, the churches, and the pretty square. Maybe the good restaurants in the reconstructed Jewish quarter. The pictures would definitely pass: Cracow is stunningly beautiful. But the content would be, um, very superficial.
And so it turns out to be: without professionals -- except for a few who put together the section on Stuff and the Gridskipper ripoff section, and they work in the home office -- you get what you pay for. And you pay $100 and get a story that's worth just that. Not, likely enough, to pay for even a night at the hotel the writer stayed at, let alone the cost of getting where they were going. But who needs professionals? We're all professionals now! We have blogs instead of magazines, You Tube instead of television. The diminution of quality isn't even commented on.
So my travel-writing friend and I are out of jobs. As far as I can tell, my career is essentially over, by some sort of mandate I wasn't allowed to vote in. This (and its sister publication, a photo magazine called JPG) is the wave of the future: poorly informed people talking to each other. Ignorance will snowball, and nobody will care.
No, it's not going to happen that way. I'm going to resist, and I hope others do, too. The travel magazine I want to do may not happen (or maybe it will: I'll happily correspond with any professional interested in developing it, since I've sure thought about it enough), but I think the coming economic collapse in the United States may wake some people -- the right people -- up to the fact that you can't have amateurs in charge of things, whether they're foreign policy or magazines, and that the only way to turn things around is to let experts do what they do, even if it's only entertain and inform you. That's all I want to do, and I think I've proven over the years that I can do it. It's worth paying for (my Cracow story made me $1000 plus expenses, and it wasn't even as long as this post; someone like Conde Nast Traveller would pay substantially more), just as any expert's expertise is worth paying for.
A word to the wise, Everywhere: doing something doesn't make you an expert. And a hundred bucks is chump change.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Neophilia And Its Discontents
The end of No Depression is one thing, but this is getting ridiculous. Grant over there sent me an article yesterday about the Atlantic's new "web brand," The Current, which will crunch articles into 250-to-300-word little thingies.
If you have ADD, be warned: this post will be longer than that.
Now the Atlantic is one of America's leading magazines. According to the Wikipedia article, it was founded in 1858 by a bunch of famous writers and intellectuals and has been publishing ever since. Just what they expect to accomplish with this new venture I can't say, although they think they'll be able to attract more eyeballs and, presumably, sell more advertising. What they won't be able to do, needless to say, is explore anything they write about in any depth. And exploring things in depth has always been what they've been about.
This rush to the Web, and the parallel abandoning of print by both publishers and advertisers is a prime example of something I've chosen to call neophilia. Neophilia is probably defined as "love of the new," but I, well, I want to explore it in more depth.
Okay, look, I'm a guy, and, like a lot of guys, I like gadgets. I like new gadgets, too: I was grumpy about computers until I moved to Europe, when someone pointed me to Compuserve, whereby I could send e-mail. This meant I could also send articles to magazines and get them there in the time it took to send them, which, on dial-up with a 256k modem, was about two minutes. This revolutionized my life: I got an Apple Powerbook, and boy, was it cool. Not only did it do e-mail and word-processing, but it did a whole lot of other things, too. If Compuserve had let its customers do it back then, I could have accessed this newfangled Internet thing, and I burned to do so, but unfortunately it would be a couple of years until I could. I was, however, able to access bulletin boards, and almost found an apartment in Berlin using one. I actually did find one during that search because of the computer, though: my brother-in-law sent me an e-mail saying a guy he knew was moving out of one here, and I called the number he sent me and got the place. Just like that.
Once I finally could access the Internet, life got really interesting. There was all kinds of stuff out there, and I zipped around (as fast as one could zip with a 256k modem with Deutsche Telekom's heinous tariffs breathing down my neck the whole time) and found a lot of it. I joined the Well, and "met" a lot of interesting folks. In fact, I also met them in person (excuse me: IRL), and that was fun.
I got more gadgets, too: I fell in love with Palm Pilots, and am on my third one now. It's a great machine that has applications that allow you to figure out public transport (a great app called MetrO, which has the routes of hundreds of cities' bus, tram, and light rail lines), keep various kinds of lists, and store all your phone numbers -- and coordinate it with your computer.
There were gadgets I wanted to like, but didn't. Cell phones: I never saw the point. I now own one, and it's great for travelling, or when you're trying to coordinate things on the fly, but I keep leaving the house without it. Then there was the iPod. I'm a confirmed Apple-head, but I really don't need to convert all my records to MP3 files and carry them with me everywhere all the time. I just don't. Although now it appears that the iPod Touch may be encroaching on Palm territory (and Palm's done a terrible job of maintaining their OS), so maybe I'll use one when they figure that out -- just not for music.
Okay, so: I like gadgets. That's been established.
But, as the cases of the cell phone and iPod prove, not unless they improve some area of my life. Because it's new doesn't mean it's better. Or even that it's important. But there are those who figure that any new gadget has to be better because it's new.
Case in point: some months ago, Amazon introduced a gadget on which you could read books you'd downloaded from them. I'm not sure how it works because I took one look at it and recoiled in horror, but over on the Well, there are sufficient neophiliacs that a big fuss ensued. One guy actually said "I'm never buying a physical book again. This is it," or some such balderdash. Finally, someone who spoke neophiliac pointed out that the platform hadn't been established, and that just maybe this guy would download a bunch of books he couldn't read in ten years. Or maybe five years. Or maybe by the end of 2008. One wise old sage noted that he had to keep old computers around just to read documents he'd created in now-vanished software programs or now-vanished platforms. No means of converting them had ever appeared. (And I know what he means: all my e-mail correspondence prior to a given date is stored in Compuserve's proprietary format on a Mac OS which is no longer supported, and I have it all stored on...a ZIP disc!)
Someone who would seriously consider abandoning books for this new gadget of Amazon's -- or similar ones Sony and others are pushing -- is a neophiliac in need of intervention.
So, in my opinion, is someone who'd abandon nearly a century's worth of work on figuring out how to mechanically reproduce music so it sounded as close as humanly possible to live performance for MP3s, portablility or not. (I mean, do you really need to be entertained every moment of your waking life? Apparently some people are so shallow that they do.) Yet the neophilic rush to this new format is such that it has practically ruined the market for physical product, allowed free exchange of music files to the point where musicians are no longer able to make a living off of recordings (and don't say "make your money on the road" until you've clocked the prices at the gas station this morning), and sent the music business into a tail-spin. I'd be the last to argue that the record biz didn't deserve a shake-up, but when the little guys are falling as fast as the big guys, then something's clearly wrong.
And so is someone who'd abandon print for the Web. Sorry, but this makes absolutely no sense to me. First there are the issues of readability. I have to walk away from the computer a lot or risk my eyeballs feeling like they've been sandpapered. Some web design is absolutely awful: one of the web's best music magazines is a design horror, so bad that I rarely read it, which I feel bad about, because the guy who puts it together is really smart and has impeccable taste. I wish...well, I wish he'd edit a magazine instead. Or, better, in addition. There's the portability and durability: you can read a paper or a magazine or a book in places where you can't read the Web. On trains, for instance. We ride a lot of trains here in Europe. Or on planes. You simply don't have to worry about battery life with print. And the platform: I can, given other variables like the language it's printed in, read books printed hundreds of years ago, and so will people hundreds of years from now. Moreover, I can be sure no one's hacked the content -- at least once the thing's been published.
Then, as I mentioned last time, there's the issue of length. Some things are so complex they take a lot of time to explain, explore, or expose. You want to be able to check back, whether to verify who a given character is, go back to the beginning of an argument, check a fact or date, or whatever. That's just harder with a virtual document. And these complex arguments or expositions just don't crunch down into 250-to-300-word bites. Moreover, they're often very important, vital to understanding our world, our society, and the ideas that drive them.
This, I think, is something that's in danger of becoming, if not lost, at least far more scarce. And that's bad.
The paranoiac in me is forced to ask a question: who benefits from neophilia? And the answer comes ringing back: the gadget-mongers. And then I have to ask, why do they get to tell us what to do? Because they've made huge fortunes selling these gadgets? Does the future of music have to be dependent on iTunes? Does the future of our political discourse have to be dependent on the Web? Does the future of literature have to be dependent on what you can read on a screen? Do Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon get to set the boundaries of our intellectual life?
Does everything have to be simplified into a compressed MP3 file, a sound-bite, a 250-to-300-word idea-bite?
Because if it does, we're in a heap of trouble.
I think there will be what the economists call a "correction," but I don't see it because the horizon is obscured by neophilia. I have to rely on gut feeling, and that's always scary when so many other guts are busy digesting what's new. I worry that it won't come quickly enough to save what I do for a living, what I've done for a living for over 40 years. Is my whole career, my whole body of expertise and skill, going to be sacrificed so that someone can sell silicon? We've already seen the damage lying memes can do: John Kerry's a traitor; Barack Obama is a Muslim (and, hence, a terrorist, as everyone "knows" all Muslims are). Without rational explanation, this sort of thing can run amok, and I believe that print plays a vital role in keeping rationality alive in a way that no other medium can.
Maybe I'm a grumpy old man, resentful at the coming new age, but somehow, I don't think it's that simple. There are those who benefit from keeping people stupid, just like there are those who benefit from compressing music into MP3 files. Both are dangerous, in wildly different ways, of course.
Naturally, I have a large stake in keeping print media alive. But I'd like to gently suggest that you do, too.
* * *
It's that time of year again, and I'm off to Texas Friday morning for SXSW. I'll try to blog some of that, just as I did last year, and I'll also certainly be blogging about the food. After SXSW, I'll fly to Paris and take the train to Montpellier. If all goes as I hope, I'll be looking for apartments that graduating students will be moving out of this summer, with an eye towards moving into one of them when they leave. With luck, I'll find one, and I'll also find enough new work to pay for it. Wish me luck. I'm more in need of it now than ever.
If you have ADD, be warned: this post will be longer than that.
Now the Atlantic is one of America's leading magazines. According to the Wikipedia article, it was founded in 1858 by a bunch of famous writers and intellectuals and has been publishing ever since. Just what they expect to accomplish with this new venture I can't say, although they think they'll be able to attract more eyeballs and, presumably, sell more advertising. What they won't be able to do, needless to say, is explore anything they write about in any depth. And exploring things in depth has always been what they've been about.
This rush to the Web, and the parallel abandoning of print by both publishers and advertisers is a prime example of something I've chosen to call neophilia. Neophilia is probably defined as "love of the new," but I, well, I want to explore it in more depth.
Okay, look, I'm a guy, and, like a lot of guys, I like gadgets. I like new gadgets, too: I was grumpy about computers until I moved to Europe, when someone pointed me to Compuserve, whereby I could send e-mail. This meant I could also send articles to magazines and get them there in the time it took to send them, which, on dial-up with a 256k modem, was about two minutes. This revolutionized my life: I got an Apple Powerbook, and boy, was it cool. Not only did it do e-mail and word-processing, but it did a whole lot of other things, too. If Compuserve had let its customers do it back then, I could have accessed this newfangled Internet thing, and I burned to do so, but unfortunately it would be a couple of years until I could. I was, however, able to access bulletin boards, and almost found an apartment in Berlin using one. I actually did find one during that search because of the computer, though: my brother-in-law sent me an e-mail saying a guy he knew was moving out of one here, and I called the number he sent me and got the place. Just like that.
Once I finally could access the Internet, life got really interesting. There was all kinds of stuff out there, and I zipped around (as fast as one could zip with a 256k modem with Deutsche Telekom's heinous tariffs breathing down my neck the whole time) and found a lot of it. I joined the Well, and "met" a lot of interesting folks. In fact, I also met them in person (excuse me: IRL), and that was fun.
I got more gadgets, too: I fell in love with Palm Pilots, and am on my third one now. It's a great machine that has applications that allow you to figure out public transport (a great app called MetrO, which has the routes of hundreds of cities' bus, tram, and light rail lines), keep various kinds of lists, and store all your phone numbers -- and coordinate it with your computer.
There were gadgets I wanted to like, but didn't. Cell phones: I never saw the point. I now own one, and it's great for travelling, or when you're trying to coordinate things on the fly, but I keep leaving the house without it. Then there was the iPod. I'm a confirmed Apple-head, but I really don't need to convert all my records to MP3 files and carry them with me everywhere all the time. I just don't. Although now it appears that the iPod Touch may be encroaching on Palm territory (and Palm's done a terrible job of maintaining their OS), so maybe I'll use one when they figure that out -- just not for music.
Okay, so: I like gadgets. That's been established.
But, as the cases of the cell phone and iPod prove, not unless they improve some area of my life. Because it's new doesn't mean it's better. Or even that it's important. But there are those who figure that any new gadget has to be better because it's new.
Case in point: some months ago, Amazon introduced a gadget on which you could read books you'd downloaded from them. I'm not sure how it works because I took one look at it and recoiled in horror, but over on the Well, there are sufficient neophiliacs that a big fuss ensued. One guy actually said "I'm never buying a physical book again. This is it," or some such balderdash. Finally, someone who spoke neophiliac pointed out that the platform hadn't been established, and that just maybe this guy would download a bunch of books he couldn't read in ten years. Or maybe five years. Or maybe by the end of 2008. One wise old sage noted that he had to keep old computers around just to read documents he'd created in now-vanished software programs or now-vanished platforms. No means of converting them had ever appeared. (And I know what he means: all my e-mail correspondence prior to a given date is stored in Compuserve's proprietary format on a Mac OS which is no longer supported, and I have it all stored on...a ZIP disc!)
Someone who would seriously consider abandoning books for this new gadget of Amazon's -- or similar ones Sony and others are pushing -- is a neophiliac in need of intervention.
So, in my opinion, is someone who'd abandon nearly a century's worth of work on figuring out how to mechanically reproduce music so it sounded as close as humanly possible to live performance for MP3s, portablility or not. (I mean, do you really need to be entertained every moment of your waking life? Apparently some people are so shallow that they do.) Yet the neophilic rush to this new format is such that it has practically ruined the market for physical product, allowed free exchange of music files to the point where musicians are no longer able to make a living off of recordings (and don't say "make your money on the road" until you've clocked the prices at the gas station this morning), and sent the music business into a tail-spin. I'd be the last to argue that the record biz didn't deserve a shake-up, but when the little guys are falling as fast as the big guys, then something's clearly wrong.
And so is someone who'd abandon print for the Web. Sorry, but this makes absolutely no sense to me. First there are the issues of readability. I have to walk away from the computer a lot or risk my eyeballs feeling like they've been sandpapered. Some web design is absolutely awful: one of the web's best music magazines is a design horror, so bad that I rarely read it, which I feel bad about, because the guy who puts it together is really smart and has impeccable taste. I wish...well, I wish he'd edit a magazine instead. Or, better, in addition. There's the portability and durability: you can read a paper or a magazine or a book in places where you can't read the Web. On trains, for instance. We ride a lot of trains here in Europe. Or on planes. You simply don't have to worry about battery life with print. And the platform: I can, given other variables like the language it's printed in, read books printed hundreds of years ago, and so will people hundreds of years from now. Moreover, I can be sure no one's hacked the content -- at least once the thing's been published.
Then, as I mentioned last time, there's the issue of length. Some things are so complex they take a lot of time to explain, explore, or expose. You want to be able to check back, whether to verify who a given character is, go back to the beginning of an argument, check a fact or date, or whatever. That's just harder with a virtual document. And these complex arguments or expositions just don't crunch down into 250-to-300-word bites. Moreover, they're often very important, vital to understanding our world, our society, and the ideas that drive them.
This, I think, is something that's in danger of becoming, if not lost, at least far more scarce. And that's bad.
The paranoiac in me is forced to ask a question: who benefits from neophilia? And the answer comes ringing back: the gadget-mongers. And then I have to ask, why do they get to tell us what to do? Because they've made huge fortunes selling these gadgets? Does the future of music have to be dependent on iTunes? Does the future of our political discourse have to be dependent on the Web? Does the future of literature have to be dependent on what you can read on a screen? Do Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon get to set the boundaries of our intellectual life?
Does everything have to be simplified into a compressed MP3 file, a sound-bite, a 250-to-300-word idea-bite?
Because if it does, we're in a heap of trouble.
I think there will be what the economists call a "correction," but I don't see it because the horizon is obscured by neophilia. I have to rely on gut feeling, and that's always scary when so many other guts are busy digesting what's new. I worry that it won't come quickly enough to save what I do for a living, what I've done for a living for over 40 years. Is my whole career, my whole body of expertise and skill, going to be sacrificed so that someone can sell silicon? We've already seen the damage lying memes can do: John Kerry's a traitor; Barack Obama is a Muslim (and, hence, a terrorist, as everyone "knows" all Muslims are). Without rational explanation, this sort of thing can run amok, and I believe that print plays a vital role in keeping rationality alive in a way that no other medium can.
Maybe I'm a grumpy old man, resentful at the coming new age, but somehow, I don't think it's that simple. There are those who benefit from keeping people stupid, just like there are those who benefit from compressing music into MP3 files. Both are dangerous, in wildly different ways, of course.
Naturally, I have a large stake in keeping print media alive. But I'd like to gently suggest that you do, too.
* * *
It's that time of year again, and I'm off to Texas Friday morning for SXSW. I'll try to blog some of that, just as I did last year, and I'll also certainly be blogging about the food. After SXSW, I'll fly to Paris and take the train to Montpellier. If all goes as I hope, I'll be looking for apartments that graduating students will be moving out of this summer, with an eye towards moving into one of them when they leave. With luck, I'll find one, and I'll also find enough new work to pay for it. Wish me luck. I'm more in need of it now than ever.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
A Death In The Family And (Maybe) Some Hope
Last year, the United States Postal Service, working with Warners and Murdoch and other media giants, pushed through new second-class postage rates. Hardly a sexy issue to protest, what with the war in Iraq, the collapse of the U.S. economy, the destruction of the Constitution, and the sabre-rattling against Iran, so it may have escaped your notice.
It sure didn't escape mine: as someone who's worked with magazines my whole life, second-class postage is a big, big deal. It's the mechanism which allows you to send your print-run to your subscribers for a tiny fraction of what it would cost to mail them first class, and it carries a bunch of restrictions: you've only got a couple of days to get your magazines out, for one thing, and missing a couple of those deadlines means you lose your second-class license.
The new rates, though, were bizarre: the more magazines you shipped, the less each unit cost, and smaller-circulation magazines were burdened with unreasonably higher per-unit costs, instead of everyone paying the same rate. But that's what happens when you allow big business to write the laws.
And on Tuesday, the fallout began. I don't know what Resonance was all about -- the avant-garde of the pop spectrum, I suspect from a cursory glance -- but its editor circulated a letter saying the current issue, which it couldn't even afford to print, would be its last.
But they weren't alone. On the same day, No Depression, a magazine I have read since its first issue and contributed to for years, also announced that it was calling it quits. Many of the same reasons Resonance mentioned were there: cost of paper, declining ad revenues, and, dammit, that second-class postage hike.
Now, I think this is a tragedy from a number of aspects, and not just because of the loss of income and ability to write stuff which pleases me. As No Depression co-editor Grant Alden notes on his blog, "it's important to provide homes for magazines which offer up ideas, for we need an informed democracy if we're to continue having anything which resembles a democracy." He's talking about Wal-Mart's decision to pare back the number of titles they sell, but the "homes" of which he speaks are also the homes of people who subscribe to magazines which espouse unpopular ideas or champion minority cultures, which both Resonance and No Depression did. It's simplistic and obvious to say it, but if print media becomes reduced to People and Rolling Stone, then America is doomed to unspeakable mediocrity.
Oh, but people are reading all kinds of stuff on the web! Yeah, well. I'm a paper guy (and it's worth noting that the price of paper, too, is helping run these magazines out of business). I just can't stare at a screen all day, and I can say that with some degree of certainty because I do stare at a screen all day these days, and have for a number of years. You can read on your laptop on the train, maybe, and if your battery holds out, you can read on it for some of a transatlantic or crosscountry flight, but...why? Why lug a thousand-dollar machine when you can spend a couple of bucks for something you can fold up, or throw out, or clip stuff out of? And I'm no eye doctor, but I suspect the way the eye handles light makes print a healthier alternative. I know that I had excellent eyesight until I started using a computer, and now I use glasses when I read or write. Some of that is aging, but I think some of it is staring at screens.
But beyond the medium -- although that's a crucial part of this story -- is the ability to disseminate ideas. Never have there been more ideas, and more need to spread them to receptive people. The current Bush presidency has resulted in most of the world becoming a counter-culture, a paradox only if you equate that term with being a minority. Most of these counter-cultures have nothing in common except their rejection of the way the world is going, and a lot of them -- radical Islam comes to mind -- are hardly constructive.
No Depression did its little bit. It started shortly after I moved here, and early on co-editor Peter Blackstock, whom I'd known in Austin, visited and stayed with me while on a story about the Walkabouts, an American band far more popular in Germany than at home. Its focus was clear, although back then it didn't have a name, really, but eventually (the music business must have labels!) someone (not on the ND side of things) decided it would be known as "Americana," which was a loaded term if there ever was one. But...there was an extent to which it made sense: if the musicians and performers (and writers and filmmakers) it covered had any commonality at all it was in their examination of the roots of American folk and folk-derived culture, which culture included country music, although in recent years the magazine took a salutary turn in beginning to investigate lesser-known African-American traditions (neglected soul singers, gospel) in its pages.
And, as those of us who lived through the great Folk Scare of the '60s realized, it's hard to dig into those traditions without uncovering some political content, some of which can come as a shock, especially to a generation that became conscious of the wider world during the Reagan years -- a generation which was ND's base. Learning that America had had a Left, that the labor unions once were opponents of, rather than collaborators with, their employers -- these were shocks, especially when an individual found the ideas resonating with half-formed suspicions of the way the world worked and not-quite-articulated ideas about why things weren't right. But making those connections, as a lot of the magazine's readers did, made these young people stronger once it dawned on them that they were part of a chain stretching back decades. Nobody likes to re-invent the wheel, after all.
During the dozen years of ND's existence, it helped give birth to a cultural change which I -- and lots of other people -- believe is just around the corner. Oh, George Bush helped, no doubt about that, and so did the Internet, and probably Paris Hilton did, too, pushing the culture of celebrity into such a caricature of itself that its seams became all too obvious. But for people who live in America, and are invested in its future (as all of us, Americans or not, are, by dint of the country's size and position in the world), and are aware of and in some cases participating in its culture, this continuity with the past, which is so easily forgotten in the onrush of the Now, has become precious. After all, the Constitution the current administration has savaged is no less a part of the cultural fabric as the odd banjo-playing musician Dock Boggs.
And -- funny I should think of him. Because he's been in my thoughts recently, too.
Last week, I got a phone call from a friend in Philadelphia I hadn't heard from in far too long. She was alerting me that a guy named Sam Amidon, whom I'd last seen years ago when he was a teenager on a ramble though Europe, and is the son of friends of hers in Vermont, was going to be playing a gig in Berlin last Sunday. Sam as a teenager was frighteningly smart, a fiddler who was also studying with Leroy Jenkins, the free-jazz violinist whose work I loved, and a kid with a lot of exciting potential. Now he was performing, had a MySpace page and a website, and was going to do a show at a place I'd never heard of in Kreuzberg. I had to go.
Oh, and did I mention that Sam's parents are folksingers?
So off I went, through the mobs of excited Albanians (and who knew there were so many of them in Berlin?) celebrating Kosovo's independence, and rang a doorbell on a nondescript apartment building. Buzzed in, I found a freestanding house in the Hinterhof, in which the downstairs was filled with 20-somethings talking and listening to a copy of The Lily Brothers With Don Stover, a fairly crucial document of the aforementioned Folk Scare. Sam found me, we caught up briefly, and pretty soon, everyone filed upstairs, where there were some chairs and stools.
When Sam finally was ready, he said something memorable: "I don't write songs. I don't know how to write songs. So these are some traditional songs I know." Already I was impressed: if there's anything that the masses of CDs I'd gotten over the years thanks to being listed as a contributor on No Depression's website had taught me, it's that there are way too many people writing way too many songs that don't matter at all.
Not that he performed them traditionally. No, his show would have given most old folkies hives; I watched one older couple, one of whom has an Americana-oriented show on local radio, stalk out halfway through. But since I knew about his connection to American avant-garde music as well as his connection to folk music, I was entranced. So were the young people, his peers, who were watching. Many of them, I suspect, were Americans attracted by hip! edgy! Berlin. Others were Germans attracted to American culture. It was great.
After the show, I hung around some, talking to the woman who'd organized the show, which was part of a series of "house concerts" (she and her husband live in this house) she'd been putting on each Sunday for a few months. Hmm, I thought, this is an article for No Depression. Or maybe Sam is. I'll have to contact Peter and Grant once I'm through with this guidebook-writing project that's eaten up all my time (and is the reason I haven't been able to blog for most of this month).
But before I could do that, I got the bad news.
It's not at total tragedy. I think there's more where Sam came from. Not a lot of them are like him, except in their commitment to exploring American traditions. And, I think, the rise in support for Barack Obama is not unrelated to this, the feeling, which I perceive in a wide spectrum of Americans, that not only political change, but cultural change, is in the air. In speaking of this, I feel like I'm in the presence of a baby: fragile, easily damaged, at risk of infection. But babies grow up quickly, and small rockslides sometimes turn into avalanches. Sometimes.
And I think that, in its not-so-modest way, No Depression has played its part in this. I'm honored to have brought my old-guy, Folk Scare-era perceptions to its pages over the years of its existence, and happy they thought them worth seeking out and encouraging. I'm sorry that the institution won't survive to see this if it happens, but I scarcely think Peter and Grant are going to just slink away. Grant wrote me this week that he's going to keep blogging, because "it may be my only writing outlet for a while." I know the feeling.
Sam gave me a copy of his new record at the gig. It's dedicated to Dock Boggs. A tiny thing to hang on to, maybe, but in times when I have so very little else to be optimistic about, I'd like to ask you to allow me this possibly impossible shard of optimism.
It sure didn't escape mine: as someone who's worked with magazines my whole life, second-class postage is a big, big deal. It's the mechanism which allows you to send your print-run to your subscribers for a tiny fraction of what it would cost to mail them first class, and it carries a bunch of restrictions: you've only got a couple of days to get your magazines out, for one thing, and missing a couple of those deadlines means you lose your second-class license.
The new rates, though, were bizarre: the more magazines you shipped, the less each unit cost, and smaller-circulation magazines were burdened with unreasonably higher per-unit costs, instead of everyone paying the same rate. But that's what happens when you allow big business to write the laws.
And on Tuesday, the fallout began. I don't know what Resonance was all about -- the avant-garde of the pop spectrum, I suspect from a cursory glance -- but its editor circulated a letter saying the current issue, which it couldn't even afford to print, would be its last.
But they weren't alone. On the same day, No Depression, a magazine I have read since its first issue and contributed to for years, also announced that it was calling it quits. Many of the same reasons Resonance mentioned were there: cost of paper, declining ad revenues, and, dammit, that second-class postage hike.
Now, I think this is a tragedy from a number of aspects, and not just because of the loss of income and ability to write stuff which pleases me. As No Depression co-editor Grant Alden notes on his blog, "it's important to provide homes for magazines which offer up ideas, for we need an informed democracy if we're to continue having anything which resembles a democracy." He's talking about Wal-Mart's decision to pare back the number of titles they sell, but the "homes" of which he speaks are also the homes of people who subscribe to magazines which espouse unpopular ideas or champion minority cultures, which both Resonance and No Depression did. It's simplistic and obvious to say it, but if print media becomes reduced to People and Rolling Stone, then America is doomed to unspeakable mediocrity.
Oh, but people are reading all kinds of stuff on the web! Yeah, well. I'm a paper guy (and it's worth noting that the price of paper, too, is helping run these magazines out of business). I just can't stare at a screen all day, and I can say that with some degree of certainty because I do stare at a screen all day these days, and have for a number of years. You can read on your laptop on the train, maybe, and if your battery holds out, you can read on it for some of a transatlantic or crosscountry flight, but...why? Why lug a thousand-dollar machine when you can spend a couple of bucks for something you can fold up, or throw out, or clip stuff out of? And I'm no eye doctor, but I suspect the way the eye handles light makes print a healthier alternative. I know that I had excellent eyesight until I started using a computer, and now I use glasses when I read or write. Some of that is aging, but I think some of it is staring at screens.
But beyond the medium -- although that's a crucial part of this story -- is the ability to disseminate ideas. Never have there been more ideas, and more need to spread them to receptive people. The current Bush presidency has resulted in most of the world becoming a counter-culture, a paradox only if you equate that term with being a minority. Most of these counter-cultures have nothing in common except their rejection of the way the world is going, and a lot of them -- radical Islam comes to mind -- are hardly constructive.
No Depression did its little bit. It started shortly after I moved here, and early on co-editor Peter Blackstock, whom I'd known in Austin, visited and stayed with me while on a story about the Walkabouts, an American band far more popular in Germany than at home. Its focus was clear, although back then it didn't have a name, really, but eventually (the music business must have labels!) someone (not on the ND side of things) decided it would be known as "Americana," which was a loaded term if there ever was one. But...there was an extent to which it made sense: if the musicians and performers (and writers and filmmakers) it covered had any commonality at all it was in their examination of the roots of American folk and folk-derived culture, which culture included country music, although in recent years the magazine took a salutary turn in beginning to investigate lesser-known African-American traditions (neglected soul singers, gospel) in its pages.
And, as those of us who lived through the great Folk Scare of the '60s realized, it's hard to dig into those traditions without uncovering some political content, some of which can come as a shock, especially to a generation that became conscious of the wider world during the Reagan years -- a generation which was ND's base. Learning that America had had a Left, that the labor unions once were opponents of, rather than collaborators with, their employers -- these were shocks, especially when an individual found the ideas resonating with half-formed suspicions of the way the world worked and not-quite-articulated ideas about why things weren't right. But making those connections, as a lot of the magazine's readers did, made these young people stronger once it dawned on them that they were part of a chain stretching back decades. Nobody likes to re-invent the wheel, after all.
During the dozen years of ND's existence, it helped give birth to a cultural change which I -- and lots of other people -- believe is just around the corner. Oh, George Bush helped, no doubt about that, and so did the Internet, and probably Paris Hilton did, too, pushing the culture of celebrity into such a caricature of itself that its seams became all too obvious. But for people who live in America, and are invested in its future (as all of us, Americans or not, are, by dint of the country's size and position in the world), and are aware of and in some cases participating in its culture, this continuity with the past, which is so easily forgotten in the onrush of the Now, has become precious. After all, the Constitution the current administration has savaged is no less a part of the cultural fabric as the odd banjo-playing musician Dock Boggs.
And -- funny I should think of him. Because he's been in my thoughts recently, too.
Last week, I got a phone call from a friend in Philadelphia I hadn't heard from in far too long. She was alerting me that a guy named Sam Amidon, whom I'd last seen years ago when he was a teenager on a ramble though Europe, and is the son of friends of hers in Vermont, was going to be playing a gig in Berlin last Sunday. Sam as a teenager was frighteningly smart, a fiddler who was also studying with Leroy Jenkins, the free-jazz violinist whose work I loved, and a kid with a lot of exciting potential. Now he was performing, had a MySpace page and a website, and was going to do a show at a place I'd never heard of in Kreuzberg. I had to go.
Oh, and did I mention that Sam's parents are folksingers?
So off I went, through the mobs of excited Albanians (and who knew there were so many of them in Berlin?) celebrating Kosovo's independence, and rang a doorbell on a nondescript apartment building. Buzzed in, I found a freestanding house in the Hinterhof, in which the downstairs was filled with 20-somethings talking and listening to a copy of The Lily Brothers With Don Stover, a fairly crucial document of the aforementioned Folk Scare. Sam found me, we caught up briefly, and pretty soon, everyone filed upstairs, where there were some chairs and stools.
When Sam finally was ready, he said something memorable: "I don't write songs. I don't know how to write songs. So these are some traditional songs I know." Already I was impressed: if there's anything that the masses of CDs I'd gotten over the years thanks to being listed as a contributor on No Depression's website had taught me, it's that there are way too many people writing way too many songs that don't matter at all.
Not that he performed them traditionally. No, his show would have given most old folkies hives; I watched one older couple, one of whom has an Americana-oriented show on local radio, stalk out halfway through. But since I knew about his connection to American avant-garde music as well as his connection to folk music, I was entranced. So were the young people, his peers, who were watching. Many of them, I suspect, were Americans attracted by hip! edgy! Berlin. Others were Germans attracted to American culture. It was great.
After the show, I hung around some, talking to the woman who'd organized the show, which was part of a series of "house concerts" (she and her husband live in this house) she'd been putting on each Sunday for a few months. Hmm, I thought, this is an article for No Depression. Or maybe Sam is. I'll have to contact Peter and Grant once I'm through with this guidebook-writing project that's eaten up all my time (and is the reason I haven't been able to blog for most of this month).
But before I could do that, I got the bad news.
It's not at total tragedy. I think there's more where Sam came from. Not a lot of them are like him, except in their commitment to exploring American traditions. And, I think, the rise in support for Barack Obama is not unrelated to this, the feeling, which I perceive in a wide spectrum of Americans, that not only political change, but cultural change, is in the air. In speaking of this, I feel like I'm in the presence of a baby: fragile, easily damaged, at risk of infection. But babies grow up quickly, and small rockslides sometimes turn into avalanches. Sometimes.
And I think that, in its not-so-modest way, No Depression has played its part in this. I'm honored to have brought my old-guy, Folk Scare-era perceptions to its pages over the years of its existence, and happy they thought them worth seeking out and encouraging. I'm sorry that the institution won't survive to see this if it happens, but I scarcely think Peter and Grant are going to just slink away. Grant wrote me this week that he's going to keep blogging, because "it may be my only writing outlet for a while." I know the feeling.
Sam gave me a copy of his new record at the gig. It's dedicated to Dock Boggs. A tiny thing to hang on to, maybe, but in times when I have so very little else to be optimistic about, I'd like to ask you to allow me this possibly impossible shard of optimism.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
No More Mr. Nice Guy And Other Crumbs
Man, I just don't know. I used to think that being a nice guy was a good idea. I'm beginning to change my mind.
My first mistake this week resulted, I'm happy to say, in a save. I hadn't seen the dancer in nearly a month. We'd both been busy, since all of a sudden I have a ton of work to do, and she's been writing on her novel when she wasn't at her job. So we got together, and in a fit of generosity, I offered to buy her dinner at this Japanese-Korean place down the street that I love and am overdue for reviewing on Hungry In Berlin.
In part, it was a gesture of thanks for helping me with the move. She hadn't lifted a single box, but she helped me get Telekom to switch my number over here and then to get them to turn on the number, and she dealt with the heating firm which spoke such thick Berlinisch I couldn't understand them. The guy came on December 27, before I moved in, and got two of the three heaters going. "I gotta talk to my boss about this other one. I'll be back later," he said and vanished. Nor has he reappeared. Which wouldn't be so bad except that it's the heater in my main room, the one where I read at night and write during the day. In other words, the one I'm in most of the time.
But because of this calling the heating firm, they had her number instead of mine, and the day after I'd taken her to dinner, they called her up, saying they needed to get into the apartment so they could check on how to connect me with the building's central heating. There's central heating here? Who knew? She couldn't reach me, though: I was running around in Potsdam for this guidebook I'm working on with some other folks. So she just made an appointment for the next day.
For 7am.
Fortunately, a panicked call to the firm's answering machine in my garbled German put an end to that, but they haven't called to make another appointment and I figure it'll be summer before they show up and then I won't need them.
We'll deal with the Potsdam trip below. Mistakes were made.
Anyway, yesterday I was sitting here innocently doing something and the phone rang. It was Katchita, who'd been in India for five weeks. She was calling from the Munich airport, distraught because the woman she'd sublet the apartment from wasn't going to be able to hand her off the key until the next day. Given that this woman had had plenty of notice that she was coming back, this seemed careless at best, thoughtless at the worst, but that didn't matter because in a few hours she'd be back here and didn't have anywhere to sleep. Could she use my couch? Why, certainly, I said, gentlemanliness being one of my many virtues. She offered to buy me dinner. I, being nearly penniless because none of the work I'd done in December and January had paid off yet, accepted.
She showed up, and after she'd railed against the woman whose apartment she wasn't in for a while, she asked if she could take a shower. I showed her how the thing worked (not all that well), cautioned her it would be short, found a clean towle for her to use, made the de rigeur leering statement about thinking of her soaped-up naked body in the steam, and went back to my desk. In about three minutes, she was out, a towel around her hair, happy to be clean again. "Oh, by the way," she said, "you're going to need a new shower head. I dropped it and it snapped off." In fact, this is exactly what had happened. I have no idea how she did it, but there was no fixing it that I could figure out.
Anyway, we had dinner, came back here, she crashed on the couch and I retreated to my bedroom and read, and by the time I was awake this morning she was gone. I got an e-mail thanking me for putting her up and offering to help fix the shower next weekend, but I realized I'm going to need to take a shower before then.
So I went out a few minutes ago and bought a new shower head and hose. It cost about €25. I now realize I need a wrench to get the old one off and secure the new one. That's going to cost money, too.
The Bird makes good burgers, but I should have ordered a steak.
* * *
Potsdam turned out to be pretty nice. Well, it would have been nicer if it had been warmer, and it would have been much nicer if any of the palaces at Sanssouci were open, but I also got to explore the whole historic downtown on Brandenburger Str. past Potsdam's own Brandenburg Gate and also the weird Holländisches Viertel, built to look like Holland, nearby. I had good company in Ms. Vinyl, who's recently moved here from New York and has a healthy degree of skepticism about staying here, and we were in good spirits when we got back to the train station, ready to take a Regionalbahn back to Berlin.
Which is what we wound up doing. But a word of warning for potential Potsdam tourists: there are a couple of routes. The one we took, which loads of trains take, goes along the S-Bahn route without stopping at all the stations, and gets you back to Berlin in about 20 minutes. But there's another route, one which leaves from Potsdam, heads west, then south, and finally winds up at Schönefeld Airport. Having gotten on this, I realized that there was only one track, meaning that this was a spur line which went to the end, then came back on the same track. So there was no getting off and catching something back to Potsdam to erase the mistake.
Observation from the journey: lots of radish fields and cement factories. Boy, is it grim out there. Saarmund, Gensenhagen, all the way to Schönefeld. As we asked ourselves: what do people do out there, anyway? Pull radishes and make cement, I guess.
* * *
One thing I'll say for my new neighborhood: the beggars sure are creative. Oh, we have our usual ration of green-skinned junkies pushing paper cups at you and murmuring about "Kleengelt," but the other day outside the bank, I saw a well-dressed woman of apparently Mongolian heritage, quite tall, with a very odd little dog on a leash wearing a muzzle. She had her hand out and she was crying. Water was pouring out of her eyes and her shoulders shook each time she sobbed. Someone would hand her money and she'd stop immediately, count the change, stick it in her pocket, stick her hand out again and turn on the waterworks. It was very disturbing. Even weirder, the other day I saw a couple with a black-and-white llama on the sidewalk, complete with a folding sign that said "Circus animals need feed." I haven't seen any circus posters up -- it's not really the season -- and one would assume that feed for the animals was part of a circus' basic costs. I found myself wondering how they got to where they were (the U-Bahn? a taxi?) and where they stashed the beast when they weren't begging.
My first mistake this week resulted, I'm happy to say, in a save. I hadn't seen the dancer in nearly a month. We'd both been busy, since all of a sudden I have a ton of work to do, and she's been writing on her novel when she wasn't at her job. So we got together, and in a fit of generosity, I offered to buy her dinner at this Japanese-Korean place down the street that I love and am overdue for reviewing on Hungry In Berlin.
In part, it was a gesture of thanks for helping me with the move. She hadn't lifted a single box, but she helped me get Telekom to switch my number over here and then to get them to turn on the number, and she dealt with the heating firm which spoke such thick Berlinisch I couldn't understand them. The guy came on December 27, before I moved in, and got two of the three heaters going. "I gotta talk to my boss about this other one. I'll be back later," he said and vanished. Nor has he reappeared. Which wouldn't be so bad except that it's the heater in my main room, the one where I read at night and write during the day. In other words, the one I'm in most of the time.
But because of this calling the heating firm, they had her number instead of mine, and the day after I'd taken her to dinner, they called her up, saying they needed to get into the apartment so they could check on how to connect me with the building's central heating. There's central heating here? Who knew? She couldn't reach me, though: I was running around in Potsdam for this guidebook I'm working on with some other folks. So she just made an appointment for the next day.
For 7am.
Fortunately, a panicked call to the firm's answering machine in my garbled German put an end to that, but they haven't called to make another appointment and I figure it'll be summer before they show up and then I won't need them.
We'll deal with the Potsdam trip below. Mistakes were made.
Anyway, yesterday I was sitting here innocently doing something and the phone rang. It was Katchita, who'd been in India for five weeks. She was calling from the Munich airport, distraught because the woman she'd sublet the apartment from wasn't going to be able to hand her off the key until the next day. Given that this woman had had plenty of notice that she was coming back, this seemed careless at best, thoughtless at the worst, but that didn't matter because in a few hours she'd be back here and didn't have anywhere to sleep. Could she use my couch? Why, certainly, I said, gentlemanliness being one of my many virtues. She offered to buy me dinner. I, being nearly penniless because none of the work I'd done in December and January had paid off yet, accepted.
She showed up, and after she'd railed against the woman whose apartment she wasn't in for a while, she asked if she could take a shower. I showed her how the thing worked (not all that well), cautioned her it would be short, found a clean towle for her to use, made the de rigeur leering statement about thinking of her soaped-up naked body in the steam, and went back to my desk. In about three minutes, she was out, a towel around her hair, happy to be clean again. "Oh, by the way," she said, "you're going to need a new shower head. I dropped it and it snapped off." In fact, this is exactly what had happened. I have no idea how she did it, but there was no fixing it that I could figure out.
Anyway, we had dinner, came back here, she crashed on the couch and I retreated to my bedroom and read, and by the time I was awake this morning she was gone. I got an e-mail thanking me for putting her up and offering to help fix the shower next weekend, but I realized I'm going to need to take a shower before then.
So I went out a few minutes ago and bought a new shower head and hose. It cost about €25. I now realize I need a wrench to get the old one off and secure the new one. That's going to cost money, too.
The Bird makes good burgers, but I should have ordered a steak.
* * *
Potsdam turned out to be pretty nice. Well, it would have been nicer if it had been warmer, and it would have been much nicer if any of the palaces at Sanssouci were open, but I also got to explore the whole historic downtown on Brandenburger Str. past Potsdam's own Brandenburg Gate and also the weird Holländisches Viertel, built to look like Holland, nearby. I had good company in Ms. Vinyl, who's recently moved here from New York and has a healthy degree of skepticism about staying here, and we were in good spirits when we got back to the train station, ready to take a Regionalbahn back to Berlin.
Which is what we wound up doing. But a word of warning for potential Potsdam tourists: there are a couple of routes. The one we took, which loads of trains take, goes along the S-Bahn route without stopping at all the stations, and gets you back to Berlin in about 20 minutes. But there's another route, one which leaves from Potsdam, heads west, then south, and finally winds up at Schönefeld Airport. Having gotten on this, I realized that there was only one track, meaning that this was a spur line which went to the end, then came back on the same track. So there was no getting off and catching something back to Potsdam to erase the mistake.
Observation from the journey: lots of radish fields and cement factories. Boy, is it grim out there. Saarmund, Gensenhagen, all the way to Schönefeld. As we asked ourselves: what do people do out there, anyway? Pull radishes and make cement, I guess.
* * *
One thing I'll say for my new neighborhood: the beggars sure are creative. Oh, we have our usual ration of green-skinned junkies pushing paper cups at you and murmuring about "Kleengelt," but the other day outside the bank, I saw a well-dressed woman of apparently Mongolian heritage, quite tall, with a very odd little dog on a leash wearing a muzzle. She had her hand out and she was crying. Water was pouring out of her eyes and her shoulders shook each time she sobbed. Someone would hand her money and she'd stop immediately, count the change, stick it in her pocket, stick her hand out again and turn on the waterworks. It was very disturbing. Even weirder, the other day I saw a couple with a black-and-white llama on the sidewalk, complete with a folding sign that said "Circus animals need feed." I haven't seen any circus posters up -- it's not really the season -- and one would assume that feed for the animals was part of a circus' basic costs. I found myself wondering how they got to where they were (the U-Bahn? a taxi?) and where they stashed the beast when they weren't begging.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
His Berlin
I've known John Rockwell ever since I wrote a story for Us magazine, back in 1978 or so. At the time, the magazine was owned by the New York Times, and Rockwell worked for them. They'd asked me for a story on "Women in Rock," which I thought was a great idea, since punk had finally liberated female rock musicians from the "chick singer" slot, and so I interviewed Joan Jett, Debbie Harry (a chick singer, true, but somehow different), Patti Smith, and Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth (who provided me with one of my favorite quotes ever: "Naked, I look sorta like Rudolf Nureyev."). They didn't like the first draft I submitted, so I rewrote the story. They still didn't like it, but were itching to go to press with it, so without telling me, they plagiarized a bunch of stuff from Ben Fong-Torres' interviews for Rolling Stone and a story Rockwell had done for the Times on Linda Ronstadt. I was horrified when I saw the magazine -- for which it was the cover story -- and even more horrified when the plagiarism was spread by the New York Times Syndicate to several dozen daily newspapers across America under my byline. The resultant uproar (Us refused to print a retraction or apology) effectively ended my career for a while and I took a job as a secretary at the Levi Strauss Corporation, which was all my skills could get me in San Francisco at the time.
Both Fong-Torres and Rockwell were very angry, naturally, but Rockwell and I had a friend in common, who arranged a dinner (I cooked) so we could meet and I could plead my case. John was appalled that the Times would do such a thing, but believed me. So we've been in touch ever since.
Ironically, we've seen more of each other since I moved to Berlin than in the years previous because of his work at the Times and, for a while, as director of the Lincoln Center Festival. John has never needed an excuse to come to Germany: he's one of the most unabashed Germanophiles I've ever run into. And, because he moved here when he was five and has lived here on and off since, he never needs an excuse to come to Berlin, where he still has old family friends dating from his father's posting here as an administrator of OMGUS, the Office of Military Government, U.S., from 1945 until just before the Berlin blockade.
So it was no surprise to hear his voice on the phone a couple of weeks ago telling me he'd accepted a short residency at the American Academy in Berlin. Usually, fellows at the Academy live there for six months while they complete or research a book, but John took a shorter stay in exchange for simply giving a lecture, which was going to be entitled "My Berlin."
Naturally, I had to hear this.
Last Thursday, I found myself walking down one of those mansion-encrusted far West Berlin streets near the Wannsee U-Bahn to hand my invitation to the gatekeeper and walk to the former villa of banker Hans Arnhold, where a mixture of Academy fellows and local intellectuals of both the German and American persuasions had come for the talk. John saw to it that I was also invited for the dinner (duck liver pâté on sherry-apple gelée and lamb's lettuce followed by wild boar sirloin medallions in chestnut sauce with jerusalem artichoke purée and broccoli romanesco -- not a million miles from what one would encounter at a place like Guy), where I was seated next to the director of the Dresden Philharmonic and a cultural attaché from the American Embassy and across from the director of the Radial System arts space and not far from a woman who thought for the longest while that I was Ed Wood. Heady conversation ensued.
Not, however, as heady as the talk which followed. John was introduced by Pamela Rosenberg, the managing director of the Berlin Philharmonic, an old school-chum of John's and a fellow Germanophile, who talked about his youthful enthusiasm for German opera and his immense record collection, both of which I can verify from personal experience.
Finally, John took the podium for his speech. He started by acknowleding his Germanophilia, while noting that this is always intertwined with the question of German culture and evil. Sensibly, he noted that although Wagner was an antisemite, the critical industry of going back to his operas and finding antisemitism in every one of them was a deplorable instance of post hoc ergo propter hoc, which I found refreshing. There is, after all, not even a Shylock or Fagin in Wagner. He did a lot of reminiscing, and I began to figure out where what I'd always considered an odd quirk had germinated. When you're five years old and you've got cultured German musicians playing in your house, playing German classics right up where you can see them, you're going to get fascinated with the music and the musicians. Furthermore, you're going to make the association, once you're back in the States, with that other place, Germany, where this happens. And that's going to lead to a fascination, not only with the music if you're so inclined (and John clearly was), but also with the country. So it's not surprising to see him doing graduate work in German topics, or hanging out in Bayreuth seeing Wagner operas over and over and over -- and returning year after year to see different producitons of them.
That he also wound up being a music critic, first at the Los Angeles Times, then at the New York Times is hardly surprising, but that he wound up as the New York Times' chief rock critic -- and did a bang-up job of it -- is what has made him a unique figure on the American critical landscape. He was doing both jobs during the great Downtown Renaissance of the late '70s -- ie, the rise of both CBGBs and Steve Reich -- and got to witness (as did I, although not as frequently or as up close) the greatest American musical revolution of our age. He's got a perplexing fondness for Linda Ronstadt that I don't share, but he's on the money a lot of the time.
As the talk continued, though, I began to see very clearly where we diverge. It comes down to one crucial juncture: romanticism. A whole lot of musical appreciation, whether some people want to admit it or not, comes down to making a soul connection, feeling a resonance within yourself to the music being presented. If you don't feel it, you gotta fake it, like the man said, but you can't fake it in print, not for long. And romanticism has never rung a single bell with me. I'm right down with the whole history of European classical (or so-called) music from Machaut through Haydn, but the minute Beethoven stalks onto the scene, I take a vacation until Stravinsky and the boys show up 80 or so years later. And even then there's a lot of stuff I can't stand, and most of it refers straight to romanticism, right down to Arnold Schoenberg and Elliot Carter.
"Romanticism is about extremes," John said, adding later that "I like romanticism with some constraints." Well, you don't have to know much about European culture to know that romanticism wasn't just music, and that its theoretical and practical origins are just about 100% German: Goethe, Schiller, and on and on. And that stuff just glazes my eyes over. I've never been able to read it, don't much like its painted or sculpted manifestations, or find any resonance in its literature or music. Is this a blind-spot, a defect in my orientation that needs fixing?
Well, naturally, I don't think so. But the equation of German culture with romanticism, or maybe just my realizing how inextricably knotted together the two are, opened my eyes just a little more. When I went to the Academy, I was still seething with an "I hate Germans" vibe I'd picked up at this year's Green Week, which had exacerbated my nagging, years-long, realization that I've just been here too long and need to move on. And maybe it was the musical clue which was responsible for a realization: once we're past the 19th Century, my musical touchstones, from Stravinsky (Russian, but it was very much a francophile culture) through Copland (studied with Boulanger in Paris) through Glass (ditto), not to mention Ravel and Poulenc and all that electronic music I was so crazy about as a teenager, are French! I felt I'd been absolved of my visceral dislike of Germany. I don't get it, never have, and don't have to.
This is the point where I make the obvious disclaimer that I don't expect France to be the magic pill which solves everything. If anything, their bureaucracy is as pig-headed as Germany's, only lacking the tiny bit of efficiency that German Ordnung brings. There's an arrogance, cultural and political, which is annoying, although as an American I guess I'm inured to a lot of that. And I won't bother expatiating about the values I find there which are more congruent with my own when it comes to esthetics or sensuality.
Coincidentally, the morning after John's talk, I got an e-mail from a guy in Berkeley who reads this blog, who'd been here the weekend before and was still a little drunk on the experience. He's planning to buy a place here and live here part-time, and had been in the Kollwitzplatz market at the same time I had been there, and was going on about how wonderful the place seemed to him. I wrote him a rather scathing reply, and suggested he read this article that Bowleserised had passed along.
We all have our Berlins. John has his, the guy in Berkeley has his, and I have mine. Your Berlin isn't superior to mine, mine's not superior to yours, at least not if either of us has come to our Berlin by serious thought.
It's goat cheese or asparagus. I know people who just cannot stand asparagus, and I can't understand that at all. But I also know people -- French people, especially -- who are serious connoisseurs of goat cheeses. It's understandable: there are a lot of them, and there are a lot of serious artisans making them, pouring their expertise into the job, and I honor them for that just as I honor winemakers for doing essentially the same thing with a different product. It's just that, for whatever reason, I can't eat it. My throat literally closes up, making it impossible for me to swallow it in the unlikely event that I've gotten it past my nose. I have no idea why this is -- it's not as easy a problem as decoding German culture through romanticism, after all -- and it may be due to biochemistry or genetics. As may be other people's asparagus problem, I don't know.
But at least now I think I have a firmer grip on my Germanophobia, thanks to John's Germanophilia. I'm still skeptical about the view both he and Ms. Rosenberg have that Berlin at the moment is a hot-spot of creativity -- it seems to me that that train left the station long ago -- but I'm glad to have a clearer vision than ever of why I need to move on.
Both Fong-Torres and Rockwell were very angry, naturally, but Rockwell and I had a friend in common, who arranged a dinner (I cooked) so we could meet and I could plead my case. John was appalled that the Times would do such a thing, but believed me. So we've been in touch ever since.
Ironically, we've seen more of each other since I moved to Berlin than in the years previous because of his work at the Times and, for a while, as director of the Lincoln Center Festival. John has never needed an excuse to come to Germany: he's one of the most unabashed Germanophiles I've ever run into. And, because he moved here when he was five and has lived here on and off since, he never needs an excuse to come to Berlin, where he still has old family friends dating from his father's posting here as an administrator of OMGUS, the Office of Military Government, U.S., from 1945 until just before the Berlin blockade.
So it was no surprise to hear his voice on the phone a couple of weeks ago telling me he'd accepted a short residency at the American Academy in Berlin. Usually, fellows at the Academy live there for six months while they complete or research a book, but John took a shorter stay in exchange for simply giving a lecture, which was going to be entitled "My Berlin."
Naturally, I had to hear this.
Last Thursday, I found myself walking down one of those mansion-encrusted far West Berlin streets near the Wannsee U-Bahn to hand my invitation to the gatekeeper and walk to the former villa of banker Hans Arnhold, where a mixture of Academy fellows and local intellectuals of both the German and American persuasions had come for the talk. John saw to it that I was also invited for the dinner (duck liver pâté on sherry-apple gelée and lamb's lettuce followed by wild boar sirloin medallions in chestnut sauce with jerusalem artichoke purée and broccoli romanesco -- not a million miles from what one would encounter at a place like Guy), where I was seated next to the director of the Dresden Philharmonic and a cultural attaché from the American Embassy and across from the director of the Radial System arts space and not far from a woman who thought for the longest while that I was Ed Wood. Heady conversation ensued.
Not, however, as heady as the talk which followed. John was introduced by Pamela Rosenberg, the managing director of the Berlin Philharmonic, an old school-chum of John's and a fellow Germanophile, who talked about his youthful enthusiasm for German opera and his immense record collection, both of which I can verify from personal experience.
Finally, John took the podium for his speech. He started by acknowleding his Germanophilia, while noting that this is always intertwined with the question of German culture and evil. Sensibly, he noted that although Wagner was an antisemite, the critical industry of going back to his operas and finding antisemitism in every one of them was a deplorable instance of post hoc ergo propter hoc, which I found refreshing. There is, after all, not even a Shylock or Fagin in Wagner. He did a lot of reminiscing, and I began to figure out where what I'd always considered an odd quirk had germinated. When you're five years old and you've got cultured German musicians playing in your house, playing German classics right up where you can see them, you're going to get fascinated with the music and the musicians. Furthermore, you're going to make the association, once you're back in the States, with that other place, Germany, where this happens. And that's going to lead to a fascination, not only with the music if you're so inclined (and John clearly was), but also with the country. So it's not surprising to see him doing graduate work in German topics, or hanging out in Bayreuth seeing Wagner operas over and over and over -- and returning year after year to see different producitons of them.
That he also wound up being a music critic, first at the Los Angeles Times, then at the New York Times is hardly surprising, but that he wound up as the New York Times' chief rock critic -- and did a bang-up job of it -- is what has made him a unique figure on the American critical landscape. He was doing both jobs during the great Downtown Renaissance of the late '70s -- ie, the rise of both CBGBs and Steve Reich -- and got to witness (as did I, although not as frequently or as up close) the greatest American musical revolution of our age. He's got a perplexing fondness for Linda Ronstadt that I don't share, but he's on the money a lot of the time.
As the talk continued, though, I began to see very clearly where we diverge. It comes down to one crucial juncture: romanticism. A whole lot of musical appreciation, whether some people want to admit it or not, comes down to making a soul connection, feeling a resonance within yourself to the music being presented. If you don't feel it, you gotta fake it, like the man said, but you can't fake it in print, not for long. And romanticism has never rung a single bell with me. I'm right down with the whole history of European classical (or so-called) music from Machaut through Haydn, but the minute Beethoven stalks onto the scene, I take a vacation until Stravinsky and the boys show up 80 or so years later. And even then there's a lot of stuff I can't stand, and most of it refers straight to romanticism, right down to Arnold Schoenberg and Elliot Carter.
"Romanticism is about extremes," John said, adding later that "I like romanticism with some constraints." Well, you don't have to know much about European culture to know that romanticism wasn't just music, and that its theoretical and practical origins are just about 100% German: Goethe, Schiller, and on and on. And that stuff just glazes my eyes over. I've never been able to read it, don't much like its painted or sculpted manifestations, or find any resonance in its literature or music. Is this a blind-spot, a defect in my orientation that needs fixing?
Well, naturally, I don't think so. But the equation of German culture with romanticism, or maybe just my realizing how inextricably knotted together the two are, opened my eyes just a little more. When I went to the Academy, I was still seething with an "I hate Germans" vibe I'd picked up at this year's Green Week, which had exacerbated my nagging, years-long, realization that I've just been here too long and need to move on. And maybe it was the musical clue which was responsible for a realization: once we're past the 19th Century, my musical touchstones, from Stravinsky (Russian, but it was very much a francophile culture) through Copland (studied with Boulanger in Paris) through Glass (ditto), not to mention Ravel and Poulenc and all that electronic music I was so crazy about as a teenager, are French! I felt I'd been absolved of my visceral dislike of Germany. I don't get it, never have, and don't have to.
This is the point where I make the obvious disclaimer that I don't expect France to be the magic pill which solves everything. If anything, their bureaucracy is as pig-headed as Germany's, only lacking the tiny bit of efficiency that German Ordnung brings. There's an arrogance, cultural and political, which is annoying, although as an American I guess I'm inured to a lot of that. And I won't bother expatiating about the values I find there which are more congruent with my own when it comes to esthetics or sensuality.
Coincidentally, the morning after John's talk, I got an e-mail from a guy in Berkeley who reads this blog, who'd been here the weekend before and was still a little drunk on the experience. He's planning to buy a place here and live here part-time, and had been in the Kollwitzplatz market at the same time I had been there, and was going on about how wonderful the place seemed to him. I wrote him a rather scathing reply, and suggested he read this article that Bowleserised had passed along.
We all have our Berlins. John has his, the guy in Berkeley has his, and I have mine. Your Berlin isn't superior to mine, mine's not superior to yours, at least not if either of us has come to our Berlin by serious thought.
It's goat cheese or asparagus. I know people who just cannot stand asparagus, and I can't understand that at all. But I also know people -- French people, especially -- who are serious connoisseurs of goat cheeses. It's understandable: there are a lot of them, and there are a lot of serious artisans making them, pouring their expertise into the job, and I honor them for that just as I honor winemakers for doing essentially the same thing with a different product. It's just that, for whatever reason, I can't eat it. My throat literally closes up, making it impossible for me to swallow it in the unlikely event that I've gotten it past my nose. I have no idea why this is -- it's not as easy a problem as decoding German culture through romanticism, after all -- and it may be due to biochemistry or genetics. As may be other people's asparagus problem, I don't know.
But at least now I think I have a firmer grip on my Germanophobia, thanks to John's Germanophilia. I'm still skeptical about the view both he and Ms. Rosenberg have that Berlin at the moment is a hot-spot of creativity -- it seems to me that that train left the station long ago -- but I'm glad to have a clearer vision than ever of why I need to move on.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Kiez
There it is, my new neighborhood, the Gleimkiez in Prenzlauer Berg. As you can see, it sticks out into nothing, a place where the Wall once ran. In fact, it was within the "security zone" of the Wall, and, had it not been made up of a solid mass of inhabitable apartment buildings, it would have been demolished for that reason. Instead, the DDR, not wishing to incur the ire of its citizens, allowed it to stand, but erected a checkpoint on the periphery which required a special one-time pass for visitors' entry. The residents were restricted to those citizens of the DDR authorized to carry weapons, in case the "fascists" came swarming over the Wall: Stasi, army, police. Merchants working there -- bakers, butchers, etc. -- had special passes. I learned all of this from a historical marker the Wall Documentation Center has up at the top of Mauerpark.
In the photo, you can see the lights of the Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn Sportpark, a huge complex which includes a soccer stadium and the Max-Schmelling-Halle, where Bob Dylan played last year. You can also make out the Fehrnsehturm in Alexanderplatz. One thing that surprised me is how close much of the city is via public transportation from here, be it Alexanderplatz, Friedrichstr., or even Westend. The Schönhauser Allee stop has the Ringbahn, which is awfully fast (I made it back from Ikea, way down south, in less than 30 minutes) and the S1, the central north-south line, as well as the U2, which goes all over the place, and the M1 tram, which gets you to Hackescher Markt in about 15 minutes. It's also got a huge shopping mall with a decent supermarket. Another huge mall, at Gesundbrunnen, is a ten-minute walk from the bridge you see in the picture.
The actual neighborhood itself is refreshingly underdeveloped, although I don't guess that'll last for long. Still, there is a flavor of the Old East here:
This won't last long, I'm afraid. Walking down Gleimstr. with BiB the other night, he confirmed that this is, as I'd been told, a concentration of gay bars, and we all know that's a harbinger of gentrification. Another sign is the presence of The Bird, the reigning monarch of the absolutely authentic American hamburger in Berlin. Another star attraction is Omoni, a Japanese-Korean restaurant with a superb sushi chef and mind-blowing Korean dishes. (Both of these will be written about soonish in Hungry In Berlin, which moving has kept me absent from of late). A few designers' shops have begun to sprout up, and even (gasp!) a couple of art galleries.
As with the rest of Prenzlauer Berg, young people pushing baby-carriages dominate the streets during the day. I'm reliably informed that both Neukölln and Wedding have higher birth-rates than Prenzlauer Berg, which was trumpeted as the "fertility capital of Europe" at one point not long ago, but the population here is predominantly young, and I really feel like a geezer, since I'm an obvious expat and yet I'm not 30 years old like the other ones are.
But I like the neighborhood, and I'm settling in somewhat, although I remain conflicted about how much work I want to (or can afford to) put into this apartment if I'm not going to be here too long. The best solution seems to be to take it all a day at a time, doing some unpacking chores every day, working every day, and figuring out what's what as I roam the streets.
Being a churl and an oaf, I neglected to thank the folks who helped me in the move, and so I do so now. First, the amazing Studentix moving team, whom I recommend to one and all. After that, the dynamic duo of Natalie and Connie, whose superhero comic will soon be on the stands, edited by Marie. Other notable assistance came from Ben and Yuhang, construction consultants extraordinaire, Mike and lady B, the dancer for on-the-phone impersonation ("nobody can tell I'm not a man on the telephone") which brought Deutsche Telekom to its knees and got the installer out on a Saturday -- incredible! -- and arranged for the heating-repair guy, Lou, for imperiling his respiratory system while packing books, John for standing guard, and a special pre-thanks to Kean for the trip we'll no doubt make soon to get a living room rug.
Some of these people were rewarded with beer 'n' burgers at the Bird, a couple with Korean stuff at Omoni, and all will receive certificates as Knights of the Couch -- people entitled to stay at my place -- once I reach Montpellier.
Which, I swear, someday, I will.
Monday, January 07, 2008
The Slum
I'm never moving again. Never. It took two weeks, two €300 sessions with the (excellent) student movers, much stress and strain, and now everything (well, almost everything; the plates and glasses are still back in the old place, which also has to be cleaned) is here.
Somewhere.
I mean, I know where the big stuff is, the bookcases and desk and so on. But the books that go in the bookcases, the stuff that goes on the desk... I know it's somewhere. Or, rather, I hope it's somewhere.
But somewhere is big. This place is a full 10 square meters bigger than the last place, which you'd think would translate into ease of storage and a more spacious living situation. No doubt some day soon it will, but until then it's just big and filled with boxes of stuff. And I'm not at all sure what's in those boxes past the occasional scribbled BOOKS or CDS. And I'm going to have to find out soon, because I've actually got a hell of a lot of work to do before I head to SXSW in mid-March.
There are some wonderful additions here. I scored two couches from a departing American journalist, one of which is faux leather and like sitting on a cloud. One thing I was definitely not sad about was finally being able to abandon the old sofa-couch which has been in my possession since 1994, when I moved to Wilmersdorf for a while and lived in a place so small I had to sleep on it after I'd finished my evening reading while sitting on it. It followed me to the rat-infested place in Wedding, then to the place I've just left, where it started falling apart, first shedding the webbing which supported the mattress, making it impossible to put up guests on it, then the cushions gradually tearing, sending a powder of aged foam rubber out of the rents. It, and the no-longer functional washing machine, were taken to a toxic waste storage site by the students. Thanks, guys.
As a Christmas present to myself, I bought a new washer, which sat unused for a week because the installers told me I needed an Abflussnase (drain-nose) for the outgoing water. Fortunately, there's a little hardware store not far from here, but the guy had never heard of an Abflussnase, and instead suggested an odd-looking plastic part that cost €2.99. It looked good, and I took it home, and although I could fit it on the hose from the washer, I couldn't figure out how you attached it to the drain on the kitchen sink. The New Year holiday subtracted a lot of valuable time from necessary purchases, but at last I took the thing to the salesman who'd sold me the machine and asked him if this was right. "Sure," he said, and went over to a display model of just the machine I'd bought. I was, it developed, trying to install the thing backwards. Never even occurred to me. How embarrassing, I said. "Ah, we can't know everything in this world," he said. Back home, it worked out just fine. Well, almost. I finally had a moment to do a load of wash yesterday and the thing leaks. I'm told there's some sort of string Germans use as a sealant, and so I'm off in search of some of that, although I'm not exactly certain how it works. But boy, it's a great washing machine.
And, also in the kitchen, say hello to a real live gas stove! Yes, folks, no more guessing how much heat is going into the pot, because you can see. No more burning the hell out of stuff because the plate on the electric stove doesn't cool off fast enough because you just turn down the heat and the effect is instantaneous. It's only got three burners, but they all work. So does the oven, although instead of registering temperatures, it's just got numbers from 1 to 5. Gotta figure that one out.
The bedroom? Spacious, and with another couch from the foreign correspondent. Kind of a weird place for it, I know, but I just couldn't turn down two comfortable couches after years of one uncomfortable one. And although there are bags of stuff all over the bedroom, I just haven't gotten around to unpacking them. There'll be a whole wall for bookshelves or whatever.
Between the kitchen and the bedroom is a very narrow little room which is one of the building's downsides. It contains a shower and a sink. The sink is so small that I can barely stand facing its mirror, and shaving involves contortion. The shower, too, isn't so big, the shower-head droops at a weird angle, and the water only lasts a couple of minutes because it's stored in an electrically-heated boiler above. Better than the 180-second shower I had to use in Wedding, but not much.
Next down the hall is the Little Room. The last guy who lived here, a single father with a son, built a loft-bed for his kid here, and that's gotta go. Ben has graciously offered to rip it out, as well as to help me get some light in the kitchen, which is painted dark red for some reason. But getting rid of the loft is now complicated by the fact that there are dozens of boxes -- heavy boxes -- of books everywhere. Another thing about the Little Room is the Tiny Room, which is through a small door at its end, and has a window, an electrical outlet, and about enough room to walk three paces. I have no idea what I'll do with this.
Then there's the long, narrow room with the toilet at one end. There's no heat in here, and no light. There is, however, a much better-situated sink, and room to put some shelves up, so I'm going to get some light installed and a mirror and make this the shaving and toothbrushing room, too. But boy, is it cold; there's a ventilator and a window at the edge of a ledge behind the toilet, and there's no closing that off. Ah, well, spring is just around the corner, right?
Finally, there's the living-room/dining-room/office, a huge room with two windows looking out on a cheerless courtyard and the brown cement this DDR-era building's make of. I had to call in a gas-heating technician to fix the heaters in the kitchen and bedroom and here, and he couldn't figure out why this one didn't work. He said he'd come back, but he hasn't. So there's no heat, although that doesn't seem to matter much. I'll get a rug and a table to eat at, and eventually figure out how the jigsaw puzzle all fits together. And, one very bizarre upside, Deutsche Telekom called to say my number had been transferred to the outlet here. It didn't work. The dancer called them on Friday to report this, and they sent a technician out on Saturday to fix it! She futzed around, plugged some stuff into the socket, and left for a few minutes. When she came back, she plugged a gizmo into the wall and pushed some buttons and...it worked! So now I'm still plowing through a week of e-mails, catching up with blogs and (oh, yes) working again. And in the evening, I sit on the cloud-like couch and read and am very, very glad I'm here.
There are reasons for this. One, the rent is much lower than at my last place. Two, I discovered when the electric company transferred my account that my monthly bill was now one-quarter of what it had been, which means that someone was piggybacking my electricity in the old place for 11 years. This pisses me off, but I doubt there's anything I can do about it at this point. Three, although this neighborhood (which will be the subject of another post later) isn't as hip! and edgy! as my last one, it does have a well-stocked Asian grocery, a regular supermarket within a short walk and another within a slightly longer walk, a shopping mall, an astonishing Korean-Japanese restaurant (which I'll soon post about over at Hungry In Berlin), a bar called The Bird, which is run by two Americans with a vision of serving completely authentic American hamburgers and steaks (succeeding almost completely), and access to a wide variety of public transportation which can get me all over town easily and quickly.
It's also unavoidable that this place is something of a slum. The hall light went out this weekend and hasn't been repaired. The plumbing makes alarming noises (the neighbors flush their toilets all night and day), and the cement walls are old and not in such great repair. The Hausmeister (what New Yorkers would call the super), the landlord's brother, doesn't appear to be overworked, shall we say. There's an overwhelming funkiness to the place, and that's not all good.
But now I've got to unpack, finish up with the old place, and settle in. And I'm never moving again. Ever. If I do, I'll do it as a Franciscan monk, with no possessions.
Oh, hell, that's not true. As soon as I've got the money, I'm going to France. I talked to the students about it and they're game. The price is less than I thought. And, since the washing machine was part of the calculations for the moving price, that's been crossed off. I may very well be able to do this in the not too distant future, like this summer, if the work keeps coming in.
And, as I speculated earlier, I do feel liberated a bit from the ghosts of the past. Time to make some new ones. It's a new year, a new place, and the same old me. That feels good. It really does.
Somewhere.
I mean, I know where the big stuff is, the bookcases and desk and so on. But the books that go in the bookcases, the stuff that goes on the desk... I know it's somewhere. Or, rather, I hope it's somewhere.
But somewhere is big. This place is a full 10 square meters bigger than the last place, which you'd think would translate into ease of storage and a more spacious living situation. No doubt some day soon it will, but until then it's just big and filled with boxes of stuff. And I'm not at all sure what's in those boxes past the occasional scribbled BOOKS or CDS. And I'm going to have to find out soon, because I've actually got a hell of a lot of work to do before I head to SXSW in mid-March.
There are some wonderful additions here. I scored two couches from a departing American journalist, one of which is faux leather and like sitting on a cloud. One thing I was definitely not sad about was finally being able to abandon the old sofa-couch which has been in my possession since 1994, when I moved to Wilmersdorf for a while and lived in a place so small I had to sleep on it after I'd finished my evening reading while sitting on it. It followed me to the rat-infested place in Wedding, then to the place I've just left, where it started falling apart, first shedding the webbing which supported the mattress, making it impossible to put up guests on it, then the cushions gradually tearing, sending a powder of aged foam rubber out of the rents. It, and the no-longer functional washing machine, were taken to a toxic waste storage site by the students. Thanks, guys.
As a Christmas present to myself, I bought a new washer, which sat unused for a week because the installers told me I needed an Abflussnase (drain-nose) for the outgoing water. Fortunately, there's a little hardware store not far from here, but the guy had never heard of an Abflussnase, and instead suggested an odd-looking plastic part that cost €2.99. It looked good, and I took it home, and although I could fit it on the hose from the washer, I couldn't figure out how you attached it to the drain on the kitchen sink. The New Year holiday subtracted a lot of valuable time from necessary purchases, but at last I took the thing to the salesman who'd sold me the machine and asked him if this was right. "Sure," he said, and went over to a display model of just the machine I'd bought. I was, it developed, trying to install the thing backwards. Never even occurred to me. How embarrassing, I said. "Ah, we can't know everything in this world," he said. Back home, it worked out just fine. Well, almost. I finally had a moment to do a load of wash yesterday and the thing leaks. I'm told there's some sort of string Germans use as a sealant, and so I'm off in search of some of that, although I'm not exactly certain how it works. But boy, it's a great washing machine.
And, also in the kitchen, say hello to a real live gas stove! Yes, folks, no more guessing how much heat is going into the pot, because you can see. No more burning the hell out of stuff because the plate on the electric stove doesn't cool off fast enough because you just turn down the heat and the effect is instantaneous. It's only got three burners, but they all work. So does the oven, although instead of registering temperatures, it's just got numbers from 1 to 5. Gotta figure that one out.
The bedroom? Spacious, and with another couch from the foreign correspondent. Kind of a weird place for it, I know, but I just couldn't turn down two comfortable couches after years of one uncomfortable one. And although there are bags of stuff all over the bedroom, I just haven't gotten around to unpacking them. There'll be a whole wall for bookshelves or whatever.
Between the kitchen and the bedroom is a very narrow little room which is one of the building's downsides. It contains a shower and a sink. The sink is so small that I can barely stand facing its mirror, and shaving involves contortion. The shower, too, isn't so big, the shower-head droops at a weird angle, and the water only lasts a couple of minutes because it's stored in an electrically-heated boiler above. Better than the 180-second shower I had to use in Wedding, but not much.
Next down the hall is the Little Room. The last guy who lived here, a single father with a son, built a loft-bed for his kid here, and that's gotta go. Ben has graciously offered to rip it out, as well as to help me get some light in the kitchen, which is painted dark red for some reason. But getting rid of the loft is now complicated by the fact that there are dozens of boxes -- heavy boxes -- of books everywhere. Another thing about the Little Room is the Tiny Room, which is through a small door at its end, and has a window, an electrical outlet, and about enough room to walk three paces. I have no idea what I'll do with this.
Then there's the long, narrow room with the toilet at one end. There's no heat in here, and no light. There is, however, a much better-situated sink, and room to put some shelves up, so I'm going to get some light installed and a mirror and make this the shaving and toothbrushing room, too. But boy, is it cold; there's a ventilator and a window at the edge of a ledge behind the toilet, and there's no closing that off. Ah, well, spring is just around the corner, right?
Finally, there's the living-room/dining-room/office, a huge room with two windows looking out on a cheerless courtyard and the brown cement this DDR-era building's make of. I had to call in a gas-heating technician to fix the heaters in the kitchen and bedroom and here, and he couldn't figure out why this one didn't work. He said he'd come back, but he hasn't. So there's no heat, although that doesn't seem to matter much. I'll get a rug and a table to eat at, and eventually figure out how the jigsaw puzzle all fits together. And, one very bizarre upside, Deutsche Telekom called to say my number had been transferred to the outlet here. It didn't work. The dancer called them on Friday to report this, and they sent a technician out on Saturday to fix it! She futzed around, plugged some stuff into the socket, and left for a few minutes. When she came back, she plugged a gizmo into the wall and pushed some buttons and...it worked! So now I'm still plowing through a week of e-mails, catching up with blogs and (oh, yes) working again. And in the evening, I sit on the cloud-like couch and read and am very, very glad I'm here.
There are reasons for this. One, the rent is much lower than at my last place. Two, I discovered when the electric company transferred my account that my monthly bill was now one-quarter of what it had been, which means that someone was piggybacking my electricity in the old place for 11 years. This pisses me off, but I doubt there's anything I can do about it at this point. Three, although this neighborhood (which will be the subject of another post later) isn't as hip! and edgy! as my last one, it does have a well-stocked Asian grocery, a regular supermarket within a short walk and another within a slightly longer walk, a shopping mall, an astonishing Korean-Japanese restaurant (which I'll soon post about over at Hungry In Berlin), a bar called The Bird, which is run by two Americans with a vision of serving completely authentic American hamburgers and steaks (succeeding almost completely), and access to a wide variety of public transportation which can get me all over town easily and quickly.
It's also unavoidable that this place is something of a slum. The hall light went out this weekend and hasn't been repaired. The plumbing makes alarming noises (the neighbors flush their toilets all night and day), and the cement walls are old and not in such great repair. The Hausmeister (what New Yorkers would call the super), the landlord's brother, doesn't appear to be overworked, shall we say. There's an overwhelming funkiness to the place, and that's not all good.
But now I've got to unpack, finish up with the old place, and settle in. And I'm never moving again. Ever. If I do, I'll do it as a Franciscan monk, with no possessions.
Oh, hell, that's not true. As soon as I've got the money, I'm going to France. I talked to the students about it and they're game. The price is less than I thought. And, since the washing machine was part of the calculations for the moving price, that's been crossed off. I may very well be able to do this in the not too distant future, like this summer, if the work keeps coming in.
And, as I speculated earlier, I do feel liberated a bit from the ghosts of the past. Time to make some new ones. It's a new year, a new place, and the same old me. That feels good. It really does.
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Dust Bunnies
So how's the move going?
Shaddap.
It's not. Or, rather, it is, sort of. On Thursday, I'll meet at noon with the heating people to figure out how to make the gas radiators work (and maybe have them check the stove to make sure it's okay), and then a truck should appear with a couple of students with a moving firm carrying two sofas I inherited from the sad closing of the McClatchey Papers' European bureau. So I'll have two couches in the apartment, and nothing else.
Yet. Clearly I have to get stuff out of here, but I made a couple of disheartening discoveries along the way. One, I didn't have as many boxes as I'd thought. And, with the current five-day holiday weekend in full roar, no way to get more. Two, once I did get some stuff in boxes, I didn't really have any place to put the boxes. So filling more of them doesn't make sense yet.
The phone gets transferred on the 2nd, probably (I'm waiting for confirmation from Deutsche Telekom...stop laughing), so it'll make sense to have moved in at least partially by then. I won't need most of the books and CDs yet, so I'm thinking a partial move over this coming weekend, followed by a fuller one later.
But today, I'm going to do next to nothing about any of this and relax and blog and try to digest this deep-fried Hungarian thing I got at the Weinachtsmarkt over by the nearly-destroyed Palast der Republik. That alone should take most of the rest of the day. Oh, and maybe throw a few more things into boxes. I can't not do that, as long as I actually have boxes to throw stuff in. Where they go, well, I haven't figured that out yet. The bathroom is full of boxes, and I have to get rid of them before I can put more in there. There's no room for more.
It's like working out a puzzle, only with some handicaps built in. For one thing, I've developed arthritis in my right knee as the weather got colder. For another, after hoisting heavy boxes, I discovered something: I'm almost 60, and I'm not as capable of sustained exercise as I once was. It was eleven years ago that I moved in here, and I've acquired a lot of stuff -- mostly books and records -- in the meanwhile. Getting them in was easy. Getting them out will be far less so. And figuring out where to put them, even in an apartment with one extra small room and an overall ten-square-meter gain on this one, won't be easy.
I wish I could push a button and have it done. But I can't. Stay tuned.
Shaddap.
It's not. Or, rather, it is, sort of. On Thursday, I'll meet at noon with the heating people to figure out how to make the gas radiators work (and maybe have them check the stove to make sure it's okay), and then a truck should appear with a couple of students with a moving firm carrying two sofas I inherited from the sad closing of the McClatchey Papers' European bureau. So I'll have two couches in the apartment, and nothing else.
Yet. Clearly I have to get stuff out of here, but I made a couple of disheartening discoveries along the way. One, I didn't have as many boxes as I'd thought. And, with the current five-day holiday weekend in full roar, no way to get more. Two, once I did get some stuff in boxes, I didn't really have any place to put the boxes. So filling more of them doesn't make sense yet.
The phone gets transferred on the 2nd, probably (I'm waiting for confirmation from Deutsche Telekom...stop laughing), so it'll make sense to have moved in at least partially by then. I won't need most of the books and CDs yet, so I'm thinking a partial move over this coming weekend, followed by a fuller one later.
But today, I'm going to do next to nothing about any of this and relax and blog and try to digest this deep-fried Hungarian thing I got at the Weinachtsmarkt over by the nearly-destroyed Palast der Republik. That alone should take most of the rest of the day. Oh, and maybe throw a few more things into boxes. I can't not do that, as long as I actually have boxes to throw stuff in. Where they go, well, I haven't figured that out yet. The bathroom is full of boxes, and I have to get rid of them before I can put more in there. There's no room for more.
It's like working out a puzzle, only with some handicaps built in. For one thing, I've developed arthritis in my right knee as the weather got colder. For another, after hoisting heavy boxes, I discovered something: I'm almost 60, and I'm not as capable of sustained exercise as I once was. It was eleven years ago that I moved in here, and I've acquired a lot of stuff -- mostly books and records -- in the meanwhile. Getting them in was easy. Getting them out will be far less so. And figuring out where to put them, even in an apartment with one extra small room and an overall ten-square-meter gain on this one, won't be easy.
I wish I could push a button and have it done. But I can't. Stay tuned.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Numbers, Numbers, Numbers
My head hurts. I've just spent another hour looking at people's living spaces on Immobilienscout24, the website where people post offers of apartments and they have a search engine set up so you can find what you can afford in the neighborhood you want, plus sign up for an e-mail alert service which'll clog your in-box or your money back.
My first time through, I punched in some criteria: 1 1/2 to 2 rooms, in Mitte or Prenzlauer Berg, rent 200-400 a month, cold. Push the search button and see what comes up: 12 pages of offers. Now to winnow out the things the search criteria don't offer: not too many stairs (I've developed a bum knee with the cold weather, which clearly means I have to move to a warmer climate!); not in one of those grim communist Plattenbau or even grimmer post-communist shoeboxes; in a neighborhood I may actually have heard of (although this is proving a great way to discover places I'd never seen before). Then start reading the descriptions.
No, Wedding is not Prenzlauer Berg, although it may please you to think of it as such for the purpose of drawing eyeballs, Mr. Real Estate Agent. No, oven heating is not "romantisch," as someone put it. I prefer to think of it as "unhealthisch." No, I don't want to "live over the roofs of Berlin" if there's no elevator.
* * *
That's as far as I'd gotten with writing this post on Monday when the phone rang. It was a Makler, a real estate agent, calling to ask me if I'd like to look at one of the apartments I'd found on Immobilienscout24, a particularly affordable one on a street I'd checked out and liked in Prenzlauer Berg. Naturally, I said yes, and there went the rest of the afternoon.
It looked good, it really did. Not particularly light, I suspect (although by 3, when we met, the light was going anyway), but with a lot more space than I have here, and that particular object of lust for someone who likes to cook as much as I do, a gas stove. Easy stairs, shopping nearby (I can't believe how many people here live far from grocery stores and other necessities), and, well, I liked it. Met the landlord yesterday, and if the lease doesn't have any hidden trap-doors in it, I'll go in Monday to finalize the deal and pick up the keys; I can move stuff in gradually and the clock won't start ticking until January 1.
But what I wanted to do with this post was to outline, for those of you who are contemplating living here, what the various real estate listings mean by what they say -- at least, to the best of my knowledge. I'm sure smarter commenters will come along to refine and correct what I say, so read the comments. Given the number of searches for "long-time apartment Berlin" and "long-term rental Prenzlauer Berg" and so on, I know there's interest out there.
Now, the first thing you want to do is look at the rent. This is expressed as "Kaltmiet," or cold rent. In almost every case (except when the sole heating is coal), the landlord pays to heat the building and adds "Nebenkosten," or service charges, to the rent. Nebenkosten also include the fees for garbage and recycling pickup, cleaning the halls, and maybe cable television. So the rent on this place is €350 a month cold, €480 warm, including a €50 charge for the gas.
In addition, I'm going to have to come up with €833 as a one-time fee (Provision) for the Makler, in addition to the €500 "Kaution," or deposit, for the landlord. Note that not all apartments are offered through Maklers, and many folks who aren't in as much of a rush as I was like to avoid them. You can find "Provisionsfrei" apartments that are part of a co-op arrangement (Genossenschaft) or offered directly by the landlord. Another way to do it is through becoming a "Nachmieter," a term which doesn't really translate -- next-renter? The way that works is that one way you can get out of your lease quickly is to fine someone to take it over. If I remember how this works correctly, you have to come up with three potential renters, and the landlord meets with them. This satisfies the legal requirements, although some landlords will be happy to say they've met people they haven't or let you come up with two friends who have no intention of moving but go through the motions, then the person you've selected as your Nachmieter.
Once you've got your place, of course, the fun really starts. You have to arrange for electricity and telephone service. This last is the most fun because Deutsche Telekom likes nothing better than saying no. They'll take your order and then get back to you and tell you that, due to a lack of new telephone numbers, you'll have to wait until 2048, but they'll be happy to cut you a deal on a mobile phone (which the Germans call ein Handy, after the extremely early Motorola Handy Phone), the details of which, once you whip out a magnifying glass to read the extremely fine print, resemble three years' indentured servitude.
And then there's furniture, and, well, the most fun of all.
Moving.
That's the part I'm really looking forward to. I remember when I left Texas, on the real crunch day of the move it was 107 degrees Fahrenheit (that's 41.667 degrees Celsius) and suddenly all the people who'd offered to help just weren't there. I'm sure there'll be a series of ice storms or something similar as this month draws to an end. But here goes another adventure.
My first time through, I punched in some criteria: 1 1/2 to 2 rooms, in Mitte or Prenzlauer Berg, rent 200-400 a month, cold. Push the search button and see what comes up: 12 pages of offers. Now to winnow out the things the search criteria don't offer: not too many stairs (I've developed a bum knee with the cold weather, which clearly means I have to move to a warmer climate!); not in one of those grim communist Plattenbau or even grimmer post-communist shoeboxes; in a neighborhood I may actually have heard of (although this is proving a great way to discover places I'd never seen before). Then start reading the descriptions.
No, Wedding is not Prenzlauer Berg, although it may please you to think of it as such for the purpose of drawing eyeballs, Mr. Real Estate Agent. No, oven heating is not "romantisch," as someone put it. I prefer to think of it as "unhealthisch." No, I don't want to "live over the roofs of Berlin" if there's no elevator.
* * *
That's as far as I'd gotten with writing this post on Monday when the phone rang. It was a Makler, a real estate agent, calling to ask me if I'd like to look at one of the apartments I'd found on Immobilienscout24, a particularly affordable one on a street I'd checked out and liked in Prenzlauer Berg. Naturally, I said yes, and there went the rest of the afternoon.
It looked good, it really did. Not particularly light, I suspect (although by 3, when we met, the light was going anyway), but with a lot more space than I have here, and that particular object of lust for someone who likes to cook as much as I do, a gas stove. Easy stairs, shopping nearby (I can't believe how many people here live far from grocery stores and other necessities), and, well, I liked it. Met the landlord yesterday, and if the lease doesn't have any hidden trap-doors in it, I'll go in Monday to finalize the deal and pick up the keys; I can move stuff in gradually and the clock won't start ticking until January 1.
But what I wanted to do with this post was to outline, for those of you who are contemplating living here, what the various real estate listings mean by what they say -- at least, to the best of my knowledge. I'm sure smarter commenters will come along to refine and correct what I say, so read the comments. Given the number of searches for "long-time apartment Berlin" and "long-term rental Prenzlauer Berg" and so on, I know there's interest out there.
Now, the first thing you want to do is look at the rent. This is expressed as "Kaltmiet," or cold rent. In almost every case (except when the sole heating is coal), the landlord pays to heat the building and adds "Nebenkosten," or service charges, to the rent. Nebenkosten also include the fees for garbage and recycling pickup, cleaning the halls, and maybe cable television. So the rent on this place is €350 a month cold, €480 warm, including a €50 charge for the gas.
In addition, I'm going to have to come up with €833 as a one-time fee (Provision) for the Makler, in addition to the €500 "Kaution," or deposit, for the landlord. Note that not all apartments are offered through Maklers, and many folks who aren't in as much of a rush as I was like to avoid them. You can find "Provisionsfrei" apartments that are part of a co-op arrangement (Genossenschaft) or offered directly by the landlord. Another way to do it is through becoming a "Nachmieter," a term which doesn't really translate -- next-renter? The way that works is that one way you can get out of your lease quickly is to fine someone to take it over. If I remember how this works correctly, you have to come up with three potential renters, and the landlord meets with them. This satisfies the legal requirements, although some landlords will be happy to say they've met people they haven't or let you come up with two friends who have no intention of moving but go through the motions, then the person you've selected as your Nachmieter.
Once you've got your place, of course, the fun really starts. You have to arrange for electricity and telephone service. This last is the most fun because Deutsche Telekom likes nothing better than saying no. They'll take your order and then get back to you and tell you that, due to a lack of new telephone numbers, you'll have to wait until 2048, but they'll be happy to cut you a deal on a mobile phone (which the Germans call ein Handy, after the extremely early Motorola Handy Phone), the details of which, once you whip out a magnifying glass to read the extremely fine print, resemble three years' indentured servitude.
And then there's furniture, and, well, the most fun of all.
Moving.
That's the part I'm really looking forward to. I remember when I left Texas, on the real crunch day of the move it was 107 degrees Fahrenheit (that's 41.667 degrees Celsius) and suddenly all the people who'd offered to help just weren't there. I'm sure there'll be a series of ice storms or something similar as this month draws to an end. But here goes another adventure.
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