Green Week Again!

About the only thing I regretted about my trip to France last week was that I might miss Green Week. Green Week (aka the Grüne Woche) is a Berlin institution that's been around since just after the War, a trade show for the grocery and gastronomy businesses which is also open to the public. It's a beloved event, because there are still people around who remember that it was possible to go there and get a free glass of milk and free samples of various kinds of food they might not see in their local stores -- at least not yet.

Today, it's another thing entirely. They've added on a gardening trade show, a pet trade show, a houseplant trade show, and a trade show for people who have Kleingartenkolonien, the little patches of land on which you can put a small shed or cottage and plant a garden. But the food show remains the heart of the thing, and the exhibitors come from around the world to show off stuff they think Germans might want to buy. In addition, the federal government puts up a huge exhibition in a hall where each German state shows off its regional specialties. Guess where most of the eating takes place.

In a way, it's wonderful: I've gone nearly every year I've been here, and come back with stuff I've loved. At one point, it was possible to get Tunisian olive oil, which is the best in the world: lots of the "Italian Extra Virgin" olive oil you buy is actually grown in Tunisia, but is packaged in Italy, where a legal loophole allows them to call it Italian. Unfortunately, the guy who was selling that stopped participating in the Tunisian stand, and I miss him: the stuff was not only good, it was phenomenally cheap. Then, a couple of years ago, I discovered Wattwurm, a company which makes long, skinny sausages that look like the shore-worms that swarm on the beaches here. The Wattwurm sausages didn't interest me as much as their Knobi-Knackers, which work just fine as Cajun sausages. Not as good as my old pal LeJeune makes in Eunice, but good enough. Some friends discovered Estonian mustard, which must be the most eye-watering mustard around. Then, the Estonians stopped selling it, although they'd put a tiny dab on your plate if you ordered one of their grilled sausages. You could get sharp cheddar at the Irish stand, a product notably missing here. And there were often other things that showed up, like the Finnish "sauna ham" we found one year, which was amazing -- and which never appeared again.

But in another way, it's depressing. It was particularly interesting to compare this year's with what I found just lying around in Montpellier's supermarkets, which were far more international than this year's Green Week. There's no getting around it: Green Week follows the Darwinian rules of capitalism: if people don't want it, they can't sell it. If they can't sell it, it doesn't get offered again.

It's also depressing because, as I've written before in an article a number of years ago, it shows how the Germans tend to reduce everything to a Pfanne of one sort or another. Pfanne means "pan," of course, but in practice, it means a gluey mass of stuff steaming in what looks to be an oversized wok. You have your Chinapfanne, your Asiapfanne, your Pilzpfanne, at every street fair, Christmas market, and in many snack bars. At Green Week, it gets ridiculous. There was a Kangaruhpfanne at the Australian stand, several other Pfanne at the Israeli stand, and variations of the Asiapfanne at the Thai, Korean, and Vietnamese stands. By reducing national cuisines to easily-understood stereotypes that Germans can accept, all of that cultural difference which other societies actually find interesting gets smoothed over. No wonder there are so many Thai sushi joints in Berlin!

And, because small nations can't afford to keep coming back if the Germans don't buy their stuff, real finds have become increasingly rare. Large nations, too, stop coming out of what must be frustration. The Americans once were represented by a doughnut maker, Samuel Adams beer, and some German wholesaler shilling for cheap California wine. (What was really cool was that the organizers invariably set them next to the Iranian stand, so dark looks shot back and forth over the figs and pistachios, the doughnuts and hot dogs). They were nowhere to be seen this year, although the Iranians had not only pistachos, but saffron. Japan, too, was missing, probably because they gave up trying to prove that Japanese people eat things other than sushi. South America was mostly missing, as was Africa (I once bought some coffee from Dahomey, I think it was, which was so good I found myself wishing I'd bought more).

So yesterday's visit was the shortest I'd ever made. I had some goals, but I was also on the lookout for bargains, since it was the last day of the event. I did manage a huge chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano, lots of Wattwurm Knobi-Knackers, a salami soaked in Barolo wine (this goes very nicely on pizza), and a tube of Estonian mustard after two years of their refusing to sell me any. I don't know what was different this year: I just asked nicely and they said yes. I got a tin of paprika from Szeged, where my friend Ray lives, and it had a little cookbook tied to it. (I just hope this isn't the stuff with the aflatoxins in it that was in the news just after last year's harvest). I also scored a nice bumper sticker from the Ukranian election, a big orange flag behind a picture of a father and son and the word TAK! in big blue letters. Nice historical souvenir.

But three hours later, I was walking back to the subway. No Irish stand this year, so no cheddar. No Tunisian guy (the Tunisians mostly sell incense and handcrafts), no surprises at all. Of course, what's on view isn't the real story: behind the scenes, as at any trade show, the attendees are talking to German grocery chains and food wholesalers and restaurant purveyors and setting up the deals that'll show up on the German food scene over the next few months. Free samples vanished years ago, so I was hungry at the appropriate time later in the day, and I wasn't interested in drinking until I got sick, which is probably the most notable non-professional activity at Green Week. It was okay, but not nearly as good as the one I attended 11 years ago, or even five years ago.

But you know what? I'll go next year if I'm here.

A Goal

Yes, it was 22 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, the wind was blowing out of the Alps at about 30 miles an hour, so the wind-chill was ridiculous. But the sun was shining, and I'll tell you one thing: Montpellier is beautiful. For some reason, I kept taking pictures of alleyways.



This won't be easy. It's going to take a minimum of €30,000, I'd say. I have no idea where I'm going to come up with that kind of money, but I'm going to try. Because from the way it looks to the way people act to the access to other places, this is the Europe I want to live in. Forever? I doubt it. Or maybe. Hell, I may be as irritated with Montpellier after 11 years as I am with Berlin. But it's less crowded than Paris, less expensive (although rents are about 20% higher than they are here and apartments are hard to come by when school's in session: half the population, almost, are students), and less visited by tourists. Not that I have anything against tourists, because I just was one for two and a half days. Of course, it's also less visited by various cultural attractions -- bands, museum shows -- and has a much smaller population. "Provincial" was the word one guy used. Of course, he owns an English-language bookstore there, and was shocked to hear we didn't have any in Berlin. Yeah, I know from provincial. And his was one of two I visited.

I'm still sorting through impressions and so on, but I did want to get a couple of pictures up because people have been asking for them.

More later. Meanwhile, here's another alley.

Ban The Bahn

I fired off a letter to Deutsche Bahn this morning before I packed for tomorrow's early-morning trip to Paris, using their service as far as Cologne. Here's what I wrote:

Dear Deutsche Bahn:

Thank you for your quick reply.

I should have known that, in typical German fashion, this incident would be made to be my fault. After all, it’s a byword of doing business here that the customer is always wrong.

I should never have expected that a Deutsche Bahn employee would volunteer the information that taking another train would allow me to save money. After all, that would be helpful, and who has time for that?

Nor should I have expected guidance from your website, which could easily have pointed out this fact. And I suppose I shouldn’t have expected you to address my question as to why anyone would buy a ticket from a website which doesn’t tell its customers how much a ticket costs. It’s too much to ask from a company which has no competition.

I will almost certainly be required to go back to Paris a couple of times this year, and for that I will fly. I don’t particularly like flying, but at least I can find out how much my ticket costs, and I haven’t been discourteously dismissed by any of the airlines yet.

Kundenfreundlich is a German word. You might like to contemplate it. My English-language readers may not know it as such, but I have no problem teaching it to them.

You have lost a customer. And I don’t think you really care.

+++++++

We'll see if there's a reply. My guess is there won't be; that foreigners don't really count with them. This is more than just an idle guess; of the Big Three services, Deutsche Post, Deutsche Telekom, and Deutsche Bahn, only the latter is still semi-attached to the government, and it hopes to go public with its stock later this year or earlier next year. I can tell you from personal experience that Deutsche Post's service improved humongously when it went private and snuggled up with DHL (in fact, the yellow mail trucks are now DHL trucks), and, although I haven't had much contact with them in the last few months (and that's a good thing), my friend the dancer insists that they've become easier to deal with of late. But when they were still under the shadow of being arms of the government, with employees who could never be fired, with workforces up to 20% redundant as a result, they treated their customers with contempt, their foreign customers like contemptable retarded people. The thing is, most Germans took it, and the rest took it for granted that their institutions hated them. They didn't expect any better. But that's another rant, for another day.

Right now, I have to throw a couple of things in a suitcase and get out of here at an obscene hour in the morning. The camera's going with me, and I'll be back late Friday night. Stay tuned.

Customer Service, German Style

When last we looked, our hero had discovered that he had been charged a whopping $400 for a round-trip ticket to Paris, despite having a 25% discount card and a further discount for international travel originating in Germany. Shocked, he wrote a letter to Deutsche Bahn's customer service division, who then suggested he copy the tickets and mail the copies to them for inspection. This he did.

Well, the reply came today, and it's not pretty.

"Based on our conditions of sale our employees compile the needed documents most carefully and our customers are obligated to prove the bought tickets accuracy," it says, setting up the classic "customer is always wrong" defense. "In case there has been a mistake it can be corrected immediately. No complaint can be accepted later." Can you believe that? But it gets better.

After informing me that I can go stand on line again and cash the German end of the tickets in (the others are non-refundable), it continues:

"Because Sparpreis tickets are only possible for the same return route, you have gotten Normalpreis tickets by using the route to Brussels and further with Thalys to Paris Nord. The return will be from Köln to Berlin with Deutsche Bahn. Thalys and Deutsche Bahn tarifs are separate and not always available at the same time. That is why our cleark has offered you that ticket for your requested travel."

Of course, the "cleark" could have pointed this out to me, but she didn't. She's a drone, and expected to behave like a drone. Note that this was presented as being completely my choice, although I was never presented with enough information to alter my decision. The customer is, as always, wrong.

There's a nice kicker, too: "We would be pleased if you would continue to prefer the ecologically friendly travelling by train and wish you pleasant trips on board of our trains." Play on guilt! That always works!

Well, I'm an ecologically and otherwise friendly guy, but I've just been screwed. Next time I have to go to Paris, EasyJet gets my business.

They also never addressed another issue: I fake-booked a ticket on this same route on the website and got as far as where I'd push the button to pay for it. No price was ever mentioned, yet they asked me to okay it so they could mail me the tickets. I asked them what customer in their right mind would buy something for which no price was quoted. They ignored that question.

If you think this is fun, you ought to try to reason with Deutsche Telekom some time.

Meanwhile, beware of doing business with Deutsche Bahn.

Another Nekkid Lady

I've been wanting to post some more shots of the graffiti around here, but I've fallen woefully behind in both processing the pix and figuring out which of them to put up. Meanwhile, my favorite graffiti artist, Nike, has been doing some wonderful work. There are two more I"ve been meaning to shoot (plus another one on Kastanienallee which is a true dud), but this one appeared very close to my house, and it's everything I like about her work: a kind of primitivism which nonetheless gets some really subtle observation about the woman's body just right -- and some wrong, as witness the hands here. I hope this shows up -- that picture of Rosenthaler Platz yesterday is a true mess, isn't it? -- and I'll try to shoot the others before too long.

The Burden Of History: Jews And Cattle

Hey, Berlinophiles! Recognize this place?



That's right: it's fabulous Rosenthaler Platz, looking north from the traffic island in the middle of its south side. We see Brunnenstr. stretching to the north, and Weinbergsweg, familiar to those of you who've stayed at Berlin's best hostel/cheap hotel the Circus, which is just visible as a yellowish building on the far right. Running right to left is Torstr. I've been walking around there for eleven years and some, because starting in January '94, I worked not too far away on Linienstr. I've lived near it for eight years, and walk through it on the average of five or six times a week.

So how come I never knew until recently that it once played an absolutely crucial part in Berlin's -- Germany's -- history?

But it did. A few months ago, I read an amazing book, The Pity Of It All, a history of the Jews in Germany by Amos Elon. Although there's a fascinating chapter at the beginning about the first Jews to come to Germany (I was blown away to learn that there were Jews in Cologne before there were Germans, but, since it was a city artificially created by the Romans -- Colonia -- as a colonial outpost, and doubtless included Jews from the Roman Empire, it makes sense), the book really starts in 1743, when a 14-year-old boy left his home in Dessau and came to Berlin to study.

At the time, Berlin still had its medieval city wall, which stretched along what is now Torstr. and it was studded with gates where armed guards took note of who came and went in the name of security. We're all familiar with the Brandenburg Gate, and just down Torstr. from me in the other direction is Oranienburger Tor, where a gate stood until the 19th Century. "Tor," in fact, means "gate," but except for a few which are memorialized by subway stops these days -- Schlesischises Tor, Hallesches Tor -- only the one which appears on German coinage is still standing.

So imagine my surprise to read the opening words of Elon's book: "In the fall in 1743, a fourteen-year-old boy entered Berlin at the Rosenthaler Tor, the only gate in the city wall through which Jews (and cattle) were allowed to pass. The boy had arrived from his hometown of Dessau, some one hundred miles away in the small independent principality of Dessau-Anhalt. For five or six days he had walked through the hilly countryside to reach the Prussian capital."

The boy, we learn in the next paragraph, was Moses Mendelssohn, one of the preeminent figures in modern Judaism, the philosopher who managed to show his fellow Jews that the ideals of the Enlightenment were compatible with Jewish thought. He fought for tolerance for the Jews in Berlin and won it, albeit grudgingly in some quarters. He founded the first secular, co-ed school for Jewish children, translated important Jewish texts into German, and is rightly revered as one of Germany's greatest thinkers. The revolution he started is the subject of Elon's book, and it is arguable that the history of the Jews in Germany is the history of Berlin, since Berlin was the Jews' central German city, and, as Germany unified into a single country, a place where Jewish artists, writers, businessmen, and politicians were increasingly prominent and powerful.

(Incidentally, Mendelssohn did almost too good a job: his children mostly converted, adding the name "Bertholdy" to his to show connections to a Gentile in the family tree, and his grandchildren Felix and Fanny became famous musicians -- Felix even writing Christian church music and conducting the famous revival of Bach's B-Minor Mass in Leipzig.)

So where do you suppose the Rosenthaler Tor, gateway for cattle and Jews was? Duhh.

And why did I have to wait until 2004, which is when I read this book, to discover that this place where several streets come together in my neighborhood held the gate where a man whose school is near me, whose family's banking business virtually built a whole street near me, and whose grave is just a few blocks from my house, came to this city?

Berlin has a very odd attitude towards its own history, I think. There is no lack of signs and monuments to the bad things that happened here. The city has allowed an artist from another city to come here and install his "Klopfensteine" (stumbling blocks), small golden squares hammered into the cobblestones in front of various buildings giving the names of the Jews who had lived there and were deported, the dates of their births and deaths. Berlin is building a mammoth memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe near the Brandenburg Gate. Wittenbergplatz has its list of concentration camps hanging outside the subway station. Nollendorfplatz has its bronze monument to the homosexuals murdered in the camps. Just next to the park where Mendelssohn's grave is, formerly the first Jewish cemetery in Berlin, there's a monument to the Jews who were collected in a building which used to stand there, an old-age home run by the Jewish community, and then deported to the camps. East Berlin is studded with small plaques memorializing Communists -- many, but not all of them, Jewish -- who were arrested and disappeared during the Nazi era.

So why isn't there a sign telling us where a very good thing happened to Berlin's Jews?

Because, as you turn Elon's pages, you realize that lots of good things happened to Jews in Berlin, despite waxing and waning periods of anti-Semitism (incidentally, Elon and several others I've read trace the origins of classic anti-Semitism to France, not Germany). Jews wrote poetry, ran salons (in the case of many notable women), filled the orchestras, made revolution, advanced science. Yes, the story has a sad ending, and that's why Elon named his book The Pity Of It All, but I guarantee anyone reading it will be uplifted and inspired.

A solution to this is near at hand, in Paris. If you've walked around Paris, you've undoubtedly noticed these shield-shaped plaques on buildings, headed "L'Histoire du Paris." There are plenty of them, and if you're just randomly walking around Paris, you can be surprised by chancing upon a gem. I was walking down a street there once because my map said it was the quickest way to get from A to B, and there was a very ornate building in the middle of the block. Thanks to the shield, I discovered it was once the city's central market for buying and selling horses, and that everything from dray-horses to fine purebreds were sold there.

The thing about these Parisian shields is they don't take up a whole lot of room, they're succinctly written (indeed, some of them don't make sense without a certain amount of context), and there are a hell of a lot of them. Berlin could do the same thing, but I suspect it never will.

So that's why I was at Rosenthaler Platz today, risking life and limb to get that shot. Just imagine young Moses walking down Brunnenstr. to the gate, nervous at the interrogation he was about to undergo (Jews without money were turned away, and pedlars were forbidden), eager to meet the rabbi who was sponsoring his education.

But there's something about this city which squirms when positive, uplifting, or optimistic stories are brought up. No, it says, I prefer to shoulder the Burden Of History. It's my fate, my duty.

Well, it's not mine.

Sauerkraut (Lunch Portion)

Been doing a lot of running around, both on the Net and on my feet, this week, trying to set up this trip to Montpellier on the 24th. On Monday, I walked down to Friedrichstr. station to buy the Berlin-Paris ticket, and as I walked into the so-called "service center," I noted that there were about 15 people in line. In the 20 minutes it took me to get to the head of the line, that number increased to 27. As always, there were four counters, but you'll never find all four open at the same time.

Anyway, I drew an old woman who seemed to be the epitome of German civil service: bored, slow, and inefficient. Hearing that I wanted to go to Paris, she disappeared into the back room for a while and came out with a huge loose-leaf book that she spent a long time consulting. It took her 25 minutes to write up my ticket, and the woman next to her handled seven customers while she fiddled.

Since I was two weeks out from the trip, I figured I'd be saving some money, especially since I have a 25% off Bahn Card with Rail Plus, a mysterious add-on that's supposed to save money in other countries on trips booked from Germany. She took my credit card, and I swear I heard her say €119 as the price, which seemed low, but not worth bothering to check. It wasn't until I got home that I looked at the receipt and saw that it was €319. That's over $400.

I was on a couple of deadlines, but I took to the Internet as soon as I could. Deutsche Bahn has a very weird interface, and it took me a couple of days to figure out how to order an imaginary ticket to Paris and back, only to get to the very last step, at which point I was going to abort, and discover that they would take my credit card and mail me a ticket -- but were forbidden to tell me how much that ticket cost!

Someone suggested I do it in reverse, so I went to the French railroad site and ordered a ticket to Berlin. This, with no discounts, cost €163. That did it: I'd paid too much.

So this afternoon I walked back down to Friedrichstr. and stood in line for another twenty minutes (but with fewer people, because this time there were even fewer windows open) and watched a young woman ahead of me completely lose it, screaming about how she was missing work and why couldn't they staff this place right, and, when they finally opened another window, breaking down in huge sobs while the guy at the desk waited impassively for her to stop.

When I finally got to the window, I explained that I was pretty sure I'd been overcharged. The woman looked at my ticket, and expressed concern, then fiddled with the computer for a few minutes. Then she disappeared into the back room, and came out again. "Sorry, it all looks correct." Really? With the discounts and everything? "It is correct." The last time I went it was a hundred Euros cheaper. "Well, you probably were taking advantage of a sale or something. This is correct." This is very expensive, I told her. Next time I guess I'll have to fly. She shrugged her shoulders.

Now, I knew she wouldn't care if I liked what she had to say or not. I'm used to that in Germany: the customer is always wrong, and, moreover, is a pain in the butt. But she offered no advice ("If you took a later train..." or something) and offered no explanation. Her job was to get me to go away.

And, having searched the great Mobissimo, I've found that even at this late date, I could book a flight on EasyJet for €209.98 that's both later in the day and cheaper.

And next time I will, most likely. But I've been looking forward to the long journey for too long, looking forward to reading a stack of magazines that have piled up, watching the scenery -- such as it is -- out the window, and listening to some CDs of radio shows David Gans sent me (no, they are not Grateful Dead shows!). Is that worth a hundred Euros? No, but it's worth a hundred Euros not to have to go back down to Friedrichstr., stand on line yet again, cancel the ticket, wait for the cancellation to show up on the card, and then pray that EasyJet still has a fare that cheap. I have my entire passage to Montpellier in my hand, I have an e-mail from the guy whose house I'm staying with that gives me directions ("When leaving the station, take the large avenue (lined with palm trees and where the streetcar runs) up to the main square..." Whoa! Palm trees?), and I have a week to do liner notes for the forthcoming Best of Son Volt CD for Rhino and maybe one or two other things before I go.

Sometimes you just learn your lesson and cut your losses.

Hit Me With Music

After a satisfying week of work and a somewhat less satisfying day buying my ticket from Berlin to Paris and back, I went over to Blaise's house last night because his landlord's girlfriend was having some people over, and, since they're interesting folks, I figured it'd be a good evening.

It was: I showed Blaise how to cook my famous hamburger curry (not one of those yellow curries, but a weird dish, allegedly Burmese, although it isn't, that was the first thing I learned to cook, and is closer to chili), and he showed me some of his latest paintings, which have amazing color and textural things going on in them and make me think he's definitely on to something these days.

We then went over to Rainer and Rike's apartment, and Blaise was given the job of making Buñuel Martinis. Not being much of a martini maven, I'm not sure what made these different, unless it was the touch of Angostura bitters, but they were real good. A few of Rike's filmmaking colleagues were over and as the evening progressed, we talked about a whole range of things. Rainer gave me an impassioned speech about how he's astonished that he can stay in one place and watch the drama of the world, and how the Internet (something most Germans have only recently discovered) gave him access to a huge range of things that he'd always hoped to be able to know, all for free. At one point I recommended he check out the Worldchanging blog as an example of what the medium he calls "der vay vay vay" (which is how you say www in German) has to offer. (I recommend it to you, too, of course).

Then we ranged on to other things, Rike put on Eno's Another Green World
and Rainer said his two musical heroes were Frank Zappa and Brian Eno, so I told him the story about the day Brian Eno came to my house in Calfornia to do an interview but had laryngitis and spent the time nibbling nasturtium leaves, which caused him to roar with laughter (well, there's a lot more to it than I just let on). Eventually, we were all pretty toasted, and I noticed it was 2:15 and remembered I had a FedEx package coming today. Well, you know the rule: if I'd gone to bed at midnight, the package wouldn't have come til four in the afternoon, but if I went to bed at 3am, it'd be here at 7, right? So I said my good-byes and left.

Blaise told me there was a taxi stand down by the hospital nearby, and although there were taxis on the street, I wasn't 100% sure where I was in relation to my house, so I figured that would be the best place to go. It was only two blocks, so it wouldn't have made much difference one way or the other. Sure enough, after a bracing, frosty walk the lights of the taxis appeared. There was one in front, and the driver had two other people in his car -- probably other drivers he was chatting with, I thought.

As I walked up on it, I saw he was Turkish, and so were the other guys. He saw me, said something, and the other two started to leave. I got up to the taxi just as they got out, and I panicked. Both were holding heavy sticks, with a knob at one end. Baseball bats! Something was definitely wrong. Not much baseball gets played in Berlin, but a lot of baseball bats get sold, mostly to young hooligans on the right and left who find them most useful in skull-cracking. But what were Turks doing with them?

Nothing, as it turned out, because by now the taxi driver was out, and he had a violin in his hands and was rushing to the trunk to stow it. The baseball bats suddenly turned into very odd flutes, with a ceramic or plastic knob facilitating blowing into one end, and I'd say they were dilsiz kavals, although one might have been a dilli kaval or a ney. Clearly, I'd interrupted a jam-session. So I turned to the two kaval players and said "I'm American, so I know nothing about Turkish music. Are those flutes?" The guys said no, they were (something). "That's real interesting," I said, lamely. "Our friend plays the fiddle," one of them said, "and if you want to learn more about Turkish music, I suggest you get in his cab and talk to him. Have a good evening."

The driver was much younger than the two guys who'd been jamming with him, and got very uptight when I asked him whether he played Turkish music. "I'm studying the violin," he said, "and I love all kinds of music. I play Turkish music, yes, but I also play jazz. And my great idol is Paganini." Ah, I said, but we don't know what he really sounded like. "People said he was the devil," the driver said, "so he had the power to entrance people who heard him. That's what I want to do." On the stereo was a Turkish violin player, very emotional, with a synthesizer set to sound like a kanun accompanying him, and I asked if it was a santur. "No, santur is Iranian instrument," the driver said. "This is more like what the Germans call a zither, a kanun." The violinist we were listening to, he said, was the greatest violinist in Turkey, and had been his teacher. Then he asked me if I'd ever heard of Chiat Askin. "Is he Turkish?" I asked. "Syrian Kurdish!" the driver snapped back, but he added that he, too, was a great musician.

It was about then that I realized I wasn't quite sure where we were, but the meter was still pretty low, and the driver asked me why I was so interested. I told him I was a music journalist and wrote about all kinds of music, but, being American, I didn't know much about Turkish music because there aren't many Turks in America. (Whenever I remind the guys at the Döner Kebap stand in front of my house about this fact, their eyes fill with dollar signs; I wouldn't be the least surprised if one of them eventually heads to the States to turn people on to this staple of German lunchtime). He had a hard time believing this, and went back to praising Paganini. That was when I snapped to the fact that, being a young guy, he didn't want me to think that just because he was hanging around with two old men who played shepherds' instruments, he was "country." And confirmation came very shortly, just as Alexanderplatz swing into view (whew!).

"Uhhh, I haven't been driving very long. This is my third day," he said. "No problem, I know just where we are and how to get back to my house from here." He sighed with relief. In fact, I'd say he hadn't even been in the country very long, but he did sort of know how to drive (or perhaps he drove like they do in Turkey, ie, even worse than Germans), and we got back to the house safely.

As I paid him, I gave him a big tip. "Young music students need to eat, too," I said. "You bet," he said, and drove away.

Placemarker

Wow, has it actually been a week since I posted anything here? Sorry: there are, after all, people who read this -- a couple of hundred, from the statistics I get -- and I apologize to one and all.

The excuse I offer, however, is the best one possible; work has been coming in like crazy, and I'm bashing it out as fast as I can. There's rent to pay, bills to pay, groceries to buy...I'm living like a human being again.

And I'm planning my trip to France at the end of the month. I'll be taking the train to Paris on the 24th, staying overnight and meeting some friends from the Well for dinner, and taking the train to Montpellier (check the nifty webcam there, and click on "Visites Virtuelles" here) the next morning. A friend-of-a-friend, who teaches English and American Studies at the university there, has kindly offered me his teenage daughter's room while she visits her mother in Paris, so I won't even have to get a hotel room, and I intend to spend Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday researching such dull stuff as the neighborhoods, the rents, the cost of living, cultural and social resources, and the like; fantasizing that I'm actually moving and taking down numbers to crunch.

I'm pretty sure those numbers will be daunting, at least as far as my current projected income is concerned, but the place is totally an abstraction to me and it's absolutely necessary to gather some reality-based information at this point. I'm sure I'll be discouraged in some ways, and encouraged in others, but the aim is to consider how I might fit into the life of a new place, and I've got to do it.

As I've said (probably even said here), just getting out of town tends to jump-start my brain, and it could well be that this trip does nothing but shake up the fragments of stuff lying around doing nothing and rearrange them in new and more useful ways which might well lead to my coming up with an idea that could wind up financing a move, or at least bring me closer to making one. I had one scare this week when the author of a not very good book asked me if I'd help him do some revisions for the paperback edition -- which were due tomorrow -- and I offered to do it for $15,000, based on an insubstantial rumor about the advance he'd gotten and the fact that several major sections would have to be rewritten from the ground up. He gulped and said no, but I have to be ready for the possibility that a similar project could come along at any moment.

I've also been busy with some business for SXSW '05, which is coming up in just a few weeks, and which I'll be attending. Last year's was a total disaster for me, but it was also the first time I pulled the handle on it and it came up all lemons; this year's could be completely different. I'll be warier of preppies with rock magazines that don't pay their bills, and editors of big magazines who get off on making promises they have no intention of keeping. I'd love to take a side trip to San Francisco and/or New York and/or Montreal, too, but I think keeping the ambitions modest and keeping focused might be a better idea.

Anyway, postings here might be quite sporadic over the next couple of weeks, although I do have one or two pieces I want to write and photograph that I just haven't had time to do. Stay tuned, and I'll be back just as quickly as I can.

Aftermath

Ahh, I was going to post some pictures of the post-Silvester mess, wasn't I? Well, I didn't. I did go out for a walk with an eye towards finding some particularly awful scene of destruction, and I did it early enough -- 1 pm -- that it would have been pretty much in its natural state, but it had sort of drizzled all night, which had the combined effect of muting some of the revelry (once the church bells stopped at about 1:30, I went straight to sleep, which is unusual for December 31) and of turning what remains there were into a reddish-brown mush: evocative, but not really photographable. The mush is from the sawdust used to pack the firecrackers and help with the explosion, and it was a good quarter-inch deep in front of a couple of buildings; my boots left footprints in it. The Thai-Indonesian restaurant at the end of Torstr. by Chausseestr. showed the remains of what looked like a thousand firecrackers, almost certainly the staff's doing -- they're pretty wild and crazy folks. And there was the usual complement of shattered bottles and kids excitedly picking through the rubble in search of unexploded things they could go off and explode. But...not exactly a great photograph lurking in there. Not that I'm close to being even a good photographer.

Then I had the idea of summing up the year, which I'm coming to think of as perhaps the worst I've lived through, both personally and professionally -- not to mention the despair I felt watching my native country choose to isolate itself from the rest of the world even further. But the whole idea of rehashing a doomed romance with a woman who turned out to be an alcoholic (I've seen her twice in recent weeks, staggering down the street; it's hard to retain any animosity against someone so clearly ill); the promise I felt coming back from my annual visit to Texas with the hope burning within me that the editor who'd taken me to lunch and promised to help me make contacts at a some important magazines would, as he said, be in touch in a couple of weeks, only to never hear back from him after repeated e-mailing, and then, much later, to discover he makes a habit of doing this to writers for reasons only he can comprehend, and never follows through; finally touching down this summer when I found myself collecting bottles in vacant lots to return for 8 Euro-cents apiece at the supermarket, counting and re-counting the change in my pocket, living on biscuits and tap-water. Who'd want to re-live that? Who'd want to read about it? Most importantly, what could anybody do about it? It's over. The important thing is not to let it happen again. I'd still like a girlfriend, and lord knows I need those magazine contacts, because I'm overflowing with ideas, and I'm ready to write them up, and I could actually erase the six months' back rent I still owe my landlord with just one article in the right place. (Well, I could if the dollar doesn't fall much more than it already has. But that I can't control.)

But that's for the days ahead. Right now, my plans are modest. I have a number of small articles to write, and I'm going to write them. If the magazines which owe me money pay me (and they will) and the money comes in on time (and I suspect it will), I'm going to take off the last week of this month and visit Montpellier, the place to which, for no particular specific reason, I've been thinking about moving. I'll meet some friends in Paris coming and going, and spend three days walking around the city fantasizing that I'm shopping, looking for an apartment, and figuring out where I am. There's no way I can actually move, of course, not with things as they are. But, just as one article could wipe out my debt to my landlord, three could put me ahead of the game. A book project could give me the money to leave Berlin. And, as I discovered both times I left here last year -- Texas in March and Austria in September -- something about travel loosens up my brain and brings ideas bubbling up. True, I should probably give this money to my landlord instead, but I'm gambling with the only capital I have -- my own talent -- that this will ultimately pay off.

I mean, it beats playing the lottery.

But then, I've been doing that, too. The odds are about the same.

HaPOWpy NeBLAMw YKABOOMear

So what am I doing for New Year's Eve, or Silvester, as it's known here?

Same thing I always do, but it's not what many of my neighbors will be doing.

There are three basic activities Germans engage in this evening, all usually accompanied by the obvious activity of drinking. But there are rites, like anywhere else, and some of them are a bit strange.

Take Bleigiessen, for instance. This is perhaps the weirdest Silvester ritual I've come across, and a clear link to Germany's pre-Christian past. You buy a little kit which consists of some small ingots of lead, a little steel pan, and a book, and gather around a candle flame and a bowl with water in it. Each person then melts a block of lead in the pan, and dumps the molten lead into the water. It sizzles as it hits, and solidifies. You then fish it out and try to determine what it looks like. Once you've decided, look it up in the book, and it'll tell you your fortune for the coming year. I remember doing this at a party one year and getting a peacock, which was quite positive, but I can't remember what it meant, nor whether or not the prophecy came true.

Then there's Fondue. This one really eludes me. It's set up like the kind of cheese fondue you may be familiar with, but instead of cheese, what you're melting in your pot is Biskin, a vegetable shortening not unlike Crisco. You have small cubes of pork and beef which you fix on your fondue fork, and you fry them in the hot fat until they're done, then dip them in any one of a number of mayonnaise-y sauces: curry, tzatziki, and so on. There's bread nearby to soak up the grease, and white wine, often sweet. I did this one year with a foodie crowd I hung with (who've all moved on) and I guess I was so mystified I guess I mostly stuck with the wine (which wasn't sweet, thank heavens), because I don't remember much about the part except being mystified as to why this was such a treat. I asked around the other day, and found that others use broth and vegetables, which sounds much better, or else do the Swiss cheese-and-kirsch thing, which also sounds better, but is, like, Swiss. Some prefer to do a raclette, which is French Swiss, and also good: you have a raclette setup which melts raclette cheese in a little heated container, and you dip stuff you cook on top of the raclette into the cheese.

And then there's fireworks. For a society which has by and large repudiated violence, this is pretty damn amazing. True, I used to buy fireworks in Texas for New Year's, and some of my neighbors and I had what we called the West 9 1/2 Street Pyrotechnics Society, but we stuck to display fireworks, some of which were pretty elaborate, like the pagoda which spun on an axis, spewing multicolored sparks until it burned to the center, at which point it would go pop! pop! pop! and two more stories would appear.

Here, though, it's rockets and bombs, mostly bombs. The bombs are divided into Böller (which means ceremonial cannons) and Knaller (which essentially means firecrackers), and they're serious: it's not at all unusual to see six-inch firecrackers, and there's one bomb which is basically a four-inch square package of gunpowder. This year, the local police tried an ad campaign with two posters. One shows a girl with a hearing aid, the other a guy showing his hand, with two bandaged stumps of fingers. "I used to think Knaller were fun," they say. But these kids look way too square to make the average Berlin kid look twice at them, and both pictures look vaguely fake. I can attest to what happens when one goes off next to your ear, though, because it happened to me one year -- the year I was going to the party where the Bleigiessen happened, in fact. Some kids had tossed it out a window, specifically at me, and I'm very, very lucky that it went off too far away to do any damage. Or maybe I just have leathery eardrums from years of going to rock shows. That was some party: the host's idiot cousin was up from Bavaria, and it was an unseasonably warm night. Nobody ever figured out why, but he went outside and shot off a teargas gun, the gas, naturally, coming in the open window into the crowd that was dancing inside. We all poured outside, coughing and sneezing and crying, and I noted wryly to the host that I'd lived through the Sixties without this happening, but had to go to a party to get my dose. Later that evening, we went out front at midnight and listened to the bombs going off. The host shrugged and said "You know, Sarajevo is only 300 km away," and walked back inside.

The bombing's already started, at 2:40 in the afternoon, and it's not even dark yet. It will get much, much worse later on. My first year here, I was watching a video I'd rented and at midnight it got so loud I couldn't hear the soundtrack for the bombing. It made me wonder how the little old ladies in my building felt, since some of them had undoubtedly been here in the last days of the War, when the house-to-house fighting of the Russians must have sounded like this. Given that this invasion was combined with an epidemic of rape which continued for some time, this must have brought back horrid memories for some. Tomorrow, the sidewalks will be an inch deep in fireworks tatters: I'll try to get out and photograph them, although, with the rain that's already started, they'll look a lot like dog-turds by then. (Although maybe it won't be so bad this year: someone told me yesterday that given the dire economic circumstances here sales seem to be way down.)

There'll also be evidence of advanced idiocy on the part of people who've finished a bottle of champagne (actually a pallid German imitation of it called Sekt, a name which originated at one of Berlin's oldest restaurants, Lutter & Wegner, which I have to admit is a pretty damn good place, although their Sekt is nothing to write home about) and then tossed in some fireworks. As oenophiles reading this know, champagne (and, yes, Sekt) matures in the bottle, and, since it fizzes, produces gas which produces pressure. Thus, the bottles are a good deal thicker than regular wine bottles, so the shards are a lot more dangerous. Torstr., a few yards from my house, is the major driveway to Charité Hospital, and all night long, the sounds of bombs will be mixed with the sirens of ambulances ferrying patients to Charité. I would think this is a once-a-year opportunity for microsurgeons to practice their finger-attaching skills.

So what will I be doing tonight if I won't be eating grease, melting lead, or blowing myself up?

I'll be continuing an old tradition my pal Bob Merlis came up with. Bob used to be VP in charge of publicity (okay, "Artist Relations") at Warner Bros. Records in L.A. (okay, Burbank), and his job was to throw press parties, show up at showcases for Warners artists, and so on. He was at a gig several times a week most weeks. Since he was one of the few people in the company who actually listened to music and saw shows (ie, he wasn't a lawyer or an accountant, like most of his co-workers), some of the others looked up to him as a hip savant (which, sure, he is, but much hipper than they were giving him credit for). New Year's would come along, and they'd ask him "Hey, Bob, what are you doing tonight?" expecting to be given the secret location of the hippest gig in L.A.

"I'm staying home and listening to music by dead people," he'd say. When they finished registering shock, he'd explain. "Dead people have more great musicians than living people, and no way I'm going to get to see them as part of my job. Dead people include Duke Ellington, and Bach, and Buddy Holly. They're not playing the Roxy or the Troubador anytime soon. I hope." As with much from the oracular Mr. Merlis, I took this to heart. I've had wonderful evenings with Jimi Hendrix and Eric Dolphy, Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus and Bill Evans and other people of the non-living persuasion.

Tonight's, though, is going to be a bit different. This year saw the passing of one of the most influential music personalities who never picked up an instrument, John Peel of the BBC. Few Americans ever got to feel his full impact, but in Britain, and wherever the BBC World Service reached -- and here in Berlin, where he did a show especially for the divided city, knowing it would be heard across the Wall -- his espousal of unfamiliar, difficult, and obscure music, which often became more familiar, easier to listen to, and popular as a result, was unparallelled by any other disc jockey. He had a list of 50 songs called John Peel's Festive Fifty, which he broadcast each year, and he eventually made a master Festive Fifty compiled from each of the annual ones. Someone I know posted the recordings from the master list briefly as a tribute to Peel, and I downloaded them and burned them to three CDs, so tonight I will raise a glass of something to the great John Peel, and listen to them all in sequence from Joy Division's "Atmosphere" to Pavement's "Here."

I can't think of a better way to start a new year. Thanks, John. And Bob. And to all the readers out there, I wish you a gute Rutsch -- a "good slide," as they say here -- into the new year.

Administrivia

Over the next few days, I'm going to be re-editing a few of these pieces, although you won't know it. What I'm going to be doing is re-jigging the hot links on the books and records I've mentioned since I made my deal with Amazon. The book links will now be directed to Powell's Books and the records to Barnes & Noble.

The reason for this is the recent revelation that Amazon was, for reasons known only to itself, a heavy contributor to the Bush campaign. I find this upsetting, and yet I think that it's only fair to put my money where my mouth is. And for reasons of customs and import duty, I still have to do my online purchasing from Amazon UK, where I still maintain a want-list. Still, I understand that the various Amazon "stores" have a certain amount of autonomy.

Meanwhile, our hard-working technical crew (aka Jon, who also takes part in a fantastic blog which just won a major award, WorldChanging, which I commend to your attention), is busily re-jiggering the design and technical underpinnings, including Trackback capability, maybe. Whatever that is.

According to the statistics, there are fewer than 200 of you out there reading this stuff, but that's no reason to slack off. I've enjoyed this exercise so far (for those of you who weren't aware, 99% of these entries are written, edited, and posted in 60 minutes or less), and I'm looking forward to continuing it in the new year.

Christmas Card

I figured it'd be nice to post a Christmas card from Berlin, and although this wasn't taken today, it's got all the right elements: dirty snow, an ugly Communist modular apartment house on the left, decaying buildings on the right, a guy with a (probably) counterfeit bit of hip-hop wear, and, rising in the distance, the golden-filigreed dome of the Neue Synagogue. If I were to blow up the building across the alley from mine and stick my head out the window just so, this is the view I'd be seeing, more or less. As it is, since I head down that street (Tucholskystr., for those of you following on the map, the big street in front being Torstr.) almost every day to catch the S-Bahn or walk to Unter den Linden or Alexanderplatz, I see it often enough.

Look out the window of wherever it is you are today and ask yourself, "Am I better off?" Answer: probably. After all, you can't smell this photo.

Actual Heartwarming Berlin Christmas Story

This really happened last night. I have a witness.

My friend the dancer is writing a novel about a dance troupe. An American dance troupe, although she's never been to America. Because of this, she pumps me for details about various things and I'm happy to give her the answers if I have them. Recently, unsurprisingly enough, it's been about how Americans celebrate Christmas. She's writing an important scene which happens at Christmas dinner, and she was really unclear about how that's done in the U.S.

Here, all the action is on the evening of the 24th. The room with the tree is sealed off from the kids, and the presents are laid beneath it, and when it gets dark, the tree is lit, the family gathers by the tree to sing Christmas songs, and then they open the packages. Dinner consists of frankfurters (Wiener Würstchen) and potato salad: easily made. Tomorrow, they'll have a big goose dinner.

So I explained that there's usually a big dinner on the 25th, and that the presents and all happen in the morning, Santa Claus having come the night before. (Santa Claus here is Weihnachtsmann, and he happens on the 6th, St. Nicholas' Day). What do they eat? She asked, and I said, oh, various things, but often it's a turkey with stuffing and all the traditional side-dishes. "Oh, you know something? I don't think I've ever had a turkey."

Well, I missed Thanksgiving this year, so I offered to buy a turkey if we could cook it at her house, and I could invite a couple of Americans who'd also missed Thanksgiving. "Great idea! Learn through doing!" So Monday we went to Rogaki, a venerable Berlin insitution best known for having the best fish selection in town (this is a city that doesn't eat much fish), but also has a notable butcher. We ordered a four-kilo French turkey, never frozen, to be delivered on Thursday, yesterday. She works as a psychiatric social worker at a crisis center for suicidal teenagers, and was working Wednesday night, so the idea was she'd pick it up in the morning on her way back from work, I'd pack various things into a suitcase, come over about 3, and start cooking. She'd invite her friend Heike, who was celebrating not having to be a teacher for the next month as the kids take their winter holiday, and I invited my friend Blaise Lawless, a painter with the best name in art, and my friend Natalie, a half-German, half-American neighbor of mine who's been a co-consipirator in numerous ventures I've undertaken here. Natalie brought green beans, and Blaise had two cans of Ocean Spray cranberry sauce flown in with a couple of neighbors who were in America at the time.

The meal was an amazing success: I'd never cooked a turkey before, let alone stuffing, and I was extremely nervous: this was a big and expensive piece of meat, and I've had some nasty turkey in my day, as I'm sure a lot of you have. Stuffing was a total mystery. Anyway, suffice it to say that the Joy of Cooking came through with flying colors, so well that I'm terrified of ever doing this again. It was perfect, and we sat around the kitchen for hours, stoned on tryptophan, the sedative that's a natural component of turkey meat, talking and groaning from the starch overload.

At about 12:15, though, practical matters had to be dealt with: the subway stops running sometime between 12 and 1 in this city, and Natalie and I had to get back up here, while Blaise only had a couple of stops to go. So we said our good-byes, I packed my stuff (and a nice chunk of breast-meat which will become turkey enchiladas later in the week), and Blaise, Natalie, and I left.

We walked down the street to the Platz der Luftbrücke subway stop, noticing the nice lights adorning Tempelhof Airport, which is in the process of being shut down (or so they say), and then going underground. A train came in just as we got there, and as we were running to catch it, Natalie noticed it was only going two stops, ending at Hallesches Tor. "Damn," she said, "I wonder if this is the last train." Well, if it is, I told her, we can take a cab. I'd been paid, I had some dough in my pocket, and I was feeling too good to douse my groove with a nightmare trip on one of Berlin's night buses.

Blaise got off to transfer at Mehringdamm, the next station, so he missed everything that follows. Natalie and I talked, speculating on what to do (there wouldn't be any cabs at Hallesches Tor, she said, but I disagreed), and then sat back, realizing we'd just have to do what we had to do. There was a young Japanese woman across from us, and, next to me, a large black guy.

"Hallesches Tor: Endstation. Alle aussteigen, bitte," the PA said when we pulled into the station, and, as it had requested, we all got out. Natalie and I were standing by the black guy, and another guy, short, with his hair in sort of a samurai topknot was also standing there. Suddenly the black guy gestured at someone who was still on the train, telling them to get off. The Japanese girl tumbled out, and Natalie told her in German that this was the last station, but she'd noticed that there was another train going to Kurt-Schumacher-Platz in seven minutes.

The Japanese girl looked dazed. "Uhhh, anyone here speak English?" she said. We laughed, and Natalie repeated what she'd said in English. "Oh, thanks," the Japanese girl said. "I'm Japanese, but I've been living in America for ten years. I also speak Spanish." The black guy smiled, and said "I speak English, too." He had an accent. "And I also speak Spanish."

Where are you from? I asked him. "Trinidad and Tobago." Ah, I said, that would explain the Spanish. "Yes, we are near to Venezuela, so there are a lot of Spanish-speaking people." At this point, the short guy, who'd been hanging at the periphery of our group, spoke up. "I speak English, too," he said, with a slight accent, "and I'm half-Japanese and half-Brazilian. I also speak Spanish." We all laughed, and the train came in the station.

We all wound up facing each other, except the black guy chose to sit on a flip-down seat in the very back of the car. He was a big guy, and needed the space. We kept on talking, and the Japanese girl said she was going to Friedrichstr., so we told her that was the one before where we got off, so we'd tell her when we got there. The Brazilian-Japanese guy was chattering on about how there were loads of Japanese in Sao Paolo, where he was from, and that his mother was Japanese and his father Brazilian, but he'd been born here in Berlin. The black guy asked me where I was from in the States, and I told him I'd last lived in Texas. "Ah, I lived in Galveston and Pasadena," he said. Oil business, I ventured. That'd be the common factor linking Trinidad, Galveston, and even Venezuela. "You're right," he said.

"Hey," the Brazilian guy said, "come over here and sit with us. Don't be so far away." Trinidad didn't seem to know what to make of this somehow, but the Japanese girl joined in the request, and he got up and slid in with them. He was still trying to figure Natalie out, though, and he asked her if she was my sister. She laughed at that one and explained that she'd been born in Berkeley, California but her parents had divorced and her mother had brought her back here to live near her family when Natalie was 12. Trinidad smiled a big smile that showed off his gold tooth. "Man, we got all kinds here," he said. A real United Nations in one subway car, I agreed.

"I'm just amazed at how beautiful Berlin is," the Japanese girl said, and the rest of us sort of gawped. "No, really: yesterday I was at the Christmas market, the one that's all fenced in in that beautiful square, and it just smelled so nice and it was so friendly feeling!" "Oh," said Natalie, "the Gendarmenmarkt." "Yeah, that's the one. And I'm going to spend Christmas in Copenhagen. I met a girl in the hostel, and she invited me up to have Christmas with her family." Turned out she'd worked at a job in Seattle to save up for this trip, and when she went back, she was going to get two jobs and then head to South America, a prospect which lit the Brazilian guy up.

Trinidad was now extremely amused by all of this. "Man, we got a whole buncha homies here! Everyone someone else's homie! Man, this really feels like Christmas now!" And we had a good laugh about that.

The train pulled into Friedrichstr., and the Japanese girl and the Brazilian guy stood to get out. "Merry Christmas!" they sang as they walked out the door. Trinidad and Natalie and I exchanged a bit more chatter in the extra minute it took us to get to our stop at Oranienburger Tor, and as we left, we shook his hand. "Merry Christmas," he said with genuine warmth, and we returned the sentiment. I was so disoriented that when the elevator out of the station stopped, I thought we'd taken the wrong exit (I wasn't going to risk the steps with my heavy suitcase full of cooking stuff). Natalie quickly corrected me (I was looking the wrong way down Friedrichstr., duhh), and then she said "Did this really happen?"

But it really happened. I have a witness.

Could Be Worse

December 22, the shortest day of the year. It's 3:30 and I'm on a train to the hospital.

My friend Kevin, in an almost stereotypical act of Middle-Age Crazy, decided some weeks ago to ditch the bicycle which features so greatly in his legend (he pursued his wife-to-be from Philadelphia to California on bicycle one summer when he was in college, since she was determined to make the trip on bike herself before moving back to Germany) in favor of something with a motor. In this case, a Vespa.

I'm still hazy on the details, but apparently he neglected to check the condition of the tires (or even properly learn how to ride it), and a tire blew, depositing him and scooter in traffic. The scooter was totalled, but Kevin survived with a broken leg and foot.

He went to the hospital, they stuck a pin in him somewhere, and they sent him home. It's not like this is a Really Difficult Operation, after all. Told him to stay off of his foot. So far, this is a sad, but unexceptional story, and if it's somewhat fuzzy in its details, it mirrors Kevin's fuzziness on the occasions we've spoken. They have good drugs here.

A couple of days later, complications set in. He went back to the hospital. There was an infection around where they'd inserted the pin. He'd have to be cut open, the infection controlled, and then he'd have to be sewn up again. He was in for a few days, minimum. They operated, and it was inconclusive. A few more days.

Then he got some awful news: his father, who'd been ailing for some time, had died in Philadelphia. He asked the doctors, and they said he wasn't going to be able to go to the hospital cafeteria, let alone Philadelphia, so he had to miss the funeral. He called his brother in Prague to find out what he was planning to do, and found his brother in shock at having just discovered his wife had left him.

You know how they say it's your Christian duty to visit the sick and afflicted? I'm no Christian, but a Satanist would feel sorry for this guy.

So this is why I found myself on the Ring S-Bahn on my way to the Westend station to walk to the Red Cross Center Hospital there. He seemed okay for someone having just come out of his third surgery when I talked to him on the phone, and I got the distinct impression he'd welcome a visitor.

And we rounded the bend towards Westend just as the sun was going down at 3:40. The Red Cross Center is a walled village of brick buildings built, I would guess, at the end of the 19th Century, each building intended to house a separate specialty, each with its own tower. The sun was golden, but the buildings themselves, the parts that show over the wall from afar, were in shadow. Only the top of each tower was showing, drenched in gold, making it look like a Burmese temple complex. The sky was blue, and far above the Center, dual contrails streamed from a jet, looking icy in the frigid air.

"I'm glad to see you," Kevin said, lounging in his hospital bed, his foot held rigid in a sort of box, covered with a cloth. A drip was feeding antibiotics into his arm, and he was clearly miserable. "Man, it could be worse," he said as his roommate donned some sweat pants and grabbed a couple of crutches and a box of cigarettes to head to the smoking room. "That guy had a motorcycle accident in September and he still doesn't know when he's going home. I got nothing to do here but watch TV and read. I've gone through a whole stack of books." I eyed the stack, which had some titles I'd wanted to read, and told him I'd happily take some off of his hands. I'm sort of short of reading matter these days.

We talked, and his cell phone rang a couple of times. One time it was his wife. "Hey, grab me some stuff before you head over," he told her. "Rent me a porno! I'm bored!" I thought, but didn't say, that a tap-dancing movie would be pretty pornographic in his condition. The nurse came in to take the drip off. He asked her exactly what his condition was, and she told him he was not to move his foot for 24 hours. If he had to pee, he had to pee in a bottle. If he had to take a crap, he had to do it in a pan. "Man," he said after she left, "that is the pits. I can't even go to that bathroom over there," and gestured to the door to the room's john.

After an hour or so, we were still talking when the door opened and his wife, her sister, and his youngest son came in. It was after 5, and I still had to go half-way across the city to get back home, so I started making my apologies and wishing him well. As I was putting on my coat, though, I remembered about the books. "Hey, Kevin, let me take some books off your hands," I said.

"Yeah," he said. "Let me see what I've got here," and he turned gingerly towards the stack. "Okay, I can let you have this one. It's pretty good. Someone brought it to me when they heard I was here." And he handed me a novel by someone named Paolo Coelho, an author I've never heard of.

It's title was Veronika Decides to Die. If that doesn't sum up Berlin, and Berliners, I don't know what does.

Baby, It's Coaled Outside

According to the folks at weather.com, it's currently 34 degrees Fahrenheit, but it "feels like 28." I'll say: I'm just back not only from the store, but from trying to buy a fuse that'll make my halogen floor lamp work again (no luck: the place closes at 6pm, it says on the door, and that means 5:55, which my radio-satellite-set watch said it was), and I'll tell you: it's cold out there. Not as bad as it's going to be, but the sidewalks are now slick with ice, so you have to watch your step, and there's a thin dusting of snow when I get up in the morning.

And as I walked to the store, I noticed at first a whiff of woodsmoke in the air. So appropriate, and going nicely with a couple of icy-looking cirrus clouds and the half-moon in the otherwise clear sky, I was thinking, when I drew myself up. Wait. That means a coal oven.

I still have trouble wrapping my brain around what the Germans call Kohlenheizung. It was weird when I first saw it in 1988, and it's downright bizarre that it's still going on sixteen years later. Because in the country which engineers the BMW and the Mercedes, where companies like Siemens build some nice high-tech products, and appliances by Braun make my kitchen hum, there are still buildings where people buy two tons of coal at the beginning of the winter to feed to ceramic tile-clad ovens in their living rooms and bedrooms, because that's how they heat their houses.

What's ultra-weird is when you run into a young German -- and there are plenty of them -- who'll tell you that it's healthier. Look, I've had coal heating, and it's at least as healthy for you as a pack and a half a day. Here's the drill:

First, you have your stack of brown-coal briquettes handy. Gotta have them. Then, you make sure the oven's been swept out, and that you've dumped the ashes into a metal bucket, because there's always a little clinker in there ready to start trouble. So you wad up some newspaper, light it, and then throw in some wood. Broken-up vegetable cartons are always good, and that's what people look for. If you're fancy, the guy who sells you the coal will sell you some shingle-looking stuff, but Berliners are thrifty (and poor) and can be seen behind vegetable markets or prowling building sites looking for good tinder. Anyway, once the wood is good and lit up, you throw in your coal, and close the door. Now go wash the black off of your hands in your unheated bathroom or your unheated kitchen. Yeah, it's cold back there where you just set the fire, but the design of the oven is such that eventually that inner wall will get good and hot and radiate outwards to the ceramic tiles, which disperse heat at a given rate, so you may be good for as many as eight hours. But it's not like you're going to just be able to go in there and throw some more coal in and keep it going. Nope: you have to let the fire die down, sweep out the ashes, and start over again, unless there's a bit of coal still going, in which case you may be able to get away with a bit of kindling and some briquettes and not have to wait so long. Oh, and the ash-bucket? You have to take that outside and dump it in the metal garbage bin. Has to be the metal one, because the plastic ones burn. And when you dump it, that yellow, powdery ash just goes everywhere. Like up your nose. Just like it gets into your furniture, your rug, your clothes.

I had an apartment, the one before the one I live in now, that had two coal ovens. One used briquettes, and that was my bedroom, athough there was a dining table at the other end of it, and the other used what's called Steinkohle, hard coal, which comes in little rocks and is much, much cleaner. Guess which kind Germany and Poland produces. But guess which one is harder to get going. Adding to this was the fact that I couldn't call the coal guy and have him deliver me a ton or two, as is usual, because the neighbors in this building, most of whom were subhuman, had wrenched the door off of the assigned coal bin in the basement, presumably so they could steal coal in a previous winter. This meant that every day I had to schlep up Brüsseler Str. to the tiny, dank, dark hole in the wall where the Coal Lady was, mostly to take orders for tons, and buy 35 kilos of coal. Every. Day. And 70 kilos on Saturday afternoon. And I had to pull it down the street, four blocks to my crappy apartment.

So you know why the day I found myself standing in the doorway while the 80-year-old psychotic who owned the building stood there with her lawyer screaming that she was charging me with arson and going to call the Kripo (short for Kriminalpolizei) and see to it I was jailed and deported (it's a long story, but someone -- not me, since I hadn't slept there that night -- had dumped a klinker in the plastic bin, which was now slumped over like a defeated dinosaur in the yard, and naturally it had to be my fault), the only two demands in my head when I headed to Zoo Station to buy the next day's Berliner Morgenpost at exactly 8 pm when it came off the presses that night so I could beat the other people to the apartments in the classifieds were: 1) Not this neighborhood (which, for the record, is called Wedding); 2) Central heat. Non-negotiable.

Of course, central heat would also mean that there wouldn't be the primitive water heaters where you pump water into a boiler and then turn on the electricity and then drain it out (which resulted in exactly 180 seconds' worth of hot water in the unheated shower room with the window rusted open -- did I mention that this was the coldest winter since Stalingrad? -- forcing me to become the fastest showerer I know), and it might even mean a gas stove (no such luck).

But that was nearly eight years ago. It's almost a cliche that Germany is the second-greenest country in Europe, next only to Holland in its adherence to environmental cleanliness. So why, I'd like to know, are there still people burning coal for heat? Why is this medieval heating system still going on? If I walk out now, two hours after I smelled that woodsmoke, there'd be another smell in the air, rather like burned coffee. That's the smell of Braunkohl Briketten, the smell of what I believe is a violation of the EU's environmental regulations. Why is this still happening?

Still: not my problem. It's light, not heat, I have to worry about tonight -- the night before the darkest day of the year. And that's only a problem because of the fact, which I've long become accustomed to, that the people around me don't want to work.

But that's another rant, for another day.

Making A Living

So the other day the phone rang, and there was a voice on the other end I hadn't heard in ages.

"Hi, Ed? This is Richard Posner." Wow. Richard Posner first brought himself to my attention back in 1999, when I was doing cultural reportage for the Wall Street Journal. He had a project he wanted to tell me about, a politically-themed piece in which the swastika -- a glyph which is totally banned in Germany, to the extent of anthropology museums not even displaying Indian artifacts where, reversed, it's a sun symbol -- was doubled over on itself, the resultant spaces filled in with various colors, and rendered in herbs and broken glass. He was a veteran of such political public art, and had had commissions from libraries and other public institutions in the U.S. and had somehow wound up in Germany, so he had decided to see if he could figure out a way to do this piece right in the hottest location possible.

Now, as I wrote a few days ago, The Burden Of History compels people making memorials here to be very grim and blatant, and I already had a story to bear this out. A guy I knew when I was working at the radio station was an artist (among other things), and at one point the Federal government here was looking for art to put up in places where the Wall had been. Now, as anyone who's been here knows, there wasn't a single Wall, but, rather, two walls, between which was a No Man's Land, which was made impassable by any number of means: trip-wires attached to automatic firing devices, vicious patrol dogs and vicious patrol humans, all sorts of things.

Well, this guy had found a place where the hazard was gargantuan amounts of pesticide, enough that you'd get incredibly ill. (Would this work? Who knows: the DDR had a very bizarre sense of things, as evidenced by the thousands of jars of cotton pads containing samples of sweat the secret police had gotten while interrogating people, some of which are on view at the Runde Ecke Museum in Leipzig). Anyway, he knew where this patch was, and his proposal was to plant corn there. Corn has an ability to suck things out of the soil, and of course none of the corn grown on this site would be eaten by humans or animals. But it was his color-scheme which killed the project: he wanted to plant the corn in rows of black (actually blue, but it's really dark blue), red, and gold, just like the German flag. There was so much resonance to this, so much fine symbolism, that I was really taken aback by the idea. I thought it was brilliant. Whoever was doing the commissioning went ballistic and firmly and thoroughly rejected the idea.

Needless to say, Posner kept running into walls. Even though, in the finished design, no swastika (it's called Hakenkreuz here, or "broken cross") could be discerned even if you worked real hard, the very idea that it was a design element produced anger and fear. I can't remember the whole rigamarole he went through, but it took months and months and months. Finally, he got a location, way down in Köpenick, on the very fringes of the city, at the site of a now-vanished synagogue, right by a clubhouse for what appeared to be young nazis. He got the broken glass from the local public transportation system, and I can't even remember if the plants went in or not (hey, it was five years ago, and I haven't re-read the story I did). And, after the installation went down, he got a teaching gig in Chicago, and that was the last I heard of him.

Until the other night. It turns out that he was having an opening Friday night, and not only was it an opening, it was at the Barbara Blickensdorff Gallery, one of my favorite local galleries. She's friends with a couple of people I know, and in fact my friends Fred and Dominica, when they lived here, had a couple of pieces they'd bought from her. (She also represents some guy named David Hockney for Germany). She consistently finds extremely interesting artists, and although it had never occurred to me, she and Richard Posner were a great match. One thing she does each year is to find a wall somewhere in Berlin and mount a piece by one of her artists. The first one I was aware of was a field of placidly munching day-glo-colored cows which were lit with black light at night, covering the entire four-story wall of a building on Kollwitzstr. in Prenzlauer Berg, done by Sergei Alexander Dott. Kinda gets your attention. (You can see this at her not-very-well designed website if you click on "Projects," and then "KUHUUNST," and then "Pictures." I recommend it!) The thought that she and Posner might do one of these public projects is a natch.

It turned out that Posner was sharing this show with another artist, but his room was the one where everyone was standing around and reading the captions and giggling. The show is called GWOTBOTS, and he's made a few dozen robots for the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Actually, what he did, he told me, was make a junk-dealer "an offer he couldn't refuse" for a bunch of small plastic toys, and then, as post-election therapy, took a whole bunch of plastic binding strips and strapped toy cars to superhero dolls, animals to airplanes, soldiers to other soldiers, and invented names for each piece to satirize or comment on the current political situation. (Or, as the invitation has it: "Richard Posner a crafstman hunched over a kitchen table full of detritus in a dimly lit hinterhof atelier, abracadabra flotsam and jetsam into a plastic toy vehicle, one at a time, by hand.") There's a mordant, bittersweet humor to the pieces, and I'll be going back again when the crush of opening-night folks isn't present to look a little more closely at them. Meanwhile, Richard, who's found himself stuck in Berlin since a couple of years ago, has invited me up to dinner on Wednesday, after which we'll play German Monopoly (the board is Munich, but it really should be Berlin) with a couple of his friends.

Then, last night, the dancer got me to go hear a piano player in the bar of the swanky Steigenberger Hotel. His name is Joe, and he's married to a friend of hers from whom she earns a bit of money babysitting their new daughter Lulu. Joe's been here since he arrived with a musical that has become infamous in Berlin: Shakespeare Rock and Roll, which left a trail of bad debts all the way to the Swiss border, where its perpetrator was caught just in time. ("I saw to it my boys got paid," Joe said). Joe is an accomplished jazz pianist, but that's no way to pay the rent here, so he alternates hotel gigs, with going out every other year with the horrific middle-of-the-road German performer James Last. Last, it develops, is a real down-to-earth type, and makes sure his band is filled with some of the finest jazz musicians around: it's work, it pays extraordinarily well, and so the money might as well go to the right folks.

Joe was singing -- and I mean singing -- "Georgia On My Mind" when we got there, and he managed to settle in comfortably with all the material he did, not carbon-copying the original singers, necessarily, but inhabiting the space they created with the original song. If that meant Elton John or Billy Joel, fine. If it meant someone more interesting to my ears, like Ray Charles, even better. But the problem last night was that the audience was Teflon: nothing was sticking. Joining us at our table between his short sets, Joe was a bit frustrated, but it's the week before Christmas, and people just aren't going out. He even has a small crowd who come out just for him, and if fate hands you the fortune to be staying at one of Berlin's better hotels (except the Adlon -- but then I never recommend anyone stay there), check the bar with the piano and see if there's a guy with totally white hair (he's got a medium case of albinism) playing with soul. That'll be Joe, from Philly, doing what he does.

Both Richard and Joe have settled here because they married German women and have families. Both are making a living here as best they can. Both are American, and both are, like me, pretty much sure they prefer living in Europe. No big moral here, no great metaphor. Just two guys on two successive nights in two completely different ends of town.

Another Article

Only this time it's a bit more accurate: a New York Times piece on clubhopping in Berlin, with the emphasis correctly on Friedrichshain, which is where the young, poor, and bohemian fled when the folks from Bonn started buying and modernizing apartment buildings in Prenzlauer Berg, whence they'd fled after Mitte got unaffordable for much the same reason. I did a bar-crawl down Simon-Dach-Str. about five years ago for the Time Out Berlin guidebook, and found it really nice, with a varied selection of bars, but it's really not too easy to get to from my house (or, rather, my house isn't that easy to get back to from there), so I haven't been back in a long time.

Given the extreme change the neighborhood takes as it heads down to the river and Ostbahnhof, it's easy to forget that that part, too, is Friedrichshain, since there's at least one four-star hotel there, but Maria, the club that started in a dumpy building (now demolished) on one side of Ostbahnhof, is there on the shore, right near the East Side Gallery, the long stretch of Wall with all the paintings on it. Simon-Dach-Str. is further in, and there it's much more apparent what the article says: you won't see the hard-core old Ossis mixing with the new, international crowd. That's potentially a recipe for conflict, in my experience, and it's a tricky one to work out: There's still a lot of resentment among some of these people, and they can't like it when they see miniskirted Japanese girls and black-clad art fiends drinking in some of the well art-directed clubs and bars in their old 'hood. In Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, the solution has largely been to push those people to the margins of the districts, which works for a while: they'll go, because they're ageing and unemployed. But most of their kids don't mix with the new crowd, either, and that's where the tinderbox is.

I'm getting too old to go clubbing, and, more important, so are most of my friends, who are the ones who used to drag me to these places -- not that I needed much dragging. I'm very happy to see the article mention that there are still illegal clubs happening in Friedrichshain, and come spring or summer, I might very well see if any of my friends knows where some of them are, since the air of improvisation that hangs around the best of them is one of the few cool things about this city.

Anyway, if you're contemplating a visit, it might not be the worst idea to print this one out and keep it in your Time Out Guide for reference. Even if you wait until the Berlinale, those addresses should still be good.

Sauerkraut: The Antidote?

I want to thank all the readers who sent me the link to this article (and I have, except for Joe, whose spam filter hates me). U.S. expatriate hipsters plugging into the buzz of Berlin does, indeed, sound very exciting, and I guess these folks know a lot more about the city than I do because they're miraculously able to find exciting music, fascinating galleries, and art-deco cafes. Of course, one of these experts has been here a whole four months, so I guess she knows what she's talking about.

Anyway, it's a hilarious article, by a clueless reporter desperate to fill some space, and it's making the rounds of the expat community as I write, which must explain the chuckling noises I keep hearing.

Three Markets

When we last saw our hero, he was ascending the steps of the Hausvogteiplatz subway station with his friend the dancer, on his way to the Weihnachtsmarkt in the Gendarmemarkt with her, only to get distracted by the monument to the garment district at the top of the stairs.

Which only took a moment, because as many of you know, there's no power as strong as a woman determined to shop. So we headed off on a side-street, and in a block or so, the Gendarmenmarkt came into view. This Weihnachtsmarkt is unique in my experience, because it costs money to get in. I figured there must be some pretty good stuff in there if they relieve you of a Euro before you can even spend money on what's on offer, not to mention the fact that the whole thing is surrounded by a chain-link fence with decorative plastic blocking the view.

So we surrendered our tickets to a guy dressed as -- what else? -- a Gendarme, and went in. The first thing she wanted was a cup of Glühwein, which was fine with me: I'll gladly watch someone else drink it, while I stand there and smell the odor, but I'm damned if I'm going to touch the stuff. Earlier, I'd passed a huge container of empty bottles of the stuff (you don't think they mull it on the premises, do you?) and noted the ingredients: wine, sugar, cinnamon. Jeez, not very sophisticated.

The more we wandered, the more it became apparent that this wasn't all that special. Outright schlock was missing, but other than that, it was the usual suspects. There were a couple of interesting stands: one, indoors, promised jewelry made from fosslized mammoths, which I found curious; another offered candy bonbons in all manner of the odd herbal flavors Germans like, such as sage and woodruff. One was labelled "breast bonbons," but didn't taste like breasts: they were concocted from a mixture supposed to clear congestion.

About the only notable thing in the Gendarmenmarkt market was the food. There was lots of it, provided by a very upscale selection of restaurants and shops: Lutter & Wegner, Trader Vic's (yup, Berlin now has a Trader Vic's), and Vau, for instance. All I can say is, if I want to eat at any of those places, at those prices, I'm damn sure going to do it indoors.

Some of my friend's desire to buy was sated by a four-Euro block of nougat with hazelnuts, a sort of very uptown version of Nutella, I guess (my local supermarket is currently offering a two-kilo jar of Nutella), but after the same overpriced Stollens appeared for the third time, we realized how small this place was, so we headed towards Unter den Linden and the market at the Opernpalais next to the City Opera. I have sort of a sentimental attachment to this one, since it's the first one I ever attended, and was the source of the Erzgebirge Rauchermännchen I used to buy for a friend's kid each year. It's still got that East German flair, to some extent, but it's become somewhat less proletarian over the years. There's a coach service this year which sells rides in a yellow-painted stagecoach between Christmas markets, and so the smell of horseshit greeted us, combined with the odor of grilling sausages at the sausage stand that's been here every year. A good place to stop, but I was still fixated on the sausages I'd already bought from the Thuringian lady earlier, which would turn into red beans and rice later, so I was determined not to sabotage my appetite.

The Opernpalais market has more, and smaller, stands than the Gendarmenmarkt, with a huge range of stuff, all of which has in common that it's affordable and overpriced for what it is. There are a couple of notable places to stop: a Swiss spice company sets up here each year, and they're famous for the high quality of their goods. My friend was very impressed with the Thuringian lady's sausage selection, and bought herself a big piece of Presskopf, which you probably call headcheese (or, in Ohio, souse). As she negotiated the sale, I watched the other woman at the stand, a grandmotherly sort, smear lard on pieces of bread: mmmm, Schmalzbrot! Yes, people here really do eat that. If it makes you feel any better, this is Griebenschmalz, with little bits of toasted cracking in it. Okay, I didn't think that'd make you feel better.

But mostly it was the same old stuff: decorations, winter clothing, wooden toys, and the sort of gimmicks you always wind up sorry you bought, like salt crystals with candles in the middle. Here, you could not only get Glühwein, but also a drink called Feuerzungebowle ("fire-tongue bowl," approximately), which smelled exactly like Glühwein, but was, I was told, connected to a film in which a beloved actor played a 19th Century chemistry student who specialized in blowing up his lab experiments. The film was even playing on a TV at one stand. I must admit, I was getting Christmas fatigue by the time we finished this part up, but there was a third market to go to, and it was just down the street.

This one was set up in front of the Palast der Republik, the former government building of the DDR, right on the banks of the Spree River. The Palast's future is in some question, since it occupies some of the same land as the old Hohenzollern Palace, which the city has voted to rebuild, but for which, of course, it lacks funds. The Palast was supposedly too infested with asbestos to keep up, but someone did an analysis of the ICC, the big conference center in the far west of the city (where PopKomm was this year) and discovered it had exactly the same amount of asbestos, so the city de-asbestified both of them. The Palast remains, and recently hosted an exhibition of the Xian pottery warriors.

Anyway, the Christmas market there is more like a carnival, with really hard-core carnies operating rides and ring-toss, lottery, and other games. There was a Wild Mouse ride, which I hadn't seen since the one at Rye Playland in New York killed a bunch of people in my youth. Lots of lights, lots of drunken guys with suspiciously short hair, lots of Peruvians selling crafts (interesting: why Peruvians?), and the smell of burnt-sugar almonds everywhere. (I don't know what it is about burnt-sugar almonds. When I went to Oktoberfest in Munich years ago, I expected lots of salty snacks, but it was the almonds that people went for. Maybe I'm crazy, but they don't seem like something I'd want with my beer).

A nice way of seeing the differences between these three markets was the stage each of them had. In the Gendarmenmarkt, a brass quartet was tootling Christmas music as we walked in, and was soon replaced by a magician. He had a kid up on the stage and was bantering with him while holding a rope, but unfortunately he wasn't going to garotte or hang the kid, so I lost interest. The Opernpalais had a Bavarian gentleman on stage with a zither when we got there, playing the "Third Man Theme," which is apparently the only piece of music that machine can play. From the comments he was making to the audience, I gather he was also not feeling any pain. At the Palast, a guy dressed as Santa Claus (excuse me, Weihnachtsmann) and another in a top-hat were forcing a bunch of volunteer kids to sing some song about snow, and once they got going, a bunch of fake snow blew out of a duct somewhere, much to the annoyance of some of the kids, who kept brushing it off their clothes. When they finished singing, nobody clapped. Since I figure most of the people in front of the stage were the kids' parents, I see a thriving psychiatric practice in the making.

The insane wattage of the Palast carnival lights notwithstanding, I noticed it was quite dark, but it was only 4:45. Still, it was time to call it a day; lurking around these things, subliminally on guard for pickpockets, is exhausting, so we walked down Unter den Linden towards Friedrichstrasse station and our respective homes. It was good to have a native along to clarify some of this stuff, like the Feuerzungebowle and the posters for a show featuring Frau Holle, a fairy tale that, unlike many German fairy tales, never got translated into American culture. She lives in the heavens and in the winter, she shakes out her bedding, the feathers falling as snow. And, although it was damn cold, it appears that so far this year Frau Holle's asleep at the switch. Fine with me; it'll come. I can wait.