A Few Thoughts On The Cannabis Cup (While I Still Have Some)

I just got back last night from a fantastic trip to Amsterdam, where I got to see the Patti Smith Band perform four times in three days, all of which I had to sit down and write about for Paste magazine, as mentioned in the previous post, this morning. The first of her gigs was at the Cannabis Cup, the competition High Times magazine in the States runs during pot-harvest week, which culminated on Thanksgiving evening, Nov. 24.

Because a friend of mine was visiting Amsterdam and would leave on Friday morning early, and in order to be able to see him, I came in a day early, and after setting up a time to meet him, I decided to wander over to the Sugar Factory, a club across from Amsterdam's famous Melkweg club, to see what the hoo-hah was all about. For €20 I got a flimsy laminate which allowed me unlimited entry to the trade show for the next two days. For €110 I could have gotten a judge's pass, which would have entitled me to sample the entries, but that would have been both self-indulgent and counter-productive, since I would have been too paralyzed to do the job I was being paid to do. But I was still curious about what was going on.

Turns out the Sugar Factory is a rather small venue, and despite exhibitors setting up in a balcony and on the stage, it was pretty much too crowded to walk around in comfortably. As for the exhibits, they were pretty lame. There was a machine which allegedly "bubbled" the THC out of your waste products and made a sort of hash thereby, and a group of chemists who were selling a kit which enabled you to extract all the THC from pot or hash and turn it into a substance which could be ingested via a capsule ("I almost ruined my lungs forever," said one of the crew at this table, "but I haven't smoked anything in two years."), but mostly it was seed companies (four or five seeds from a good strain can set you back a couple of hundred Euros) and people with gewgaws like pipes and stash boxes and the like. The unhappiest exhibitor I saw was a mammoth black guy in the balcony who was trying to sell t-shirts and sweatshirts with a pot theme from his radio station, Alaska Hip-Hop. I don't think he moved a one of 'em.

Sure, you could get samples to smoke from the seed companies, but, again, I was wary of having to be alert and knew all too well how strong this stuff was. I probably picked up a bit of a contact high because the air in the Sugar Factory was thick with smoke, and I admit, it smelled good. It was against the law to be selling any or giving any away to be taken away, however, all part of the bureaucratic maze the Dutch have set up for the cannabis industry.

What was creepy was the crowd. Just walking around the Leidseplein, the general area in which it was held, you could pick out the C.C. attendees even without their laminates. For one, lots and lots of them were American. This makes sense because High Times sells tour packages from the U.S. For another, they were acting very, very stoned. This makes sense because unless they were being as puritanical as I was, they were very, very stoned. Third, they were dressed appallingly. Nearly every single person under 50 at this thing looked like they'd picked up their clothes from a heap on the floor and shrugged them on. This was because they were overwhelmingly male, of course. There was one hugely obese father-son couple, dressed in overalls, who were staggering around looking like stoned farmers. Of course, there's every reason to suspect that they were, and would perhaps smuggle back a few dozen of those expensive seeds to fund next year's expenses.

Now, you'll notice that I singled out people under 50. There was an interesting gap here. There were all the young stoners, vaguely hip-hoppish, but I'd say their cohort peaked at about 35. Between 35 and 45 there was virtually no one there. And then it picked up to people who were obvious veterans of the '60s. For the most part, they were rather straight-looking; I got talking with one during the awards ceremony (the first show that Patti played) and he claimed to have been a road manager and techie for dozens of bands during the '70s, now out of the biz and doing something he didn't specify based in Houston and Las Vegas. There was one prominent Texas writer, there out of curiosity. I only spotted one beads-and-bells hippie type, and he was apparently a beloved Amsterdam counterculture icon named Cosmos or something. But yes, there was a bit of grey hair around.

In the end, I decided that my pre-visit characterization of the event as being like Oktoberfest was pretty accurate. Like Oktoberfest, it celebrates only the local product, although Moroccan hash, illegally smuggled in but tolerated once in the country, was one of the categories being judged. Like Oktoberfest, once you've attended you'll likely not want to attend again if you have any taste or self-esteem, because no matter how much you may like the product being celebrated, you don't want to be associated with the, uh, "overserved" masses. (Unlike Oktoberfest, there was no equivalent to the "you must be seated to be served" rule which promotes and maintains a certain level of order in Munich). And, again like Oktoberfest, I'm willing to bet that any number of the coffeeshops in Amsterdam would be just as happy if the Cannabis Cup didn't happen next year, since they're doing quite well being the equivalent of a friendly neighborhood bar.

What irks me slightly, though, is that I wasn't able to sell a story on this event. I tried, sent out a damn good pitch letter, but was turned down flat. I wasn't interested in promoting the damn thing: in the pitch letter I said I'd be interviewing police, emergency medical folks who deal with over-stoned tourists, and the proprietors of little coffeeshops, as well as such celebs as might be around. But, whether it's the pall of conservatism which is still sitting over America, or the lack of interest in stories about Europe which I've always had to deal with, or the fact that nobody read far enough down in the thing to see that I wasn't asking to be flown in from New York, but to take a simple €68 round-trip train journey, I can't say.

So instead I did the story someone was willing to pay for, at least in part, and did a little half-assed snooping around to write the sadly incomplete and one-sided blog entry above. I'm not complaining; the Patti Smith shows were great, and it was wonderful to see my old pal Lenny Kaye again and hang out with him a little, and I got to go to my favorite Indonesian restaurant and my second-favorite Indonesian restaurant, and even have a bacon cheeseburger on Thanksgiving at the Hard Rock Cafe (hey, they make decent hamburgers, and when you live over here you occasionally let your base desires overwhelm your sense of good taste). I also picked up two liters of Beerenburg (see previous post), so I'm set for the winter.

Nope, not complaining. I just wish the U.S. media was a little less blinkered, that's all.

Another Decent Interval

Boy, I haven't even been back in Berlin long enough to get pissed off at it again, and I'm off on Wednesday for another adventure. This time it'll be a trip to Amsterdam, where I'll be doing a story on Patti Smith for Paste, the enigmatically-named music magazine. She's doing four "guerrilla" shows there, one closing the Cannabis Cup ceremonies, one at the van Gogh Museum, one at a tiny blues bar called Maloe Melo, and, apparently, another at the Paradiso, but I'm not sure what that's all about.

I'm looking forward, too, to bringing back a winter's supply of my favorite miracle drug. No, not *that* miracle drug. I mean Beerenburg, a herb liquor made in Friesland, in the north of Holland, which actually can prevent colds. In fact, during a long period of puritanism in that part of the world, Beerenburg was the only alcohol not banned, because as everyone knew, it was medicine, not a drink. My favorite, after sampling about a half-dozen varieties over the years, is made in the city of Sneek (pronounced "snake") by Weduwe Joustra, the widow Joustra, who's long since gone to her reward, but whose products are still being made. Her variety has 25 different herbs, but does not include one whose name (both Friesian and English) I've forgotten, which contains so much caffeine that it defeats the purpose of Beerenburg. I was introduced to the stuff by a friend who lived near Sneek when I showed up at his farmhouse one evening, clearly coming down with a cold. "Oh," he said, "I can help there. I'll be right back." He got on his bike and pedaled down to the nearest bar, bought a bottle, and came back. "This isn't the best, but it'll do," he said. A couple of glasses and I got real tired and went to sleep. The next morning I awoke, blew my nose a dozen times, and discovered that the impending cold seemed to be gone. I've now socked in a couple of bottles nearly every winter here, and proclaim it a wonder of folk medicine. The taste varies, and the first sip can seem bitter, but the best description of it I've been able to come up with is what Coca-Cola would taste like if it were a vintage beverage like wine, and this would be a well-aged Coke.

Anyway, should you find yourself in the Netherlands, I've been able to find the widow hanging out at Holland's largest chain of liquor stores, Gall & Gall, although if you're in Leeuwarden or Sneek, it's everywhere.

So if I don't post anything before I go, or anything from the road, I'll be back Monday evening.

Montpellier Aftermath

Wait, you were there for four days and you didn't take one photograph??

Well, not exactly. I took what I thought were two of a sunset, but it looks like only one of them registered with the camera, and I'm not sure it's all that good.

But I wasn't there to take photos; I was there to meet some people and look at some parts of town I'd missed before, try to figure out the public transportation, and, as I said, see where the fly might be in the ointment. That, I managed to find right where I expected: the bureaucracy. I was told that the French make it very hard for Americans to get a carte du séjour, a "green card," unless they're buying property. But I plan to play the same card I played here: native-language journalism. That's one that almost no natives can argue against. Anyway, immigration is, as you may have noticed, a bit of an issue in France at the moment.

In fact, I was shocked, getting to Paris, to start reading some of the commentary that the International Herald Tribune was publishing about the problems non-French people have getting jobs in France. Every time I've come to Paris, I've wound up in the Metro station at the Gare du Nord, and I've been virtually the only European face in the crowd. To think that there's no affirmative action program, that there's still such blatant discrimination...well, no wonder they're burning cars.

Except they weren't in Montpellier, at least not that I was aware of. Saturday night, when I got in, was as peaceful as could be, and I was so tired from the train trip that it was all I could do to grab a little dinner and stagger back to the hotel. Sunday was spent walking around a couple of quarters I'd missed before, most notably Beaux Arts, which is just north of the historic center and has a number of rather nicely funky old buildings in it. So does Arceaux, over by my hotel (incidentally, if you're a map freak like me and want to see where this stuff is, go to the Montpellier Tourist Office site and download the map they have there as a .pdf file). Arceaux might be more expensive, though. But I saw enough affordable-looking housing within the pedestrianized center that I'm still hoping to score something there.

Sunday night was cold and rainy and I spent far too much time walking around looking for a restaurant that was open. I not only wandered around on the hill for ages, but I came back to the hotel hoping the West Indian/African restaurant around the corner might be open, and it wasn't. The hotel clerk went through the guidebook he had and found a couple of places he thought would be open, but the first one wasn't and the other was clear over in Beaux Arts. It wasn't all that good, but it was okay, and it was, as I said, open.

Monday was meetings. I started off with lunch at an interesting chain restaurant which only has one thing on the menu, entrecote steak, with a mysterious "special sauce" they've made famous (I tasted sage, tarragon, anchovies and caper juice) with Peter, who runs The Languedoc Page, a wonderful resource for people in the area. The man's a born networker, and he's seemingly in touch with all the expat Brits and Americans around. After lunch, he conducted me on a whirlwind tour of the local seaside communities, which do look deserted at this time of year, and then we swung over to Aigues-Mortes, a walled city which had been a port when St. Louis launched the Seventh Crusade, and which still has a fortified church from the days of the religious wars. This was also close to the famous Camargue salt pans, which have been in use since Roman days, and which play host to flocks of pink flamingoes, the only ones in Europe, who get their color from eating tiny brine shrimp in the salt pans.

No sooner had he dropped me off at the end of the tram-line in Montpellier than I had to turn around and meet a couple of other people who are working on a project I can't reveal at the moment, but one with which I'm going to be involved. One of them, however, is in the real estate business and volunteered to help me with the apartment search when it becomes time for that, which is very good news indeed. Talk went late into the night, and I left with a feeling of optimism.

The next day I was going to have lunch with an Irish journalist who's lived in the area for decades, but she was still whacked from her last trip to London, so she didn't make it into town to meet me. Instead, I checked out the amazing market in front of the hotel again, which was a trifle less obscene in its offerings because it wasn't high summer (but it was still mightily inspiring) and then wandered around the city some more and looked at more odd corners, checked out the local mall, the Polygone, a bit more carefully for things that might come in handy, managed to stay out of the fantastic supermarket they have there and felt virtuous about not spending money there, and got back to the hotel for a really wide-ranging conversation with the Irish woman, who was the one who put me onto the possibility of immigration problems. But again, the conversation ended with her saying "I think you're really going to like it here," and the feeling that I could, despite everything, conquer the bureaucracy and the bullshit.

As I tend to do, I decided to try the Restaurant That's Never Open that night, and guess what? It wasn't open! That's three for three. Maybe when I move there... But then I'll be cooking for myself.

There was an odd symmetry the next morning. I set the alarm on my cell phone for 7:15, and it went off at 6:15 because it hadn't readjusted to standard time yet. Since I almost missed my train out on Friday because my alarm clock didn't go off and I slept for an extra hour, this was pretty ironic. And it was annoying having to wait four hours at the Gare du Nord, which was unheated despite its being cold as hell, and looking at the signs announcing wi-fi access, which neglected to mention that said access was only for people with certain cell-phone plans who could charge the access fees to their bills. I could have blogged from there instead of watching the clochard with the cat, a very deeply schizophrenic guy who kept packing and unpacking a bag and his pockets while his cat, on a leash, yowled at the other people in the waiting area. The guy took 90 minutes to get his act together, and it was painful to watch.

At any rate, it was great to get back to Amsterdam, discover a decent Indian restaurant there, and get back on the train to Berlin yesterday morning. Not that I was looking forward to coming back here, but I was very definitely looking forward to doing some more work to pay for all of this and turning around again this coming Wednesday to go back to Amsterdam to do a story on Patti Smith, my first rock-mag story in ages and ages.

It was a great trip, and I agree with everyone who said I'm going to like it there. Now to make sure I can afford it.

Listening To The Train

I've never understood people who have to be plugged in to music all the time when they go about their daily life, but then, for some reason, the amount of music I listen to has been decreasing steadily for a number of years. I'm not sure why that is, except for the Lesbian Threat (my next-door neighbors, nice ladies, both of 'em, but insistent that their time is more precious than mine and that if they hear any music after 10pm -- and that means 10:01 -- they won't be able to sleep, so they'll call the police) and the fact that I hate headphones.

But also, there are sounds all around us that sometimes have their own fascination. I discovered this the other night as I got on a so-called Sprinter train from Amsterdam to Utrecht (it's actually the kind we call milk trains, since it takes 15 minutes longer to get there than the other kind) on my way to go see Jon Dee Graham.

As the train gathered speed, I noticed the sound of a cheap electronic organ. I listened a bit harder, and realized I wasn't overhearing anyone's walkman, not unless they were playing something really dementedly minimalist and primitive. What it sounded like was a child messing around with the keyboard, its hands too small to actually play more than a range of just a few notes. The tones changed chromatically, and, busting up the image of the kid, there were occasional octave unisons. And this kept on and on until we got to a station, at which point it stopped until we got going again.

Now, this was baffling me. I remember the sound of the Montreal Metro, which I believe has rubber tires, as it takes off: a tone, its fifth, and the octave, after which it just stays there. That's all easily explained by phyiscs. Seconds, and seconds descending by a half-tone, is a bit harder to understand. But the train was almost empty, there wasn't any kid, or, strange as it may seem, anyone wearing ear-buds (that particularly painful type of listening device preferred by just about everyone, it seems). True, as the train sped up leaving a station, the "organ" would creep up the scale, sometimes by half-tones, sometimes by whole tones, so it was probably related to that. But by the time I found the Muziekcentrum at the edge of the Utrecht train station (right were Alex said it'd be), I felt I'd already had a concert.

I got another one, though: Jon Dee Graham's got a good solo act, and he plays his acoustic guitar so well you don't even miss his band, which, of course, he couldn't afford to bring over. Sounds like some good new material's being written, even if he doesn't have a record company, having had the ignominy of being dropped by an indie for not selling enough records, although he topped a lot of critics' top tens last year. Afterwards, I talked with him and Mike Stewart, who was road-managing this tour of Holland by train with him, and caught up on a bunch of stuff. And yes, I didn't go in to hear Grey DeLisle, because I was able to walk right onto a fast (but non-musical) train back to Amsterdam and make it to Kantijl en Tijger, my favorite Indonesian restaurant, well before they closed, and then, having started the day by waking up an hour late in Berlin and almost missing my train, heading back to the hotel for a few hours' well-deserved sleep before getting up at 7:30 to head to Paris and then to Montpellier.

Which is where I'm writing this from, as a matter of fact, because the great hotel where I stayed this summer has wi-fi in its rooms. In fact, I could probably post to this blog from my new Palm, but I suspect it'd be a pain.

I walked around some today, looking at some neighborhoods I'd been tipped to as being affordable, and it all goes into the database. Tomorrow I meet some locals and start asking stupid questions. And I might shoot some photos, although those will have to wait until I get back before I can post them. But I gotta say, I do like it down here, even though it's been raining like crazy most of the time today. I'll admit it, though: I'm also looking for a few flies in the ointment. Starry-eyed people annoy me, after all.

Decent Interval

I'm off on the road again starting tomorrow morning. First to Amsterdam, where I'll take a short ride to Utrecht to see Jon Dee Graham, who's opening for somebody named Gray Delisle I don't much want to see, and then, the next morning, to Paris, and thence to Montpellier, where I ought to get in at about 7pm, if the TGV doesn't fail me.

I've got a number of appointments there with people who are doing some interesting projects -- can't say more than that at the moment, I'm afraid -- and I'm also going to be looking into some other neighborhoods a former Montpellierian pointed out on the map a few months ago as the site of potential apartments. Moving day isn't all that much closer at the moment, but I'm hoping to sell a couple of stories in the next few days, and, I hope, a couple of books in the very near future.

Meanwhile, of course, I've got my collection of San Francisco posters up for sale. As I've said, it pains me to part with these, because of the circumstances in which I got them and the fact that they're living mementos of a piece of my history. But continuing to have a history trumps all of that, so if you're in an eBay frame of mind, you might want to check this rare Sierra Club poster, or this one, which comes from a venue nobody I know has even heard of, or classic designs like this, this, this, this, or any of the others found at this link.

And, as I wrote to a friend who expressed concern this morning about my going to France, I don't have any business at night in the immigrant neighborhoods of industrialized cities -- Montpellier is all university and hospitals -- and that's where all the trouble has been. Nor has Montpellier been hit by rioting or unrest, as far as I can tell, although a map in the New York Times online edition the other day listed it, but it seemed to be an unedited map of France showing the major cities, and a number of other quiet places were also included. (But no, I'm not going to be a good blogger and blame the MSM for the mistake).

I'll be back next Thursday, and will very likely be able to get my e-mail while I'm gone, since the entire Place de la Comédie seems to be wired with a free hot-spot. We'll see, though. It's France, after all.

Dear M. de Villepin

What you'd better ask Père Noel for is a Franco-African Martin Luther King who speaks fluent hip-hop and gives good SMS. Be nice if he had a girlfriend/wife who was similarly equipped and had a sassy public image, but I realize you can't have everything. Not that I'd have a clue where to start with this, but my fellow Americans seem to think this is a jihad thing instead of a civil-rights thing.

Your (I hope) future neighbor,

Ed Ward

Two Further Thoughts on Al and Beate

I've been meaning to add some stuff to the previous post, but this has been a week of scrambling for stories and waiting for answers -- none of which have yet arrived, of course. But I'm leaving for the Netherlands and France on Friday morning, and have a few deadlines before then, so I thought I'd grab some time this afternoon to post two further reflections on the Du Bist Deutschland matter.

The first is a story, which may seem a tangent, but hold on, it should pay off.

Some six or seven years ago, my friend The Count had a birthday party at his favorite restaurant, and his wife invited me to join them. From his odd grab-bag of acquaintences he had, as usual, made a great selection so that conversation at the table was always on the highest level, and intellectually and socially enriching. In particular, I was enchanted by a young woman who worked in the Berlin art world, and, when the party adjourned to the bar next door, we continued to talk. She seemed to be as smart as she was good-looking, and she was very, very smart.

The next morning I was delighted to find her business card in the pocket of my pants, and wasted no time getting in touch with her. We spent an evening having dinner and hitting a couple of the illegal clubs which flourished on the east side back in those days, both of us marvelling at how utterly mundane they were and how the local and international media made such a big deal out of nothing: one much-vaunted avant-garde musical space/club consisted of one bored DJ putting on one record after another, and a few bored people sitting on cushions drinking Becks. She took me to a club frequented by artists which was just as stimulating, albeit more crowded. We finally left, she hailed a taxi, we agreed to do it again sometime soon, and she blew me a kiss as the cab sailed off.

Thus started the weirdest courtship I've ever had. I use such an old-fashioned word because, unless we collided at some point during that first night out, I never laid a hand on her over the course of the year this thing lasted. We'd go out to some event, hang out, and say good-night. It didn't take me long to figure out that there was something in her past that made it a bad idea to make advances too quickly, so out of respect I held back. We were also both busy: I was not only doing a lot of work for the Wall Street Journal Europe, but I was also starting a company that was going to publish a magazine, a website, and maintain a clearing house for information on the city in English, and she was involved with dozens of art projects here and in other countries, so hooking up was always a problem, but it was always fun when we did.

About six months into this, she confessed that she suffered from clinical depression, and I told her I had been given a piece of advice about that which had worked like a charm: a regimen of physical excercise, which, in my case, meant an hour's walk every day, enough to elevate my heartbeat and give myself a good workout. Coincidentally, she lived a block away from where I had lived when I'd first moved to town, so I had a path I'd worked out that took exactly the 55 minutes you're supposed to do this for, and I offered to show her. That turned out to be a particularly wonderful afternoon, and I made her a cassette of some of the music we'd talked about afterwards, as much in thanks for her turning me onto some great art that I'd been able to turn into Journal articles as for anything.

In return I got an e-mail saying "I must lower my dosage of you. Please do not contact me for a while."

So I didn't. Still, the world we moved in was small enough that we ran into each other again, and the old attraction was still there. But again, she backed off. I had to go back to the States on an emergency, and at one point I remember being in a bit of turmoil, so I took the car and drove out into the Arizona desert, determined to hash this all out or drive to Las Vegas, whichever came first. Fortunately, I came to a decision well before the Nevada state line: when I got back, I'd lay it all on the line and ask her what it was that was bothering her, because I wanted this thing to move forward.

I'm a little hazy on how things finally got to where they did, because I was busy putting out a magazine by then, as well as holding down a three-day-a-week radio show and travelling and writing stories for the Journal, but I do remember sending her an avant-garde flower arrangement done by a professional florist friend from New York and getting snarled at for it, and finally, on the telephone, of all things, the confession and explanation of The Thing In Her Past. At last, what I'd needed to know, and yes, it was pretty much what I figured it was, and this was the point at which, in my experience, you could actually start a relationship.

But not her. At the climax of her long, sad, and sordid tale, she said "Now that I have told you this, I never want to see you again. Don't try to contact me. I won't read e-mails, and if you call I will hang up on you without a word. I will never speak to you again, so don't try to talk to me!" and she banged down the phone. I knew she wasn't kidding or bluffing, either: she'd once told me of the great joy she'd had frustrating a guy she'd broken up with by hanging up every time he called. "I always have the last word," she'd said at the time, "because I mean what I say."

So I was sitting here at my desk, half glad it had resolved itself, half wondering what the hell had happened when the phone rang. Naturally, I answered.

"Hi, Ed, it's Albert!" said a merry voice on the other end. Now, Albert is a guy I barely know, a sometime journalist who checks in with me about every two or three years. He is actually so crazy he spends his summers in Florida, where it's too hot to walk on the beach, and his winters in Berlin, where it's cold, dark, and miserable. "What's happening?" he fairly chirped.

So I told him. Hey, he asked.

There was a brief silence on the other end, and he said "Ed! Don'cha know? German girls all hate themselves!"

There followed one of those moments when thousands of pieces of experience all tumble into place and form a picture. A theory has made order out of chaos. And this Albert was no Einstein, believe me.

But over the next couple of days, I kept sticking my failed relationships with German women into the template, and found that I didn't have to force any of it. Compulsive sexual experimentation? Check. Inability to find a career suited to your intelligence? Check. A long string of abusive guys? Check. Preference for guys with half your IQ? Check. And more. Oh, so much more.

A couple of weeks later I was in Copenhagen doing a Journal story, and, as usual, I had dinner with my pal Scandigirl. "So are you still going out with the Art Babe?" she asked. (She'd seen her picture in German GQ and had been much impressed). No, I said, and told her the story, right down to Albert's phone call. "Oh," Scandigirl said, "I don't know if I agree. I think German men hate themselves, too." And, since she had some experience here, I had to defer to her.

Okay, see how that fits into Du Bist Deutschland?

But there's something else. When the dancer read my post on Du Bist Deutschland, she said "Oh, Beate Uhse is a hero!" and then said something about how there had been a law that was only taken off the books in the 1970s which had stipulated that women had to have written permission from their husbands to work outside the home, and many other things. Once I asked for details, she backpedalled a bit, but we're still looking into this so-called "alte Familienrecht," which also regulated under which circumstances one could get a divorce.

And so this fits into it, too: feminism, as we know it in the United States, at least, never really happened in Germany. Like many new ideas, it came into public discourse through academia, of all things, and so by the time it hit the average woman, it was tainted with connotations of elitism and extremism, which its proponents in the universities never bothered to challenge. Feminists were often rightly accused of being man-hating lesbians, and lesbians weren't part of the common experience of the average Hausfrau, sheltered as she was by the Familienrecht. Getting a job was illegal unless the Herr (the word also means "lord" and is the one used to address God in the Bible) allowed it. The sort of gradual feminism, the Ms magazine kind, the kind gently introduced into the womens' magazines, that we got in the States -- where there was still a lot of opposition, and still is -- never happened in Germany. True, feminism grew apart from its academic/theoretical beginnings, and true, there are plenty of women in places of power (including the Chancellery, of course) in some parts of German society today, but its landing in the mainstream was more a belly-flop than a graceful three-pointer. There just have to be ambiguous feelings. Residual ones, perhaps, but they just have to persist.

So I'm contemplating a society that doesn't like itself, a population of self-hating men and women, men who hate women, women who hate men, and everyone hating themselves. A portrait drawn with far broader strokes than is realistic, of course, and one verging on a cartoon. Yet, if there's a kernel of truth there -- and I believe there is -- then a part of the malaise has been diagnosed.

I got an e-mail from The French Guy, a regular reader, when I posted my travails with Bewag/Vattenfall a couple of weeks ago, asking me if I really thought that the French fonctionnaires were going to be any different than the German Beamte, and I had to confess that no, I didn't. But to move from a society that doesn't think highly enough of itself to one that thinks far too highly of itself ought to feel like a homecoming: I am, after all, American.

I'm just hoping that the rioting which has resulted from excessive self-regard causing disregard of others will have cooled off some by the time I head down to Montpellier on Saturday. But stay tuned.

Who, Me?

All of a sudden, the neighborhood's been blitzed with a new advertising campaign. The billboards I saw first were all the same: a picture of a familiar aged man, and the words "Du bist Albert Einstein. Du bist Deutschland."

Well, a whole lot of the Germans I run into every day sure aren't Albert Einstein, or even anything close, but then, who is? And, more to the point, what was going on here? I've mentioned before that pride is a sticky issue here, that the word pride, Stolz, is never, ever heard under any circumstance. But clearly this was some sort of pride campaign, which meant it was risky for whoever was doing it. And, given that the German colors were present as a sort of logo/squiggle, I figured it was the federal government.

Turns out I was right -- and that I'd already written about this campaign for that self-same government, albeit a different wing of it. This is all part of Partner für Innovation, which I'll get to in a moment. Du Bist Deutschland, however, is the public face, and from the website, it appears that it's got a whole lot of television commercials attached to it, as well as a bundle of billboards.

Strangely, the second one I saw, of the many they're going to put up, was the one that's bound to be the most controversial:



For those of you who don't live here, the name Beate Uhse will draw a blank, but she was, in the waning days of the war, a Luftwaffe pilot. After the war, unemployed, widowed, with kids to support, and looking around at the devastation of Germany, she took what little funds she had and printed up a booklet giving women straightforward information about birth control, a very controversial subject in those days, which she sold for a nominal fee via mail-order. Busted for obscenity, she stood trial and defended herself with common sense. She won, and began selling birth-control devices -- condoms and diaphragms -- through the mail. From there, she moved into other sex-related areas, and finally added bricks-and-mortar shops to her empire, selling sex toys, erotic clothing, and lots and lots of pornography. Today, it's a very small town indeed which doesn't have a Beate Uhse shop in it, and she'll probably best be remembered by East Germans as the name on the first piece of mail they got after their government fell: the Beate Uhse catalogue. Some of the very first capitalistic businesses in the East, too, were her shops, setting up in quonset huts and containers until she could get a more stable piece of real-estate. When she died a few years back, she must've been a billionaire: among her holdings is a virtual supermarket over by Zoo Station here in Berlin which also contains her Erotic Museum, which was once the collection of an erotica specialist in Munich. He offered to donate the whole collection to the city of Munich, and when they sniffed at him, Beate Uhse stepped right in and bingo! Instant museum. The real estate it's on isn't cheap, either: it's as centrally located as you get in West Berlin.

Which is to say that, next to some of the other choices -- Michael Schumacher, Otto Lilienthal, Albert Schweitzer, and our pal Herr Einstein -- she sort of sticks out.

But what's most intriguing here isn't using Beate Uhse as an exemplar of German initiative -- she's actually a very good one, as the copy on the sign makes clear -- but that this campaign is seeking to sell Germans the idea that they're actually worth something. This is something that's bothered me since I've lived here: the fear that, by being proud of your country and its culture, you run the risk of slipping down the greasy slope into full-blown fascism again. The idea that national pride equals nationalism seems pretty much universal here, although I would think that, having been there before, they'd be in an excellent position to stop the train well before it pulled into that station.

If you think I'm kidding about what's going on here, and if you read German, go check out the campaign's manifesto. It's all "Come on, big feller! You're okay! Things look bad, but you're really stronger than you think!" It skates around a lot of dicey issues -- dicey to Germans, anyway. You can't invoke the past, because, uh, well, it was dicey, some of it. You can invoke the "Denker und Dichter" (thinkers and poets) image, although you have to use people like Lilienthal and Frau Uhse because there's been a certain lack of universally-loved authors since the war, nobody reads poetry, and nobody pays any attention to philosophers -- particularly post-war German ones. So instead of talking about national pride, it invokes rooting for your football team (not nearly as loaded with fascist baggage as it is in, say, England or Italy, although a meeting of rivals here can still scare the crap out of visiting Americans due to the massed singing and chanting -- and the rioting which sometime erupts when a left-wing team like St. Pauli meets a right-wing one) and waving flags for Formula 1 driver Michael Schumacher.

The other half of this campaign, which is the one I wrote about and which is where the money comes in, is the one which is trying to hook researchers up with industry, thereby beefing up Germany's wobbling industrial and technological infrastructure. This Partner für Innovation campaign publishes a little booklet Deutsche Stars (which you can download as a big old PDF file on the home page), which consists of descriptions of "fifty innovations which everyone ought to know about" which were made by Germans. Some of it reaches kind of far: I'm not at all willing to concede television, automobiles, beer (Saddam Hussein, call your lawyer! Babylon's being besmirched again!), or the computer to the Germans, but I was convinced that toothpaste and coffee-filters, to name just two things I use daily, were German, as, of course, was the Currywurst, an invention few outside the country know aoout, and one of the few culinary delights here I think might have a wider audience. (Curiously, the book does not mention the Döner Kebap, a fake-Turkish fast-food invented here in Berlin by a Turkish restaurateur and now a stock European fast food).

I'm still reeling from the implications of this campaign, and may well have more to say about it in further posts here, but meanwhile, I'll look around me and see if it seems to be working. I'm not going to hold my breath, however.

Power Story

Last Wednesday, I got a surprise visit: a guy from Bewag, the power company, holding a turn-off notice. This was odd, because I always get two warning notices before they send someone out and I hadn't had one yet. In a very loud voice, he told me, almost as if he were reciting it, that I HADN'T PAID MY BILL and that if I didn't HE WAS AUTHORIZED TO COME BACK IN A WEEK AND TURN OFF MY ELECTRICITY.

Wow, Mrs. B must've really enjoyed that performance.

Anyway, I realized that it had been a while since I'd heard from Bewag, but, since they've just been taken over by the Swedish firm Wattenfall, the bills might've gotten lost in the mail during the change-over.

But the next day, I got a printed bill in the mail that included the €42.55 charge for the guy's visit. That was absurd; it must have been mailed before he showed up. Trouble was, I didn't have the money to pay the bill. Best to have some ammunition before you go talk to these people, I reasoned.

This morning, though, I got an e-mail which indicated that I'd have plenty of money by week's end, so I figured, okay, I'll go all the way across town to the Bewag offices and see if they'll let me pay the whole thing by Friday, which seemed reasonable. I had to change trains twice, and the weather was cold and wet, but I made it down there to Bismarckstr. and took a number. You always have to take a number.

Mine was only three away from the number being dealt with, though, so it only took a half hour for me to get to the desk of the guy who'd hear my case. Which he would have if he'd bothered to listen. I asked him why I'd been billed for the guy's appearance on a bill that must have been mailed the day before, and he clicked around the computer and told me I'd gotten three warning notices, which, in fact, I hadn't. "You must have," he said with a smug expression. "The computer says they were sent." Impasse.

Okay, I told him, I would have the money by the end of the week, because I was getting more than enough to pay it. "Congratulations (Ich gratuliere Sie)" he sneered, "but you have to pay by the 26th." Can't you be a little flexible? I asked him. "You can pay half of this by the end of the day tomorrow in cash," he said, fixing me with a steely gaze, "or we turn you off on the 26th."

Well, if I pay half of it I won't have any money for food, but I can scrape it together. The guy spoke in rapid German, even though I asked him several times to speak slower. This only make him speak louder. You know, foreigners understand better when you yell at them. So I have to repeat this tomorrow and hope for the best.

The dancer was over for dinner yesterday, and at one point we started talking about how there were two Germanys, one made up of people who had no social mobility, who were in the working class with no chance of escaping it due to the class system and the educational system, and another Germany made up of educated, aware people. The first class also includes the bureaucrats, people like this guy, whose face slammed shut just as soon as he realized I was a foreigner. These people use their minimal education to secure jobs within a system from which they can't be fired, but can, if they play by the rules, be promoted. Some day, this guy may wind up in a cushy job like the fat gentleman with whom I had to register to get my number for the line. Until then, he gets to be completely inflexible, unfriendly, and severe. That's what pays off.

And hell, I've gone without food before, and I can do it again.

It was a weird trip there and back. On one train, a girl was crying uncontrollably, as people edged away from her. The billboards at the stations were loaded with "Bewag is now Wattenfall!" ads showing happy Germans doing this and that, happy, no doubt, because the city's deficit-ravaged company had been sold off to merry Swedes. I hope they make their invstment back. They're doing it on the backs of people like me, and at the expense of our good will.

***

I knew there was one item I forgot to post yesterday. I recently criticized the Berlinische Galerie for mounting yet another show about the group of painters known as Die Brücke, after the Neue Nationalgalerie had had a boffo show on just this group a few months earlier. As it turns out, on closer inspection of the BG's posters, they're housing the Brücke Museum, which is usually located in the borough of Dahlem, at the moment. No doubt the Dahlem location is being renovated or something. So the BG gets out of having to mount a new show for the fall and winter, sure, but it's not as confusing or stupid as it appeared. My apologies to all concerned, and if you missed the NNG show, you might want to go check this out.

Catchup Crumbs

Been leaving too many loose threads around here, so I thought I'd take up some of Sunday afternoon to tie some of them up. And to celebrate the 200th post here. I know that's not much for a lot of blogs, but considering how damn verbose I am, it's not half bad.

***

No sooner do I mention Chinky the Chinaman than his sister shows up on the cover of this week's tip magazine. tip is one of the two biweekly listings magazines, the more yuppie-friendly and lifestyle oriented, as opposed to Zitty, which is more politically inclined, but their deep dark secret is they're essentially the same company, as you discover when you ascend their twisted business structure. Anyway, Chinkette can be seen a little ways up from the bottom of this page, although she's a lot more, uh, striking full-sized or on the posters tip has up all over town. And now I hear I'm about to get an ad for a new "soul" radio station here which will be the Afro equivalent. Hmmm.

***

The "Do Not Ask" sign on White Trash across the street went down shortly after I mentioned it, and we got yet another in the seemingly endless stream of temporary art shows, this one entitled "seven +: Eleven Positions of Contemporary German Photography." I've always been put off by this "positions" word, since what it seems to mean is "this stuff's not real interesting to look at, but we've got these really interminable and unreadable essays by the artists and various art history PhDs in this big thick catalog which explains what's going on and what makes it art." Now, I'd call the show "Eleven Contemporary German Photographers" and let it go at that, but then, I don't even have a Bachelors degree. Nor can I figure out why a show of 11 photographers gets called "seven +." If you're showing there, are you one of the seven, or one of the others?

***

I've been told that one reason for all the horrendous lack of anything at all at the last race at the Hoppegarten is that the track has once again filed for bankruptcy. I have no details on this at the moment, but it could well be that all concerned weren't actually anticipating that the race would go on until the very last minute, although, come to think of it, that's pretty unlikely considering the fact that the big BMW race was happening that day. Will it be there next year? Wait and see, I guess.

***

The rain has started falling, hard enough to wake me up last night, as a matter of fact. Right now, Berlin is beautiful because all the deciduous trees are changing color. We've got about a week of this before things really turn ugly, but it's worth going out and suffering a little bit of precipitation to see it before it all turns grey and bare.

Another Night On The Town

I tell ya, I spend all week waiting for various people in various countries to get back to me about various projects, and nothing doing. I could have been working! But no, nothing doing. Then, all of a sudden, I have three things to do in one day.

Mid-afternoon yesterday I headed for Berlin's hinterlands, where I jumped into a car with a couple of my friends and their young daughter and headed out to the middle of nowhere to the Havelpark, a gigantic shopping mall. The reason? My favorite German winemaker, the ebulliently eccentric Heribert Kastell was, for some reason, selling wine there.

I first met Heribert when a couple of friends of mine here made an ill-fated investment in a restaurant. It was a superb restaurant, in a superb location, but they got screwed by some legal technicalities relating to the sale, and lost everything they had -- another Berlin success story: no matter how good you are, someone will come along to make sure you don't succeed. But before it all crashed, they invited me to a dinner and tasting with Kastell, and said he was their favorite winemaker, so, knowing their exquisite taste, I agreed to show up. Heribert was in fine form, opening various wines, and matching them perfectly with the food. I was dead broke, so I couldn't do anything but nod approvingly and remember his name.

Then, a year later, I was both writing for the Wall Street Journal Europe and heading to Cologne. His headquarters is in Bingen, an hour or so south of town, and so I headed down there with a friend who was living in Cologne and did a story on him. He drove us to the land he'd inherited from his family and told about how, after skipping a generation while his father was a butcher, he'd decided to reclaim the family business. Not only the family business: the Rheinhessen, where he's located, has a very poor reputation for wine in Germany, and he was out to rehabilitate that, too. No more weak, sweet wines like Grandma liked. Nope: he was going to use his experience apprenticing at Schlossgut Diel, one of Germany's top estates, to good use. The idea of bigger, drier wines was an idea whose time had come, and now he was advising younger winemakers on how to turn their production around. By the time I visited him, in 1997, he was selling out nearly everything he was producing, to clients like Deutsche Bank's main executive dining room. That didn't stop him from loading me up with enough stuff to take home and try that it took me a couple of years to get through most of it, and I saved a 1994 Riesling Sekt, his answer to champagne, for the 1999/2000 New Year's evening, when I enjoyed a tremendous wine, redolent of hazelnuts and flowers, as the Millenium changed.

The next year, I was back in Cologne for PopKomm, and one of the guys from SXSW, with whom I was working, declared he'd never had a German wine he'd liked. We had an extra day, so I called my friend and he agreed to drive us down there. We got to Bingen, I called Heribert's house, and was fortunate to get his brother, an archaeologist specializing in Native American archaeology, and based at the University of Wisconsin, on the line. Heribert had just packed off for a wine fair near Frankfurt, and his brother was loading the car with more wine and said he'd meet us there.

We walked into the fair, and there was the Kastell stand at the end of a row of stands. Heribert saw us coming and waved. "Heribert," I said as we got there, "my friend from America here says he's never had a German wine he liked." His eyes lit up and he grabbed a couple of glasses. "I hope you have a little bit of time," he said. As much as he was willing to spare, we said. A couple of hours later, we weaved away from the stand, my friend wondering how he'd ever get so many bottles through customs.

But I lost track of Heribert for a while after that, and it wasn't until my suburban friends announced earlier this year that he was coming to visit them over lunchtime that I saw him again. This time, it was obvious that he'd made great strides. He had a Kastell Klassik Riesling, which was, simply, the Platonic ideal of a German Riesling. He had begun experimenting with other grapes, including the Blauer Portugeser, which produces some of Europe's worst wine, out of which he made a rosé with amazing vanilla and floral tones. This being a classic German granny tipple, it was typical of his attitude towards winemaking: it's universally derided? Time to give it a spin! There were also a couple of others, very limited editions, which were just as astonishing.

Yesterday he didn't have as much in the way of avant-garde goods, but he did have some good solid stuff, including a couple of reds, one, a Frühburgunder (Pinot Noir), which I swear has a nose of gunpowder -- or, rather, gunpowder after it's gone off. I bought three. Yes, German reds.

As we stood and sampled, I watched the heavily-laden Friday-night shopping carts being pushed along by the Brandenburgers who come to Havelpark to shop at Kaufland, surely one of the largest supermarkets I've seen in Europe, filled with about 85% stuff I'd never consider eating. It seemed that the more heavily-laden a cart was, the worse the nutrition represented by what was visible in it. The bad nutrition was also evident on the faces and bodies of the customers, and it reinforced my observation that this part of the country is one which takes no pleasure whatever at the table. Even so, it should try to feed its families better.

We were there for about two hours, sampling things Heribert poured -- I don't use that much white wine, so although it was interesting to taste, I wasn't blown away enough to actually buy any -- and watching the parade. Finally, we made our purchases and left. I'd bought some Riesling Klassik, and some of that good Pinot, and Heribert had given me another couple of bottles to try. My friends, who are headed to Frankfurt soon, made tentative plans to visit him in Bingen, which is only 60 km away, and we headed out to the car with the booty.

My next stop was a Halloween party, although 3-year-old Amalia didn't approve, it not being Halloween yet. This invitation had come out of the blue, with a phone call earlier this week. I'd been expecting a call from a British guy working on a very interesting project (the remastered Harry Smith Anthology), and when the voice on the other end had a British accent, I assumed it was him. It wasn't: it was Alex, the owner of Another Country, a used book store I'd been hanging out in at the end of last year and early this year, as Alex tried to cobble together some sort of expat community non-profit organization. The trouble was, each conversation took hours, and I had to be there in person, and, after a long hiatus, my time was actually getting used up doing actual work for a while, so I stopped going. I really don't think I'd talked with the guy since about January, and here he was, inviting me to his Halloween party.

It was tons of fun, as I sort of half-expected, with the store's regulars, mostly sci-fi fans like the owner, all in costume, mostly Goth-y stuff, as one would expect. What one wouldn't expect was a huge amount of great food, all prepared by our host, who was on the verge of collapse, as you might expect. I met Heidi, a strapping young woman who'd lived in Austin and was now living in Schöneberg, and Bernie, an affable Jamaican slightly older than myself, who'd gone from St. Catherine's to Harvard just as the '60s began to ripen in that area of the world, and who had known Richard Fariña.

Trouble was, I didn't get to stay as long as I wanted to there, because duty called. I had helped put together the Bubblegum Film Festival, which was essentially a screening of a strange bootleg film called Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth, based on the book of the same name. Because the film is, let's not mince words, illegal, showing it is, too, except if it's part of a larger event. So it was decided that D Strauss, music editor of the otherwise-crappy local English-language rag The Ex-Berliner, would read an excerpt from the book and then DJ a few hours of bubblegum music.

The event got picked by lots of our local media, but as it turned out, there were only something like four paying customers. Strauss was jet-lagged all to hell, and apparently had forgotten he was supposed to read, so he slurred his way in a monotone through a text which wound up being pretty much word-for-word repeated by the first few minutes of the film, which, at around two hours, was waaaaay too long. Each artist, and I use the term loosely, as about half of them were cartoon characters, was represented by two songs, which, in some cases, was two too many. As the lights went up, most of the audience bolted for the doors so fast you'd think the Berlin Marathon had just started. As I was out on the sidewalk afterwards, waiting for some friends to conclude some business inside the cinema, along came Heidi from Another Country. "Hey! This is my neighborhood! Is this where the bubblegum thing was? I'm sorry I couldn't come. But I gotta love this town." She pointed at the Klingon ears which poked out of her black-dyed hair. "I just rode all the way back here on the U-Bahn and nobody even noticed this." Heidi, stick around. You'll see much scarier aliens on the U-Bahn. Try Zoo Station at about 11pm.

So I think in the next couple of weeks I'll take some books I don't want down to Alex and shoot the breeze with him and see if he's gotten anywhere with this thing. I'm already in exit mode, I can feel it every time I walk into another part of town I haven't been in recently and wonder if this is the last time I'll see it for a while. But with the reduced daylight, the coming of horrible weather, and all, this is the time when community does make a difference in Berlin. It won't get better for six months, if that. It helps to have others around.

More Graffiti!

I've been meaning to post some more results of my wandering around the neighborhood documenting graffiti, and I've finally gotten over the depresssion caused by the crash of my hard-drive in April with hundreds of pictures I never posted here. Like the graffiti itself, they've just gone away. Unlike graffiti, there's a good chance I'll pay to have them -- and much else -- recovered. But until then, there's always the new stuff.

Since there's always evolution in art, my favorite new graffiti artist is the nut-case who's posting dolls. Actual 3-D graffiti. There are three of them on Rosenthaler Str just below Rosenthaler Platz. Here they are:





I'm sure there must be more of them around, but I haven't found them. Thinking about them this morning, I was reminded of the artist, whose name I've long forgotten, who built the little adobe buildings in odd locations in New York in the 1970s. But that was a "serious" artist, with art-world support, although as I remember, the locations weren't publicized, except, of course, for the ones that wound up in the Whitney Biennale.

In other graffiti news, I was going to photograph a "new" painting by Nike, the amazing primitive painter of female nudes, who had a masterpiece painted on a signboard for the Süddeutscher Zeitung on a fence by the corner of Rosenthaler Str and Weinmeisterstr. that was serving as a sort of odd public outdoor gallery. It was a nude facing the ocean on a tropical beach, with the sun shining, and it was dated '04, which made me wonder if she'd stopped painting. But it was only up a couple of weeks, and last week when I went there with the intention of photographing it, it and all the other paintings and artworks had been taken down and some fake paper graffiti some theater has made were up instead. I despaired of seeing any more of her work, especially since the few remaining examples had all been hideously defaced, like this, her first piece, which has been hanging by Friedrichstr station for over a year:



But imagine my surprise this afternoon when I walked out of my house to see a brand-new Nike, affixed to the wall right across the street, on the wall of what had been White Trash Fast Food!



No, her skill hasn't improved -- look at that neck! -- but I'm hoping this means there are a bunch more in the process of going up. Some graffiti, after all, just creates urban blight. But, as the dollmaker and Nike show, some of it can really brighten a place up.

Chinky & Co.

A friend visiting from the West Coast last year got really offended as I gave him directions to my house from the hostel at Rosenthaler Platz where he was staying. "Just go out the door, cross the street, and if you see Chinky the Chinaman you know you're on the right side of the street," I told him. He made some odd noises, but when he finally showed up here, he said "Hey, sorry for all of that. But you were right. Chinky the Chinaman."

What I was referring to was this:



Now, if that's not Chinky the Chinaman, I don't know what is. The most annoying part of this is...well, it's hard to say just what the most annoying part of this is. This is an exquisitely-decorated Chinese restaurant, although the food it serves is the usual German Chinese crap. It was also, according to an ad campaign that was all over Berlin last year, assisted in its creation by a Federal initiative to encourage business start-ups. That campaign just used the motif of a tongue with those five characters on it (and any Chinese experts out there, I have a question: are those or aren't those archaic characters? Certainly they're not the ones in common use, are they?).

But what's really annoying is that no one is upset by Chinky. In fact, it's been a lot worse. Four or five years ago, McDonald's went on an ethnic rampage, featuring new sandwiches every ten days or so in various "exotic" combinations. There was an Indian sandwich, a Mexican one, a Greek one, and each one was, of course, advertised by a saturation billboard campaign. Now, of course, a billboard isn't a subtle medium, and you have to get your point across fast, so yeah, the Indian one was advertised with Hindu-like lettering, the Greek with squared-off blue and white letters, the Mexican one with a sombrero. But the Chinese one was done with one-word posters with a little explanatory text below. The first one I saw, right near my house, announced LIESIG! and of course used fake-Chinese type. I reeled when I saw this, because, knowing German, I realized that the word they were using was "riesig," giant. It wasn't until I saw a second one that said RECKA! ("lecker," delicious) that I started getting mad.

Soon after this McDonald's campaign was all over town, I read an article in some left-wing paper here about it, which at least reassured me that I wasn't the only Caucasian who'd gotten offended. They interviewed a woman who was the head of some Chinese-German association, and her response was "It's annoying, but there are bigger issues we have to deal with." That kind of disappointed me; the idea of a bunch of Germans in coolie hats picketing McDonald's had occurred to me, but hey, if Frau Lee wasn't going to get excited, no one else would. Although, on reflection, it seems to me that starting with such "little" issues, you can bring attention to the bigger ones. Well, whatever.

It's undeniable, though, that this sort of racism -- Orientalism, to give it its proper name -- is acceptable here. There's a snack food that comes in "Thailandische süss-scharf" (sweet-hot) flavor, and features a "Thai" on the package wearing a coolie hat, slanty eyes, a pigtail, and those kind of Japanese wooden shoes with the two platforms, the kind that geishas wear. It's an offensive stereotype, but it isn't even a remotely accurate offensive stereotype.

I usually learn my multiculturalism at the table, and the "Asia" restaurants here have had my back up since I arrived. The "Asiapfanne" is a mess of pork and noodles and a couple of vegetables, including bean-sprouts, seasoned with soy sauce, that's ubiquitous at the Asia Imbisses (snack-bars) here, and it's wildly popular: I see people cramming it into their mouths every day. It's of no known nationality, created, like chop suey, by Asians themselves for the society they find themselves in. I'd reckon that the majority of Asia Imbiss owners are ethnic-Chinese Vietnamese, because there was a huge number of Vietnamese who came to the West as refugees around the time of the Vietnam War (thanks to Germany's once-liberal refugee policies) and to the East as "friendly socialist workers," and, just as the Chinese in America invented chop suey, they invented Asiapfanne.

Eventually, they opened restaurants, so people could come in and sit down, but the fare in there was just further variations on Chinapfanne. And when other ethnicities came into the mix, it was no better: I once went clear across town for dinner because I'd found a Vietnamese restaurant, the first I'd seen here. Nothing on the menu -- or on the plate I ordered -- was even remotely Vietnamese. In fact, it was indistinguishable from the "Chinese" food I'd had.

This is still going on: what got me to finally sit down and write this rant was the discovery in my mailbox this morning of yet another take-out menu. This one is from the newly-opened Mai Bistro, and offers "China-Japan-Thai" cooking. Its contents are so horrible that I shudder to re-open it to give examples, but I will. First, in the Chinese section, there are seven varieties of Chinapfanne, plus four more "fried noodle" dishes which are indistinguishable from them. This is followed by fried rice in a number of varieties. Bami Goreng and Nasi Goreng are also listed under noodles and rice, respectively, although they're European Indonesian dishes. Then we're on to the chicken, beef, duck, and shrimp dishes, each with its chop suey, curry, sweet-sour with pineapple, and peanut-sauce variations, not to mention bamboo shoot, carrot and glass-noodle stir-fries. Under Thai, we have our choices of green curry, red curry, fried noodles, and fried glass-noodles, with the same meats as the Chinese stuff. The Japanese menu is truly amazing: Katsu (breaded, fried chicken-breast) with curry, hot, sweet-sour, hot-sour, or "Braten" (which I presume means the nebulous brown MSG-laced Maggi sauce) sauces, or Topia (chicken cubes) done the same way. Then chicken teriyaki, chicken yakitori, fried chicken cubes, chicken chop suey, and chicken "Mai curry." Finally, we have the shrimp, Ebi-Katsu-sticks, it says here, shrimp breaded and fried in oil, with tartar sauce.

I will not be calling them any time soon.

This cultural confusion isn't helped by the fact that the sushi industry here is dominated by the Thais, and the "Thai-Sushi" sign is practically all you see. (There are a few restaurants in the west which cater to Japanese businessmen, including the wonderful Sabu, and here you can get normal donburu and tonkatsu -- things Japanese people actually eat). In fact, the nearest place to my house where I can buy sushi is a restaurant called Südostasien, or South-east Asia. Thai-sushi is cut in factories, placed on waxed paper, and frozen to be delivered to these places. Long gone is the magnificent sushi-joint Mäcky Messer on Mulackstr., where a maniacal German guy from Hamburg made some of the best sushi I've had outside of Japan.

In fact, I've met actual educated intelligent Germans who have argued with me that the predominant starch in Chinese diets is noodles, and that there's really no difference between Chinese and Japanese and Thai food. This confusion goes well beyond the table, too, since they're confused that there's a difference between Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam on the one hand and Indonesia, or China on the other. Worse, they don't see why this exasperates me.

Now, you could argue that this is a culture which hasn't had much first-hand experience with these ethnicities, and I'd argue right back that if we were in a small city like Seelow, hard on the Polish border, it would be one thing, but this is the supposed "World City" of Berlin. And yeah, it's so much easier to deal in stereotypes, and if we but admit it, we can fall into this way of thinking sometimes, and yeah, if I were discussing Amazon Indian tribes, I might make stupid mistakes because I've never really studied them or, needless to say, experienced their culture or known any. I'll even grant you that Laotians haven't made much of an impact on Germany, maybe. (The Vietnamese made enough of an impression that right after I moed here, the German government deported something like 15,000 of them, in an effort, they said, to "cut down on crime." Sure.) But China? Japan?

The fact is, there's a current of lazy racism under German -- and, I'm willing to bet, most European -- culture. My favorite restaurant has a hotel attached to it (two, in fact), and in the window of its office, there's a little sculptural ensemble of happy darkies playing instruments, red lips and all. I guess I cut them slack because I know they're good people and because they've built a former dissident Ossi bar into a lodging and gastronomy empire, but I do wince a bit every time I walk past this little group. And there's no denying that, when I made my first visit here, in 1988, the apartment I stayed in had a box of chocolate-covered domes, with a cookie base, the dome filled with some sort of awful white cream, which were labelled Negerküsse, "nigger-kisses." Nobody I mentioned this to could figure out what I was on about: that's what they'd always been called.

However, when I finally moved here in 1993, I went looking for them in the supermarket. The name had been changed. Now they were Maurenküssen -- "Moors' kisses."

Now, that's progress.

Mrs. Badvibes

And it was such a peaceful summer...

But now the apartment across the hall is occupied, and anyone who knows me knows what that means: Mrs. B is back. Of course, it's her apartment, so it's not exactly unusual that she'd be living there, but things are a whole lot nicer when she's not.

She's my landlord's mother. She was all smiles, cheery, effusive, and even helpful, when I first moved in. At the time, the whole family was involved in the ongoing renovation of the house, since they seem possessed by Winchester Mystery House Syndrome. The sound of pounding, sawing, and people shouting at each other over the din went on from 7 in the morning until about 4 in the afternoon, when the older Mr. B would go off to the store, buy a little bottle of something, and start getting pickled. He was a nice enough old geezer, and thought it was pretty comical that I was so unhandy with tools. He and the Hausmeister, the handyman-cum-property-manager who lives in the house across the courtyard, really got a kick out of that.

Then Mr. B died of liver cancer. The family actually lives in suburban Düsseldorf, so that's where she went to mourn. Her son, my actual landlord, showed up from time to time to deal with new tenants, various crises with the plumbing, and so on, but mostly the apartment was empty. After a while, though, she apparently missed the place, and so she came back, This was when things got bad. She'd stop people in the halls and lecture them. As an American, I got to hear her opinions on the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. "Think of the children!" she shrieked. "Think of the children!" She'd have me backed up against the wall, jabbing with her finger. Nor did she restrict this to the residents of the building: friends of mine who came over would get trapped by her, too, and apparently to Germans she espoused some particularly ugly right-wing political positions.

This makes a certain amount of sense. Her family, she once told me, was from Radeberg, a suburb of Dresden known for its famous beer, which was the only one in the entire Deutsche Demokratische Republik considered good enough to export to the rest of the world. There, her family (or maybe she and Mr. B) owned a mill, but when the communists came, they kicked them out of the mill. How they wound up in suburban Düsseldorf I don't know, nor do I know whether it was just Mrs. B who was the Radeberger, but apparently when the records were opened and searched after reunification, the family discovered they owned an apartment building in Berlin, and so, fired with Winchester Mystery House Fever, they came, they stayed, and they renovated.

When there was no renovation to do, in the days after Mr. B Senior's death, she got restless. She has a bike, which she rides all over town, and she also has friends who come visiting and make whooping noises, and giggle and talk very loud, doubtless because they're old and some of them are deaf. Anyway, one day, she showed up at the door and asked if she could come in, not giving a reason. I hesitated and she pushed me aside and came in anyway. I'd been away on various assignments, since this was when I was travelling every other week for the Wall Street Journal Europe, so the place wasn't in very good shape. This she acknowledged by walking around, her hands raised to the heavens, shrieking at the top of her lungs "FURCHTBAR!! FUUUURRRCCCCCHTBAAAAR!!!" ("Terrible, awful, dreadful," says my dictionary). She then started coming at me, her finger cocked and loaded. "You have to clean! You have to spend at least two hours a day cleaning your house, every day! You have rats!" (This was a pure product of her imagination). She then stomped out.

I was shook. I called a friend, who informed me that Mrs. B had just violated one of the most basic landlord-tenant laws. If someone like the landlord wants to inspect the property, they have to give you written notice, and a very good reason. You can also, under some circumstances, deny them entry. And she wasn't even my landlord. But, of course, he got in touch. I wrote back a letter telling him that I had been away, and that I had cleaned up since her visit, and that she hadn't been given permission to enter the apartment.

That did it. The next time she visited, she got me against the wall again. "You lied! You lied to my son! You should be ashamed of yourself for being a liar!" She was howling at the top of her lungs. After about 20 minutes of this -- I'm not kidding -- I got away.

From that day onwards, she's made it a point to make a horrible grimace at me every time she sees me, and to tell everyone she can corner what a horrible human being I am -- so dirty! And this has now been going on for at least five years. She comes here, messes around in the garden, and snarls at me. It's impossible to avoid her, and it's not a whole lot of fun being around someone whose face twists into a rictus of disgust every time they see you, who heads back into her apartment if we're leaving at the same time and slams the door, waiting until I've gone. I've also stopped planting things like basil and coriander because she steals the pots. Apparently, although the garden is allegedly half mine, everything in it belongs to her.

How a saint like her son sprung from her loins -- he's spotted me rent during all of the horrible times here, and I've been up to a year behind at times -- I cannot say. (Nor can I converse with him because he never opens his mouth when he talks and talks very, very quietly: I can't understand a word he says, and never have been able to). But when she's here, I try to get out of the house as much as I can. You can feel the hatred burning through the walls. The one thing we have in common is we both can't wait for me to move away from here.

The good news is, she's rarely here longer than a week, and she arrived on Friday. Other good news is, leaving the house, I've taken the camera, and there will be some photos and stuff, both here and on Flickr as soon as I get around to it.

Oh, you read the headline and thought I was going to write something about Angela Merkel? Well, not only did Jane Kramer scoop me some weeks back in the New Yorker (sorry, but the story doesn't seem to be online: it was in the Sept. 19 issue, and it was, unsurprisingly, very, very good), but I must say that Frisco Mike has a much better comment than I could make.

Another Race, Another Country

Monday was, besides the 15th anniversary of the diplomatic protocol which united East and West Germany, the last day of racing out at Hoppegarten. All week, the weather forecast had been for rain -- and there'd been a lot of rain all week -- but when I woke up on Monday, that had all changed: a cloudy, but dry, day was forecast. Blaise had been asking about going to the races, so I got in touch with him and told him it was on.

I bought a three-zone day-pass (weekend) for five Euros, and we headed out, almost to the end of the public transportation system. We got there about 30 minutes after the first race, stood in the usual interminable line, and paid seven Euros to get in.

That's when it started to go wrong. The shed where the programs and racing forms are sold -- and there's only one -- only had a dozen programs left and no racing forms, which had already sold out. This was a problem: without the statistics in the racing form, there's no way to accurately attempt to pick a winner. Without that, there wasn't much point in making any bets. And without making bets, there wasn't much point in going to the track.

But we were there, so we stood in line for a sausage, it being that time of day. It was a very long line, twenty or more people, but it was the shortest of the lines at the several sausage stands. Germans, of course, love to stand in lines, it being a favorite pastime, but the closer we got, the more obvious is was that they were already running out of food. At 2:30 in the afternoon!

Finally, somewhat refreshed, we headed over to the paddock area to watch the horses for the next race -- all 15 of them -- being led around. There was really no way to tell which was which, just do the usual check for kidney sweat and obvious drug mania, so I just picked a couple at random and played them. Surprisingly, they did pretty well, although they didn't win. The next race was a much smaller field, but again, I had no idea what was going on. This time, I got lucky: I not only picked the favorite, but the one I liked went off at 10 to 1, and won. Paid for the whole day.

The next race had a field of four, and was the big €50,000 BMW German Unification Cup, featuring the unbeaten Horse of the Year from 2004, Manduro. Here, I was tempted to place an exotic bet, boxing three of the four. In other words, if they came in, in any order, I'd win. These kinds of bets can pay off in the thousands, but not in a four-way race; at best I'd double my money. But I chickened out and only boxed two, and then watched the one I'd eliminated come in second. Ah, well: I still came out ahead.

But the racetrack was a mess, the whole day through. Lines everywhere, like I've never seen them. Food concessions running out, drink concessions running out. And, although I'm loath, 15 years on, to blame this on the usual East-versus-West thing, the inevitable conclusion is that the bad planning was simply down to the stereotypical Lazy Ossi way of doing business: the forecast was for rain, so we won't buy enough sausages, enough racing forms, enough beer, because nobody's going to come. Never mind that the sausages would eventually get grilled and the beer drunk, and I'm sure the newsagent takes returns.

Ah, well, there's always next year, although I don't think I'll be around for much of the season. And the nearest races to where I'm moving seem to be in Toulouse, which is a pretty far piece away. This gorgeous racetrack out in the countryside is one thing I'll miss about Berlin.

***

The past, they say, is another country. I know: I've been living there all weekend, courtesy of a combination Christmas/birthday present I bought myself, The Complete New Yorker. Every page of every issue of the magazine has been scanned and transferred to eight computer-readable DVDs, and a complete search engine, along with abstracts of every single article, cartoon, poem, and piece of fiction, can find you anything they've published.

And, while it's nice to be able to find all four parts of Truman Capote's original publication of In Cold Blood, save them to a custom reading list, and read them later, or to read Janet Flanner's mysterious Letter from Paris, which had become a total relic of another era by the 1960s, or to find, as I did just randomly flipping around, a great two-part article from the '60s by the previously unkown-to-me John Brooks (who seems to have mostly covered business) on the history of the New Jersey meadows with an emphasis on muskrat trappers there, or to come upon a piece by the great Joseph Mitchell I'd never read before, what's really astonishing is the ads.

And it's not just the prices. Sure, I was amazed that you could get the best seats at a hit Broadway show for $6.35, or fly Pan Am from New York to Paris and back in 1965 for $400, although someone who knows about such things reminded me that $400 in 1965 was equivalent to $2300 and change today. But the things being advertised amazed me. Lots and lots of liquor. Lots of it, and a high percentage was what most people today would consider pretty down-market stuff, particularly the Scotch. There was a really weird ad for California wine which basically said that foreigners drink it, so how bad could it actually be, huh? There was glassware to serve drinks in, martini recipes galore, a company in Maine offering oranges in syrup (oranges in Maine?) for use in Old Fashioneds, and, of course, stuff to eat in canapes while you drank: cheeses and the inevitable Vita Herring Snacks.

In case you didn't want to do your drinking at home, there were ads for nightclubs (Lena Horne! Benny Goodman!) and restaurants, two of which, Emily Post's and Peter's Backyard, I vaguely remember eating at as a kid. There were ads for travel urging us to "See Beautiful YUGOSLAVIA!" and to travel Russia with Intourist, both of which rather surprised me. A bit closer to home, Jamaica was putting on a major promotion, as was a group of hotels in Barbados where you could stay for as little as $16 a night, double, which, even with inflation, is a damn good bargain. And even closer to home, there were ads for the Greenbriar Resort in suburban Washington (illustration of a co-ed target shooting group), and hotels in Boston and Philadelphia.

Flipping through all of this at fairly high speed, looking for goodies or just randomly wandering through a bunch of issues, the cumulative effect eventually gave me several weird dreams. It's not like this is the return of the repressed, really: I never saw these magazines when I was a kid. I did have a best friend whose parents, I think, got the New Yorker, and for certain they had the cartoon collections, which my friend and I would race through looking for Charles Addams. It's more a case of being thrown into a random barrel of pop culture and consumer goods from a long-vanished era, and that serves as some sort of abrasive to loosen things long thought gone in my subconscious.

And not so long gone: my friend's parents had pinned up in the house somewhere a New Yorker cartoon that stayed with me. A couple is leaving a cocktail party, and she turns to him and says "Why do you have to mention that you're a Democrat and cause those long silences?"

Thing is, if I had the New Yorker software fired up at the moment, I could actually find that cartoon by typing "Democrat" and "long silences" into the search function. No question about it: this is the biggest time-waster I've found for the computer since Marathon. And, for all its equal power to disturb, more intellectually enriching.

Okay, I Lied

A few more crumbs before the month vanishes.

***

Thanks to Jason of Perfect Sound Forever, the web's best music magazine, for forwarding Little Steven's keynote address to a radio conference. It's all rah-rah, and I love the way the guy who posted this has bowdlerized it, because we know some of those words can get girls pregnant, right, kids?

But after the adrenaline of reading his words drains off, one wonders if what he's saying makes any sense. Is radio even a viable medium for breaking artists any more? Isn't his nostalgia-fuelled rant just another middle-aged guy saying "Aaah, music was better when I was a kid?" I like the idea of his "underground garage" format a lot, and I'm happy that so many new acts have gotten heard there, but it's been over 30 years since radio programming was done by live humans and deejays went unscripted or unformatted, so it's only on college stations and the occasional weirdo outlet like KPIG in California where Mr. Van Zandt's ideal is practiced.

In an age of cultural overproduction like we're living in, there's no way mass media can even begin to get a handle on what's out there, no matter how microtome-thin they slice the categories and divisions. It's almost impossible to squeeze all the goodies, old and new, onto even ten radio stations, as cable-casting listeners in the States already know. Hoping that commercial radio will take the lead again is nicely idealistic, but I'd like to hear less cheerleading and a lot more hard-nosed detail, Steven.

***

I was jolted out of my sleep this morning by the doorbell, and when I buzzed the person in, dressing as I did, I heard a hearty voice booming "GOOD MORNING!" Uh-oh, this couldn't be good.

But it was. I'm the guy in the building who, because I live on the ground floor and I'm almost always here, gets to take in the packages for the neighbors who aren't answering the bell. And, as I opened the door, here was the mustachioed, portly little guy who works for Hermes Versand, a delivery service. "Are you ready for...THE COUNTESS?" he asked, handing me a package. "Has she got BLUE BLOOD?" he inquired when I said yeah, I knew the Countess. I signed for the package, and there it was, addressed to [name deleted by request, 11/29/05]. Aka the 25-year-old girl upstairs who talks English with a Valley Girl accent and drives a convertible BMW sportscar with Freiburg plates.

German royalty: big deal. When I first moved here, I hung out with a crowd of students, including a tall, horsy woman who I'll call Ingeborg, because I can't remember her real name. One day we were going to do something, and someone asked me if I'd call her. They didn't know her number, but gave me her last name. Sure enough, there in the book, was XXX, Ingeborg Baroness von. "She's a baroness?" I asked one of my friends. "Ssssh. She hates people knowing that. Her parents are pretty awful about it."

Then there was Fred. Still is Fred, in fact, off in London. Fred the no-count count. There's history there. I once asked him if he were a count, why he never had any money or at least invited his friends up to some crumbling castle somewhere for drinks. "Well," he replied in his posh British accent (born in America, raised in Ireland, with a German title: an international kinda guy), "even if my uncle hadn't been involved in the plot against Hitler, Schulenburgs tend to breed like rabbits." And it was true: his great-uncle had been Police Chief in Berlin and had been part of the plot of noblemen and military who tried to kill Hitler with a bomb. His grandmother had been part of the German Resistance, and had lived to write a book about it.

But he was right. He went to Texas with me one time for SXSW, and we went off to Louisiana afterwards. He joined me on the condition that we go there via Schulenburg, Texas so he could satisfy his curiosity about its name. We walked into the Chamber of Commerce, and he immediately charmed the woman behind the counter into calling the town historian, who worked at the public library. He, in turn, directed us to the old graveyard where the man who'd founded the town was buried. Sure enough, in the back of the cemetery, we found an old-world-looking tombstone, and the words "in Hessen geboren" above Mr. Schulenburg's dates. "Oh, my," said Fred, scribbling down details, "this should keep Grandma busy for a while." As we drove away (laden with a dozen of the coffee mugs from the Chamber, which declared, in unwitting dismissal of the place, "Schulenburg: Half-way to Everywhere!" -- "There, that's Christmas sorted," said Fred), he explained that this guy was probably the fifth son or something, and he'd basically been told there'd be nothing for him to inherit, so he had to make his way in the world. At that time, a lot of land-agents were coming through Germany trying to settle the land between Austin and San Antonio to promote an Anglo majority because they were afraid that the Hispanic (Tejano) population might well side with Mexico against the Republic of Texas should another war break out. (Ridiculously paranoid -- those same Tejanos had just given their lives fighting for independence from Mexico -- but that's how it was). Tons of Germans settled what's now called the Hill Country, and Schulenburg wasn't the only impoverished nobleman to settle there, or the most high-ranking: the Prinz von Braunfels picked up, lock stock and modest crown, and founded New Braunfels, Texas.

Nor is Fred the highest-ranking nobleman to sit in my living-room. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was proud to play host to Chris Strachwitz, the founder of Arhoolie Records, so that we could talk about a project he's working on. I mentioned this to someone a few days later and he commented, "Oh, yeah, Chris Strachwitz. He's, like, a prince or something." Or something.

***

I've done the numbers, and from what I can tell, it's going to cost me just under €10,000 to make the move to France. That includes everything, including paying off all my debts. It also includes a number of padded figures, just because stuff always costs more than it looks like it will.

This is doable. Right now I'm anticipating liftoff mid next year. And accepting any legal work to raise the funds.

September's Last Crumbs (Probably)

I really don't get the Berlin Marathon. How on earth do you hold a race that lasts two days? Actually, I guess the first day's race wasn't runners, since I walked out of the apartment to go to the store in the middle of it on Saturday and looked over my shoulder to goggle at the speed the runners were achieving, only to realize seconds later that it was an endless stream of grim-faced inline skaters. (I think it may be illegal to show enjoyment in this city, but I'd better check with a lawyer first). They kept going the entire time I was at the store, and were still going strong when I got back, which is a time-span of about 35 minutes. The chaos this occasioned among the vehicles that couldn't use Torstr., of course, was of legendary proportions. And Berlin drivers lose their tempers very, very easily.

The next day, they were going down Torstr. on foot (I guess: I didn't go check) at about 8:30. I know this because there are people who line the route of the race and applaud constantly. There are others who whistle, and then there are the idiots who bring airhorns and honk them. They are very loud. They can wake you out of a sound sleep. They should be illegal. I mean, if I can't play music after 10pm without fear of a visit from the cops, how can these cretins stand out there for 90 minutes, honking aimlessly, on Sunday morning?

The promotional billboards for this event are still up all over town. They make it seem like a very grim event indeed. My favorite shows a row of porta-potties with exhausted people lined up in front of them. The caption is: There's stage fright even at the Berlin Marathon. Boy, that'd be enough to sell me!

And, as always, the kicker line, in English, apparently delivered by Adidas: Impossible Is Nothing!

Memo to Nike: change it to Do It Just. Or maybe Do Just It.

***

Ever willing to risk my frail body for my readers -- well, actually, because I was curious and because I was too lazy yesterday to go to Potsdamer Platz to hit Salomon in Potsdamer Platz -- I bought a couple of bagels at the Turkish bakery on the corner this morning. They weren't bagels. They were normal Berliner Brötschen, one sesame, one poppy-seed, only in bagel form, and at 80 cents each, twice the price of their un-holed brethren. They were clearly not boiled before baking, and I am not looking forward to the impending Israeli-Turkish War. Does anyone know how to say "you have to use high-gluten flour and you must boil them before you bake them" in Turkish?

Actually, they weren't as bad as the horrid cakey things Cynthia Barcomi introduced as bagels here about ten years ago, but today I was rummaging through some old tear-sheets while trying and failing to create an Excel spread-sheet for this class-action suit for freelancers and discovered one of my old articles about bagels. Ten years ago, I was wondering why a delicacy which was invented sixty or so miles away (historians are uncertain of the bagel's exact origin, but place it in Poland and/or Russia) wasn't being made here. Today, they're trendy (I have, somewhere, a little booklet entitled Was Ist Ein Bagel?, which advises that it's pronounced BYE-gull), and every half-assed bakery (including the one on my corner) is making "bagels" and a couple of "bagel" franchises have erupted in the touristy corners of my 'hood. None are as good as the German Bagel Brothers franchise, though. And I have a sneaking suspicion I'll be bereft of bagels once I move to France.

***

The former White Trash Fast Food location on the other corner has been a hive of activity for the past few days, and it looks like it might be turning into a gallery. That's all we need: another gallery around here. But I have no way of knowing for certain, because someone's put a huge sheet of brown paper over the door and written on it, in English:

DO
NOT
ASK

Fine. I didn't want to know anyway.

***

I feel guilty every minute I'm inside these days, because this fine warm weather won't last much longer. The current forecast is for rain starting tonight, and I'm just hoping Monday, which is a holiday (German Unification Day), will be cool and clear so that I can go to the last race of the season. Oncie the rain starts in, though, it'll be all downhill, and cold and gray will dominate the city once again. We've actually been very lucky, although the summer's been intermittent. Since the evidence is piling up that it'll be my last summer here, I really do want to get out and savor it until it's utterly gone.