For a long time, I've said that if a use could be found for this city's most abundant organic product, the economy here could turn around. Well, according to this article, San Francisco is hoping to turn its dog poop into energy.
Actually, it's not all that surprising. I just did an article for the forthcoming issue of Invest In Germany magazine (stop giggling: I have to feed myself and pay the rent) about this company, which is doing a similar thing with the byproducts of sewage treatment plants in a pilot project in Germany.
Unfortunately, as you can read, the San Francisco project is dependent upon pet owners cleaning up after their dogs. This little bit of civility has yet to occur here, although dispensers of little plastic bags can be found in some parks. They don't last long, though; they're routinely vandalized and the baggies strewn around the park.
Still, Paris and some other places have those motorcycle-like vaccum cleaner machines, and if the city can scrape together enough credit for a small fleet of those (unlikely, I admit, in the present fiscal crisis), maybe Berlin can attack its energy crisis and its unemployment crisis at the very same time.
Naaah. Never happen.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Term Limit
All things end, and this blog is no exception. It's not going to happen overnight, and it's not even going to happen anytime soon, but this week I finally got to see the next few months fall into place, so this has been on my mind.
I'll be off to Texas for SXSW on the 8th or 9th of March, stopping in Paris to see a performance by Carl Stone, and then heading off to Austin via Dallas the next morning. The reason for leaving from Paris (besides going to see Carl) was that on my return, I was going to rest up for a day, then take the train down to Montpellier to start apartment-hunting.
Thing is, I'd somehow gotten in my mind that late March is the right time to do this. I have no idea where this chimera came from, but there you go. Two of my contacts down there told me this week that this would be way too early, and that I should think about late May instead. So...that's now my deadline.
This is actually a Good Thing, in that it gives me more time to raise money. Getting paid, in my business, takes a lot of time. I'm still waiting to get paid for work I did in October and November, which is pretty much par for the course. And it's not just about renting the apartment; I'm going to need a new washing machine, a new couch, more shelving, and who knows what else.
Fortunately, there's also another plan in the works. This blog is going to serve as the basis for a book, a sort of memoir of my semi-voluntary expatriation, a guide to how not to expatriate, in a way, as well as a narrative of the things I've seen and done here. After all, when I arrived, it was only five years after Germany had reunited, and the divisions were still very much in evidence. Other former East-bloc countries were even more tentative. At any rate, over the past few weeks I've been putting together a book proposal and this week I had a very encouraging talk with my agent, a former colleague from the daily newspaper I worked at in the '80s. Don't worry: nobody's comments will be quoted, I don't think, and if I do want to quote you, by chance, you'll be contacted.
But moving to Montpellier, which will almost certainly happen now in the next three months, is going to render maintaining a blog called BerlinBites absurd. This blog will have to be shut down.
On the other hand, I've become very fond of this kind of forum, and I'm certain I'll want to keep it up. I've been wracking my brains for a name for the new one, but it's really too early. Unfortunately, this name doesn't lend itself to the kind of morphing that Marie's blog can do: it's gone from No Hurry in Africa to (I swear) No Hurry in Jersey City, and now she's in Kuwait. (Well, actually, today she's in Bahrain, but that's Marie for you). Somehow, MontpellierBites doesn't sound right. Not to mention that most Americans can't pronounce it (or Languedoc, either, for that matter).
Still, I'm sure the next three months will provide me with plenty to write about here. For one thing, America is about as foreign a country as Italy for me after all these years, so I'm sure there'll be some culture-shocked posts from my stay in the States, especially if my nebulous plans to go to California pan out. And then there'll be the joy of packing up and moving. Sauerkraut will ensue, you may be assured.
Anyway, the big news this week is I have a deadline. I'm a writer. Writers like deadlines. And now I have one.
Gulp.
I'll be off to Texas for SXSW on the 8th or 9th of March, stopping in Paris to see a performance by Carl Stone, and then heading off to Austin via Dallas the next morning. The reason for leaving from Paris (besides going to see Carl) was that on my return, I was going to rest up for a day, then take the train down to Montpellier to start apartment-hunting.
Thing is, I'd somehow gotten in my mind that late March is the right time to do this. I have no idea where this chimera came from, but there you go. Two of my contacts down there told me this week that this would be way too early, and that I should think about late May instead. So...that's now my deadline.
This is actually a Good Thing, in that it gives me more time to raise money. Getting paid, in my business, takes a lot of time. I'm still waiting to get paid for work I did in October and November, which is pretty much par for the course. And it's not just about renting the apartment; I'm going to need a new washing machine, a new couch, more shelving, and who knows what else.
Fortunately, there's also another plan in the works. This blog is going to serve as the basis for a book, a sort of memoir of my semi-voluntary expatriation, a guide to how not to expatriate, in a way, as well as a narrative of the things I've seen and done here. After all, when I arrived, it was only five years after Germany had reunited, and the divisions were still very much in evidence. Other former East-bloc countries were even more tentative. At any rate, over the past few weeks I've been putting together a book proposal and this week I had a very encouraging talk with my agent, a former colleague from the daily newspaper I worked at in the '80s. Don't worry: nobody's comments will be quoted, I don't think, and if I do want to quote you, by chance, you'll be contacted.
But moving to Montpellier, which will almost certainly happen now in the next three months, is going to render maintaining a blog called BerlinBites absurd. This blog will have to be shut down.
On the other hand, I've become very fond of this kind of forum, and I'm certain I'll want to keep it up. I've been wracking my brains for a name for the new one, but it's really too early. Unfortunately, this name doesn't lend itself to the kind of morphing that Marie's blog can do: it's gone from No Hurry in Africa to (I swear) No Hurry in Jersey City, and now she's in Kuwait. (Well, actually, today she's in Bahrain, but that's Marie for you). Somehow, MontpellierBites doesn't sound right. Not to mention that most Americans can't pronounce it (or Languedoc, either, for that matter).
Still, I'm sure the next three months will provide me with plenty to write about here. For one thing, America is about as foreign a country as Italy for me after all these years, so I'm sure there'll be some culture-shocked posts from my stay in the States, especially if my nebulous plans to go to California pan out. And then there'll be the joy of packing up and moving. Sauerkraut will ensue, you may be assured.
Anyway, the big news this week is I have a deadline. I'm a writer. Writers like deadlines. And now I have one.
Gulp.
Saturday, February 18, 2006
The Missing Stink
I realized yesterday what's been missing from this winter: the smell of coal.
It looks like finally, after all these years, coal oven heating is disappearing from Berlin. I noticed it briefly when the winter was just getting underway and thought I'd comment here, but then I thought, no, today's just a fluke. It'll be back. And it was, very lightly, very subtly, on some cold days. But the days when the entire city stunk like some sort of burned coffee horror are, I guess, over.
Having had the privilege of living in an apartment that had not one, but two, kinds of coal ovens as the only source of heat, during a winter (1995) that was colder, they said, than any but the one that coincided with the siege of Stalingrad, I have some experience with this medieval form of alleged warmth. By far the most common kind is Braunkohle, soft, brownish coal that comes in bricks the size of, well, bricks. These get burned in a standing oven of greater or lesser exterior fanciness, with half-glazed ceramic tiles with special backs that are supposed to maximize the radiant heat. At about chest height, there was a door, which led to the oven. You'd put in newspaper, then some kindling wood (people scavenged fruit crates all year long for this purpose, and it's not uncommon to see a pile of them out on the street even now, offered to people who need them), and, when this was going, a few bricks of coal. You would then close the door and freeze, because it would take a minimum of an hour for the heat inside -- which was quite intense -- to start radiating out of the tiles.
The one I had was in my bedroom, and this was one reason I hated it so much. I like to sleep cold -- well, not freezing, but cool -- and the oven made it impossible. If you fed it at about 8 pm, it'd be doing its best around midnight, when I wanted to go to bed. I'd have a hard time going to sleep, but about 4am, I'd be awake because it was too cold. I'd have some sweatshirts near the bed to put on, and then go back to sleep. And when I woke up, it would be so cold I wouldn't want to get out of bed.
One night, I actually started developing a fantasy. Because I had a cab-driver friend, I knew a little about the prostitution trade in Berlin, because she often got passengers who wanted to pick up a whore. I knew that most of the unlicensed prostitutes here were basically slaves, from various Eastern European places, working for the Russian mob. When their usefulness was deemed over, they were abandoned, even though by then they were ususally addicted to heroin or HIV-positive. You could, I was told to my horror, buy one for around $50. So I thought, wow, if anyone knows how these damned ovens work, it'd be a woman from the East. I could buy her, treat her humanely, get her in a HIV-treatment program, and all she'd have to do would be to make sure the heat in the two ovens worked all the time.
Mind you, in the cold light of day, I was horrified that I'd even had this thought, but like I said, this was the coldest winter in sixty years. Like, breaking the ice on the dishes if you'd left them there overnight in the sink kind of cold. And no, I didn't even take this weird fantasy any further than conceiving of it.
Oh, yes, I said "ovens." The other oven I had was a metal thing, in the living room. It burned black coal, which has another name I've forgotten. It burns hotter, and ignites quicker, than the brown coal, but it burns out faster and is more expensive. I was forever dumping another scuttle of coal pebbles into this machine, and yet it was never really warm. I used to sit on the couch at night, reading in a jacket with two sweaters, a shirt, and a t-shirt.
The other horrible thing about coal heat is that you've got to have so much coal on hand, and it's heavy and dirty. Houses with coal heat provide a little lockable coal cellar in the basement where you can store coal, a ton at a time. Unfortunately, in this particular slum, the neighbors had wrecked the cellar assigned to my apartment, apparently in an attempt to steal coal. A successful one. (Given all that transpired with the neighbors in this place, this is hardly surprising, but you'll have to wait for the book for that).
Anyway, this meant that I had to go to the coal-selling lady, who had a dim, barely lit, dungeon a few blocks away, with my little handcart and buy 35 kilos of coal a day. Actually, the consumption wasn't quite 35 kilos a day, but nearly every day I had to buy around that much. It wasn't terribly expensive, thank heavens -- although it would have been significantly cheaper by the ton -- but it was a drag pulling that cart back to the house, then firing up both ovens, and praying for a little warmth.
Of course, burning the coal was only half of it. Getting rid of the ashes was the other half. The people I was subletting from had given me zero instruction on how to use these infernal ovens, nor had they left any equipment around. The first time I scooped out the incredibly fine yellow ash from the brown-coal oven, it went everywhere. Electrostatically charged in the cold, dry air, it mostly poured into the plastic bucket I'd found somewhere around the house, but clouds of it also went up, into my hair, up my nose, onto the bookshelves, onto the bed, and everywhere else. I still raise a cloud of it every time I turn my futon over, and it's been nearly ten years since I've moved. But there was another problem, of course: if there was any coal still burning, it was dangerous. And I noticed that the very first time I cleaned that damned oven out: on the side of the plastic bucket, a tiny black mark appeared, and suddenly a hole started widening. I dashed outside with it, praying the clinker would burn itself out before I dumped the ash. And then, of course, I was left with the fact of a pile of ash on the rug, no bucket, and an oven that had to be fed.
These clinkers were a constant hazard, especially as the city garbage company replaced the old metal garbage bins with plastic ones. Every now and again, you'd come across a twisted piece of plastic art, with singed stuff in it, icicles hanging from it, where the fire department had had to put out a garbage fire caused by live clinkers.
Now, right about this point, you may be asking yourself how, in a country as environmentally aware as Germany (second-greenest country in Europe after Holland!), this barbaric means of heating, pouring tons of CO2 and sulfur into the air each day, was allowed to exist. Part of the reason, I'm fairly sure, was reunification. Lots of buildings in the East were coal-heated, since it was cheap because the majority of the brown coal came from the friendly neighboring socialist country of Poland (where it was a major hard-currency trade item thanks to West Germans needing it, too), and you couldn't very well expect all those buildings to conform to the new code overnight. However, I have to mention that the apartment where I had coal heat was very much in old West Berlin, and I had plenty of friends in the West who had coal oven heating. There was suppsed to be an EU-dictated deadline for getting rid of it, but nobody seemed to know when it was.
And, I should mention right about here, even with my two ovens, it could have been worse: a neighbor of mine at that time, also in the West, had all of his water heated by coal. This, of course, meant that, unlike me, he had to buy it year-round.
Yes, folks, this was the 20th Century. Really, it was.
But like I said, for the first time since I've lived here, the smell was absent as fall started to cool off. It hasn't been entirely missing. One day I clearly smelled wood-smoke, but it's not impossible that one of my neighbors in one of the fancier buildings has a fireplace as part of the living-room. And I have, in fact, smelled coal from time to time, but never as strongly as before, even as much as last year. They're renovating one of the last buildings on my block to need it at the moment, and I've been watching the dumpster outside waiting for the inevitable load of tiles. It's probably the last one for several blocks around, and I won't be sorry to see evidence that less coal's being burned.
The weird thing is, lots of Germans will argue that coal heat is actually good for you, and offer all kinds of rationales about dry versus wet heat and other imponderables that any sane doctor would arch an eyebrow at. The only thing I'll say is that some of the old ovens, many of which can be seen in the museum in Velten, just north of Berlin, a town which still makes tons of ceramic tiles due to the clay deposits in the area, were strikingly beautiful. Until you had to clean them.
Which brings me to another end-of-an-era subject related to all of this. As the weather begins to warm up in the spring, people look for signs of good luck, and none is so potent as the Schornsteinfeger, or chimney-sweep. These guys, mostly young, swarm the city when it's chimney-cleaning time, clad in their traditional outfits of frock coat and top-hat, holding swabs and buckets. They're young because they don't live too long, I suspect: chimney-sweeps historically have had abnormal instances of lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. But to see a chimney-sweep in this amazingly superstitious country is fantastic luck: people often give chimney-sweep dolls to each other on important occasions as a way of wishing good luck.
The chimney-sweeps, too, are disappearing.
Which is hardly surprising. So is Berlin's luck.
It looks like finally, after all these years, coal oven heating is disappearing from Berlin. I noticed it briefly when the winter was just getting underway and thought I'd comment here, but then I thought, no, today's just a fluke. It'll be back. And it was, very lightly, very subtly, on some cold days. But the days when the entire city stunk like some sort of burned coffee horror are, I guess, over.
Having had the privilege of living in an apartment that had not one, but two, kinds of coal ovens as the only source of heat, during a winter (1995) that was colder, they said, than any but the one that coincided with the siege of Stalingrad, I have some experience with this medieval form of alleged warmth. By far the most common kind is Braunkohle, soft, brownish coal that comes in bricks the size of, well, bricks. These get burned in a standing oven of greater or lesser exterior fanciness, with half-glazed ceramic tiles with special backs that are supposed to maximize the radiant heat. At about chest height, there was a door, which led to the oven. You'd put in newspaper, then some kindling wood (people scavenged fruit crates all year long for this purpose, and it's not uncommon to see a pile of them out on the street even now, offered to people who need them), and, when this was going, a few bricks of coal. You would then close the door and freeze, because it would take a minimum of an hour for the heat inside -- which was quite intense -- to start radiating out of the tiles.
The one I had was in my bedroom, and this was one reason I hated it so much. I like to sleep cold -- well, not freezing, but cool -- and the oven made it impossible. If you fed it at about 8 pm, it'd be doing its best around midnight, when I wanted to go to bed. I'd have a hard time going to sleep, but about 4am, I'd be awake because it was too cold. I'd have some sweatshirts near the bed to put on, and then go back to sleep. And when I woke up, it would be so cold I wouldn't want to get out of bed.
One night, I actually started developing a fantasy. Because I had a cab-driver friend, I knew a little about the prostitution trade in Berlin, because she often got passengers who wanted to pick up a whore. I knew that most of the unlicensed prostitutes here were basically slaves, from various Eastern European places, working for the Russian mob. When their usefulness was deemed over, they were abandoned, even though by then they were ususally addicted to heroin or HIV-positive. You could, I was told to my horror, buy one for around $50. So I thought, wow, if anyone knows how these damned ovens work, it'd be a woman from the East. I could buy her, treat her humanely, get her in a HIV-treatment program, and all she'd have to do would be to make sure the heat in the two ovens worked all the time.
Mind you, in the cold light of day, I was horrified that I'd even had this thought, but like I said, this was the coldest winter in sixty years. Like, breaking the ice on the dishes if you'd left them there overnight in the sink kind of cold. And no, I didn't even take this weird fantasy any further than conceiving of it.
Oh, yes, I said "ovens." The other oven I had was a metal thing, in the living room. It burned black coal, which has another name I've forgotten. It burns hotter, and ignites quicker, than the brown coal, but it burns out faster and is more expensive. I was forever dumping another scuttle of coal pebbles into this machine, and yet it was never really warm. I used to sit on the couch at night, reading in a jacket with two sweaters, a shirt, and a t-shirt.
The other horrible thing about coal heat is that you've got to have so much coal on hand, and it's heavy and dirty. Houses with coal heat provide a little lockable coal cellar in the basement where you can store coal, a ton at a time. Unfortunately, in this particular slum, the neighbors had wrecked the cellar assigned to my apartment, apparently in an attempt to steal coal. A successful one. (Given all that transpired with the neighbors in this place, this is hardly surprising, but you'll have to wait for the book for that).
Anyway, this meant that I had to go to the coal-selling lady, who had a dim, barely lit, dungeon a few blocks away, with my little handcart and buy 35 kilos of coal a day. Actually, the consumption wasn't quite 35 kilos a day, but nearly every day I had to buy around that much. It wasn't terribly expensive, thank heavens -- although it would have been significantly cheaper by the ton -- but it was a drag pulling that cart back to the house, then firing up both ovens, and praying for a little warmth.
Of course, burning the coal was only half of it. Getting rid of the ashes was the other half. The people I was subletting from had given me zero instruction on how to use these infernal ovens, nor had they left any equipment around. The first time I scooped out the incredibly fine yellow ash from the brown-coal oven, it went everywhere. Electrostatically charged in the cold, dry air, it mostly poured into the plastic bucket I'd found somewhere around the house, but clouds of it also went up, into my hair, up my nose, onto the bookshelves, onto the bed, and everywhere else. I still raise a cloud of it every time I turn my futon over, and it's been nearly ten years since I've moved. But there was another problem, of course: if there was any coal still burning, it was dangerous. And I noticed that the very first time I cleaned that damned oven out: on the side of the plastic bucket, a tiny black mark appeared, and suddenly a hole started widening. I dashed outside with it, praying the clinker would burn itself out before I dumped the ash. And then, of course, I was left with the fact of a pile of ash on the rug, no bucket, and an oven that had to be fed.
These clinkers were a constant hazard, especially as the city garbage company replaced the old metal garbage bins with plastic ones. Every now and again, you'd come across a twisted piece of plastic art, with singed stuff in it, icicles hanging from it, where the fire department had had to put out a garbage fire caused by live clinkers.
Now, right about this point, you may be asking yourself how, in a country as environmentally aware as Germany (second-greenest country in Europe after Holland!), this barbaric means of heating, pouring tons of CO2 and sulfur into the air each day, was allowed to exist. Part of the reason, I'm fairly sure, was reunification. Lots of buildings in the East were coal-heated, since it was cheap because the majority of the brown coal came from the friendly neighboring socialist country of Poland (where it was a major hard-currency trade item thanks to West Germans needing it, too), and you couldn't very well expect all those buildings to conform to the new code overnight. However, I have to mention that the apartment where I had coal heat was very much in old West Berlin, and I had plenty of friends in the West who had coal oven heating. There was suppsed to be an EU-dictated deadline for getting rid of it, but nobody seemed to know when it was.
And, I should mention right about here, even with my two ovens, it could have been worse: a neighbor of mine at that time, also in the West, had all of his water heated by coal. This, of course, meant that, unlike me, he had to buy it year-round.
Yes, folks, this was the 20th Century. Really, it was.
But like I said, for the first time since I've lived here, the smell was absent as fall started to cool off. It hasn't been entirely missing. One day I clearly smelled wood-smoke, but it's not impossible that one of my neighbors in one of the fancier buildings has a fireplace as part of the living-room. And I have, in fact, smelled coal from time to time, but never as strongly as before, even as much as last year. They're renovating one of the last buildings on my block to need it at the moment, and I've been watching the dumpster outside waiting for the inevitable load of tiles. It's probably the last one for several blocks around, and I won't be sorry to see evidence that less coal's being burned.
The weird thing is, lots of Germans will argue that coal heat is actually good for you, and offer all kinds of rationales about dry versus wet heat and other imponderables that any sane doctor would arch an eyebrow at. The only thing I'll say is that some of the old ovens, many of which can be seen in the museum in Velten, just north of Berlin, a town which still makes tons of ceramic tiles due to the clay deposits in the area, were strikingly beautiful. Until you had to clean them.
Which brings me to another end-of-an-era subject related to all of this. As the weather begins to warm up in the spring, people look for signs of good luck, and none is so potent as the Schornsteinfeger, or chimney-sweep. These guys, mostly young, swarm the city when it's chimney-cleaning time, clad in their traditional outfits of frock coat and top-hat, holding swabs and buckets. They're young because they don't live too long, I suspect: chimney-sweeps historically have had abnormal instances of lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. But to see a chimney-sweep in this amazingly superstitious country is fantastic luck: people often give chimney-sweep dolls to each other on important occasions as a way of wishing good luck.
The chimney-sweeps, too, are disappearing.
Which is hardly surprising. So is Berlin's luck.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Mad Cow
The past few days, I've really been craving Chinese food, and, this being Berlin, if you want Chinese food, you'd better learn how to make it yourself, because the so-called Chinese restaurants here all suck. So last night I went to the store and bought some flank steak, properly battered into thinness and rolled up for the German delicacy Rinderrouladen, as I have many times
before. This is good stuff for turning into Chinese beef dishes because it shreds into nice little matchsticks which are thin enough to stir-fry quickly. Plus, I was in luck: this was the use-by date for this package, so it was half price!
So around dinner-time, I pulled it out of the fridge to start preparing it and when I opened the plastic box they entomb their meat in at this supermarket, an odd, but not unpleasant, odor reached my nose. I checked the package: "Prepared ready to cook," it said. "Ingredients: 95% beef, marinade (water, iodized salt, glucose syrup), stabilizer: trisodium nitrate, flavor
enhancer: E 621 [aka MSG], antioxidant E 3013."
What on earth?
I couldn't use this for Chinese cooking. In fact, I can't use it for anything: I'm sensitive to MSG, and I certainly don't cook with it. Plus, what's with the glucose syrup and all? If I'd wanted Sauerbraten I'd have bought it, although my guess is that the pre-prepared Sauerbraten there also has MSG.
Okay, maybe this preparation makes it easier to make Rinderrouladen, which I've never made, but even if that were what I was trying to make I'd be angry. I'd want to season and treat it my own way.
So tonight I thought, well, I've got all the other stuff I bought -- I've had to pitch a full pound of beef, which really, really hurts, considering all the nights I've had little or nothing to eat around here -- so maybe I just made a mistake and I'll go back and buy untreated flank steak.
No way: every piece of beef in the supermarket is now treated with this crap, except for the hamburger.
What are these people thinking? Or is this just because Germans tend to regard beef with deep suspicion? But stewing beef, steaks (to the extent they actually have steaks: something called Rumpsteak which looks tough as leather and contains no fat whatever), soup bones...all treated with this mass of chemicals!
So beef's off my diet now until I can either find another source (unlikely) or until I move.
German food retailing: you'll take what we give you and like it. The customer is always wrong. We reserve the right to poison you without warning you first. There is only one way to prepare any given foodstuff. And who cares what it tastes like: pass the salt.
before. This is good stuff for turning into Chinese beef dishes because it shreds into nice little matchsticks which are thin enough to stir-fry quickly. Plus, I was in luck: this was the use-by date for this package, so it was half price!
So around dinner-time, I pulled it out of the fridge to start preparing it and when I opened the plastic box they entomb their meat in at this supermarket, an odd, but not unpleasant, odor reached my nose. I checked the package: "Prepared ready to cook," it said. "Ingredients: 95% beef, marinade (water, iodized salt, glucose syrup), stabilizer: trisodium nitrate, flavor
enhancer: E 621 [aka MSG], antioxidant E 3013."
What on earth?
I couldn't use this for Chinese cooking. In fact, I can't use it for anything: I'm sensitive to MSG, and I certainly don't cook with it. Plus, what's with the glucose syrup and all? If I'd wanted Sauerbraten I'd have bought it, although my guess is that the pre-prepared Sauerbraten there also has MSG.
Okay, maybe this preparation makes it easier to make Rinderrouladen, which I've never made, but even if that were what I was trying to make I'd be angry. I'd want to season and treat it my own way.
So tonight I thought, well, I've got all the other stuff I bought -- I've had to pitch a full pound of beef, which really, really hurts, considering all the nights I've had little or nothing to eat around here -- so maybe I just made a mistake and I'll go back and buy untreated flank steak.
No way: every piece of beef in the supermarket is now treated with this crap, except for the hamburger.
What are these people thinking? Or is this just because Germans tend to regard beef with deep suspicion? But stewing beef, steaks (to the extent they actually have steaks: something called Rumpsteak which looks tough as leather and contains no fat whatever), soup bones...all treated with this mass of chemicals!
So beef's off my diet now until I can either find another source (unlikely) or until I move.
German food retailing: you'll take what we give you and like it. The customer is always wrong. We reserve the right to poison you without warning you first. There is only one way to prepare any given foodstuff. And who cares what it tastes like: pass the salt.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
More Ranting and Raving
It's right about now that people start to lose it in Berlin. Between the long nights, the cold, and the utter shabbiness of this place, it gets to you. I've always had a safety-valve: I go to SXSW in Austin each year, and get out of a couple of weeks of cold, rain, and depression.
I was just thinking about this as I took a walk to see if I could find a book to read at Dussmann, which has the largest selection of English-language books in town (which isn't saying much), and the tabloids were screaming about a guy who apparently went nuts with a knife on the subway last night. The extreme rarity of such a situation both makes it headline fodder and points out how extremely safe this city is, by and large. There are some places further east where I wouldn't like to be a Vietnamese at 3 am, but in terms of street crime or things like this, it's easy.
One of the tabs had a line across the top saying "How many crazy people do we have in Berlin?" I'd say take the latest population figures, subtract maybe 10-20%, and you've got your number. Although instead of "crazy" I'd say "mentally ill."
***
Thanks to Karen for pointing me towards a rich vein of sauerkraut, one which is even intellectually and socially redeeming. These guys are critiquing the German media, and doing it well. It's a shame that their politics are so gung-ho American and, thus, right-wing, but if you can read around that, you'll get a good picture of what the German media's saying and how it's saying it. Especially good are the magazine covers, in case you're wondering how America's currently perceived by Germany's media elite, which is not to say the average person in the street, I don't think. Written German is quite different from spoken German, so I don't read the local newspapers or watch TV (well, my TV blew up a couple of years ago anyway) where the news is read in the same indecipherable formal language. This site is a good place to stop each day if you want to widen your perspective.
***
Yes, it's Berlinale time, which means that the Potsdamer Platz subway stations are either closed or undergoing repair. The festival, of course is held in Potz Platz, so this annual ritual is just another part of Berlin's anti-tourist offensive, along with not signposting anything in any language other than German and, of course, the ritual hostility from service personnel.
I've never figured out, either, why Berlin stages a film festival in February. Faced with the choice of opening your film to the European markets in Berlin in Feburary or the French Riviera in May, honestly, which would you choose to do? I rarely go to Berlinale events (in fact, I've only been to two, and one was for a film I'd helped work on, although my name was left off the credits), but I remember standing in line for one screening back before everything got consolidated in one place and having a huge roof full of slush rain down on the whole lot of us. I got a bunch down my back, thanks to lucky clothing placement.
But I do have to admit, I'm simply not that interested in films. I think the last one I saw in a theater was Ray, and that's got to be over a year ago. Part of my indifference is due to having been exposed to far too many amateur cinéastes over the years. grad students in film and the like, who just can't understand that all I really want from a film is a good story accompanied by good visuals. The icy condescension I've been subjected to when stating frankly that I didn't particularly like a film (for instance McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a film which kept me out of theaters for five years), the assumption that one has to be able to know the technical vocabulary, the camera tricks, the mise-en-scène-whatever-the-hell-that-is, or one isn't able to have the full experience, just annoys me. And since film festivals are largely people making films for other filmmakers as far as I can tell (and, in Berlin, Hollywood premiering the Big Films they're going to impose on us in a few weeks), I'm just not interested.
Still, it does bring an awful lot of Americans here. One is a woman with a film called Pine Flats, posters for which were put up on every flat surface in my neighborhood (including a couple of Nike paintings, dammit), mostly illegally, so I hope the damn thing falls flat. Others were like the ladies I saw on Friedrichstr. today, clearly American because they were clutching bottled water like their lives depended on it. Forty degrees Fahrenheit out there and you gotta have your bottled water. Either American mothers aren't doing such a good job of weaning kids, or the dangers of dehydration are far worse than I've been told.
***
There goes the neighborhood: someone has opened a gallery on my street. For photography and contemporary art, it says. It's never open, and what's up now -- dull photos -- sure isn't going to change the world. But there's a subsidy a landlord can collect for a while by renting out an empty space to would-be gallerists in this part of town, which is what was responsible for the rise of Auguststr. some years back. Nowadays, though, the cheap rents have disappeared, so the bulk of the interesting galleries there have, too, replaced by blatantly commercial hangers of crap. I was going to give you an example from a gallery I pass frequently, Röhr + Ripken, but the website they ostentatiously display in their window doesn't seem to exist. Too bad: you're missing some really depressingly ugly stuff.
But then, that's what you're missing in general by not being in Berlin in February!
***
(Added a few hours later)
Almost forgot: although the money hasn't come together yet, although the apartment has yet to be found, I received proof positive yesterday that I will, in fact, be moving from Berlin shortly. It was this article in the New York Times. I've been contributing to Fresh Air for almost 20 years, yet I've never lived anywhere I could hear it. Even though I spent several years using KUT Austin's studios, the station refused to add the program to its lineup -- even as it gained status as one of NPR's most popular -- until about six months after I moved.
Now that it'll be available in Berlin, though, that just means I'll be gone.
I was just thinking about this as I took a walk to see if I could find a book to read at Dussmann, which has the largest selection of English-language books in town (which isn't saying much), and the tabloids were screaming about a guy who apparently went nuts with a knife on the subway last night. The extreme rarity of such a situation both makes it headline fodder and points out how extremely safe this city is, by and large. There are some places further east where I wouldn't like to be a Vietnamese at 3 am, but in terms of street crime or things like this, it's easy.
One of the tabs had a line across the top saying "How many crazy people do we have in Berlin?" I'd say take the latest population figures, subtract maybe 10-20%, and you've got your number. Although instead of "crazy" I'd say "mentally ill."
***
Thanks to Karen for pointing me towards a rich vein of sauerkraut, one which is even intellectually and socially redeeming. These guys are critiquing the German media, and doing it well. It's a shame that their politics are so gung-ho American and, thus, right-wing, but if you can read around that, you'll get a good picture of what the German media's saying and how it's saying it. Especially good are the magazine covers, in case you're wondering how America's currently perceived by Germany's media elite, which is not to say the average person in the street, I don't think. Written German is quite different from spoken German, so I don't read the local newspapers or watch TV (well, my TV blew up a couple of years ago anyway) where the news is read in the same indecipherable formal language. This site is a good place to stop each day if you want to widen your perspective.
***
Yes, it's Berlinale time, which means that the Potsdamer Platz subway stations are either closed or undergoing repair. The festival, of course is held in Potz Platz, so this annual ritual is just another part of Berlin's anti-tourist offensive, along with not signposting anything in any language other than German and, of course, the ritual hostility from service personnel.
I've never figured out, either, why Berlin stages a film festival in February. Faced with the choice of opening your film to the European markets in Berlin in Feburary or the French Riviera in May, honestly, which would you choose to do? I rarely go to Berlinale events (in fact, I've only been to two, and one was for a film I'd helped work on, although my name was left off the credits), but I remember standing in line for one screening back before everything got consolidated in one place and having a huge roof full of slush rain down on the whole lot of us. I got a bunch down my back, thanks to lucky clothing placement.
But I do have to admit, I'm simply not that interested in films. I think the last one I saw in a theater was Ray, and that's got to be over a year ago. Part of my indifference is due to having been exposed to far too many amateur cinéastes over the years. grad students in film and the like, who just can't understand that all I really want from a film is a good story accompanied by good visuals. The icy condescension I've been subjected to when stating frankly that I didn't particularly like a film (for instance McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a film which kept me out of theaters for five years), the assumption that one has to be able to know the technical vocabulary, the camera tricks, the mise-en-scène-whatever-the-hell-that-is, or one isn't able to have the full experience, just annoys me. And since film festivals are largely people making films for other filmmakers as far as I can tell (and, in Berlin, Hollywood premiering the Big Films they're going to impose on us in a few weeks), I'm just not interested.
Still, it does bring an awful lot of Americans here. One is a woman with a film called Pine Flats, posters for which were put up on every flat surface in my neighborhood (including a couple of Nike paintings, dammit), mostly illegally, so I hope the damn thing falls flat. Others were like the ladies I saw on Friedrichstr. today, clearly American because they were clutching bottled water like their lives depended on it. Forty degrees Fahrenheit out there and you gotta have your bottled water. Either American mothers aren't doing such a good job of weaning kids, or the dangers of dehydration are far worse than I've been told.
***
There goes the neighborhood: someone has opened a gallery on my street. For photography and contemporary art, it says. It's never open, and what's up now -- dull photos -- sure isn't going to change the world. But there's a subsidy a landlord can collect for a while by renting out an empty space to would-be gallerists in this part of town, which is what was responsible for the rise of Auguststr. some years back. Nowadays, though, the cheap rents have disappeared, so the bulk of the interesting galleries there have, too, replaced by blatantly commercial hangers of crap. I was going to give you an example from a gallery I pass frequently, Röhr + Ripken, but the website they ostentatiously display in their window doesn't seem to exist. Too bad: you're missing some really depressingly ugly stuff.
But then, that's what you're missing in general by not being in Berlin in February!
***
(Added a few hours later)
Almost forgot: although the money hasn't come together yet, although the apartment has yet to be found, I received proof positive yesterday that I will, in fact, be moving from Berlin shortly. It was this article in the New York Times. I've been contributing to Fresh Air for almost 20 years, yet I've never lived anywhere I could hear it. Even though I spent several years using KUT Austin's studios, the station refused to add the program to its lineup -- even as it gained status as one of NPR's most popular -- until about six months after I moved.
Now that it'll be available in Berlin, though, that just means I'll be gone.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Addenda And Corrigenda
Three things from this month that I forgot to post.
***
Inexplicably missing from my top non-reissue records was the record I played second-most after Jon Hardy's, Transglobal Underground's Impossible Broadcasting
. Most of these world-music-goes-dance things are indigestible stews of samples, or new agey tranceodelic crap, or condescending primitivist assemblages that are embarrassing to listen to. I have no idea who these people are, but as soon as they swing into "The Khaleega Stomp," with its infectious "WOO-hah!" chant, you know they're putting the dancefloor, instead of their own cleverness, first. Add to that Sheema Mukherjee, one of the baddest sitarists around, with a technique half Earl Scruggs and half Vilyat Khan, stir with a genuine sense of humor, and you've got yourself a great album. Check it out.
***
Sort of a followup to my "Listening to Trains" post from November: The cheap way to get to Paris from Berlin is often through Amsterdam, which means taking the Thalys, the French/Belgian/Dutch/German-owned fast train. Not as nice as either France's TGV or Germany's ICE, it still gets you there, albeit in cramped seats in a depressing red-brown interior. The announcements are in four languages, Dutch, French, German, and English, and up until this afternoon I thought I'd caught them in a weird German grammatical error, but checking in with a translator friend, it turned out to be yet another weird bit of German grammar I'd never encountered before. What's indisputably odd, however, is the English announcements, all of which start with an oddly-inflected "Ladies...and gentlemen," which sounds distinctly like the speaker is implying that you're in a car filled with drag queens and men. Still, it must be said that it's a nice service for monolingual English speakers. One way you know you've changed to Deutsche Bahn is that all the announcements are in German.
***
Finally, a wine bargain discovered at last Saturday's launch party for the magazine. That whole part of the country is known for its reds and, by some, for its rosés (Languedoc's big secret: great rosés), but I was offered a small glass of a white called Picpul de Pinet, which Robin had picked up at Monoprix, the low-end supermarket, for €2. "It's remarkably good," he said, and as I tasted it, his next-door neighbor, Paolo, said "Imagine drinking this with oysters." He's right, though: the wine's from down around Sète, and it's obviously perfect for that. People say that nobody respects Languedoc wines because they're so cheap, but I say if you can make a two-buck wine this good, that just leaves me more to spend on oysters!
***
Inexplicably missing from my top non-reissue records was the record I played second-most after Jon Hardy's, Transglobal Underground's Impossible Broadcasting
. Most of these world-music-goes-dance things are indigestible stews of samples, or new agey tranceodelic crap, or condescending primitivist assemblages that are embarrassing to listen to. I have no idea who these people are, but as soon as they swing into "The Khaleega Stomp," with its infectious "WOO-hah!" chant, you know they're putting the dancefloor, instead of their own cleverness, first. Add to that Sheema Mukherjee, one of the baddest sitarists around, with a technique half Earl Scruggs and half Vilyat Khan, stir with a genuine sense of humor, and you've got yourself a great album. Check it out. ***
Sort of a followup to my "Listening to Trains" post from November: The cheap way to get to Paris from Berlin is often through Amsterdam, which means taking the Thalys, the French/Belgian/Dutch/German-owned fast train. Not as nice as either France's TGV or Germany's ICE, it still gets you there, albeit in cramped seats in a depressing red-brown interior. The announcements are in four languages, Dutch, French, German, and English, and up until this afternoon I thought I'd caught them in a weird German grammatical error, but checking in with a translator friend, it turned out to be yet another weird bit of German grammar I'd never encountered before. What's indisputably odd, however, is the English announcements, all of which start with an oddly-inflected "Ladies...and gentlemen," which sounds distinctly like the speaker is implying that you're in a car filled with drag queens and men. Still, it must be said that it's a nice service for monolingual English speakers. One way you know you've changed to Deutsche Bahn is that all the announcements are in German.
***
Finally, a wine bargain discovered at last Saturday's launch party for the magazine. That whole part of the country is known for its reds and, by some, for its rosés (Languedoc's big secret: great rosés), but I was offered a small glass of a white called Picpul de Pinet, which Robin had picked up at Monoprix, the low-end supermarket, for €2. "It's remarkably good," he said, and as I tasted it, his next-door neighbor, Paolo, said "Imagine drinking this with oysters." He's right, though: the wine's from down around Sète, and it's obviously perfect for that. People say that nobody respects Languedoc wines because they're so cheap, but I say if you can make a two-buck wine this good, that just leaves me more to spend on oysters!
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Notes From The Trip
The Cold From Hell is still with me, but I'm enough recovered to know that a straight narrative of the trip would be boring to just about every one of you, so I'm going to hit some highlights, and think about putting some energy into getting pix onto Flickr.
****
I pulled into Nimes station at 2:24 pm, right on time, and almost immediately, a young woman walked up to me and asked if I were me. I'd just met Jacqui, the third member of the Languedoc Sun team. Laurence was also somewhere on the platform looking for me. It was, apparently, a matter of some urgency: a story about the launch of the magazine was going to appear in the local paper, Midi Libre, and the photographer didn't have much time to snap a shot of the three of us. Snap, however, he did, and a picture of us admiring the new arrival appeared on p. 3 of the Nimes edition the next day.
This led me to think nice thoughts about the French press, thoughts which evaporated the next day when Laurence told me that the regional news box that appeared in all the other editions had run a story about the magazine's launch, with her name, a couple of sentences of quotes from her, but not the name of the magazine. Presumably Midi Libre has editors, but one has to wonder what they do.
****
My first assignment, after checking into the hotel, was to head to the Nimes Tourist Office to determine when they opened the next morning, and when the one in Alès did. Laurence wanted to get the earliest possible start in the morning to distribute the magazines, since we were going to have to hit as many towns as we could. This was limited only by the fact that my hotel didn't serve breakfast until 7:30, and I can't work until I've had coffee.
After talking to the tourist lady, I was free to wander until I got picked up for dinner at Jacqui's later, so, the weather being nice considering it was the end of January, I went for a walk. Actually, I just walked down the street and up the stairs of the Maison Carrée, the Greek temple. It's free to get in, although it doesn't have much in the way of displays, just some random Roman sculpture from other sites in Nimes, usually uncovered when someone was starting a building project. Still, the fact that it's survived all it has is amazing. I'm still wondering about deep scars close to the bottom of the columns, which look like they may have been inflicted by a chain. Not that there was any information about this inside: from inspecting the map I got in the tourist office later, I realized that Nimes doesn't have a clue how to sell itself. Nothing whatever is marked, with even the simplest sign. Here's the cathedral. How old is it? No idea. Old. ("Medieval," says the Rough Guide, while the Hachette -- out of print for decades and still the best -- says 11th Century facade on a 19th Century rebulding). A pile of stones near my hotel is definitely Roman -- why else would they have put that silly reproduction of the statue of Julius Caesar there? -- but I have no idea what it is, although all my references dutifully note the Protestant temple next to it, which is apparently filled with lots of Roman findings. Anyone?
The real big deal of the Roman past, though, is the Arènes, the arena, which holds 6-7000 people for the ferias, the twice-yearly bullfights which attract people from all over. They even run the bulls like they do in Pamplona, and a
German photographer apparently met her death trying to photograph them a couple of years back. But a big old Roman arena is quite the thing to have sitting a couple of blocks from the train station.
****
The first stop the next day was going to be Alès, which is Laurence's home town, but we stopped 11 km outside of town to deliver some magazines to the tourist office in Vézénobres, a Romanesque village clinging to a hillside which apparently has a number of British residents. Coulda fooled me: the only humans we saw the whole time were in the tourist office. One thing, though: they're in shape. The way into town from the parking lot was pretty much straight up and down.
Alès, when we got there, looked like a Frenchified New Jersey, which figures because it was a clothmaking city which turned into a coal-mining one. I didn't see a whole lot of history, since most of the old buildings were burned down long ago (this whole area has always been Protestant, which has pissed off the Church for centuries), but it's the place to base yourself for sorties into the Cévennes Nature Park, and anyway, they bought our back page. We might have spent too much time there, but I can't begrudge Laurence her local-girl-makes-good moment. We also hit the School of Mines, where Jacqui's companion Nicolas went to school -- it's apparently France's top engineering college. (He, incidentally, started a company that inspects buildings for safety, and it's flourishing. Since he's not much over 30, if that, I had positive proof that I wasn't in Germany any more: an actual entrepreneur who took his education and put it to use and is now making money with it! He'd be 40 in Germany before he'd even dare to think of such a thing, and then he'd blow it off because, well, it's so much easier to just sign on with an existing company).
Next stop was Uzès, childhood home of Racine and André Gide, center of gastronomy (especially during truffle season), and magnet for British people wanting to buy houses. There, we got interviewed yet again, for the Alès Républicain, although the reporter's note taking seemed to be more concerned with good penmanship than anything else. The guy who ran the cafe where the interview took place, called Terroir, turned out to be Swedish, just the kind of English-speaking expat I love to find, because he's not British or American, yet told us that he considers English pretty much his first language. If only I could have convinced the Berlin folks that such critters existed when I was trying to raise money for my magazine...
The idea was to hit the Pont du Gard on the way home, but it didn't happen because time was tight. Too bad: I love crossing off UNESCO World Heritage sites from the list.
****
The next day was largely spent in Montpeller distributing magazines, both in the city and in a language school based in what appeared to be a fortified farmhouse out by the airport (fortifications from another era, of course) and at the airport itself. I picked up a timetable and was happy to discover that not only can I fly pretty much straight to New York from there, but also to Copenhagen, Prague, and Fez. Never been to Fez, but I have friends in the other two. I also stopped by my favorite wine shop, La Maison des Vins et Produits du Terroir, for some research materials. The place is astonishing, a virtual museum of what's made in the region. The guys there know their stuff, too.
****
Saturday was launch-party day at Laurence and Robin's place -- Robin is her British husband -- with most of the writers and other folks in attendance, although at least one person was unable to attend because the previous evening, an almost unprecedented thing had happened: in the higher regions, around Alès, it had snowed. Just like in Texas -- which this whole part of the world definitely feels and looks like -- people became utterly unhinged.
And, as I mentioned, the next day we drove down to Pézenas, where Molière apparently liked to hang out. The rain was brutal, and so were the winds, and I've vowed to come back and look at this place again. One thing I noticed right off: small free-standing enamel shields with the landmarks described on them. Seems to me Nimes could do with a couple of those. After that, a small village, Gabian, where local expats have a book sale on the last Sunday of each month, and then back to Nimes.
****
My explorations into the local cuisine yielded some interesting results. One night I went to a restaurant Jacqui had recommended, Nicolas, right by my hotel. I was the only customer, but Mama came over and took my order and eventually another couple walked in and ordered. It was an odd meal: it started out with mussels with a strange white sauce on them, very subtle, so much so that I couldn't even begin to tell you what it was. After that was an aïoli, fish and steamed vegetables and a pot of the famous garlic mayonnaise. The portion was rather scant, but it was okay. I don't eat dessert, so I got some cheese, which was the beginning of my discovery that not all Roqueforts are created equal -- or, I should say, alike. This one had a real citrusy tang to it -- odd, but not offputting. The wine was a local red, Costières de Nimes, rough but okay.
Saturday I walked around in the rain some until I found what appeared to be an okay place run by a youngish pair. He was quite amusing, especially after he got a call that a party of nine was coming and he tried to figure out how to rearrange the tables to seat nine. I could have told him, but it was more fun watching him try and fail. I started with what was supposed to be a crayfish terrine, but sure didn't seem like one. It was surrounded by a sauce that was mostly ketchup. After that came a slice of beef -- or taurine -- that was amazingly thin and small, with a little pot of nondescript marchand du vin sauce and frozen french fries. Sigh. (I think taurine, or bull, is actually a French code-word for "tough.") The wine, another Costières de Gard, was fine, though.
Sunday, I went and found the most overdecorated restaurant in France, and I'm thinking next time I'll hit the place across the street, which wasn't doing a fraction of the business, although who knows, they might have had a kitchen like the place I'd eaten the night before. At any rate, unlike Montpellier, Nimes has no shortage of places to dine on a Sunday night, which is encouraging, and this place served me an anchoiade, which was a plate of raw vegetables with a pot of some kind of anchovy-and-olive-oil concoction, a great appetizer, followed by the best thing I had the whole trip: seiches, which are little cuttlefish that are mostly body with very little tentacles, in a rouille. Now, if you've had bouillabaisse or the kind of fish soup they do in Sète, you're familiar with one kind of rouille, a mayonnaise with lots of garlic and red pepper in it. This one was different: it was bright yellow, and redolent of saffron. If your French is good enough, you might look at this recipe, making sure to click the link for rouille for more details, and you might also want to look at this one for some useful tips. The dish was served in a casserole dish with a layer of steamed potatoes under the seiches, the whole thing covered with the yellow sauce. It was magnificent.
One reason I ordered seiches instead of the other temptation, the dried-codfish-and-potato morue, was that I'd been at the market that morning. I really shouldn't do this to myself, but I can't resist. I was very careful to notice that the prices were often astronomical -- I saw one cut of beef that was going for €36 a kilo, or close to twenty bucks a pound. But it was still a great demonstration of the variety of local produce, even in the middle of the winter, and one thing that was going strong was the category the French call coquillages, which basically covers shellfish. Seiches were on display, and looking good. I also stopped by a baked-goods counter and bought a fougasse, a pate pastry, and another pastry. Fougasse is a local thing, flaky pastry with tiny bits of (very peppery, in this case) bacon cooked into it ("and the rest is secret," says Laurence). My only other one had been in Montpellier last January, at 4pm, which explained the odd look I got from the lady selling it and the intense resistance it put up to my attempts to eat it. Fougasse is for breakfast. Not sure about the little pate pastry, but it was great, and the other one, same basic shape and size, was so soaked in eau-de-vie that I was a little disoriented after I ate it. There was more fougasse, though, so I downed it. Next thing is to figure out why so many fougasses are in the shape of the letter A.
Not at all French, but a great discovery, was the bacon cheeseburger at Auntie Lou's British restaurant in Montpellier, down a side-street I'd never seen before. Lou herself is a panic, and the cheeseburger would be perfect if she could just find buns which didn't dissolve into mush less than half-way through eating the burger -- just like they do here in Berlin. I don't get it: the French and the Germans, two great bread-baking cultures, and they can't make hamburger buns! How hard can it be?
Oh, and one more meal: in Uzès, we stopped in a little cafe for lunch, and I ordered a fine cold-weather dish, a tartiflette. If you can get the cheese, I recommend it highly. I doubt I left a molecule on the plate.
****
That's it for this trip. I'm going to plunge head-first into work until mid-week, because this is the spurt of activity which, I hope, will provide the initial funds for my return to Montpellier in late March and early April, at which point, if the money is there, I'll be looking for apartments.
****
I pulled into Nimes station at 2:24 pm, right on time, and almost immediately, a young woman walked up to me and asked if I were me. I'd just met Jacqui, the third member of the Languedoc Sun team. Laurence was also somewhere on the platform looking for me. It was, apparently, a matter of some urgency: a story about the launch of the magazine was going to appear in the local paper, Midi Libre, and the photographer didn't have much time to snap a shot of the three of us. Snap, however, he did, and a picture of us admiring the new arrival appeared on p. 3 of the Nimes edition the next day.
This led me to think nice thoughts about the French press, thoughts which evaporated the next day when Laurence told me that the regional news box that appeared in all the other editions had run a story about the magazine's launch, with her name, a couple of sentences of quotes from her, but not the name of the magazine. Presumably Midi Libre has editors, but one has to wonder what they do.
****
My first assignment, after checking into the hotel, was to head to the Nimes Tourist Office to determine when they opened the next morning, and when the one in Alès did. Laurence wanted to get the earliest possible start in the morning to distribute the magazines, since we were going to have to hit as many towns as we could. This was limited only by the fact that my hotel didn't serve breakfast until 7:30, and I can't work until I've had coffee.
After talking to the tourist lady, I was free to wander until I got picked up for dinner at Jacqui's later, so, the weather being nice considering it was the end of January, I went for a walk. Actually, I just walked down the street and up the stairs of the Maison Carrée, the Greek temple. It's free to get in, although it doesn't have much in the way of displays, just some random Roman sculpture from other sites in Nimes, usually uncovered when someone was starting a building project. Still, the fact that it's survived all it has is amazing. I'm still wondering about deep scars close to the bottom of the columns, which look like they may have been inflicted by a chain. Not that there was any information about this inside: from inspecting the map I got in the tourist office later, I realized that Nimes doesn't have a clue how to sell itself. Nothing whatever is marked, with even the simplest sign. Here's the cathedral. How old is it? No idea. Old. ("Medieval," says the Rough Guide, while the Hachette -- out of print for decades and still the best -- says 11th Century facade on a 19th Century rebulding). A pile of stones near my hotel is definitely Roman -- why else would they have put that silly reproduction of the statue of Julius Caesar there? -- but I have no idea what it is, although all my references dutifully note the Protestant temple next to it, which is apparently filled with lots of Roman findings. Anyone?
The real big deal of the Roman past, though, is the Arènes, the arena, which holds 6-7000 people for the ferias, the twice-yearly bullfights which attract people from all over. They even run the bulls like they do in Pamplona, and a
German photographer apparently met her death trying to photograph them a couple of years back. But a big old Roman arena is quite the thing to have sitting a couple of blocks from the train station.
****
The first stop the next day was going to be Alès, which is Laurence's home town, but we stopped 11 km outside of town to deliver some magazines to the tourist office in Vézénobres, a Romanesque village clinging to a hillside which apparently has a number of British residents. Coulda fooled me: the only humans we saw the whole time were in the tourist office. One thing, though: they're in shape. The way into town from the parking lot was pretty much straight up and down.
Alès, when we got there, looked like a Frenchified New Jersey, which figures because it was a clothmaking city which turned into a coal-mining one. I didn't see a whole lot of history, since most of the old buildings were burned down long ago (this whole area has always been Protestant, which has pissed off the Church for centuries), but it's the place to base yourself for sorties into the Cévennes Nature Park, and anyway, they bought our back page. We might have spent too much time there, but I can't begrudge Laurence her local-girl-makes-good moment. We also hit the School of Mines, where Jacqui's companion Nicolas went to school -- it's apparently France's top engineering college. (He, incidentally, started a company that inspects buildings for safety, and it's flourishing. Since he's not much over 30, if that, I had positive proof that I wasn't in Germany any more: an actual entrepreneur who took his education and put it to use and is now making money with it! He'd be 40 in Germany before he'd even dare to think of such a thing, and then he'd blow it off because, well, it's so much easier to just sign on with an existing company).
Next stop was Uzès, childhood home of Racine and André Gide, center of gastronomy (especially during truffle season), and magnet for British people wanting to buy houses. There, we got interviewed yet again, for the Alès Républicain, although the reporter's note taking seemed to be more concerned with good penmanship than anything else. The guy who ran the cafe where the interview took place, called Terroir, turned out to be Swedish, just the kind of English-speaking expat I love to find, because he's not British or American, yet told us that he considers English pretty much his first language. If only I could have convinced the Berlin folks that such critters existed when I was trying to raise money for my magazine...
The idea was to hit the Pont du Gard on the way home, but it didn't happen because time was tight. Too bad: I love crossing off UNESCO World Heritage sites from the list.
****
The next day was largely spent in Montpeller distributing magazines, both in the city and in a language school based in what appeared to be a fortified farmhouse out by the airport (fortifications from another era, of course) and at the airport itself. I picked up a timetable and was happy to discover that not only can I fly pretty much straight to New York from there, but also to Copenhagen, Prague, and Fez. Never been to Fez, but I have friends in the other two. I also stopped by my favorite wine shop, La Maison des Vins et Produits du Terroir, for some research materials. The place is astonishing, a virtual museum of what's made in the region. The guys there know their stuff, too.
****
Saturday was launch-party day at Laurence and Robin's place -- Robin is her British husband -- with most of the writers and other folks in attendance, although at least one person was unable to attend because the previous evening, an almost unprecedented thing had happened: in the higher regions, around Alès, it had snowed. Just like in Texas -- which this whole part of the world definitely feels and looks like -- people became utterly unhinged.
And, as I mentioned, the next day we drove down to Pézenas, where Molière apparently liked to hang out. The rain was brutal, and so were the winds, and I've vowed to come back and look at this place again. One thing I noticed right off: small free-standing enamel shields with the landmarks described on them. Seems to me Nimes could do with a couple of those. After that, a small village, Gabian, where local expats have a book sale on the last Sunday of each month, and then back to Nimes.
****
My explorations into the local cuisine yielded some interesting results. One night I went to a restaurant Jacqui had recommended, Nicolas, right by my hotel. I was the only customer, but Mama came over and took my order and eventually another couple walked in and ordered. It was an odd meal: it started out with mussels with a strange white sauce on them, very subtle, so much so that I couldn't even begin to tell you what it was. After that was an aïoli, fish and steamed vegetables and a pot of the famous garlic mayonnaise. The portion was rather scant, but it was okay. I don't eat dessert, so I got some cheese, which was the beginning of my discovery that not all Roqueforts are created equal -- or, I should say, alike. This one had a real citrusy tang to it -- odd, but not offputting. The wine was a local red, Costières de Nimes, rough but okay.
Saturday I walked around in the rain some until I found what appeared to be an okay place run by a youngish pair. He was quite amusing, especially after he got a call that a party of nine was coming and he tried to figure out how to rearrange the tables to seat nine. I could have told him, but it was more fun watching him try and fail. I started with what was supposed to be a crayfish terrine, but sure didn't seem like one. It was surrounded by a sauce that was mostly ketchup. After that came a slice of beef -- or taurine -- that was amazingly thin and small, with a little pot of nondescript marchand du vin sauce and frozen french fries. Sigh. (I think taurine, or bull, is actually a French code-word for "tough.") The wine, another Costières de Gard, was fine, though.
Sunday, I went and found the most overdecorated restaurant in France, and I'm thinking next time I'll hit the place across the street, which wasn't doing a fraction of the business, although who knows, they might have had a kitchen like the place I'd eaten the night before. At any rate, unlike Montpellier, Nimes has no shortage of places to dine on a Sunday night, which is encouraging, and this place served me an anchoiade, which was a plate of raw vegetables with a pot of some kind of anchovy-and-olive-oil concoction, a great appetizer, followed by the best thing I had the whole trip: seiches, which are little cuttlefish that are mostly body with very little tentacles, in a rouille. Now, if you've had bouillabaisse or the kind of fish soup they do in Sète, you're familiar with one kind of rouille, a mayonnaise with lots of garlic and red pepper in it. This one was different: it was bright yellow, and redolent of saffron. If your French is good enough, you might look at this recipe, making sure to click the link for rouille for more details, and you might also want to look at this one for some useful tips. The dish was served in a casserole dish with a layer of steamed potatoes under the seiches, the whole thing covered with the yellow sauce. It was magnificent.
One reason I ordered seiches instead of the other temptation, the dried-codfish-and-potato morue, was that I'd been at the market that morning. I really shouldn't do this to myself, but I can't resist. I was very careful to notice that the prices were often astronomical -- I saw one cut of beef that was going for €36 a kilo, or close to twenty bucks a pound. But it was still a great demonstration of the variety of local produce, even in the middle of the winter, and one thing that was going strong was the category the French call coquillages, which basically covers shellfish. Seiches were on display, and looking good. I also stopped by a baked-goods counter and bought a fougasse, a pate pastry, and another pastry. Fougasse is a local thing, flaky pastry with tiny bits of (very peppery, in this case) bacon cooked into it ("and the rest is secret," says Laurence). My only other one had been in Montpellier last January, at 4pm, which explained the odd look I got from the lady selling it and the intense resistance it put up to my attempts to eat it. Fougasse is for breakfast. Not sure about the little pate pastry, but it was great, and the other one, same basic shape and size, was so soaked in eau-de-vie that I was a little disoriented after I ate it. There was more fougasse, though, so I downed it. Next thing is to figure out why so many fougasses are in the shape of the letter A.
Not at all French, but a great discovery, was the bacon cheeseburger at Auntie Lou's British restaurant in Montpellier, down a side-street I'd never seen before. Lou herself is a panic, and the cheeseburger would be perfect if she could just find buns which didn't dissolve into mush less than half-way through eating the burger -- just like they do here in Berlin. I don't get it: the French and the Germans, two great bread-baking cultures, and they can't make hamburger buns! How hard can it be?
Oh, and one more meal: in Uzès, we stopped in a little cafe for lunch, and I ordered a fine cold-weather dish, a tartiflette. If you can get the cheese, I recommend it highly. I doubt I left a molecule on the plate.
****
That's it for this trip. I'm going to plunge head-first into work until mid-week, because this is the spurt of activity which, I hope, will provide the initial funds for my return to Montpellier in late March and early April, at which point, if the money is there, I'll be looking for apartments.
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Rock Star!
Clannnnggg! Man, you can just about hear the power chord this grrrl's just hit! Actually, it's Erato, the muse of Music from the front of the Jules Scalles Gallery, the municipal art museum in Nimes, where I spent the better part of last week. This building was right across from my deeply funky hotel, but wouldn't you know? I never had time to walk in the front door.
Starting a magazine is every bit as time-consuming and nerve-shredding as giving birth (although, to be honest, I've never given birth), and Thursday through Sunday, Laurence, Jackie, and I zig-zagged around the Languedoc delivering the newly-printed copies of the Languedoc Sun to the places that agreed to distribute them, most of which were very excited to see the magazine. In the process, I got to see a lot of the countryside in the northeastern part of the area, known, after the river that flows through it, as the Gard, as well as return to Montpellier, mooch around Avignon, and see a number of small villages.
The bad news, though, was that it rained nearly the whole time, and even snowed in Alès and Uzès, which is a rare event. On Sunday, as we headed down to Pézenas to drop some copies off at the tourist bureau there, the rain was particularly severe, with police trying to persuade truckers not to hit the motorway as we left Nimes. Actually, it wasn't too bad, although there were strong winds and there were vineyards completely under water past Montpellier, and rivers overflowing their banks all along the way. Some villages were cut off from the main road by the flooding, and all of the water was weirdly tinted with pink mud. And, in a final irony, I wound up with publisher Laurence Boxall's cold, which has had me down ever since Monday. Lots of fun doing those 12-hour train rides with your head feeling like it's going to explode.
I'm going to attempt a more thorough post about this trip -- although it might not happen, depending on how the work schedule lines up in the next couple of days -- and I'll definitely post some of the 66 pictures I took on Flickr and provide a link.
Meanwhile, ever unable to resist cliches, here's another photo from Nimes, of the Maison Carrée, the remarkably well-preserved temple from 5 AD that was built so people could worship Julias Caesar's kids. It's quite amazing to see it looming up just down the street like this, but it's gorgeous lit up at night, which was mostly when I was able to walk around Nimes, usually in search of food. Which I found.
Anyway, maybe tomorrow; the residual blah feeling from the cold has me still, and I want to do this justice.
Monday, January 23, 2006
This Month's Decent Interval
I'm leaving tomorrow morning for a week in France. Given that I woke up this morning and goggled at the temperature being 1 degree Fahrenheit (that's -17 and change Celsius), I'm not at all unhappy about this. Good lord, it's cold out there! I went to the dancer's house last night for dinner, and just walking to and from the subway almost killed me. I know some people reading this live in places like Alaska where you're very likely scoffing at me, but man, this is crazy. Although, on the other hand, it does bode well for the local farmers, many of whose crops -- especially fruit trees -- need a hard frost to bear properly in the summer.
At any rate, this trip will not be based in Montpellier (home of Europe's latest bird-flu scare) -- although of course we'll go there -- but, rather, to Nimes, where I'll be staying near a Roman amphitheater which is currently used for bullfights. Yes, the French also have bullfights.
The reason for this is that I've been working on a project which I've had to keep secret: an English-language magazine for the Languedoc region, which includes Montpellier. It'll be free, and it's going to be distributed over a wide geographical range -- by me and the publisher! That's right: Thursday and Friday will find me in her car zooming hither and yon, handing off copies to shops and tourist bureaus, and anyone else who wants them.
The first issue is available as a pdf download here, and, while it's no masterpiece, it's definitely got potential. And once I'm living down there, I'm quite sure I can attract writers, photographers, and other support personnel to make it a model of a regional magazine.
But first we have to get them out to the folks who need them. I'm definitely taking the camera this time, and there'll be pix here and on Flickr for those who'll want to see them.
And, because the journey's so long, I'm breaking it coming and going with an overnight stay in Paris. Tomorrow, dinner at Chez Paul! Yet another thing to look forward to.
Back here late in the evening of the 31st. See you then.
At any rate, this trip will not be based in Montpellier (home of Europe's latest bird-flu scare) -- although of course we'll go there -- but, rather, to Nimes, where I'll be staying near a Roman amphitheater which is currently used for bullfights. Yes, the French also have bullfights.
The reason for this is that I've been working on a project which I've had to keep secret: an English-language magazine for the Languedoc region, which includes Montpellier. It'll be free, and it's going to be distributed over a wide geographical range -- by me and the publisher! That's right: Thursday and Friday will find me in her car zooming hither and yon, handing off copies to shops and tourist bureaus, and anyone else who wants them.
The first issue is available as a pdf download here, and, while it's no masterpiece, it's definitely got potential. And once I'm living down there, I'm quite sure I can attract writers, photographers, and other support personnel to make it a model of a regional magazine.
But first we have to get them out to the folks who need them. I'm definitely taking the camera this time, and there'll be pix here and on Flickr for those who'll want to see them.
And, because the journey's so long, I'm breaking it coming and going with an overnight stay in Paris. Tomorrow, dinner at Chez Paul! Yet another thing to look forward to.
Back here late in the evening of the 31st. See you then.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Best of 2005, Part Two: The Past
Thanks to my gig with Fresh Air, I get far better service from reissue labels than from labels putting out new stuff. This is, of course, as it should be: record labels aren't charities, and they only send press things they think will get publicity. And it must be admitted, this was a great year for reissues.
Biggest news of the year was Motown Select's Internet-only release of three volumes of the complete Motown singles in deluxe packaging with a copy of a vintage Motown 45 slipped into the cover of each one. The landscape this opens up is much wider and more diverse than you'd think, although the real treat is the scores of lost soul acts like the Velvettes and the Contours who recorded for Motown. Motown Select also reissued three of Eddie Kendricks' solo albums, which, although dotted with missteps like many Motown albums of the '70s, go a long ways towards proving my long-held contention that the "disco" era wasn't the arid stretch of musical history so many people believe it is. It'd be stretching it to say that "Keep On Truckin'" is worth the forty bucks alone, but his attempt to clone Marvin Gaye's What's Going On with his album People...Hold On is a very pleasant revelation.
It was a great year for folk fanatics, thanks to Legacy's Charlie Poole box, which, remarkably, doesn't attempt to present Poole's recordings in a straightahead chronological fashion, but, rather, to show the records which influenced Poole and the ones he influenced, thereby proving that this marginally insane drunken banjo player was a force in country music similar to Robert Johnson in blues. An exemplary document, even if the packaging is a bit fragile.
Equally fascinating and welcome as a cultural touchstone is Good For What Ails You, Old Hat's collection of medicine show music, black and white, which was incredibly influential in the days before radio became widespread among rural Americans. Sure, what the "doctors" were selling was, for the most part, booze (as if you couldn't figure that out by some of the performances here), but the music itself came from traditional wellsprings and went into the folk process, too. A great example is "The Mysterious Coon," a song which seems pretty racist from its title (and, by our standards, is), but which invests the "coon" of the title with superpowers any rapper would envy when it comes to standing up to the law. Don't be surprised if you find yourself entertained by this; it was, after all, intended as entertainment.
And the weirdest of all the folk reissues from the era of the 78 rpm record is Revenant's American Primitive, Vol. 2, the last collection curated by the late John Fahey, filled with his love of the odd and singular, and with performances both completely bizarre and breathtakingly moving, often in the same song. It's worth having for the complete (known) works of the mysterious Delta blueswoman Geeshie Wiley, whose "Last Kind Favor" is up there wtih Richard "Rabbit" Brown's "James Alley Blues" and Skip James' "Devil Got My Woman" for expressing something dark and deep that we all recognize, even if we've never encountered it before.
The British reissue label Ace (which also reissues soul on Kent) got an American deal this year for distribution, and acquired an American publicist, thereby making it easier for U.S. music fans to finally hear thousands of tracks they've never been aware of. The list of great Ace reissues is too long to post here, but this year's had some killers in it.
Ace has a deal to reissue the King label, which has always stood with Atlantic and Modern in my mind as one of the groundbreaking postwar independents, and in a way, greater than them because it also issued some great country music. Proof positive comes on Fifty Miles to Travel, a collection of the Delmore Brothers' original master recordings from the late 1940s and early 1950s, whose clear sound and impeccable guitar pyrotechnics could get you hooked on this duo who were an important link between the '30s brother duets and rock and roll. The King deal also means finally having clean copies of recodings by two almost forgotten rockabilly masters, Charlie Feathers and Mac Curtis, both of whom did their best work for King.
And, naturally, it means that my all-time forgotten doo-wop group, the "5" Royales, get a "hits and rarities" album, It's Hard But It's Fair, which, because the box set I helped curate for Rhino is long out of print, is the best place to find out why I venerate this group, whose co-lead singer, Johnny Tanner, passed away this year.
Another deal Ace has been working on for the past couple of years has been leasing the Modern catalogue, which has not only been out of print forever, but has been sloppily curated on the reissue front. The biggest news out of this deal was the B.B. King box set which came out a couple of years ago, and the reissues of his albums for Kent with original covers and half again as many tracks as the originals. But it's also meant that the likes of Richard Berry and Jesse Belvin are back in print, and this year saw a great double of Etta James' Modern and Kent singles, which will blow your socks off.
Moving into the '60s, Ace also put out two great pop masterpieces. Many of you will be familiar with Jack Nitzche, the arranger and producer who showed up practically everywhere, from Phil Spector sessions to working with the Buffalo Springfield, but until this year he never got the career overview he deserved. Go look for my Fresh Air piece on this if you want a taste of how great it is. And if you like that kind of dramatic pop music, The Best of Reparata and the Delrons will send you to heaven. Fresh Air piece on this one is coming up.
In fact, if girl group pop is to your liking, the mammoth Rhino collection, One Kiss Can Lead To Another, will be a treasure worth finding. Assembled by a British fanatic, a female British fanatic, at that, it's got almost no tracks which duplicate other collections, and yet from the perverse to the pretty, it's as good a summation of this era as you'll find.
Speaking of mammoth Rhino collections, the words "sumptuous packaging" almost fails to describe Pure Genius, which is nothing less than Ray Charles' complete works for Atlantic, down to the famous "rehearsal tape" of Ahmet Ertegun singing the words to "The Mess-Around" as he teaches it to Ray. There's also a mindblowing DVD of an appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, a hardback book, and the whole thing is packaged to simulate a vintage portable record player.
The '60s have been mined so thoroughly that there's little rock left to explore -- or so you'd think. Rhino Handmade scored a coup by turning out Magic Hollow, a four-disc celebration of San Francisco's "lost" band. It's inconceivable to me that a group this good could have fallen between the cracks, especially during the whole Haight-Ashbury hoo-hah, but they did. Their version of "One Too Many Mornings" cuts Dylan's to shreds, and yet it never got higher than 95 on the national charts. Warning, though: my copy of this doesn't seem to play all the way through each disc, despite the fact that there doesn't seem to be any physical defect. No idea what's going on with it, but there you go. I'm certain Rhino will exchange defective ones.
And, of course, speaking of Herr Zimmerman, there was the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese's documentary, which I have yet to see. The double disc stands on its own, though, especially the second one, which shows Dylan developing things we all know by heart in the studio, as well as two incendiary performances from That Tour.
What killed the '60s, as everyone knows, was the Stooges. Rhino has reissued, as double albums, both their first and their second albums, with disc two in each case featuring alternate versions and outtakes. Most importantly, the sound, for the first time, is perfect, and you can hear history being made in all its trashy glory. Annotator Ben Edmonds, who clearly has read too much of what the Brits have to say, still doesn't get it about my Rolling Stone review of the first album, where I pronounced it "loud, boring, tateless, unimaginative and childish," adding that it was proof that rock and roll was bad for you, just like your parents said, and concluding the sentence with the words "I kind of like it." Ben's irony meter is obviously defective, but Iggy's always understood, and that's what counts with me.
What the Stooges didn't destroy, Patti Smith did. Okay, that's also supposed to be humorous, but this year's 30th anniversary reissue of her first album, Horses, with the album remastered on one disc and then played at a recent concert on a second one, is a fascinating document of an artist's coming to fully inhabit her art. I know Ms. Smith's not for everyone, but this is solid. (Oh, and I understand my article on her Incredible Shrinking Tour from November has just come out in Paste, so run down to the newsstand today!)
There weren't as many country reissues as I'd have liked to have seen this year, but I do find the Johnny Cash collection, The Legend, to be extremely well-curated. I haven't yet seen the liner notes, but the music, although arranged thematically, is, of course, right on the money.
And speaking of Nashville, three Nashville soul collections came out this year which are well worth your notice. The first is the second volume of the Country Music Foundation's Night Train to Nashville, exploring Nashville's heretofore badly-documented R&B and soul scenes. Extra bonus with this set is a picture of Jimi Hendrix on stage with The Imperials, a show band he spent some time with in his early days. And Sundazed has come out with two more discs, neither of which duplicates anything from either of these collections. The first, Shake What You Brought!, is a collection from the SSS International label run by Shelby Singleton, with tracks by Peggy Scott, Jo Jo Benson, and Bettye LaVette (although, curiously, none of the Scott and Benson duets), and the second, My Goodness, Yes!, is all about his Silver Fox label, which I missed entirely, with Robert Parker, more Bettye LaVette, and (gasp) Hank Ballard, he of the "Annie" trilogy and the original recording of "The Twist," singing Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Coming Down." Both are highly recommended.
Finally, bringing us almost to the present day, is something which looks like a ripoff, but, in fact, isn't at all. The Talking Heads Brick may look like a triumph of art direction over utility (and, in that the albums aren't labelled on their spines, is), but it presents each of the band's albums, meticulously remastered by the band's own Jerry Harrison, on one side of each dual disc, and, on the other side, the whole thing in DVD-A sound (for those of you with players for such things) and a wealth of videos. Not all that many outtakes until you get to the later albums, but the sketches for some of the funkier stuff, especially the experiments which were abandoned, are very much worth checking out.
I'm sure that as soon as I post this I'll think of a couple of others, but this should keep you happy until I do my next one, which, for those of you looking for Christmas presents, I'll try to post before Dec. 25 of this year.
No promises, though. The past, after all, is a big place.
Biggest news of the year was Motown Select's Internet-only release of three volumes of the complete Motown singles in deluxe packaging with a copy of a vintage Motown 45 slipped into the cover of each one. The landscape this opens up is much wider and more diverse than you'd think, although the real treat is the scores of lost soul acts like the Velvettes and the Contours who recorded for Motown. Motown Select also reissued three of Eddie Kendricks' solo albums, which, although dotted with missteps like many Motown albums of the '70s, go a long ways towards proving my long-held contention that the "disco" era wasn't the arid stretch of musical history so many people believe it is. It'd be stretching it to say that "Keep On Truckin'" is worth the forty bucks alone, but his attempt to clone Marvin Gaye's What's Going On with his album People...Hold On is a very pleasant revelation.
It was a great year for folk fanatics, thanks to Legacy's Charlie Poole box
, which, remarkably, doesn't attempt to present Poole's recordings in a straightahead chronological fashion, but, rather, to show the records which influenced Poole and the ones he influenced, thereby proving that this marginally insane drunken banjo player was a force in country music similar to Robert Johnson in blues. An exemplary document, even if the packaging is a bit fragile. Equally fascinating and welcome as a cultural touchstone is Good For What Ails You
, Old Hat's collection of medicine show music, black and white, which was incredibly influential in the days before radio became widespread among rural Americans. Sure, what the "doctors" were selling was, for the most part, booze (as if you couldn't figure that out by some of the performances here), but the music itself came from traditional wellsprings and went into the folk process, too. A great example is "The Mysterious Coon," a song which seems pretty racist from its title (and, by our standards, is), but which invests the "coon" of the title with superpowers any rapper would envy when it comes to standing up to the law. Don't be surprised if you find yourself entertained by this; it was, after all, intended as entertainment. And the weirdest of all the folk reissues from the era of the 78 rpm record is Revenant's American Primitive, Vol. 2
, the last collection curated by the late John Fahey, filled with his love of the odd and singular, and with performances both completely bizarre and breathtakingly moving, often in the same song. It's worth having for the complete (known) works of the mysterious Delta blueswoman Geeshie Wiley, whose "Last Kind Favor" is up there wtih Richard "Rabbit" Brown's "James Alley Blues" and Skip James' "Devil Got My Woman" for expressing something dark and deep that we all recognize, even if we've never encountered it before. The British reissue label Ace (which also reissues soul on Kent) got an American deal this year for distribution, and acquired an American publicist, thereby making it easier for U.S. music fans to finally hear thousands of tracks they've never been aware of. The list of great Ace reissues is too long to post here, but this year's had some killers in it.
Ace has a deal to reissue the King label, which has always stood with Atlantic and Modern in my mind as one of the groundbreaking postwar independents, and in a way, greater than them because it also issued some great country music. Proof positive comes on Fifty Miles to Travel
, a collection of the Delmore Brothers' original master recordings from the late 1940s and early 1950s, whose clear sound and impeccable guitar pyrotechnics could get you hooked on this duo who were an important link between the '30s brother duets and rock and roll. The King deal also means finally having clean copies of recodings by two almost forgotten rockabilly masters, Charlie Feathers and Mac Curtis, both of whom did their best work for King. And, naturally, it means that my all-time forgotten doo-wop group, the "5" Royales, get a "hits and rarities" album, It's Hard But It's Fair
, which, because the box set I helped curate for Rhino is long out of print, is the best place to find out why I venerate this group, whose co-lead singer, Johnny Tanner, passed away this year. Another deal Ace has been working on for the past couple of years has been leasing the Modern catalogue, which has not only been out of print forever, but has been sloppily curated on the reissue front. The biggest news out of this deal was the B.B. King box set
which came out a couple of years ago, and the reissues of his albums for Kent with original covers and half again as many tracks as the originals. But it's also meant that the likes of Richard Berry and Jesse Belvin are back in print, and this year saw a great double of Etta James' Modern and Kent singles, which will blow your socks off. Moving into the '60s, Ace also put out two great pop masterpieces. Many of you will be familiar with Jack Nitzche, the arranger and producer who showed up practically everywhere, from Phil Spector sessions to working with the Buffalo Springfield, but until this year he never got the career overview he deserved
. Go look for my Fresh Air piece on this if you want a taste of how great it is. And if you like that kind of dramatic pop music, The Best of Reparata and the Delrons will send you to heaven. Fresh Air piece on this one is coming up. In fact, if girl group pop is to your liking, the mammoth Rhino collection, One Kiss Can Lead To Another
, will be a treasure worth finding. Assembled by a British fanatic, a female British fanatic, at that, it's got almost no tracks which duplicate other collections, and yet from the perverse to the pretty, it's as good a summation of this era as you'll find. Speaking of mammoth Rhino collections, the words "sumptuous packaging" almost fails to describe Pure Genius
, which is nothing less than Ray Charles' complete works for Atlantic, down to the famous "rehearsal tape" of Ahmet Ertegun singing the words to "The Mess-Around" as he teaches it to Ray. There's also a mindblowing DVD of an appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, a hardback book, and the whole thing is packaged to simulate a vintage portable record player. The '60s have been mined so thoroughly that there's little rock left to explore -- or so you'd think. Rhino Handmade scored a coup by turning out Magic Hollow, a four-disc celebration of San Francisco's "lost" band. It's inconceivable to me that a group this good could have fallen between the cracks, especially during the whole Haight-Ashbury hoo-hah, but they did. Their version of "One Too Many Mornings" cuts Dylan's to shreds, and yet it never got higher than 95 on the national charts. Warning, though: my copy of this doesn't seem to play all the way through each disc, despite the fact that there doesn't seem to be any physical defect. No idea what's going on with it, but there you go. I'm certain Rhino will exchange defective ones.
And, of course, speaking of Herr Zimmerman, there was the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese's documentary
, which I have yet to see. The double disc stands on its own, though, especially the second one, which shows Dylan developing things we all know by heart in the studio, as well as two incendiary performances from That Tour. What killed the '60s, as everyone knows, was the Stooges. Rhino has reissued, as double albums, both their first
and their second albums, with disc two in each case featuring alternate versions and outtakes. Most importantly, the sound, for the first time, is perfect, and you can hear history being made in all its trashy glory. Annotator Ben Edmonds, who clearly has read too much of what the Brits have to say, still doesn't get it about my Rolling Stone review of the first album, where I pronounced it "loud, boring, tateless, unimaginative and childish," adding that it was proof that rock and roll was bad for you, just like your parents said, and concluding the sentence with the words "I kind of like it." Ben's irony meter is obviously defective, but Iggy's always understood, and that's what counts with me.What the Stooges didn't destroy, Patti Smith did. Okay, that's also supposed to be humorous, but this year's 30th anniversary reissue of her first album, Horses
, with the album remastered on one disc and then played at a recent concert on a second one, is a fascinating document of an artist's coming to fully inhabit her art. I know Ms. Smith's not for everyone, but this is solid. (Oh, and I understand my article on her Incredible Shrinking Tour from November has just come out in Paste, so run down to the newsstand today!)There weren't as many country reissues as I'd have liked to have seen this year, but I do find the Johnny Cash collection, The Legend
, to be extremely well-curated. I haven't yet seen the liner notes, but the music, although arranged thematically, is, of course, right on the money.And speaking of Nashville, three Nashville soul collections came out this year which are well worth your notice. The first is the second volume of the Country Music Foundation's Night Train to Nashville
, exploring Nashville's heretofore badly-documented R&B and soul scenes. Extra bonus with this set is a picture of Jimi Hendrix on stage with The Imperials, a show band he spent some time with in his early days. And Sundazed has come out with two more discs, neither of which duplicates anything from either of these collections. The first, Shake What You Brought!, is a collection from the SSS International label run by Shelby Singleton, with tracks by Peggy Scott, Jo Jo Benson, and Bettye LaVette (although, curiously, none of the Scott and Benson duets), and the second, My Goodness, Yes!, is all about his Silver Fox label, which I missed entirely, with Robert Parker, more Bettye LaVette, and (gasp) Hank Ballard, he of the "Annie" trilogy and the original recording of "The Twist," singing Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Coming Down." Both are highly recommended. Finally, bringing us almost to the present day, is something which looks like a ripoff, but, in fact, isn't at all. The Talking Heads Brick
may look like a triumph of art direction over utility (and, in that the albums aren't labelled on their spines, is), but it presents each of the band's albums, meticulously remastered by the band's own Jerry Harrison, on one side of each dual disc, and, on the other side, the whole thing in DVD-A sound (for those of you with players for such things) and a wealth of videos. Not all that many outtakes until you get to the later albums, but the sketches for some of the funkier stuff, especially the experiments which were abandoned, are very much worth checking out. I'm sure that as soon as I post this I'll think of a couple of others, but this should keep you happy until I do my next one, which, for those of you looking for Christmas presents, I'll try to post before Dec. 25 of this year.
No promises, though. The past, after all, is a big place.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Best of 2005, Part One
Like I did last year, I've been meaning to put down a list of my favorite records from last year, but I've actually had so much work it's been impossible to find the time, since this project involves my putting down a lot of links. So today I'm taking a break from writing my book proposal to jot some notes about the best new records I heard last year. A second, much longer, post will deal with the reissues.
There's a major problem, though, about writing about new stuff. I hardly heard any. I don't think there's been a year in my adult life when I listened to less music. I've been puzzling over this and there are a few reasons which come to mind. First, I hardly have any place to write about music any more. There are virtually no "general" music magazines left, and the ones which exist want formulaic, short reviews with no criticism. I find it risible that so many writers call themselves "rock critics" which they don't do a lick of criticism, and concentrate instead on description. Some of them are very good at it, but it's still a recitation of feelings or technical observations with no attempt to link them to any higher purpose or broader context. The majority of my writing this year was done for specialty, ie, genre-driven, music magazines: No Depression, Harp, and the oddly-named Paste. All lean towards the "Americana" label (although No Depression has gone through a salutary re-evaluation, and Paste is more an "adult" rock mag than a purely "Americana" one), and so the few makers of new music who send me stuff tend to be in that area.
Which leads to the second reason I haven't listened to much. Back before cultural overproduction killed off any possibility of being a musical generalist, I'd have listening sessions when I'd grab a given kind of music and play a bunch of related records. One night it might be jazz, another night some kind of oddball pop, another singer/songwriter stuff, another hard rock, another some kind of acoustic quiet stuff. Almost all of this was stuff that came in the mail to me as a reviewer/writer. But without those choices, my evenings now tend to be "Do I want to listen to Americana or not" kinds of affairs. There is, on the newly-made music front, an appallingly monochromatic set of choices in front of me. So, as often as not, I just opt for silence.
Which leads to the third reason I haven't listened to much. I tend to get up late and work late, because nearly all the business I transact is with the United States, which is from six to nine hours behind Central European Time. Thus, at 10 pm, which is when I tend to quit for the day, it's still only 1 pm out on the West Coast. After that there's dinner, and then the traditional time I spend reading and listening to stuff. But there's a law here that there can be no noise after 10pm. For years I paid it no heed. I don't listen to music very loud, and much of what I play is pretty quiet anyway, but as soon as the building next to me changed hands a few years back and became an ownership building instead of a rental one, the two women on the other side of the wall -- a double wall, it should be emphasized -- informed me that they would tolerate no noise after 10, since they're both sensitive artists who need to paint during the daylight hours. So this means that my listening has to be done through headphones. And I hate headphones. Hate 'em! Music, for those of you who are so iPod'd out that you don't remember, should be played into an acoustic space, be it a room or a concert hall. Not inside your head.
So you add it all together, and I'm listening, when I'm listening, to a kind of music which tends towards the personal and confessional, sung by people inside my head, which is much too close, on records which basically kind of sound alike. No wonder I'm opting out.
There's also the fact that I've now been away from the American mainstream so long that there's tons and tons of best-selling, cultural-touchstone stuff that I've just never heard. White Stripes? Nope. Coldplay? Nope. (Although that may be a blessing). Strokes? Uh-uh. Arcade Fire? One track on a compilation that came with Word, the only general music mag I can think of, and probably the best music magazine out there. But it made no impression. And I've just given up trying to seek it out. It would mean buying tons of CDs I'd read raves about, but never heard, and that, I know from long experience of listening to stuff I got free that I'd read raves about, is an experience which would lead to inevitable disappointments.
Is it okay not to care? I do care, somewhat, but I've gotten a lot more passive about seeking stuff out. Yeah, I could download stuff from websites (legally, of course!), but I find it deeply ironic that we've just spent 100 years learning how to reproduce the natural sound of musical instruments as closely as possible to the original, only to enter into the drab world of compressed MP3 fidelity. And (sorry Dr. Jon) I spend enough time in front of my computer all day without wanting to stare at the screen while I play music, too.
So I'm losing interest in new music. Big deal. I've been writing about it since I was 16, had a job where I was out at least five nights a week for five years seeing it live, met and interviewed some of the top people on the scene (and cooked dinner for a bunch of 'em, too!), and now, well, there are other things to engage me. Yes, I'll be going to SXSW again this year, and yes, I'll be trying to catch as much good stuff as I can, but I'm not anticipating any epiphanies.
There's a larger essay here, if anyone's interested (and don't all e-mail me at once, of course...), but I've got other things to write and other stuff to do. Meanwhile, here's the new stuff from this year.
***
My big discovery this year was a guy from St. Louis named Jon Hardy, whose album Make Me Like Gold is a disturbing, catchy, haunting melange of influences filtered through a very distinctive personal style. I guess the nearest touchstone is Neil Young, but that's actually not very accurate. I'm still waiting (albeit not as tensely as he must be) to find out if he's been accepted at SXSW, because I really, really want to see this band live. If you live around the midwest, you've got a shot at seeing them. If not, the record's only eleven bucks from his website, and I think it'd be a real good investment.
My other big discovery this year, which kind of unsettles me, is that I'm beginning to like some jam band music. I always hated the Grateful Dead, and the genre's other antecedents, from latter day Little Feat to post-Duane Allman Brothers, did nothing for me, either. But when fearless publicist Ken Weinstein sent me the North Mississippi Allstars' new album Electric Blue Watermelon, I remembered going out one evening in Memphis with Jim Dickinson and his wife to hear his boys play in an awful grunge/metal band called DNA and found myself wondering what they're doing now. This is what they're doing now, and I find it more rooted than most jam music -- and in fact didn't snap to the fact that it even was jam music until I heard their previous record, Hill Country Revue and realized what was going on. Anyway, I'm watching these guys.
A band I caught at SXSW this year which really impressed me, although they have a ways to go, is the Heartless Bastards, whose debut record (on blues label Fat Possum, no less), Stairs and Elevators, doesn't quite capture their live show. Frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom, however, is a force of nature, and I'm very curious to see where they go from here, not to mention whether they get sued by James McMurtry, whose band has been using that name for a couple of years now.
I usually hate superstar records, where a bunch of "guest vocalists" come in to sing on a track, but all rules are off for Los Super 7, who are only sometimes a band and exist mainly as a project that's a vehicle for just such records. At any rate, this year's celebration of Texas border radio music from them, Heard It On The X, is a sheer pleasure right up to its final track, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown singing Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," which has nothing to do with what preceded it, but was probably the song the cantankerous old man insisted on recording and nobody could talk him out of it. Did he have a premoniton that he'd die last year? Eerie. The rest of the record celebrates the wild mixture of R&B, rock and roll, and Mexican border music the "X" stations broadcast. Of particular note: Raul Malo's rendition of Doug Sahm's classic-to-be "The Song of Everything."
While we're on the cross-cultural tip, it seems appropriate to mention Ry Cooder's much raved-about Chavez Ravine, which has everything going for it: great story-line, performances by Mexican-American legends like Little Willie G, Lalo Guerrero, and Don Tosti, and impeccable production. Trouble is, I find it a chore to listen to. Cooder can no longer sing, nor can Bla Pahinui, who's brought in for the album's pentultimate number, "3rd Base, Dodger Stadium." A lot of people enjoy the recording of the Coasters' "Three Cool Cats" here, saying how it brought out the Latin rhythms, but they're there on the original, which is better sung. I'm going to play this a few more times, but if it's still hard going, I'll file and forget it, and relegate it to the category of stuff critics all like but I don't. It sort of brings back memories of those awful Latin Playboys albums that spun off of Los Lobos some while ago.
One band I was happy to see come back this year was the Go-Betweens, even if that long-legged blonde drummer of theirs has retired. Still, on the evidence of this year's album Oceans Apart and the half-concert I saw in July, Robert Forster and Grant McLennan -- who are the Go-Betweens -- are still writing amazing songs which sound almost effortless, and still performing them brilliantly. Their back catalogue, too, is worth exploring.
Another band which re-formed this year kinda sorta is Son Volt, and although I haven't played it as much as I should have (I lost it: record companies send me advance copies in plastic sleeves, and they just get lost on the shelves: guys, I do want production copies, too!), their new album Okemah and the Melody of Riot shows that Jay Farrar isn't quite as limited melodically as his solo albums would have you believe. (He's no Brian Wilson, either, of course). This year also saw the old Son Volt's Best of, A Retrospective, for which I wrote the liner notes, which involved interviewing the usually taciturn Mr. Farrar. I still haven't seen a copy of this. Thanks, Reprise!
And as far as reunions go, howzabout that Cream? Yeah, I know, it's a guilty pleasure, but their recorded reunion at the Royal Albert Hall definitely had its moments. Inessential, but fun.
Outside of rock, or whatever you file the above under, I really didn't hear much new that was worth crowing about. One exception (which might need to go under reissues, but the originals were barely issued in the first place) was Numero Records' reanimation of the Belize pop scene of the 1970s, Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up. No indigenous musical tradition to turn into world-pop? No problem! Steal liberally from others and make the rest up off the top of your head! This may be the year's goofiest album. It'll sell dozens, but it deserves more.
Finally, one jazz album. One. Jason Moran ruined SXSW for me this year by playing a set on the first night that set the musical bar so high none of the poor rockers I saw afterwards came anywhere near. Moran's not always easy to listen to, but boy, does he have ideas, and boy, does he have the skills to express them. He also has a killer band, and some very modern ideas about what to do with samples. At any rate, one day when I found a little extra cash in my pocket, I bought the album he excerpted that evening, Same Mother, and was blown away, as I thought I would be. Too bad, though, that it has such an astonishing amount of copy protection that my portable CD player, the machine on which I listen to everything, doesn't recognize the disc.
But that, again, is another rant for another day. That's just barely ten records there, too. Gone are the days when I'd submit four different top ten lists to four different magazines because of the embarrassment of riches I'd heard that year.
Still, ten good records is ten good records.
Reissues later, okay?
There's a major problem, though, about writing about new stuff. I hardly heard any. I don't think there's been a year in my adult life when I listened to less music. I've been puzzling over this and there are a few reasons which come to mind. First, I hardly have any place to write about music any more. There are virtually no "general" music magazines left, and the ones which exist want formulaic, short reviews with no criticism. I find it risible that so many writers call themselves "rock critics" which they don't do a lick of criticism, and concentrate instead on description. Some of them are very good at it, but it's still a recitation of feelings or technical observations with no attempt to link them to any higher purpose or broader context. The majority of my writing this year was done for specialty, ie, genre-driven, music magazines: No Depression, Harp, and the oddly-named Paste. All lean towards the "Americana" label (although No Depression has gone through a salutary re-evaluation, and Paste is more an "adult" rock mag than a purely "Americana" one), and so the few makers of new music who send me stuff tend to be in that area.
Which leads to the second reason I haven't listened to much. Back before cultural overproduction killed off any possibility of being a musical generalist, I'd have listening sessions when I'd grab a given kind of music and play a bunch of related records. One night it might be jazz, another night some kind of oddball pop, another singer/songwriter stuff, another hard rock, another some kind of acoustic quiet stuff. Almost all of this was stuff that came in the mail to me as a reviewer/writer. But without those choices, my evenings now tend to be "Do I want to listen to Americana or not" kinds of affairs. There is, on the newly-made music front, an appallingly monochromatic set of choices in front of me. So, as often as not, I just opt for silence.
Which leads to the third reason I haven't listened to much. I tend to get up late and work late, because nearly all the business I transact is with the United States, which is from six to nine hours behind Central European Time. Thus, at 10 pm, which is when I tend to quit for the day, it's still only 1 pm out on the West Coast. After that there's dinner, and then the traditional time I spend reading and listening to stuff. But there's a law here that there can be no noise after 10pm. For years I paid it no heed. I don't listen to music very loud, and much of what I play is pretty quiet anyway, but as soon as the building next to me changed hands a few years back and became an ownership building instead of a rental one, the two women on the other side of the wall -- a double wall, it should be emphasized -- informed me that they would tolerate no noise after 10, since they're both sensitive artists who need to paint during the daylight hours. So this means that my listening has to be done through headphones. And I hate headphones. Hate 'em! Music, for those of you who are so iPod'd out that you don't remember, should be played into an acoustic space, be it a room or a concert hall. Not inside your head.
So you add it all together, and I'm listening, when I'm listening, to a kind of music which tends towards the personal and confessional, sung by people inside my head, which is much too close, on records which basically kind of sound alike. No wonder I'm opting out.
There's also the fact that I've now been away from the American mainstream so long that there's tons and tons of best-selling, cultural-touchstone stuff that I've just never heard. White Stripes? Nope. Coldplay? Nope. (Although that may be a blessing). Strokes? Uh-uh. Arcade Fire? One track on a compilation that came with Word, the only general music mag I can think of, and probably the best music magazine out there. But it made no impression. And I've just given up trying to seek it out. It would mean buying tons of CDs I'd read raves about, but never heard, and that, I know from long experience of listening to stuff I got free that I'd read raves about, is an experience which would lead to inevitable disappointments.
Is it okay not to care? I do care, somewhat, but I've gotten a lot more passive about seeking stuff out. Yeah, I could download stuff from websites (legally, of course!), but I find it deeply ironic that we've just spent 100 years learning how to reproduce the natural sound of musical instruments as closely as possible to the original, only to enter into the drab world of compressed MP3 fidelity. And (sorry Dr. Jon) I spend enough time in front of my computer all day without wanting to stare at the screen while I play music, too.
So I'm losing interest in new music. Big deal. I've been writing about it since I was 16, had a job where I was out at least five nights a week for five years seeing it live, met and interviewed some of the top people on the scene (and cooked dinner for a bunch of 'em, too!), and now, well, there are other things to engage me. Yes, I'll be going to SXSW again this year, and yes, I'll be trying to catch as much good stuff as I can, but I'm not anticipating any epiphanies.
There's a larger essay here, if anyone's interested (and don't all e-mail me at once, of course...), but I've got other things to write and other stuff to do. Meanwhile, here's the new stuff from this year.
***
My big discovery this year was a guy from St. Louis named Jon Hardy, whose album Make Me Like Gold is a disturbing, catchy, haunting melange of influences filtered through a very distinctive personal style. I guess the nearest touchstone is Neil Young, but that's actually not very accurate. I'm still waiting (albeit not as tensely as he must be) to find out if he's been accepted at SXSW, because I really, really want to see this band live. If you live around the midwest, you've got a shot at seeing them. If not, the record's only eleven bucks from his website, and I think it'd be a real good investment.
My other big discovery this year, which kind of unsettles me, is that I'm beginning to like some jam band music. I always hated the Grateful Dead, and the genre's other antecedents, from latter day Little Feat to post-Duane Allman Brothers, did nothing for me, either. But when fearless publicist Ken Weinstein sent me the North Mississippi Allstars' new album Electric Blue Watermelon
, I remembered going out one evening in Memphis with Jim Dickinson and his wife to hear his boys play in an awful grunge/metal band called DNA and found myself wondering what they're doing now. This is what they're doing now, and I find it more rooted than most jam music -- and in fact didn't snap to the fact that it even was jam music until I heard their previous record, Hill Country Revue and realized what was going on. Anyway, I'm watching these guys. A band I caught at SXSW this year which really impressed me, although they have a ways to go, is the Heartless Bastards, whose debut record (on blues label Fat Possum, no less), Stairs and Elevators
, doesn't quite capture their live show. Frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom, however, is a force of nature, and I'm very curious to see where they go from here, not to mention whether they get sued by James McMurtry, whose band has been using that name for a couple of years now. I usually hate superstar records, where a bunch of "guest vocalists" come in to sing on a track, but all rules are off for Los Super 7, who are only sometimes a band and exist mainly as a project that's a vehicle for just such records. At any rate, this year's celebration of Texas border radio music from them, Heard It On The X
, is a sheer pleasure right up to its final track, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown singing Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," which has nothing to do with what preceded it, but was probably the song the cantankerous old man insisted on recording and nobody could talk him out of it. Did he have a premoniton that he'd die last year? Eerie. The rest of the record celebrates the wild mixture of R&B, rock and roll, and Mexican border music the "X" stations broadcast. Of particular note: Raul Malo's rendition of Doug Sahm's classic-to-be "The Song of Everything."While we're on the cross-cultural tip, it seems appropriate to mention Ry Cooder's much raved-about Chavez Ravine
, which has everything going for it: great story-line, performances by Mexican-American legends like Little Willie G, Lalo Guerrero, and Don Tosti, and impeccable production. Trouble is, I find it a chore to listen to. Cooder can no longer sing, nor can Bla Pahinui, who's brought in for the album's pentultimate number, "3rd Base, Dodger Stadium." A lot of people enjoy the recording of the Coasters' "Three Cool Cats" here, saying how it brought out the Latin rhythms, but they're there on the original, which is better sung. I'm going to play this a few more times, but if it's still hard going, I'll file and forget it, and relegate it to the category of stuff critics all like but I don't. It sort of brings back memories of those awful Latin Playboys albums that spun off of Los Lobos some while ago. One band I was happy to see come back this year was the Go-Betweens, even if that long-legged blonde drummer of theirs has retired. Still, on the evidence of this year's album Oceans Apart
and the half-concert I saw in July, Robert Forster and Grant McLennan -- who are the Go-Betweens -- are still writing amazing songs which sound almost effortless, and still performing them brilliantly. Their back catalogue, too, is worth exploring. Another band which re-formed this year kinda sorta is Son Volt, and although I haven't played it as much as I should have (I lost it: record companies send me advance copies in plastic sleeves, and they just get lost on the shelves: guys, I do want production copies, too!), their new album Okemah and the Melody of Riot
shows that Jay Farrar isn't quite as limited melodically as his solo albums would have you believe. (He's no Brian Wilson, either, of course). This year also saw the old Son Volt's Best of, A Retrospective, for which I wrote the liner notes, which involved interviewing the usually taciturn Mr. Farrar. I still haven't seen a copy of this. Thanks, Reprise!And as far as reunions go, howzabout that Cream? Yeah, I know, it's a guilty pleasure, but their recorded reunion at the Royal Albert Hall
definitely had its moments. Inessential, but fun. Outside of rock, or whatever you file the above under, I really didn't hear much new that was worth crowing about. One exception (which might need to go under reissues, but the originals were barely issued in the first place) was Numero Records' reanimation of the Belize pop scene of the 1970s, Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up
. No indigenous musical tradition to turn into world-pop? No problem! Steal liberally from others and make the rest up off the top of your head! This may be the year's goofiest album. It'll sell dozens, but it deserves more. Finally, one jazz album. One. Jason Moran ruined SXSW for me this year by playing a set on the first night that set the musical bar so high none of the poor rockers I saw afterwards came anywhere near. Moran's not always easy to listen to, but boy, does he have ideas, and boy, does he have the skills to express them. He also has a killer band, and some very modern ideas about what to do with samples. At any rate, one day when I found a little extra cash in my pocket, I bought the album he excerpted that evening, Same Mother
, and was blown away, as I thought I would be. Too bad, though, that it has such an astonishing amount of copy protection that my portable CD player, the machine on which I listen to everything, doesn't recognize the disc. But that, again, is another rant for another day. That's just barely ten records there, too. Gone are the days when I'd submit four different top ten lists to four different magazines because of the embarrassment of riches I'd heard that year.
Still, ten good records is ten good records.
Reissues later, okay?
Thursday, January 12, 2006
January Crumbs
Had a couple of beers last night with yet another person who's giving up on Berlin -- or so he thinks -- and returning to New York at least through the end of the World Cup. (Incidentally, he's trying to sublet his apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, so if you're interested, toss me an e-mail).
He says that in recent months, nine of his close friends here have left. Nine. "And how many close friends do you have at any given time?" He can't seem to make a living, although I'm not sure how hard he's tried, but the stuff he's doing to pay the rent disgusts him, so he's reached a sort of career impasse.
One does hate to see someone in such misery, but I do take some sort of comfort in the fact that I'm not at all alone in this.
Now if I could figure out what that stuff the bartender made us drink before he'd let himself be paid, I'd be okay. It sure wasn't a good dessert for Bohemian black beer, I'll tell you that.
***
Yes, folks, there is a German sense of humor. One separate from the usual crude slapstick and excrement jokes. Heard today:
"Why do neo-nazis make such lousy DJs?"
"They can't tell the difference between '33 and '45."
***
It's hit me. In four months I'll be gone, if all goes as planned. It makes it hard to look around the apartment and think, I'm going to have to either pack or get rid of a lot of this stuff. It makes it hard to concentrate on the book proposal I'm writing about my time here. It occasionally give me a twinge of melancholy as I look at something and think "next year, I'll be looking at something else." For instance, the Grüne Woche, the big food trade fair that's been a landmark, a sort of start-of-the-year tradition for me for the years I've been here, opens tomorrow, and I'm making plans to go, but it'll be my last unless chance catches me visiting Berlin when it happens again. I guess I'll be settling for Vinisud from now on. And pining for a Berliner Pilsner.
He says that in recent months, nine of his close friends here have left. Nine. "And how many close friends do you have at any given time?" He can't seem to make a living, although I'm not sure how hard he's tried, but the stuff he's doing to pay the rent disgusts him, so he's reached a sort of career impasse.
One does hate to see someone in such misery, but I do take some sort of comfort in the fact that I'm not at all alone in this.
Now if I could figure out what that stuff the bartender made us drink before he'd let himself be paid, I'd be okay. It sure wasn't a good dessert for Bohemian black beer, I'll tell you that.
***
Yes, folks, there is a German sense of humor. One separate from the usual crude slapstick and excrement jokes. Heard today:
"Why do neo-nazis make such lousy DJs?"
"They can't tell the difference between '33 and '45."
***
It's hit me. In four months I'll be gone, if all goes as planned. It makes it hard to look around the apartment and think, I'm going to have to either pack or get rid of a lot of this stuff. It makes it hard to concentrate on the book proposal I'm writing about my time here. It occasionally give me a twinge of melancholy as I look at something and think "next year, I'll be looking at something else." For instance, the Grüne Woche, the big food trade fair that's been a landmark, a sort of start-of-the-year tradition for me for the years I've been here, opens tomorrow, and I'm making plans to go, but it'll be my last unless chance catches me visiting Berlin when it happens again. I guess I'll be settling for Vinisud from now on. And pining for a Berliner Pilsner.
Monday, January 09, 2006
Cold
The dancer was over the other night, trying to look on the bright side of the weather. "At least today we had one whole hour of sun," she said. Indeed, I know when that happens: the sun shines straight into the window of one of the buildings across the way, which then reflects it straight into my eyes as I sit here at the desk trying to work. "But at least when it's really cracking cold like this, it doesn't snow and we get sun."
I like that. No idea if it's a German idiom she translated or not, but that exactly describes the current weather, down in the teens at night, but fortunately not with a serious wind. It can still be painful to walk in, though, and no matter how good your gloves are, your hands ache for a while after you get back into the warmth.
Still, we cracked out into the night last night for a concert: a viol consort named Labyrinto at the Kammermusiksaal of the Philharmonie, playing 17th century German repertoire. Several of the players seemed to be moonlighting from regular Berliner Philharmoniker gigs (including one guy who'd been with the orchestra since 1970), and several numbers were sung by the disconcerting male alto of Michael Chance.
I'm not sure about my reaction to this performance. My consort experience has been limited to listening to the English repertoire (and one wonderful concert by Jordi Savall and Hesperion XX), and it could be that what I perceived as an over-Romanticizing of the music -- dramatic dynamic effects, lots of legato -- is authentic to the German repertoire. Two of the composers on deck, Johann Rosenmüller and Franz Tunder, I'd never even heard of, and I'm an old music buff, but there was a full compliment of Sch's: Scheidt, Schütz, and Schein.
I also wish I could have seen them play. The Kammermusiksaal is part of what I've always thought of as one of the ugliest buildings in Berlin, and it turned out to be as confusing inside as it is unappealing outside. The good news is that, for chamber music, the performers are in the round. The bad news is, it's not exactly round, it's polygonal, and there's definitely a direction in which the performers face. "Tickets on that side were fully twice what they are for these," the dancer told me, and while the sound was good (I assume it was mostly the natural sound: boy, is that room rigged with "clouds" and other acoustic jiggery-pokery), when the ensemble took its bows, we mostly got to watch their asses.
That said, this was my first live music since Bob Dylan came to town in October, and live music of a sort I rarely get to see. I'm hoping that more off-the-wall stuff like this plays Montpellier because it's more of a backwater and doesn't have the self-importance that Berlin's cultural establishment seems to feel it has to display. For that matter, Jordi and the boys and girls are just a few hours away, so maybe some spinoffs of all that Hesperion energy will make themselves manifest.
On our way out, a woman was handing out cards advertising forthcoming concerts. "More old music," she said, "next weekend." I didn't look at the card til I got home, but it was advertising Bach cantatas. Sorry, to me Bach's not "old."
I like that. No idea if it's a German idiom she translated or not, but that exactly describes the current weather, down in the teens at night, but fortunately not with a serious wind. It can still be painful to walk in, though, and no matter how good your gloves are, your hands ache for a while after you get back into the warmth.
Still, we cracked out into the night last night for a concert: a viol consort named Labyrinto at the Kammermusiksaal of the Philharmonie, playing 17th century German repertoire. Several of the players seemed to be moonlighting from regular Berliner Philharmoniker gigs (including one guy who'd been with the orchestra since 1970), and several numbers were sung by the disconcerting male alto of Michael Chance.
I'm not sure about my reaction to this performance. My consort experience has been limited to listening to the English repertoire (and one wonderful concert by Jordi Savall and Hesperion XX), and it could be that what I perceived as an over-Romanticizing of the music -- dramatic dynamic effects, lots of legato -- is authentic to the German repertoire. Two of the composers on deck, Johann Rosenmüller and Franz Tunder, I'd never even heard of, and I'm an old music buff, but there was a full compliment of Sch's: Scheidt, Schütz, and Schein.
I also wish I could have seen them play. The Kammermusiksaal is part of what I've always thought of as one of the ugliest buildings in Berlin, and it turned out to be as confusing inside as it is unappealing outside. The good news is that, for chamber music, the performers are in the round. The bad news is, it's not exactly round, it's polygonal, and there's definitely a direction in which the performers face. "Tickets on that side were fully twice what they are for these," the dancer told me, and while the sound was good (I assume it was mostly the natural sound: boy, is that room rigged with "clouds" and other acoustic jiggery-pokery), when the ensemble took its bows, we mostly got to watch their asses.
That said, this was my first live music since Bob Dylan came to town in October, and live music of a sort I rarely get to see. I'm hoping that more off-the-wall stuff like this plays Montpellier because it's more of a backwater and doesn't have the self-importance that Berlin's cultural establishment seems to feel it has to display. For that matter, Jordi and the boys and girls are just a few hours away, so maybe some spinoffs of all that Hesperion energy will make themselves manifest.
On our way out, a woman was handing out cards advertising forthcoming concerts. "More old music," she said, "next weekend." I didn't look at the card til I got home, but it was advertising Bach cantatas. Sorry, to me Bach's not "old."
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Hairy Beans and Liquid Asparagus
One thing about holiday feasting around here is that it's never going to be too good. I was reminded of this just recently when I unexpectedly got a big check. Oh, sure, I was going to spend most of it on rent and other silly necessities, but there's always an element of celebration when you find a wad of money you hadn't been expecting sitting in your account.
So I went to the Italian wholesale place to replenish the supplies of good olive oil and professional-grade pasta and discovered that it was salsiccie day. Now, Americans can just go into the supermarket and buy "Italian sausage," but it's a distinct rarity around here, so I got a kilo. The rest of the stuff I wanted was also there, and I got off with only €50 worth of damage, 13 of which was the sausage.
When I got back home, I tossed all but two links into the freezer and, with the super-cheap white cannellini beans I'd gotten, I realized that I could take two of these fresh links and make pastafazool, a kind of bean, sausage, and pasta stew. But...what to have with it?
Well, the local supermarket was in the throes of holiday fever, and lo and behold, they had green asparagus, another rarity in a land where only white asparagus, fibrous and devoid of any vitamin content, is considered fit to eat. True, it was €3.99, but I was celebrating! So I tossed it into my basket and got the rest of what I needed and went to the checkout.
Back home, everything went well. I cut the sausage into coins and fried them, prepared the tomato-based stew base/sauce, and set it all bubbling and perfuming the house. I was looking forward to this meal, after which I'd sit and read a good George Pelecanos book I'd found on sale. Time to start steaming the asparagus, since I was already melting butter and infusing it with garlic.
Now, the way this asparagus is sold, it's wrapped in paper right up to the tips. I don't know why this is, but the packer in Greece does it this way. Sometimes it hides old stems, but on the rare occasions when I've found it, there have never been any problems. So I popped the paper and found...decay. I'm talking about greyish stems, oozing liquid, and a stench.
I kicked myself. The reason I'd seen the asparagus in the first place was that it was prominently displayed. Under lights. Hot lights.
And I knew about this, and should have realized right from the start that there was going to be something wrong. I was just so euphoric about what the rest of the day had brought that I zoned it out completely. And it's not like I haven't bought bad vegetables there before.
Germans don't eat much greenery, at least not in this part of the country, where it's historically been hard to raise. Around here, there are all kinds of root vegetables, and there are pumpkins in season, but a lot of the other stuff comes from Italy, Spain, and Greece. Mid-winter there's always a crop of green beans from Egypt, which I think is cool, and on the rare occasion you can get authentic Haas avocados, the only ones I'll consider, they come from Kenya. But the stores do carry a limited number of green vegetables, and I, of course, buy as many as I can. I'm just not into big radishes or parsnips.
But, although I'm completely certain that the stuff arrives from these exotic lands in decent shape, the idiots who run the supermarket here don't seem to get it. Okay, the stuff's not cooled at all, which is one big mistake, but needn't be fatal. But the bright halogen lights? They're cooking them right on the shelves. Once, you could buy as much or as little as you wanted, which meant that you could actively reject the rotted stuff, but no longer: everything gets packed in these plastic panniers, and then wrapped in cellophane. Then, under the bright lights, moisture evaporates from the vegetables and sits on them. And this, in turn, encourages mold and rot. Many is the pannier of 500g of green beans I've bought, only to discover that, in the center, they've turned to a black liquid mass surrounded by other beans sprouting white fuzzy hair.
I could have taken the asparagus back, if I'd wanted to walk back to the store, if it weren't past 8pm when the store closes, and if I'd thought I'd have a chance in hell of getting anything out of it but grief. But you have to factor in the German "the customer is always wrong" attitude. You should have looked more closely before you bought it. How do we know you bought this here? How do we know you bought this today? Anyway, the guy who could take care of this, if you're not lying, which you almost certainly are, isn't here.
Instead, I carefully trimmed the tips and ate what remained of the 500g bundle as buttered asparagus tips. I don't remember what they tasted like, because I was so pissed off at myself for not realizing I was about to be ripped off when I bought them in the first place.
At least Pelecanos delivered.
So I went to the Italian wholesale place to replenish the supplies of good olive oil and professional-grade pasta and discovered that it was salsiccie day. Now, Americans can just go into the supermarket and buy "Italian sausage," but it's a distinct rarity around here, so I got a kilo. The rest of the stuff I wanted was also there, and I got off with only €50 worth of damage, 13 of which was the sausage.
When I got back home, I tossed all but two links into the freezer and, with the super-cheap white cannellini beans I'd gotten, I realized that I could take two of these fresh links and make pastafazool, a kind of bean, sausage, and pasta stew. But...what to have with it?
Well, the local supermarket was in the throes of holiday fever, and lo and behold, they had green asparagus, another rarity in a land where only white asparagus, fibrous and devoid of any vitamin content, is considered fit to eat. True, it was €3.99, but I was celebrating! So I tossed it into my basket and got the rest of what I needed and went to the checkout.
Back home, everything went well. I cut the sausage into coins and fried them, prepared the tomato-based stew base/sauce, and set it all bubbling and perfuming the house. I was looking forward to this meal, after which I'd sit and read a good George Pelecanos book
I'd found on sale. Time to start steaming the asparagus, since I was already melting butter and infusing it with garlic. Now, the way this asparagus is sold, it's wrapped in paper right up to the tips. I don't know why this is, but the packer in Greece does it this way. Sometimes it hides old stems, but on the rare occasions when I've found it, there have never been any problems. So I popped the paper and found...decay. I'm talking about greyish stems, oozing liquid, and a stench.
I kicked myself. The reason I'd seen the asparagus in the first place was that it was prominently displayed. Under lights. Hot lights.
And I knew about this, and should have realized right from the start that there was going to be something wrong. I was just so euphoric about what the rest of the day had brought that I zoned it out completely. And it's not like I haven't bought bad vegetables there before.
Germans don't eat much greenery, at least not in this part of the country, where it's historically been hard to raise. Around here, there are all kinds of root vegetables, and there are pumpkins in season, but a lot of the other stuff comes from Italy, Spain, and Greece. Mid-winter there's always a crop of green beans from Egypt, which I think is cool, and on the rare occasion you can get authentic Haas avocados, the only ones I'll consider, they come from Kenya. But the stores do carry a limited number of green vegetables, and I, of course, buy as many as I can. I'm just not into big radishes or parsnips.
But, although I'm completely certain that the stuff arrives from these exotic lands in decent shape, the idiots who run the supermarket here don't seem to get it. Okay, the stuff's not cooled at all, which is one big mistake, but needn't be fatal. But the bright halogen lights? They're cooking them right on the shelves. Once, you could buy as much or as little as you wanted, which meant that you could actively reject the rotted stuff, but no longer: everything gets packed in these plastic panniers, and then wrapped in cellophane. Then, under the bright lights, moisture evaporates from the vegetables and sits on them. And this, in turn, encourages mold and rot. Many is the pannier of 500g of green beans I've bought, only to discover that, in the center, they've turned to a black liquid mass surrounded by other beans sprouting white fuzzy hair.
I could have taken the asparagus back, if I'd wanted to walk back to the store, if it weren't past 8pm when the store closes, and if I'd thought I'd have a chance in hell of getting anything out of it but grief. But you have to factor in the German "the customer is always wrong" attitude. You should have looked more closely before you bought it. How do we know you bought this here? How do we know you bought this today? Anyway, the guy who could take care of this, if you're not lying, which you almost certainly are, isn't here.
Instead, I carefully trimmed the tips and ate what remained of the 500g bundle as buttered asparagus tips. I don't remember what they tasted like, because I was so pissed off at myself for not realizing I was about to be ripped off when I bought them in the first place.
At least Pelecanos delivered.
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
First Crumbs of the Year
New Year's wasn't so bad at all, which led the Krautmeister to ask in an e-mail whether this reflected the state of the German economy. I think it's partially that -- who wants to spend substantial quantities of money on stuff that just goes bang when money's tight, after all? -- but there also seemed to be a technological shift taking place this year.
In previous years, there were mostly really loud explosions, but from what I could hear, these bombs have been refined. There was one which seemed to make a huge splashing noise after the explosion, and another that seemed to be a composite, where there was hissing, then a lot of tiny explosions and then a few big ones: sssssssskkkkkkkkkktttttktktktktktkABOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Presumably there was a visual display with this as well. But by far, the majority of what I heard until I went to bed about 1:30 in the morning were whistlers. The night sounded like thousands of suicidal canaries were about.
And the next morning there were fewer red sidewalks. What inevitably happens on New Year's evening is that at some point the snow starts to melt, and the cheap dyed paper wrapping the fireworks falls into the water and the cheap cardboard holding the powder is blown up and it all turns into mush. The tubular firecracker corpses become indistinguishable from the tubular leavings of our doggie friends, so red sidewalks are best avoided.
Anyway, it's over until next year, at which point I hope to be annoyed at citizens of an entirely different country.
And this year's dead guy was Buhaina Art Blakey. The classic Blue Note period, but also the 1958 album of his band with Thelonious Monk. A great way to usher in the New Year.
***
Strange English of the month has to go to the Volksbühne, Berlin's beloved hard-core lefty theater, which has been presenting a play with the enigmatic title Life Is The New Hard. What, for heaven's sake, was the old hard?
***
The odd business called Mörder (murderer) has opened a few doors away. Very hard to tell what goes on in there, although it seems to sell wine, Gummi Bears, and soda. On the first, it was offering pickles and aspirin. Ah, well. At least it's not White Trash Fast Food -- or likely to become a draw like they were.
***
Thanks to Natalie for this article from the Berliner Zeitung (and, thus, in German), which states the amazing fact that the best selling records in Germany last year were...German! This may not seem like much, but it's actually a pretty ground-breaking event. Pop music in postwar Europe has, for years, been all about colonization by first the Americans, and then, after the Beatles, the British. When I first moved here, German divisions of the major labels signed German acts as tax-losses to offset the profits from their Rod Stewart and Tina Turner releases, and you'd almost never hear anyone singing in German on a pop station. The Hamburg band Element of Crime were considered radicals for making pop music in German, and they were about the only big-selling band that did so.
All in all, I think this is a healthy development. Pop music in Europe is multilingual, so that we get the occasional world music number or tune in another language on the charts. Germans have avoided their own pop and folk culture and language because of the residual memory of the uses Hitler and company made of them, but maybe those days are over. Certainly the days of the major labels are over, and the next few years in what the record industry calls the GAS Territories -- Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the German-speaking market, which is the second-largest in the world -- should be very interesting to watch.
In previous years, there were mostly really loud explosions, but from what I could hear, these bombs have been refined. There was one which seemed to make a huge splashing noise after the explosion, and another that seemed to be a composite, where there was hissing, then a lot of tiny explosions and then a few big ones: sssssssskkkkkkkkkktttttktktktktktkABOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Presumably there was a visual display with this as well. But by far, the majority of what I heard until I went to bed about 1:30 in the morning were whistlers. The night sounded like thousands of suicidal canaries were about.
And the next morning there were fewer red sidewalks. What inevitably happens on New Year's evening is that at some point the snow starts to melt, and the cheap dyed paper wrapping the fireworks falls into the water and the cheap cardboard holding the powder is blown up and it all turns into mush. The tubular firecracker corpses become indistinguishable from the tubular leavings of our doggie friends, so red sidewalks are best avoided.
Anyway, it's over until next year, at which point I hope to be annoyed at citizens of an entirely different country.
And this year's dead guy was Buhaina Art Blakey. The classic Blue Note period, but also the 1958 album of his band with Thelonious Monk. A great way to usher in the New Year.
***
Strange English of the month has to go to the Volksbühne, Berlin's beloved hard-core lefty theater, which has been presenting a play with the enigmatic title Life Is The New Hard. What, for heaven's sake, was the old hard?
***
The odd business called Mörder (murderer) has opened a few doors away. Very hard to tell what goes on in there, although it seems to sell wine, Gummi Bears, and soda. On the first, it was offering pickles and aspirin. Ah, well. At least it's not White Trash Fast Food -- or likely to become a draw like they were.
***
Thanks to Natalie for this article from the Berliner Zeitung (and, thus, in German), which states the amazing fact that the best selling records in Germany last year were...German! This may not seem like much, but it's actually a pretty ground-breaking event. Pop music in postwar Europe has, for years, been all about colonization by first the Americans, and then, after the Beatles, the British. When I first moved here, German divisions of the major labels signed German acts as tax-losses to offset the profits from their Rod Stewart and Tina Turner releases, and you'd almost never hear anyone singing in German on a pop station. The Hamburg band Element of Crime were considered radicals for making pop music in German, and they were about the only big-selling band that did so.
All in all, I think this is a healthy development. Pop music in Europe is multilingual, so that we get the occasional world music number or tune in another language on the charts. Germans have avoided their own pop and folk culture and language because of the residual memory of the uses Hitler and company made of them, but maybe those days are over. Certainly the days of the major labels are over, and the next few years in what the record industry calls the GAS Territories -- Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the German-speaking market, which is the second-largest in the world -- should be very interesting to watch.
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