We interrupt this Sommerloch with an important announcement.
An edible hamburger has been found in Berlin. And not just edible: actually quite good.
If that news is all you need to hear, head off to Hazelwood, Choriner Str. 72, at the corner of Zionskirchstr. in that grey area between Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte. If you need more info, just read on.
To call this joint "bare bones" is to glorify it. My guess is that someone decided they had a genius in the kitchen and just opened up a business. There are absolutely no decorative features in the entire place, which didn't bother me because I ate out on the sidewalk at one of the tables just like everyone else did. But when the bad weather sets in, someone might want to give this some thought.
The menu, too, is small. There were two sandwiches, the hamburger and a bizarre Reuben made with ham (!), a salad, and a soup. Oh, and I guess dessert, because a table near us got a huge sundae. There was an abundant cocktail menu, but that's not what we came for.
The biggest downside to Hazelwood is the price. The hamburger alone (it comes with a side of rather rough-cut coleslaw) set me back €6.50, which is a lot for 200g of beef. Upgrading it to "deluxe" -- ie, the addition of a smallish side of previously-frozen french fries -- was an additional €1.50. I was hoping for a small salad (the coleslaw not being mentioned on the menu) and was presented with the Hazelwood Salad, €4.50, which was a Thai-style chicken, ginger, fish sauce-and-lime, chopped peanuts salad which was more than I wanted but only disappointed because I'd made a nearly identical one two days earlier. Draft Pilsner Urquel -- excellent -- was €2,90.
But even at that price, the hamburger was worth it. Or, I should say, cheeseburger; a slab of that unique cheddar available in Berlin, the one with absolutely no taste, was added on top. But the meat is mixed with a wonderful onion and spice mixture -- not a lot, but enough to subtly flavor the meat -- and I was happy I hadn't drowned it in ketchup (which would only have happened accidentally, but you can't put ketchup back in the bottle). Now, the fact that it's not, like every other hamburger I've had in this city but one, a pre-frozen, cereal-laden hockey puck is remarkable in itself. (The other one is the hamburger at the Hard Rock Cafe, which I'm not sure is still in business, the Berlin one being the biggest money drain in the entire Hard Rock empire, but all expats in Europe know that the only reason to go to the Hard Rock wherever you are is to get a decent burger). But there's an additional technological breakthrough here: the burger is served on what seems to be a hunk of ciabatta instead of one of those instantly-soggy, fall-apart hamburger buns that are the shame of a country with great baking skills. Thus, the structural integrity of the bread is maintained throughout the consumption of the burger.
A lot of Germans have a fear of ground beef, for some reason, which is weird considering they eat Hackpeter, raw ground pork mixed with spices, for breakfast. This, I think, is the rationale for the frozen patties; untouched by human hands, they go on the griddle frozen and come off hard. And that's another thing about the Hazelwood burger: it's actually grilled instead of griddled! This gives the patty a nice crisp surface and extra flavor, not to mention extra authenticity points.
Service was fast and friendly, another anomaly. And, after getting slightly lost on the way over, it was encouraging to see how close to the house this actually is. The price will keep me away as a frequent visitor, but I'll definitely be back.
Thanks to Radio Free Mike and Bowleserised for the tip!
And now back to our regularly-scheduled Sommerloch.
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Sommerloch '06, Part 2
Wow, things really have gone quiet around here. Well, "quiet" isn't exactly the right word. I seem to have a knack for living near sound-enhancing bricks. In Austin, I lived behind a school, which had a big playground, and the walls of the school bounced any sound made on the playground right over to me. Now, you'd think that this would be a pain during the day, but kids make so much noise you can't tell how loud it really is. True, there was a lesbian who came to practice bagpipes, enamored of the brick acoustic effect, but she wasn't there all that often. (She managed to scare the lizards in my garden, though: they immediately changed color and scampered away). No, what was bad was the nighthawks.
Nighthawks have an amazingly annoying courtship ritual. The males soar high, then drop with outstretched wings, and recover before they hit the ground. This makes the wings vibrate and create a zooming sound. So when the neighborhood nighthawks discovered the amplification qualities of the schoolyard, every horny male nighthawk in Texas went over there to broadcast amplified zooms. And they were loud. Naturally, as you can tell by the name, they did it at night. Late at night. And there was me, trying to sleep with the windows open. Fat chance.
There are no nighthawks in Berlin, of course, but there sure are crows. Not those small, glossy ones you have in America. These guys are big, and are properly referred to as the hooded crow. And they make a variety of sounds, all vaguely cawing. I have no idea if some of these are mating strategies, but several of them have discovered the brick wall in the parking lot outside my window, so that when they call, they sound like they weigh about 25 pounds. There are those who say crows can be domesticated and kept as pets, and that they can be trained to talk like a parrot can. I can't verify the former, but there's one crow who's been visiting this year whose cry, I swear, is "VALLLLyum!" Perhaps this is a new species, and we can add to the hooded crow and the carrion crow the new mutation, the Valium crow.
Or maybe he's just as annoyed with the little electric toys the neighbor kids zoom around the parking lot in as I am.
***
Some time ago, I mentioned that our building had acquired a real live Countess, although you'd never have guessed it from talking to her, and I wrote a post about minor German royalty and how it's all over the place. The Countess got a little upset because I gave her name, and she was Googling herself instead of doing her schoolwork and found the post, so I removed her name at her request.
I walked into the courtyard the other day, though, and saw her directing a fleet of movers who were packing her things into their trunk. "I'm outta here!" she said in her fine Valley Girl accent. "I gotta have my space!" So now my landlord's here getting the apartment ready to rent again, and no doubt worrying about it, because this is the worst possible time to have a vacancy: the rental market in Berlin is wide open (especially for office space), the universities are out, and nobody has any money.
So now my building is full of no-counts, and we have no Countess. We still do have Herr Böse and Herr Schlecht, though. And, unfortunately, for a while longer, Herr Ward.
***
One industry that's going great guns here is graffiti. The owners of the building next door have decided that the best way to stop the tagging on the wall closest to the street is to hire a crew of professional graffiti painters, and I have to say, what they've come up with so far is horrible. They keep overpainting stuff, though, and maybe once they get things layered a bit more it'll look better, but I could have come up with a dozen locals who could have done better than what's up there right now.
On the other hand, creative graffiti still pops up now and again, and one of the best new tricks I've seen was when I was walking down Bergstr. on the way back from the supermarket and saw some strange English written in chalk on the sidewalk. It took a minute, but it dawned on me that I was reading the lyrics to ABBA's "Super Trooper" backwards. As I got to the Ackerkeller, the gay bar that took over the space that was formerly Bergwerk, a student bar, I found the start of the song, along with the inscription "Street Karaoke #2: Super Trooper by ABBA." And just on the other side of the bar, there was Street Karaoke #1, some German pop song whose lyrics seem to be so twistedly psychosexually right for relationships in this country (something like "I know you lie when you say you love me, but you are mine and I am yours, so I lie, too, when I say I love you") that I'm sure it was a hit.
Still, I like the idea of street karaoke, and pass it along to others who might like to experiment with the idea. Good penmanship, though, is a must.
***
I'm wondering if I'm so out of it that I've missed the idea that every European household has to have seven or eight shishas, or elaborate Arab hookahs. That's the only reason I can think of for the fact that there are, within two blocks of my house, two huge stores selling them, everything from five-foot-tall floor models to portables which come with their own intricate wooden case. One of these stores is in a really big space which used to be a bank. I have never seen anyone except the shopkeepers in either one of them, which makes me suspect that, like the dozens of Arab-run Internet cafes which erupted like mushrooms after a storm around here, they may not be in business strictly to make money.
Nighthawks have an amazingly annoying courtship ritual. The males soar high, then drop with outstretched wings, and recover before they hit the ground. This makes the wings vibrate and create a zooming sound. So when the neighborhood nighthawks discovered the amplification qualities of the schoolyard, every horny male nighthawk in Texas went over there to broadcast amplified zooms. And they were loud. Naturally, as you can tell by the name, they did it at night. Late at night. And there was me, trying to sleep with the windows open. Fat chance.
There are no nighthawks in Berlin, of course, but there sure are crows. Not those small, glossy ones you have in America. These guys are big, and are properly referred to as the hooded crow. And they make a variety of sounds, all vaguely cawing. I have no idea if some of these are mating strategies, but several of them have discovered the brick wall in the parking lot outside my window, so that when they call, they sound like they weigh about 25 pounds. There are those who say crows can be domesticated and kept as pets, and that they can be trained to talk like a parrot can. I can't verify the former, but there's one crow who's been visiting this year whose cry, I swear, is "VALLLLyum!" Perhaps this is a new species, and we can add to the hooded crow and the carrion crow the new mutation, the Valium crow.
Or maybe he's just as annoyed with the little electric toys the neighbor kids zoom around the parking lot in as I am.
***
Some time ago, I mentioned that our building had acquired a real live Countess, although you'd never have guessed it from talking to her, and I wrote a post about minor German royalty and how it's all over the place. The Countess got a little upset because I gave her name, and she was Googling herself instead of doing her schoolwork and found the post, so I removed her name at her request.
I walked into the courtyard the other day, though, and saw her directing a fleet of movers who were packing her things into their trunk. "I'm outta here!" she said in her fine Valley Girl accent. "I gotta have my space!" So now my landlord's here getting the apartment ready to rent again, and no doubt worrying about it, because this is the worst possible time to have a vacancy: the rental market in Berlin is wide open (especially for office space), the universities are out, and nobody has any money.
So now my building is full of no-counts, and we have no Countess. We still do have Herr Böse and Herr Schlecht, though. And, unfortunately, for a while longer, Herr Ward.
***
One industry that's going great guns here is graffiti. The owners of the building next door have decided that the best way to stop the tagging on the wall closest to the street is to hire a crew of professional graffiti painters, and I have to say, what they've come up with so far is horrible. They keep overpainting stuff, though, and maybe once they get things layered a bit more it'll look better, but I could have come up with a dozen locals who could have done better than what's up there right now.
On the other hand, creative graffiti still pops up now and again, and one of the best new tricks I've seen was when I was walking down Bergstr. on the way back from the supermarket and saw some strange English written in chalk on the sidewalk. It took a minute, but it dawned on me that I was reading the lyrics to ABBA's "Super Trooper" backwards. As I got to the Ackerkeller, the gay bar that took over the space that was formerly Bergwerk, a student bar, I found the start of the song, along with the inscription "Street Karaoke #2: Super Trooper by ABBA." And just on the other side of the bar, there was Street Karaoke #1, some German pop song whose lyrics seem to be so twistedly psychosexually right for relationships in this country (something like "I know you lie when you say you love me, but you are mine and I am yours, so I lie, too, when I say I love you") that I'm sure it was a hit.
Still, I like the idea of street karaoke, and pass it along to others who might like to experiment with the idea. Good penmanship, though, is a must.
***
I'm wondering if I'm so out of it that I've missed the idea that every European household has to have seven or eight shishas, or elaborate Arab hookahs. That's the only reason I can think of for the fact that there are, within two blocks of my house, two huge stores selling them, everything from five-foot-tall floor models to portables which come with their own intricate wooden case. One of these stores is in a really big space which used to be a bank. I have never seen anyone except the shopkeepers in either one of them, which makes me suspect that, like the dozens of Arab-run Internet cafes which erupted like mushrooms after a storm around here, they may not be in business strictly to make money.
Friday, July 21, 2006
Sommerloch '06, Part 1
"Boy, this sure is a quiet city," said the visitor from Austin. Yeah, and it's also green and warm. Hardly typical at the moment, in other words. The key word is warm, though: 36 degrees C, 97 degrees F yesterday, although some cooling breezes came in at night and mellowed it down about ten degrees F. Me, I don't mind. This heat is wonderful, as long as I don't have to rush around in it. I'm just kicking myself for not planting basil this year; in the cold, rainy summers we've had these past couple of years, it develops mighty roots, and little plants about an inch and a half high. I could have had a rain-forest, a jungle of the stuff this year! And yet I know if I plant some today by the time it comes up it'll be cold and rainy outside.
***
One thing about the WM that I'm already missing is the change in opening hours for stores, the convenience of having them open until 10 and open on Sunday. I got used to it all too quickly, I'm afraid. But help may be on the way: the Bundestag, the federal legislature, recently passed a law giving the individual states the power to regulate a lot of things the feds used to, and one of those things is opening hours. So it might be you'd find Berlin open all day Sunday, and Bavaria closed up like a prison. At any rate, my prediction is that as Christmas gets nearer, Berlin's going to experiment with keeping things open longer, and they'll notice a permanent upsurge in business. People found themselves enjoying the convenience despite their ingrained instincts and years of social programming. Once they get used to this, who knows what frontiers await? Itemized phone bills! Friendly sales-clerks! Errr, well, let's not get too carried away.
***
Berlin is a place deeply suspicious of entrepreneurship, and anyone who attempts to start a business here is faced with amazing obstacles every step of the way. And heaven forbid you try something which hasn't been tried before!
But still, every now and again, it happens. Thanks to Brent for passing along news of the Teddy Tour Berlin, a brand-new business right here in the Weltstadt. Here's the deal: you mail your teddy to these folks and they take it on a tour of Berlin, one of three they offer. Why the vacation? They figure it's stressful being a teddy, on the receiving end of your owner's tears and heartbreak, your job being to comfort a much larger organism who could easily destroy you. So: send the little feller on a vacation with people who'll show him around. You get back a certificate showing he's taken the tour, photos (on a CD if you choose the "Exclusive" or "Deluxe" tour), a postcard, a travel pass (Germans love documents, can you tell?), and "a little surprise" after your pal is mailed back to you, fully insured.
The larger question, though, is why Berlin? Few enough humans come here to relax and de-stress. The Teddy Tour folks mention that Berlin has a bear on its flag, and so it's a place where a bear can feel proud. Okay. I'm not a bear, let alone a teddy bear, so maybe I don't understand the psychology behind this. I would think that, being bears, the teddies would rather go hiking in Alpine valleys and so on, but like I said, maybe these folks know best.
What they do seem good at, though, is publicity: the first Teddy Tour sold out, and look at the prices for the three tours! (I like the fact that all the tours go to the Siegessäule, better known as the large column with the winged Nike on top that was a fixture of Wings of Desire, but only the deluxe tour takes the bears to the top of the thing for the view).
And it must be mentioned that if bears are going to be touring, they have to take care: last month one of the brown bears Italy introduced into its northern provinces as a means of trying to re-establish a wild species crossed the line into Bavaria, where, as bears do, it ate a couple of sheep and the odd rabbit. The Bavarians' reaction was predictable enough: SHOOT IT! Wildlife lovers got up in arms, but the Bavarian hunters grabbed their own arms and soon Bavaria was home to an ex-bear. So maybe if you think someone needs a vacation, Berlin is the safest solution after all.
***
Mind you, if I'd had a rifle yesterday, I might well have gone bear-shooting, thanks to stumbling on Bebelplatz (site of the Nazis' fabled book-burning) and finding the United Buddy Bears all standing around in a circle there. These goddam things are everywhere: businesses put them up outside, with their logos painted on them by "artists," and it all reeks of commercialism and desperation. The UBBs, of course, put a different face on it, promoting world peace and the friendship of all children, and blah blah blah. But they're just as annoying as the "Germany Land Of Ideas" crap that's all over town (not just the Big Pill behind the Reichstag, but huge musical notes ruining the Gendarmenmarkt, a big pile of books competing with the UBBs in Bebelplatz, which must be the city's epicenter of kitsch at the moment, and a gigantic sneaker by the Hauptbahnhof), in a syrupy irritating way.
Didn't all of this start in Chicago with the Cow Parade and people painting cows? And yet you see them all over the place now, cows and bears and eagles and any other damn symbol a city wants to use to promote itself, smeared with logos and ads, kitsch posing as art in the service of a Good Cause and civic improvement.
Not to mention the fact that between the huge pile of books and the Buddy Bears, the real attraction of Bebelplatz, the moving, understated monument to the book-burning, is all but lost in the hoopla.
***
One thing about the WM that I'm already missing is the change in opening hours for stores, the convenience of having them open until 10 and open on Sunday. I got used to it all too quickly, I'm afraid. But help may be on the way: the Bundestag, the federal legislature, recently passed a law giving the individual states the power to regulate a lot of things the feds used to, and one of those things is opening hours. So it might be you'd find Berlin open all day Sunday, and Bavaria closed up like a prison. At any rate, my prediction is that as Christmas gets nearer, Berlin's going to experiment with keeping things open longer, and they'll notice a permanent upsurge in business. People found themselves enjoying the convenience despite their ingrained instincts and years of social programming. Once they get used to this, who knows what frontiers await? Itemized phone bills! Friendly sales-clerks! Errr, well, let's not get too carried away.
***
Berlin is a place deeply suspicious of entrepreneurship, and anyone who attempts to start a business here is faced with amazing obstacles every step of the way. And heaven forbid you try something which hasn't been tried before!
But still, every now and again, it happens. Thanks to Brent for passing along news of the Teddy Tour Berlin, a brand-new business right here in the Weltstadt. Here's the deal: you mail your teddy to these folks and they take it on a tour of Berlin, one of three they offer. Why the vacation? They figure it's stressful being a teddy, on the receiving end of your owner's tears and heartbreak, your job being to comfort a much larger organism who could easily destroy you. So: send the little feller on a vacation with people who'll show him around. You get back a certificate showing he's taken the tour, photos (on a CD if you choose the "Exclusive" or "Deluxe" tour), a postcard, a travel pass (Germans love documents, can you tell?), and "a little surprise" after your pal is mailed back to you, fully insured.
The larger question, though, is why Berlin? Few enough humans come here to relax and de-stress. The Teddy Tour folks mention that Berlin has a bear on its flag, and so it's a place where a bear can feel proud. Okay. I'm not a bear, let alone a teddy bear, so maybe I don't understand the psychology behind this. I would think that, being bears, the teddies would rather go hiking in Alpine valleys and so on, but like I said, maybe these folks know best.
What they do seem good at, though, is publicity: the first Teddy Tour sold out, and look at the prices for the three tours! (I like the fact that all the tours go to the Siegessäule, better known as the large column with the winged Nike on top that was a fixture of Wings of Desire, but only the deluxe tour takes the bears to the top of the thing for the view).
And it must be mentioned that if bears are going to be touring, they have to take care: last month one of the brown bears Italy introduced into its northern provinces as a means of trying to re-establish a wild species crossed the line into Bavaria, where, as bears do, it ate a couple of sheep and the odd rabbit. The Bavarians' reaction was predictable enough: SHOOT IT! Wildlife lovers got up in arms, but the Bavarian hunters grabbed their own arms and soon Bavaria was home to an ex-bear. So maybe if you think someone needs a vacation, Berlin is the safest solution after all.
***
Mind you, if I'd had a rifle yesterday, I might well have gone bear-shooting, thanks to stumbling on Bebelplatz (site of the Nazis' fabled book-burning) and finding the United Buddy Bears all standing around in a circle there. These goddam things are everywhere: businesses put them up outside, with their logos painted on them by "artists," and it all reeks of commercialism and desperation. The UBBs, of course, put a different face on it, promoting world peace and the friendship of all children, and blah blah blah. But they're just as annoying as the "Germany Land Of Ideas" crap that's all over town (not just the Big Pill behind the Reichstag, but huge musical notes ruining the Gendarmenmarkt, a big pile of books competing with the UBBs in Bebelplatz, which must be the city's epicenter of kitsch at the moment, and a gigantic sneaker by the Hauptbahnhof), in a syrupy irritating way.
Didn't all of this start in Chicago with the Cow Parade and people painting cows? And yet you see them all over the place now, cows and bears and eagles and any other damn symbol a city wants to use to promote itself, smeared with logos and ads, kitsch posing as art in the service of a Good Cause and civic improvement.
Not to mention the fact that between the huge pile of books and the Buddy Bears, the real attraction of Bebelplatz, the moving, understated monument to the book-burning, is all but lost in the hoopla.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
The Summerloch Starts Here
Image courtesy QMDS500
The yuppies next door have given their kids two instruments of torture: an electric automobile and an electric motorcycle, both of which sound like dentists' drills and each of which costs over a thousand Euros apiece. I propose adding the above conveyance to the mix. Of course, the little girl will have to be replaced by an automaton, but if the gator is hungry enough it'll have served its purpose.
***
Monday morning Berlin will at last see the start of this year's Sommerloch, the "summer hole" in which nothing whatever happens. Meanwhile, we still have the Love Parade to endure, although it's becoming more and more irrelevant to the city and more and more a ploy to get the local equivalent of New York's bridge-and-tunnel kids -- in this case clueless rural kids in search of a little sex, drugs, and techno -- into Berlin and squeeze as much money as possible out of them while bombarding them with branding opportunities for the latest crap merchandisers want them to buy. You'd think this isn't such a lucrative move on the city's part, but there are also plenty of clueless young jet-setters who come in for this and camp out in expensive hotels.
Fortunately, its impact on my own neighborhood is minimal, but I'd sure hate to be a tree in the Tiergarten (Berlin's huge central park), after a month of football fans relieving themselves followed by a million or so b'n'ts doing the same. Still, as an index of the city's financial desperation, this all is quite instructive. No doubt there are people huddled away in rooms right now trying to figure out what next summer's attractions will be. Another Love Parade, for sure. But what could top the WM?
***
It's also an index of how slim the local music scene has gotten. Very few big concerts on the agenda for this summer, and I suspect people just aren't going out much any more. One inescapable image, though, is that of Dieter Thomas Kuhn, the campy entertainer who gently mocks the Schlager world of German mainstream pop and who, for some reason, is playing Central Park in New York this year. Even with his posters everywhere, some people may not have noticed the logo for his booking company, DTK Musik und Marketing, which features a screaming darky. (Note, clicking that link will display the DTK MuM page only briefly, but long enough for you to get a glimpse at what I'm talking about). My question is, what on earth is he thinking? DTK, that is, not the darky.
***
Meanwhile, for a glimpse of German hi-tech, not to mention a propensity for taking credit for everything, there's this video. Not that I'm sure why a German would want to take credit for it.
***
More from the Sommerloch as it widens!
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
A Patriotic Utterance
I don't get into American politics here. I don't live in America, and there are many, many other bloggers who do.
I do, however, belong to the Well, an online community which just celebrated its 20th anniversary (I've only been on for five of those years), and every now and again someone there makes a comment which deserves to be spread further. Thing is, you can't read the Well unless you join, and part of the rules when you join is you can't re-post other people's stuff without their permission.
Fortunately, there are a lot of bloggers there, and the other day one of them, off the top of his head during a 20-minute break from his job, wrote one of the most concise, clear, and honest appraisals of the state of the American media I've read. And posted it on his blog.
If he'd had it up yesterday, or I'd known abut it yesterday, I would have posted it here as the best 4th of July present I could give my fellow Americans, and the many people from other countries who read this blog.
Please take a minute to read it here.
I do, however, belong to the Well, an online community which just celebrated its 20th anniversary (I've only been on for five of those years), and every now and again someone there makes a comment which deserves to be spread further. Thing is, you can't read the Well unless you join, and part of the rules when you join is you can't re-post other people's stuff without their permission.
Fortunately, there are a lot of bloggers there, and the other day one of them, off the top of his head during a 20-minute break from his job, wrote one of the most concise, clear, and honest appraisals of the state of the American media I've read. And posted it on his blog.
If he'd had it up yesterday, or I'd known abut it yesterday, I would have posted it here as the best 4th of July present I could give my fellow Americans, and the many people from other countries who read this blog.
Please take a minute to read it here.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Pentimenti
I really like finding old urban relics, although they rarely last very long once they're unearthed. There are some exceptions: a small-scale model of the Statue of Liberty which once stood in Madison Square in New York while the real thing was under construction used to (and may still) stand atop a building which used to house the Liberty Warehouse right across from Lincoln Center, and could be seen from the top steps there. And in Austin, someone's kept the old winged-wheel Studebaker sign and the old hat-shop sign in good shape.
Berlin, of course, where construction is fatally married to destruction, is no place to look for such things, but occasionally one appears, for however briefly, and I try to grab it.
This one (not my photo, but used with kind permission) is a reminder that the Berliner Zeitung of today was once an East Zone paper.
Wiceguy photo
And, up in Prenzlauer Berg, one which has been there for ages, reminding us that there are still parts of this city heated by coal.
I also wonder about that odd half-timbered building you can see in that shot.
There are a few more of these around here I should grab before they're gone. I fondly remember the one near Friedrichstr. station advertising the DDR lottery (kind of hard to imagine, but apparently there was one) which vanished one day, not to mention the lovely old neon sign by the Friedrichstadt Palast with the ad for the Berlin-Moscow Railway ("Comfortable, Quick, Convenient," it lied) that gradually fell apart before it was stripped from its wall. Someday the powers that be will have had their way and Berlin will look like Paramus. Until then, I'm going to grab what I can.
Berlin, of course, where construction is fatally married to destruction, is no place to look for such things, but occasionally one appears, for however briefly, and I try to grab it.
This one (not my photo, but used with kind permission) is a reminder that the Berliner Zeitung of today was once an East Zone paper.
Wiceguy photo
And, up in Prenzlauer Berg, one which has been there for ages, reminding us that there are still parts of this city heated by coal.
I also wonder about that odd half-timbered building you can see in that shot.
There are a few more of these around here I should grab before they're gone. I fondly remember the one near Friedrichstr. station advertising the DDR lottery (kind of hard to imagine, but apparently there was one) which vanished one day, not to mention the lovely old neon sign by the Friedrichstadt Palast with the ad for the Berlin-Moscow Railway ("Comfortable, Quick, Convenient," it lied) that gradually fell apart before it was stripped from its wall. Someday the powers that be will have had their way and Berlin will look like Paramus. Until then, I'm going to grab what I can.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Weekend Crumbs
Short Story On A Lamppost:
I was waiting to cross Torstr. on Saturday when I saw two notices newly taped on the lamppost where I was standing. The upper one said "Apartment Sought!" and showed two female stick figures. (You know, with the triangular dress thing. I guess male stick figures are naked.) One was larger than the other, and had an arrow pointing to it with the number 31. The smaller one had an arrow pointing to it with the number 3 1/2.
Underneath it was another notice which said "Part-Time Father Urgently Seeks Apartment!" This apartment-hunter was 35.
Both notices showed an appalling ignorance of current housing prices in this neighborhood, too. Guess it's been a while since they've been looking.
***
The church down the street from me owns an awful lot of real-estate immediately around it, not only the Konvikt (seminary) which adjoins the house next door, but also a parish-house on Tieckstr. which is tied to the rest of the buildings. This gets rented out to various people (there are AA meetings -- yes, they have AA in Germany -- there, for instance) from time to time, and until yesterday I'd forgotten about one of its more interesting regulars. I was coming back from the store at about 3:30 and saw two very large African women in their finest Dutch Wax finery walking down the street. As I got to the parish house, I heard singing, and remembered that there's some kind of African congregation which meets there on Sunday afternoons and has all-singing services. The first time I encountered them, I stopped under the window to listen for a while, but it became evident that there was more spirit than technique at work there. I guess things were pretty played out yesterday, though, because there were only two voices, and they were pretty hoarse.
Still, that was preferable to what happened last night, as the Konvikt had another of their appalling hootenannies, with gut-string guitars strumming and voices attempting Beatles songs and "Blowing in the Wind." Man, if I play a record that's audible to anyone after 10pm I get the cops called on me. But in yesterday's warm breezy evening, I got to endure this until midnight. Yet another argument for the separation of church and state, if you ask me!
I was waiting to cross Torstr. on Saturday when I saw two notices newly taped on the lamppost where I was standing. The upper one said "Apartment Sought!" and showed two female stick figures. (You know, with the triangular dress thing. I guess male stick figures are naked.) One was larger than the other, and had an arrow pointing to it with the number 31. The smaller one had an arrow pointing to it with the number 3 1/2.
Underneath it was another notice which said "Part-Time Father Urgently Seeks Apartment!" This apartment-hunter was 35.
Both notices showed an appalling ignorance of current housing prices in this neighborhood, too. Guess it's been a while since they've been looking.
***
The church down the street from me owns an awful lot of real-estate immediately around it, not only the Konvikt (seminary) which adjoins the house next door, but also a parish-house on Tieckstr. which is tied to the rest of the buildings. This gets rented out to various people (there are AA meetings -- yes, they have AA in Germany -- there, for instance) from time to time, and until yesterday I'd forgotten about one of its more interesting regulars. I was coming back from the store at about 3:30 and saw two very large African women in their finest Dutch Wax finery walking down the street. As I got to the parish house, I heard singing, and remembered that there's some kind of African congregation which meets there on Sunday afternoons and has all-singing services. The first time I encountered them, I stopped under the window to listen for a while, but it became evident that there was more spirit than technique at work there. I guess things were pretty played out yesterday, though, because there were only two voices, and they were pretty hoarse.
Still, that was preferable to what happened last night, as the Konvikt had another of their appalling hootenannies, with gut-string guitars strumming and voices attempting Beatles songs and "Blowing in the Wind." Man, if I play a record that's audible to anyone after 10pm I get the cops called on me. But in yesterday's warm breezy evening, I got to endure this until midnight. Yet another argument for the separation of church and state, if you ask me!
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Meanwhile, Crumbs
I'm about to go off to yet another farewell party for yet another person who's decided to leave Berlin -- there are times when if I didn't have a farewell party to go to I wouldn't have any social life at all, although of course each one diminishes the odds of having one -- but I figured it'd be worth adding a crumb or two in here.
***
As those of you who don't follow sports probably don't know, and as those of you who live in Berlin are all too aware, Germany beat Argentina last night and goes into the semi-finals. The game was at the Olympiastadion here in Berlin, and the noise went on for a good two and a half hours, as cars filled with cheering, chanting fans drove away from the stadium and into the local streets. People streamed out of shops to wave at the revellers, and, off in the distance, firecrackers and police sirens alternated. And this is for the quarter-finals!
There were cops everywhere, I noted as I paid a flying visit to Postdamer Platz, which for some reason was choked with fans. Some of them were deployed in odd places, though. A big van-load of them were on the bridge near Friedrichstr. station, for instance, possibly to spell their brethren within the station. A nice touch: on the public transportation, after the usual announcements, they tell you at Friedrichstr., for instance, that you can change there for Hauptbahnhof and the Olympiastadion -- and then repeat it in heavily accented English! This is the first time I've ever noticed our public transportation acknowledging that there are non-German speakers around. True, the ticket machines function in a couple of different languages, but that's it.
Ah, well, anything to wring the tourist dollar out of the tourist's hand.
Anyway, I'm not looking forward to Germany vs. Italy. Although I think that's not going to be played here. Still, there are plenty of Italian-owned businesses near my house (yes, another Italian deli just opened up!), so the potential for ugliness is there.
***
More like it:
There's a couple of gay guys with an apartment I pass on my way from the store each day, and they've got a penchant for decorating the outside of their third-story apartment. One spring, they had Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, complete with rubber snake (and Ken and Barbie in the starring roles) in their window-box. Today, I noticed, they've got a t-shirt taped to the window which says "FICKEN STATT KICKEN." Amen.
***
And I had a horrible revelation today. Next Sunday, when the WM finals happen, isn't the end of the horror here. No, because the Friday after that comes...the Love Parade!
Someone get me outta here!
***
As those of you who don't follow sports probably don't know, and as those of you who live in Berlin are all too aware, Germany beat Argentina last night and goes into the semi-finals. The game was at the Olympiastadion here in Berlin, and the noise went on for a good two and a half hours, as cars filled with cheering, chanting fans drove away from the stadium and into the local streets. People streamed out of shops to wave at the revellers, and, off in the distance, firecrackers and police sirens alternated. And this is for the quarter-finals!
There were cops everywhere, I noted as I paid a flying visit to Postdamer Platz, which for some reason was choked with fans. Some of them were deployed in odd places, though. A big van-load of them were on the bridge near Friedrichstr. station, for instance, possibly to spell their brethren within the station. A nice touch: on the public transportation, after the usual announcements, they tell you at Friedrichstr., for instance, that you can change there for Hauptbahnhof and the Olympiastadion -- and then repeat it in heavily accented English! This is the first time I've ever noticed our public transportation acknowledging that there are non-German speakers around. True, the ticket machines function in a couple of different languages, but that's it.
Ah, well, anything to wring the tourist dollar out of the tourist's hand.
Anyway, I'm not looking forward to Germany vs. Italy. Although I think that's not going to be played here. Still, there are plenty of Italian-owned businesses near my house (yes, another Italian deli just opened up!), so the potential for ugliness is there.
***
More like it:
There's a couple of gay guys with an apartment I pass on my way from the store each day, and they've got a penchant for decorating the outside of their third-story apartment. One spring, they had Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, complete with rubber snake (and Ken and Barbie in the starring roles) in their window-box. Today, I noticed, they've got a t-shirt taped to the window which says "FICKEN STATT KICKEN." Amen.
***
And I had a horrible revelation today. Next Sunday, when the WM finals happen, isn't the end of the horror here. No, because the Friday after that comes...the Love Parade!
Someone get me outta here!
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Berlinbites Sells Out!
You may notice little ads on the blog these days. These were inserted by our Technical Guru, Jonl, who's using the proceeds to upgrade the large machines which maintain the pages of this blog and whisk you to them over the Interweb. Anything left over will be used to buy a modest farmhouse in the Languedoc, which we will use on alternate months. I couldn't say no to this plan. What I know of HTML could be engraved on the head of a pin, with room for the complete works of Shakespeare left over.
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Coffee and Crumbs
It turns out that that vacant lot wasn't the only disappearance in the air on that last trip to Galleries Lafayette. Today, I took advantage of the WM opening hours to go replace my coffee on a Sunday, only to find out that the Malongo boutique in Gal Laf is closing, and has sold out all its coffee; only tea remains.
This is a shame. One thing about the food floor at Gal Laf is that you can bet you're paying about 30% more than you would anywhere else for most items, but some of what they have is unique in Berlin. Thus with whole-bean Malongo coffee. Malongo isn't hard to find in France in supermarkets -- but only in ground form, and never in single-bean varieties. If Malongo's pulling out of Gal Laf is a store-wide event, then it's tragic; this is the best whole bean coffee I've ever had, better than what I used to get at Whole Foods. Cheaper, too; cheaper than any other whole-bean coffee I've found in this city.
And there's the problem of what to do next. I satisfied myself with a bag of Gold Coast from Starbuck's, but that's not going to be a regular thing. I have nothing against Starbuck's, actually, at least not here, where they're far from ubiquitous and don't, to the best of my knowledge, engage in the sleazy real-estate moves they've used in the States to get rid of established businesses that might compete with them. But they're way more expensive than Malongo, and not as good.
I guess it's time to start exploring some of their competition. I used to occasionally buy from Einstein, but they seem to discourage their workers from enjoying their product, or else they're selling hash under the counter, because all the service I ever encountered there was lethargic and stoned-seeming. There's a Balzac shop not far from me on Friedrichstr., so when what I've got runs out, I'll see if I can put together a decent blend from what they sell.
Ms. Choi, the Korean woman who works at Malongo and really knows her beans, said there's a place over on Uhlandstr. somewhere "which also sells herbs" and that's the only place in the city she recommends. I've got a transit pass these days which I'm not using to its full extent; maybe I'll whip over to the west and see what she's talking about. But I'm going to miss this ritual of walking down Friedrichstr. every couple of weeks.
***
Walking back, I took another look at that vacant lot, and now there's a sign up announcing that the Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Center, a university library and media center, will rise there soon, and there's a nice architectural watercolor of the white glass-clad building.
It occurred to me that, for most people in the English-speaking world, the Brothers Grimm means fairy tales, while Germans invariably think of dictionaries, for it was these two brothers who compiled the first dictionary of the German language, the Deutsches Wörterbuch, which appeared in 32 volumes between 1852 and 1960. That's not a typo: the brothers only lived to see volumes A through Forsche, but they were the ones who set the scholarly apparatus in motion for the century-long project.
I also remembered the buildings which had stood in the lot, and feel a little better. No architectural monuments were destroyed in the preparation of the Grimm Center, although one, which seemed to be an old house which had been bombed and then repaired by encasing it in a concrete box, always piqued my curiosity.
And yes, I know most Germans refer, not to the Grimm, but to the much shorter Duden when it comes to dictionaries.
***
In fact, it was the long-lost Surfin' Steffen who contacted me with a fascinating footnote about having a pig -- ein Schwein haben -- which he found in...the Duden. Apparently, in contests in the old days, the guy who came in second was awarded a pig. Which, when you think about it, can be a lot more useful than a medal, so there's a sort of winning-by-losing connotation to it, I guess.
***
Had a couple of beers with a couple of Australians last night, one of whom had been on a river cruise (a great way to see this city in this weather) when Germany won the game yesterday. She reported that people started throwing off their clothes and diving into the Spree River, which, given the quality of the water in it, is tantamount to mass suicide. Wow, cholera! What a WM souvenir!
Since I didn't leave the house when it happened, I don't know if the spontaneous parade which erupted on Torstr. was clothed or not, but there was a huge roar of male voices singing something. Whether it was the alcohol or the lack of talent, or (more likely) a combination of the two, the melody and lyrics were impossible to make out, but there was stamping of feet, blowing of whistles, and the inevitable firecrackers.
Germany is still in the running, and I'm now feeling ambivalent about seeing them possibly win. Lord knows this country -- and this city, in particular -- is in a horrid mess, with a declining economy and massive unemployment, so maybe a WM win would actually be a good thing, in that it would be some positive news for a change, make some people feel better, and maybe the wave of good feeling might result in some things getting better.
Still, for the moment, I'm hoping Ghana goes all the way. Germany's in trouble, but man, talk about a country with very, very little going for it: Ghana really deserves something good.
Anyway, in two weeks it'll be over. And the Sommerloch will descend upon us yet again.
This is a shame. One thing about the food floor at Gal Laf is that you can bet you're paying about 30% more than you would anywhere else for most items, but some of what they have is unique in Berlin. Thus with whole-bean Malongo coffee. Malongo isn't hard to find in France in supermarkets -- but only in ground form, and never in single-bean varieties. If Malongo's pulling out of Gal Laf is a store-wide event, then it's tragic; this is the best whole bean coffee I've ever had, better than what I used to get at Whole Foods. Cheaper, too; cheaper than any other whole-bean coffee I've found in this city.
And there's the problem of what to do next. I satisfied myself with a bag of Gold Coast from Starbuck's, but that's not going to be a regular thing. I have nothing against Starbuck's, actually, at least not here, where they're far from ubiquitous and don't, to the best of my knowledge, engage in the sleazy real-estate moves they've used in the States to get rid of established businesses that might compete with them. But they're way more expensive than Malongo, and not as good.
I guess it's time to start exploring some of their competition. I used to occasionally buy from Einstein, but they seem to discourage their workers from enjoying their product, or else they're selling hash under the counter, because all the service I ever encountered there was lethargic and stoned-seeming. There's a Balzac shop not far from me on Friedrichstr., so when what I've got runs out, I'll see if I can put together a decent blend from what they sell.
Ms. Choi, the Korean woman who works at Malongo and really knows her beans, said there's a place over on Uhlandstr. somewhere "which also sells herbs" and that's the only place in the city she recommends. I've got a transit pass these days which I'm not using to its full extent; maybe I'll whip over to the west and see what she's talking about. But I'm going to miss this ritual of walking down Friedrichstr. every couple of weeks.
***
Walking back, I took another look at that vacant lot, and now there's a sign up announcing that the Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Center, a university library and media center, will rise there soon, and there's a nice architectural watercolor of the white glass-clad building.
It occurred to me that, for most people in the English-speaking world, the Brothers Grimm means fairy tales, while Germans invariably think of dictionaries, for it was these two brothers who compiled the first dictionary of the German language, the Deutsches Wörterbuch, which appeared in 32 volumes between 1852 and 1960. That's not a typo: the brothers only lived to see volumes A through Forsche, but they were the ones who set the scholarly apparatus in motion for the century-long project.
I also remembered the buildings which had stood in the lot, and feel a little better. No architectural monuments were destroyed in the preparation of the Grimm Center, although one, which seemed to be an old house which had been bombed and then repaired by encasing it in a concrete box, always piqued my curiosity.
And yes, I know most Germans refer, not to the Grimm, but to the much shorter Duden when it comes to dictionaries.
***
In fact, it was the long-lost Surfin' Steffen who contacted me with a fascinating footnote about having a pig -- ein Schwein haben -- which he found in...the Duden. Apparently, in contests in the old days, the guy who came in second was awarded a pig. Which, when you think about it, can be a lot more useful than a medal, so there's a sort of winning-by-losing connotation to it, I guess.
***
Had a couple of beers with a couple of Australians last night, one of whom had been on a river cruise (a great way to see this city in this weather) when Germany won the game yesterday. She reported that people started throwing off their clothes and diving into the Spree River, which, given the quality of the water in it, is tantamount to mass suicide. Wow, cholera! What a WM souvenir!
Since I didn't leave the house when it happened, I don't know if the spontaneous parade which erupted on Torstr. was clothed or not, but there was a huge roar of male voices singing something. Whether it was the alcohol or the lack of talent, or (more likely) a combination of the two, the melody and lyrics were impossible to make out, but there was stamping of feet, blowing of whistles, and the inevitable firecrackers.
Germany is still in the running, and I'm now feeling ambivalent about seeing them possibly win. Lord knows this country -- and this city, in particular -- is in a horrid mess, with a declining economy and massive unemployment, so maybe a WM win would actually be a good thing, in that it would be some positive news for a change, make some people feel better, and maybe the wave of good feeling might result in some things getting better.
Still, for the moment, I'm hoping Ghana goes all the way. Germany's in trouble, but man, talk about a country with very, very little going for it: Ghana really deserves something good.
Anyway, in two weeks it'll be over. And the Sommerloch will descend upon us yet again.
Friday, June 23, 2006
Places That Are Gone
Last week, I was returning from buying coffee at Galleries Lafayette on Friedrichstr. when I turned a corner and -- POW! -- there was a huge hole where something had been. I stopped and gaped. What had been there before? It was a district between the railroad tracks and the river, a sort of no-man's-land, but it was someplace I'd been many times before. Something was gone, yet I had no idea what. But that it was gone was absolutely certain.
I went back yesterday to shoot it, and by then the bulldozers had smoothed over the rubble. This is one feature of demolitions in Berlin: there's always something below, often ghosts of bombed buildings, their cellars, or their air-raid shelters. That's what I saw when I first saw this site, but nothing of the sort is visible in the shot you see above. Still, a huge hunk of a city block has just vanished, as you can see.
To write about Berlin is to write about what's not there any more. I'm not old enough to be able to remember what was there before the Allied bombings and the depredations of the Russian soldiers as they retook the city, but you don't have to be in your 80s to gasp in shock when you revisit a familiar block and see that it's gone. There's an absolute mania for tearing down the past here without spending much time thinking about it. It makes the future more accessible, even if there's not really a plan for that future at hand, and it also erases a past which is frequently filled with inconvenient facts.
A classic example is the Palast der Republik, the former headquarters of the East German government. PBS in America just did an interesting piece on it, 17 minutes long, and worth watching every second, although the guy soft-pedals the political affiliations of the people who want to rebuild the Schloss. (I also posted a long comment, and although I doubt they'll post it, maybe they'll show it to the filmmaker). The vehemence with which the pro-demolition forces pursue their agenda in this film is frightening, but all too common in a city whose motto is "tear it down today, worry about it tomorrow."
Incidentally, here's what the Palast looked like yesterday:
It'll be gone by this time next year, if not by Christmas.
But buildings are just buildings, and what I'm beginning to miss about Berlin is a sense of mystery which made it unique for me when I first came here and for many years thereafter. I used to work on Linienstr., just a block away from where I live today, and there was one block of that street on which every single building was pocked with bullet holes from the street-to-street fighting the Russians engaged in while taking control of the city. I used to walk down that street and imagine the sheer number of bullets expended, any one of which could have killed me if I'd been in its way. Nor was Linienstr. alone in this; plenty of other streets in the neighborhood shared this feature, although not necessarily on every building. But there was enough to remind one of the horrors of war far more eloquently than the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche near Zoo Station. That's just a war ruin. Walking down Linienstr. was like being in a place seconds after the war was over.
Today, it is nearly impossible to find bullet holes. That is absolutely mind-boggling to me, that no one has sought to preserve this most eloquent reminder of what war is like for the average civilian. Churches get bombed: we know that. It could be Coventry Cathedral, or it could be the Kaiser Wilhelm. But an obscure street with little traffic is not a landmark. Still, you were reminded, it happened there, too.
That was another facet of the suddenly-vacated lot I stumbled upon. There was an old building there, and the demolition had made its bullet holes suddenly a lot easier to see:
No doubt this building, if it's allowed to stand, will soon be scrubbed and sanitized and divested of its patina of history, too.
Rather autumnal thoughts for the gorgeous summer weather we've been having (although there are always threatening-looking clouds in the sky and a forecast of rain always hovering a day or two off, nothing's happened so far), but these, I'm afraid, are the sorts of thoughts that you get when you live in the middle of a place with this sort of heritage. But since I now have a good camera, I'm going to be documenting a lot of this stuff in the neighborhood, because I know it probably won't be there much longer.
I went back yesterday to shoot it, and by then the bulldozers had smoothed over the rubble. This is one feature of demolitions in Berlin: there's always something below, often ghosts of bombed buildings, their cellars, or their air-raid shelters. That's what I saw when I first saw this site, but nothing of the sort is visible in the shot you see above. Still, a huge hunk of a city block has just vanished, as you can see.
To write about Berlin is to write about what's not there any more. I'm not old enough to be able to remember what was there before the Allied bombings and the depredations of the Russian soldiers as they retook the city, but you don't have to be in your 80s to gasp in shock when you revisit a familiar block and see that it's gone. There's an absolute mania for tearing down the past here without spending much time thinking about it. It makes the future more accessible, even if there's not really a plan for that future at hand, and it also erases a past which is frequently filled with inconvenient facts.
A classic example is the Palast der Republik, the former headquarters of the East German government. PBS in America just did an interesting piece on it, 17 minutes long, and worth watching every second, although the guy soft-pedals the political affiliations of the people who want to rebuild the Schloss. (I also posted a long comment, and although I doubt they'll post it, maybe they'll show it to the filmmaker). The vehemence with which the pro-demolition forces pursue their agenda in this film is frightening, but all too common in a city whose motto is "tear it down today, worry about it tomorrow."
Incidentally, here's what the Palast looked like yesterday:
It'll be gone by this time next year, if not by Christmas.
But buildings are just buildings, and what I'm beginning to miss about Berlin is a sense of mystery which made it unique for me when I first came here and for many years thereafter. I used to work on Linienstr., just a block away from where I live today, and there was one block of that street on which every single building was pocked with bullet holes from the street-to-street fighting the Russians engaged in while taking control of the city. I used to walk down that street and imagine the sheer number of bullets expended, any one of which could have killed me if I'd been in its way. Nor was Linienstr. alone in this; plenty of other streets in the neighborhood shared this feature, although not necessarily on every building. But there was enough to remind one of the horrors of war far more eloquently than the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche near Zoo Station. That's just a war ruin. Walking down Linienstr. was like being in a place seconds after the war was over.
Today, it is nearly impossible to find bullet holes. That is absolutely mind-boggling to me, that no one has sought to preserve this most eloquent reminder of what war is like for the average civilian. Churches get bombed: we know that. It could be Coventry Cathedral, or it could be the Kaiser Wilhelm. But an obscure street with little traffic is not a landmark. Still, you were reminded, it happened there, too.
That was another facet of the suddenly-vacated lot I stumbled upon. There was an old building there, and the demolition had made its bullet holes suddenly a lot easier to see:
No doubt this building, if it's allowed to stand, will soon be scrubbed and sanitized and divested of its patina of history, too.
Rather autumnal thoughts for the gorgeous summer weather we've been having (although there are always threatening-looking clouds in the sky and a forecast of rain always hovering a day or two off, nothing's happened so far), but these, I'm afraid, are the sorts of thoughts that you get when you live in the middle of a place with this sort of heritage. But since I now have a good camera, I'm going to be documenting a lot of this stuff in the neighborhood, because I know it probably won't be there much longer.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
WM Outrages Of The Day
First, thanks to Hudson for the pics of assorted WM players' girlfriends in incredibly stupid outfits, none of which is as stupid as the dress I mentioned a couple of posts back. I guess I'm going to have to go back there and photograph it.
Then, I was walking by Butlers today, the store with the four-Euro-per-roll football-patterned toilet paper, if you remember, and saw a grill painted like a football. Cheap tin, and I'm sure it wouldn't last until the finals under regular use, but then, grilling is illegal almost everywhere in Berlin, so I'm sure nobody will be able to find out for sure. Still: hideous.
And, finally, Kevin sends along this short video, which will be incomprehensible to most of my readers, both because it's in German and it's sung in a speeded-up voice. Also because, for reasons I have never been able to discover, having a "Schwein" means having an unexpected bit of good luck. With Germany facing Poland in an hour and a half and reports from Dortmund of fan clashes in the streets there, a defeat for Deutschland tonight would be all the Schwein I need today.
And for a little relief, I want to thank the estimable Static for finding this video of one of my favorite bands, one which only played once in the U.S. -- and long before they got this good -- featuring a teenage-looking Nick Lowe.
Then, I was walking by Butlers today, the store with the four-Euro-per-roll football-patterned toilet paper, if you remember, and saw a grill painted like a football. Cheap tin, and I'm sure it wouldn't last until the finals under regular use, but then, grilling is illegal almost everywhere in Berlin, so I'm sure nobody will be able to find out for sure. Still: hideous.
And, finally, Kevin sends along this short video, which will be incomprehensible to most of my readers, both because it's in German and it's sung in a speeded-up voice. Also because, for reasons I have never been able to discover, having a "Schwein" means having an unexpected bit of good luck. With Germany facing Poland in an hour and a half and reports from Dortmund of fan clashes in the streets there, a defeat for Deutschland tonight would be all the Schwein I need today.
And for a little relief, I want to thank the estimable Static for finding this video of one of my favorite bands, one which only played once in the U.S. -- and long before they got this good -- featuring a teenage-looking Nick Lowe.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Ber-zil
I just got back from a short walk down Friedrichstr. and the whole area is a sea of yellow and green. Which prompts a question: can these people all be Brazilian?
I'd imagine that a lot of them are, just because I imagine that airlines did cheap charter flights and travel agencies put together flight-hotel-ticket packages, and although there's plenty of poverty in Brazil, it's not exactly a Third World country. Proof positive comes from the amount of Portugese being spoken (I think that's what it is; it's not a language I'm terribly familiar with, but it sounds kind of like Spanish, which I am familiar with) on the street.
But I'd also imagine that a good number aren't; they're German. The reason? Brazil kept Germany from the championship last time.
This was the fulfillment of an awful lot of Germans' dreams. Two World Cups ago, I cooked hamburgers for a friend who'd invited a number of his friends and their wives over to watch a game and eat dinner afterwards, and I asked him who he was rooting for, naively enough. "Well, nobody in particular," he said, "although I think what everyone here agrees on is that Germany should lose. It's just not healthy if they win. The coach is a pretty low-down right-wing type, and so are a lot of the guys on the team. Kohl's been talking the team up a lot, and you know what I think of him. Winning the WM would just encourage Germany's worst nationalistic, right-wing tendencies, and there's enough of that going around here at the moment."
That was eight years ago, and the coach has changed to a rather New Age-y guy who lives in America, but coincidentally enough, the same political party is back in power, although the faction Frau Merkel represents is far from the reactionary, blockheaded, (aw, go ahead, say it!) Bavarian wing of the party. Furthermore, I think the current nationalisms out there, including the American flavor, have been sufficient to quell all but the most recalcitrant German stirrings -- or at least suppress them.
But one way that gets done is by actual Germans being anti-German. And one healthy, sportsmanlike way to express that is to cheer on the team which beat Germany last time. (Oh, and it's no problem urging anyone on to beat Croatia, where crypto-fascist elements are right up on the surface, with war veterans who fought with the Nazis getting a much higher pension than those who fought with the resistance, and one or two out-of-the-closet fascist parties standing in every election). It's that German self-loathing, which, I have to say, is at least in part therapeutic and probably commendable to some degree, which is causing people to wear all that yellow and green. Not to mention joining some of the world's stiffest samba schools and turning caipirinhas into a long-lasting fad.
And boy, are those Brazilians friendly, I thought, as I returned home. Look you straight in the face and smile these big smiles... And it wasn't until I took my hat off and noticed that it was the one I bought from some weird Japanese artist at the Yokohama Biennale in 2001 that I realized it was...yellow and green.
***
WM Gripe of the Day: Attention all Berlin bars, kneipes, restaurants, hotels, dives, temporary spaces, church gardens, outdoor wide-screens, and so on. You do not have WM LIVE, as you advertise. You have it on television. It would be a very good idea for you to remember the distinction between television and LIVE. The only place that has WM LIVE is the stadium, where the little men down on the field are, as they play, living. That's what LIVE means. Thank you for your prompt attention to this.
I'd imagine that a lot of them are, just because I imagine that airlines did cheap charter flights and travel agencies put together flight-hotel-ticket packages, and although there's plenty of poverty in Brazil, it's not exactly a Third World country. Proof positive comes from the amount of Portugese being spoken (I think that's what it is; it's not a language I'm terribly familiar with, but it sounds kind of like Spanish, which I am familiar with) on the street.
But I'd also imagine that a good number aren't; they're German. The reason? Brazil kept Germany from the championship last time.
This was the fulfillment of an awful lot of Germans' dreams. Two World Cups ago, I cooked hamburgers for a friend who'd invited a number of his friends and their wives over to watch a game and eat dinner afterwards, and I asked him who he was rooting for, naively enough. "Well, nobody in particular," he said, "although I think what everyone here agrees on is that Germany should lose. It's just not healthy if they win. The coach is a pretty low-down right-wing type, and so are a lot of the guys on the team. Kohl's been talking the team up a lot, and you know what I think of him. Winning the WM would just encourage Germany's worst nationalistic, right-wing tendencies, and there's enough of that going around here at the moment."
That was eight years ago, and the coach has changed to a rather New Age-y guy who lives in America, but coincidentally enough, the same political party is back in power, although the faction Frau Merkel represents is far from the reactionary, blockheaded, (aw, go ahead, say it!) Bavarian wing of the party. Furthermore, I think the current nationalisms out there, including the American flavor, have been sufficient to quell all but the most recalcitrant German stirrings -- or at least suppress them.
But one way that gets done is by actual Germans being anti-German. And one healthy, sportsmanlike way to express that is to cheer on the team which beat Germany last time. (Oh, and it's no problem urging anyone on to beat Croatia, where crypto-fascist elements are right up on the surface, with war veterans who fought with the Nazis getting a much higher pension than those who fought with the resistance, and one or two out-of-the-closet fascist parties standing in every election). It's that German self-loathing, which, I have to say, is at least in part therapeutic and probably commendable to some degree, which is causing people to wear all that yellow and green. Not to mention joining some of the world's stiffest samba schools and turning caipirinhas into a long-lasting fad.
And boy, are those Brazilians friendly, I thought, as I returned home. Look you straight in the face and smile these big smiles... And it wasn't until I took my hat off and noticed that it was the one I bought from some weird Japanese artist at the Yokohama Biennale in 2001 that I realized it was...yellow and green.
***
WM Gripe of the Day: Attention all Berlin bars, kneipes, restaurants, hotels, dives, temporary spaces, church gardens, outdoor wide-screens, and so on. You do not have WM LIVE, as you advertise. You have it on television. It would be a very good idea for you to remember the distinction between television and LIVE. The only place that has WM LIVE is the stadium, where the little men down on the field are, as they play, living. That's what LIVE means. Thank you for your prompt attention to this.
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Ghost Town
Okay, I surrender. Only two days into the madness, and I realize that if I'm going to write about Berlin for the next month, I have to include the World Cup. Not that I want to, but it's really all that's happening here, all anyone talks or thinks about. Of course, as someone who knows exactly zero about the subject, I'm both at an advantage and a disadvantage. The disadvantage is obvious: I can't talk about the game, or the players or anything like that. I can't have an opinion about the sport. The advantage is, all I can really attend to is the ephemera around the thing, the epiphenomena, if that's the right word. I'm trapped inside it without being at all interested.
For instance, today. A friend asked me to join her at a church, where a friend of hers, a soprano, was giving a recital with something called the Berliner Ensemble for Old Music. So I figured sure, this would be one venue where there was sure not to be a big-screen television showing the day's games. To get there, I walked, since nobody has paid me recently, and two Euros is too much to invest in a trip I can walk in an hour. Anyway, the weather's gotten much nicer, and the sun was out, so why not?
The route was pretty straightforward: down Friedrichstr. to the end. (Actually, on the way down, I took a detour which added ten minutes to the walk, but that's neither here nor there). It was pretty amazing: I left at 3, which is when the day's first game started. The streets were largely deserted, but not entirely: there were scores of Brazilians walking around. They were there yesterday, too, when I took another shorter trip down Friedrichstr., but the ones I saw yesterday were hyping some sort of Brazilian outdoor bar with a big-screen TV, and handing out little ribbons that they said were "Brazilian good-luck charms." Today's Brazilians, though, were fans, singing songs, wearing stupid hats and t-shirts, and generally ogling Berlin. (And yes, it's true: Brazilian women are impressively good-looking, even the ones who are football fans.) But the Germans -- and, I guess, all the other nationalities -- were inside, watching television. Or outside watching it at a sidewalk cafe. Or outdoors watching it on a huge screen in Potsdamer Platz. Friedrichstr., the part of it not talking Portugese, was deserted. Auto traffic was a fraction of normal, although many of the cars that were out were flying German flags.
Which is interesting, because 90% of the shops were open. One salutary side-effect of the WM (Weltmeisterschaft, an abbreviation I'm going to use because it's quicker to type than World Cup, and yes, I'll call it football because most of the world does) is that shops have been given the option of staying open until 10pm on weekdays, and opening from 2-8pm on Sunday. I'm waiting to see what the fallout from this will be. The stringent opening-hours laws are on the books because the shopkeepers' union insists that they preserve the German family by giving workers time to spend with their spouses and kids. When closing time on weekdays was extended from 7pm (but everyone closed at 6) to 8, there were posters all over town screaming that this would mean the end of the German family as we know it. Further, family-owned businesses were allowed to stay open until 10, a boon for your average Turkish family running the little corner shop. But if the upsurge in business is big enough, and the German family doesn't dissolve in a month (and I want it noted that Dad is probably out in a bar watching football), this temporary measure may re-surface, particularly as Christmas comes.
At any rate, the concert was so-so, but the venue was one of these huge brick churches built at the turn of the last century, so the Berliner Ensemble for Old Music sounded like they were performing in a tunnel, or as if they had been produced by Phil Spector. The sonic environment swallowed up the Baroque music, so I left at the break and walked back home. It was there that I saw, in a boutique, the so-far most hideous bit of WMsploitation I've seen (although this contest has a whole month to run, folks!): a dress, in black and white, little footballs sewn to its skirt, and, at the bust, two half-footballs for the breasts. This is a perfect illustration of why the words "fashion" and "Berlin" rarely appear in the same sentence, and no, I do not want to meet the woman who buys this. The dress beat out yesterday's entry, the heads of iceberg lettuce at my local supermarket, wrapped in cellophane with a pentagon pattern on it, so they resemble green footballs. I was thinking of kicking one around until I realized that this was a game I'd never played and likely was very bad at.
And the stupid slogans continue apace, too. Memo to Esprit: "The World Is Our Culture" is a phrase utterly without meaning, and sticking a football on it doesn't make it make any more sense.
Oh, and today, when I was reading the forum at The Languedoc Page, people were commenting that the French were being fairly subdued about the whole thing; no flags flying, no overt show of interest. I commented that that sounded good after Berlin, and someone responded that France hosts the WM in 2007, with games in, among other places, Toulouse, Marseille, and...Montpellier.
Nooooooo!
For instance, today. A friend asked me to join her at a church, where a friend of hers, a soprano, was giving a recital with something called the Berliner Ensemble for Old Music. So I figured sure, this would be one venue where there was sure not to be a big-screen television showing the day's games. To get there, I walked, since nobody has paid me recently, and two Euros is too much to invest in a trip I can walk in an hour. Anyway, the weather's gotten much nicer, and the sun was out, so why not?
The route was pretty straightforward: down Friedrichstr. to the end. (Actually, on the way down, I took a detour which added ten minutes to the walk, but that's neither here nor there). It was pretty amazing: I left at 3, which is when the day's first game started. The streets were largely deserted, but not entirely: there were scores of Brazilians walking around. They were there yesterday, too, when I took another shorter trip down Friedrichstr., but the ones I saw yesterday were hyping some sort of Brazilian outdoor bar with a big-screen TV, and handing out little ribbons that they said were "Brazilian good-luck charms." Today's Brazilians, though, were fans, singing songs, wearing stupid hats and t-shirts, and generally ogling Berlin. (And yes, it's true: Brazilian women are impressively good-looking, even the ones who are football fans.) But the Germans -- and, I guess, all the other nationalities -- were inside, watching television. Or outside watching it at a sidewalk cafe. Or outdoors watching it on a huge screen in Potsdamer Platz. Friedrichstr., the part of it not talking Portugese, was deserted. Auto traffic was a fraction of normal, although many of the cars that were out were flying German flags.
Which is interesting, because 90% of the shops were open. One salutary side-effect of the WM (Weltmeisterschaft, an abbreviation I'm going to use because it's quicker to type than World Cup, and yes, I'll call it football because most of the world does) is that shops have been given the option of staying open until 10pm on weekdays, and opening from 2-8pm on Sunday. I'm waiting to see what the fallout from this will be. The stringent opening-hours laws are on the books because the shopkeepers' union insists that they preserve the German family by giving workers time to spend with their spouses and kids. When closing time on weekdays was extended from 7pm (but everyone closed at 6) to 8, there were posters all over town screaming that this would mean the end of the German family as we know it. Further, family-owned businesses were allowed to stay open until 10, a boon for your average Turkish family running the little corner shop. But if the upsurge in business is big enough, and the German family doesn't dissolve in a month (and I want it noted that Dad is probably out in a bar watching football), this temporary measure may re-surface, particularly as Christmas comes.
At any rate, the concert was so-so, but the venue was one of these huge brick churches built at the turn of the last century, so the Berliner Ensemble for Old Music sounded like they were performing in a tunnel, or as if they had been produced by Phil Spector. The sonic environment swallowed up the Baroque music, so I left at the break and walked back home. It was there that I saw, in a boutique, the so-far most hideous bit of WMsploitation I've seen (although this contest has a whole month to run, folks!): a dress, in black and white, little footballs sewn to its skirt, and, at the bust, two half-footballs for the breasts. This is a perfect illustration of why the words "fashion" and "Berlin" rarely appear in the same sentence, and no, I do not want to meet the woman who buys this. The dress beat out yesterday's entry, the heads of iceberg lettuce at my local supermarket, wrapped in cellophane with a pentagon pattern on it, so they resemble green footballs. I was thinking of kicking one around until I realized that this was a game I'd never played and likely was very bad at.
And the stupid slogans continue apace, too. Memo to Esprit: "The World Is Our Culture" is a phrase utterly without meaning, and sticking a football on it doesn't make it make any more sense.
Oh, and today, when I was reading the forum at The Languedoc Page, people were commenting that the French were being fairly subdued about the whole thing; no flags flying, no overt show of interest. I commented that that sounded good after Berlin, and someone responded that France hosts the WM in 2007, with games in, among other places, Toulouse, Marseille, and...Montpellier.
Nooooooo!
Monday, June 05, 2006
Pfingsten Pfragments
Neato Keano PhotoYou thought I was kidding about the pill behind the Reichstag, right? Well, here's your evidence. There are even more of these abominations around town, all in that pallid sickly color. The most recent one I've seen is behind the new Hauptbahnhof, a pair of sneakers. I bet you didn't know the Germans invented sneakers, did you? Someone alert Chuck Taylor! Worse, so as not to offend any company and invite a lawsuit, these giant galumphers have been designed so that they look like immense bronzed baby shoes with velcro tabs.
***
Yeah, I said I was through with it, but what else is there to write about? In fact, what other reality does Berlin have at the moment? Anyway:
Worst World Cup slogan so far goes to Coca-Cola Germany for its "It's your Heimspiel! Make it real!" Although, to be honest, it shows how strong the use of English is in marketing to youth in Germany; this would never be allowed in France, where any English is an ad has to sport an asterisk and a translation below in legible type (my favorite: "Do You Yahoo!?"* *Est-ce que vous etes Yahoo?" Well, actually, no, but I wish I were, looking at the latest stock quotes). The bizarre mixture of English and German only where it's absolutely necessary (as in the word Heimspiel, which took me a while to figure out, but which means that all the championship games are being played in Germany) is ubiquitous in the advertising of sneakers, clothes, music (especially downloadable) and soft drinks.
Does this mean that the average German high-school kid speaks English? Hahahahaha! Stop! You're killing me!
Although, y'know, more of them speak more English than American high-school kids speak German. Or French. Even the ones who are studying those languages.
***
You can read about yesterday's trip to the races at Hoppegarten here and here, although I just want to say that comments like "everyone lost money" are rank jealousy. Just because I'm a manly enough man to be able to collect my winnings in cash without need of a bodyguard is no reason to get sniffy. And factoring in everything, I think that €24 made me break even. At any rate, it's nice when a long-shot horse pays off on your first bet. Not so nice when none of the rest of them do.
And, to be fair, these folks take better pictures than I do.
***
That's all for today. Have a pfabulous Pfingsten, pfolks!
Saturday, June 03, 2006
Station
It was almost nice yesterday, with a little sun which warmed you if you stood in it, and a friend came over babbling about how cool Berlin's new main train station, the Hauptbahnhof, was and how I should really take a look at it. My position had been that I'd go see it when I had to leave for somewhere from it, but with the weather so nice and nothing to do, really, towards the end of the afternoon, I realized that it wasn't more than 15 minutes' walk away, and so I hoofed over there.
So what's it like? It's big.
How big is it, Ed?
It's so big that it's got a Burger King and a McDonald's in it, and you know how much those behemoths like being too close to each other.
The other thing is, it's dark. I don't really understand this, what with all the glass up top, but the interior of the station is downright gloomy, so that going downstairs to board a north-south train (as opposed to upstairs for the east-west trains) is like descending into a coal-mine. Yeah, there are lights in the ceiling, but they're more like spots, and don't really dissipate the darkness all that much.
One good thing: this north-south, east-west nexus. Deutsche Bahn has been crowing that Berlin will be the crossroads of European rail travel, where the Stockholm-to-Rome trains meet the Moscow-to-Paris trains, which is nice, I guess, in its own way, but it really does centralize the process of getting somewhere. Having Intercity access to Leipzig at long last has sliced a half-hour off of the travel time, and I presume other amenities of that sort will follow. The signs, all screens, are easy to read, and you can even find the track you need. This hasn't been a feature of German train stations in a lot of cases.
But one reason I was there was because of an idiosyncratic law we have here which says that shops in train stations should be open to meet travellers' needs. This includes grocery stores, and the Hauptbahnhof has a Kaiser's. (For you American readers, that's the company which owns A&P). And with a three-day weekend in the offing (yes, it's Pfingsten again), I just know I'm going to run out of something by Monday. After all, I always do.
For some reason, the Kaiser's was filled with photographers snapping pix of the groceries. I may even have gotten my photo taken while looking at the pathetic wine selection, but the rest of the store seemed adequate for emergency fillups. It was the rest of the retail space that gave me pause.
Now, a shopping mall in a train station is nothing new here. Leipzig has a three-level one, and it's populated by the same sort of mall rats you find in America; presumably Leipzig's teenagers have nowhere else to hang out. The Hauptbahnhof, however, is out in the middle of nowhere, so I wonder if that'll happen here. A lot of the retail is clothing stores, not the kind of thing I imagine travellers having a whole lot of use for. Crystal jewelry? Got it. A couple of shoe stores? Right here. Women's clothing in three or four locations. Two newspaper shops, one with a thin selection of international press, both operated by Relay, which I think of as a French company because they're in all the French railroad stations. Loads and loads of bad food: Pizza Hut, a Döner Kebap place, several chain bakeries, a muffin-and-doughnut shop, and the scarily named Asia Gourmet, which is your usual non-specific glop-provider. There's a sushi shop which sells bentos, which is a train-station concept I endorse, even if they're not even close to being as cool as the bentos you get in Japan.
But most of what's for sale there looks like someone conceived of this huge building on the edge of the government building district as a destination for shopping, which is ridiculous, especially since the word is that Deutsche Bahn had to clobber people over the head to get them to rent there -- very few contracts were signed as recently as three months ago. In other words, I wonder how long most of these joints are going to last, especially since the exact same stores are available all over town, there not being much variety in German retail.
There's also an oyster bar, which wasn't open, but I feel must be doomed because Berliners sure don't eat oysters -- or any other shellfish -- and what appears to be a brewpub, although I couldn't find it from the inside.
It does seem to be fulfilling its promise as a public space, though, because lots of people were sunning themselves on the steps, only natural on one of the first sunny days we've had this year. And I imagine a lot of the foot traffic was curiosity-seekers drawn by the novelty of the place. We'll see how this plays out. I'm not terribly optimistic, I have to say.
I left by the portal which faces all the government buildings, and they were erecting a stage there for the free concerts they're putting on this summer: the Scorpions (good lord, are they still around?) and good old Schlager gal Nena (yes, there's life after "99 Luftballons"). As I walked back towards my part of town, I passed a bar with an artificial beach which seemed to be run by the Agriculture Department as a way of promoting German produce, and some folks from Debitel who were running a "free bicycle rental" for people who want to cycle around town advertising Debitel. Unfortunately for them, I'd already spent €15 on a card to top up my cell phone from O2, because they'd sent me a notice saying that if I didn't, I'd not only lose my number, but I'd also lose the €35 credit I still had in it. Seemed like highway robbery, but I do take the damn thing on trips.
As a footnote, I wound up over by Charité Hospital on the route back, and saw that its campus was open, the part where Humboldt University has its research and teaching facilities. Having never been in there, although it's quite close to my house, I wandered around, looking at the 18th and 19th Century buildings there (including the macabre 18th Century dissection theater, which has cow's skulls as its identifying feature), the statues of German medical men, and its gloomy, tree-shaded premises. It's creepy enough that I'm going to go back there with the camera and shoot it.
If, that is, it ever warms up and stops raining. Maybe in August.
So what's it like? It's big.
How big is it, Ed?
It's so big that it's got a Burger King and a McDonald's in it, and you know how much those behemoths like being too close to each other.
The other thing is, it's dark. I don't really understand this, what with all the glass up top, but the interior of the station is downright gloomy, so that going downstairs to board a north-south train (as opposed to upstairs for the east-west trains) is like descending into a coal-mine. Yeah, there are lights in the ceiling, but they're more like spots, and don't really dissipate the darkness all that much.
One good thing: this north-south, east-west nexus. Deutsche Bahn has been crowing that Berlin will be the crossroads of European rail travel, where the Stockholm-to-Rome trains meet the Moscow-to-Paris trains, which is nice, I guess, in its own way, but it really does centralize the process of getting somewhere. Having Intercity access to Leipzig at long last has sliced a half-hour off of the travel time, and I presume other amenities of that sort will follow. The signs, all screens, are easy to read, and you can even find the track you need. This hasn't been a feature of German train stations in a lot of cases.
But one reason I was there was because of an idiosyncratic law we have here which says that shops in train stations should be open to meet travellers' needs. This includes grocery stores, and the Hauptbahnhof has a Kaiser's. (For you American readers, that's the company which owns A&P). And with a three-day weekend in the offing (yes, it's Pfingsten again), I just know I'm going to run out of something by Monday. After all, I always do.
For some reason, the Kaiser's was filled with photographers snapping pix of the groceries. I may even have gotten my photo taken while looking at the pathetic wine selection, but the rest of the store seemed adequate for emergency fillups. It was the rest of the retail space that gave me pause.
Now, a shopping mall in a train station is nothing new here. Leipzig has a three-level one, and it's populated by the same sort of mall rats you find in America; presumably Leipzig's teenagers have nowhere else to hang out. The Hauptbahnhof, however, is out in the middle of nowhere, so I wonder if that'll happen here. A lot of the retail is clothing stores, not the kind of thing I imagine travellers having a whole lot of use for. Crystal jewelry? Got it. A couple of shoe stores? Right here. Women's clothing in three or four locations. Two newspaper shops, one with a thin selection of international press, both operated by Relay, which I think of as a French company because they're in all the French railroad stations. Loads and loads of bad food: Pizza Hut, a Döner Kebap place, several chain bakeries, a muffin-and-doughnut shop, and the scarily named Asia Gourmet, which is your usual non-specific glop-provider. There's a sushi shop which sells bentos, which is a train-station concept I endorse, even if they're not even close to being as cool as the bentos you get in Japan.
But most of what's for sale there looks like someone conceived of this huge building on the edge of the government building district as a destination for shopping, which is ridiculous, especially since the word is that Deutsche Bahn had to clobber people over the head to get them to rent there -- very few contracts were signed as recently as three months ago. In other words, I wonder how long most of these joints are going to last, especially since the exact same stores are available all over town, there not being much variety in German retail.
There's also an oyster bar, which wasn't open, but I feel must be doomed because Berliners sure don't eat oysters -- or any other shellfish -- and what appears to be a brewpub, although I couldn't find it from the inside.
It does seem to be fulfilling its promise as a public space, though, because lots of people were sunning themselves on the steps, only natural on one of the first sunny days we've had this year. And I imagine a lot of the foot traffic was curiosity-seekers drawn by the novelty of the place. We'll see how this plays out. I'm not terribly optimistic, I have to say.
I left by the portal which faces all the government buildings, and they were erecting a stage there for the free concerts they're putting on this summer: the Scorpions (good lord, are they still around?) and good old Schlager gal Nena (yes, there's life after "99 Luftballons"). As I walked back towards my part of town, I passed a bar with an artificial beach which seemed to be run by the Agriculture Department as a way of promoting German produce, and some folks from Debitel who were running a "free bicycle rental" for people who want to cycle around town advertising Debitel. Unfortunately for them, I'd already spent €15 on a card to top up my cell phone from O2, because they'd sent me a notice saying that if I didn't, I'd not only lose my number, but I'd also lose the €35 credit I still had in it. Seemed like highway robbery, but I do take the damn thing on trips.
As a footnote, I wound up over by Charité Hospital on the route back, and saw that its campus was open, the part where Humboldt University has its research and teaching facilities. Having never been in there, although it's quite close to my house, I wandered around, looking at the 18th and 19th Century buildings there (including the macabre 18th Century dissection theater, which has cow's skulls as its identifying feature), the statues of German medical men, and its gloomy, tree-shaded premises. It's creepy enough that I'm going to go back there with the camera and shoot it.
If, that is, it ever warms up and stops raining. Maybe in August.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Crumbs From The Burden Of History
Not long after my last visit to Haus Bethanien, I went over there again to see a couple of so-so pieces done by people with Bethanien grants, and dragged along my painter friend, who I thought might welcome the opportunity to get out of his studio and into the real world. Not that Kreuzberg, and Bethanien in particular, is the real world, but it's realer than abstract painting, I guess.
Anyway, it didn't take any time at all to get from his house over to where the opening was, and we were early, so we took a walk around the surrounding neighborhood and stumbled on something that really spoke volumes about Berlin and its relationship to its own history.
Over in what must have been a corner of the city smack up against the wall is a collection of red-brick buildings which once apparently housed a school for young men. In a dark corner, shaded by large trees, there's a monument with an Iron Cross on it, a real rarity in this country. The monument has four brass plaques, one on each face, with the names of students from this academy who died "in defense of the Fatherland" during World War I. So far, so relatively unspectacular.
But at the base of the monument, there's another plaque, much more recent. On it is an inscription saying that after protests about the monument's existence were registered with the Kreuzberg borough authorities, a dialog was entered into, and it was decided to add this inscription making it clear that the citizens of Kreuzberg found this monument shameful and pledged never again to fight another war.
In other words, they couldn't stand the fact that this monument existed way over in the dark shade of the trees, but they couldn't take it down because it was Historic.
***
The Sauerkrautmeister, taking time off from the delightful little bundle of cabbage he and Ms. Arpa brought into the world recently, noted my mention of the 30-foot (I checked yesterday) aspirin in back of the Reichstag, erected there as part of the Germany: Land of Ideas campaign that's got a truly hideous pile of books at Bebelplatz and a rather generic car somewhere else. "I love that," he writes. "Guess where they got lots of human pain data to refine the formula?" Why, volunteers from the S&M clubs which flourished here during the Weimar Republic, right? No?
I guess what George Clinton said is true: "When you have a big headache, you need a big pill."
***
Last week the PEN International crew were in town for their annual convention, and a couple of them were waylaid by some of the folks who are now going to enthusiastically rebuild the Hohenzollern Schloss -- well, as soon as the Palast der Republik is finally demolished. Apparently the neo-royalists have given up on the idea of turning it into a shopping mall (we really don't need another shopping mall so much as we need the money that could be spent in one), and now it's going to be a giant museum! They're planning on putting the bust of Nefertiti, the Blue Gate of Babylon and who knows what else in there so tourists won't have to schlep from one of Berlin's museums to another! What a great idea: tourists here have little enough context with which to evaluate what they're seeing, so why not confuse them further?
The good news, of course, is that these bufoons still don't have one Euro to rub against another.
***
And, nothing to do with the Burden at all, but worth noting: among the flood of World Cup crap being dumped into the stores is one item that expresses my feelings completely: Butlers, a chain of stores selling cheesy "lifestyle accessories," is selling soccer-ball-print toilet paper. At €3 a roll.
Anyway, it didn't take any time at all to get from his house over to where the opening was, and we were early, so we took a walk around the surrounding neighborhood and stumbled on something that really spoke volumes about Berlin and its relationship to its own history.
Over in what must have been a corner of the city smack up against the wall is a collection of red-brick buildings which once apparently housed a school for young men. In a dark corner, shaded by large trees, there's a monument with an Iron Cross on it, a real rarity in this country. The monument has four brass plaques, one on each face, with the names of students from this academy who died "in defense of the Fatherland" during World War I. So far, so relatively unspectacular.
But at the base of the monument, there's another plaque, much more recent. On it is an inscription saying that after protests about the monument's existence were registered with the Kreuzberg borough authorities, a dialog was entered into, and it was decided to add this inscription making it clear that the citizens of Kreuzberg found this monument shameful and pledged never again to fight another war.
In other words, they couldn't stand the fact that this monument existed way over in the dark shade of the trees, but they couldn't take it down because it was Historic.
***
The Sauerkrautmeister, taking time off from the delightful little bundle of cabbage he and Ms. Arpa brought into the world recently, noted my mention of the 30-foot (I checked yesterday) aspirin in back of the Reichstag, erected there as part of the Germany: Land of Ideas campaign that's got a truly hideous pile of books at Bebelplatz and a rather generic car somewhere else. "I love that," he writes. "Guess where they got lots of human pain data to refine the formula?" Why, volunteers from the S&M clubs which flourished here during the Weimar Republic, right? No?
I guess what George Clinton said is true: "When you have a big headache, you need a big pill."
***
Last week the PEN International crew were in town for their annual convention, and a couple of them were waylaid by some of the folks who are now going to enthusiastically rebuild the Hohenzollern Schloss -- well, as soon as the Palast der Republik is finally demolished. Apparently the neo-royalists have given up on the idea of turning it into a shopping mall (we really don't need another shopping mall so much as we need the money that could be spent in one), and now it's going to be a giant museum! They're planning on putting the bust of Nefertiti, the Blue Gate of Babylon and who knows what else in there so tourists won't have to schlep from one of Berlin's museums to another! What a great idea: tourists here have little enough context with which to evaluate what they're seeing, so why not confuse them further?
The good news, of course, is that these bufoons still don't have one Euro to rub against another.
***
And, nothing to do with the Burden at all, but worth noting: among the flood of World Cup crap being dumped into the stores is one item that expresses my feelings completely: Butlers, a chain of stores selling cheesy "lifestyle accessories," is selling soccer-ball-print toilet paper. At €3 a roll.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Fussball Fieber!
Okay, pay attention, because I hope this is the last time I'm going to even mention this issue.
The World Cup.
The hype had already become unbearable three weeks ago, but now it's beyond insane. You literally cannot step outside your door here without being assaulted with it from all sides. As an example, let's go to the supermarket. Here, you can see an 850g jug of Nutella in the shape of a soccer ball, loaves of bread cut so that they get the markings of a soccer ball, FIFA cereal by Nestle, and Fussball Flips, which are the same as peanut flips (you Americans can think Cheetos only with peanut flavor instead of cheese flavor, and yes, they're quite good), only in the shape of -- you guessed it -- a soccer ball. Not to mention the dozens of other products which are running promotions geared towards giving away tickets, temporarily offering "limited edition" versions of candies in soccer-ball form, and the ads blaring over the loudspeakers with World Cup themes.
Billboards everywhere urge Germans to be friendly to the visitors (they've got an uphill battle here in Berlin) and on others, various stars of the local soccer team have donned garbageman's outfits to urge Berliners to sock it into the goal -- "it" being garbage and the goal being the widely-ignored orange trash cans on every block. Other ads urge the ticketless or travel-impaired to buy the add-on cable channel Premiere so they can watch everything, while yet others promote their business' teamwork by showing players. If the concept "goal" or "teamwork" or "good sportsmanship" can be wedged into an ad campaign, it wears shorts and jerseys.
All this for four games. Really: that's all that are going to be played here in Berlin, but one of them is the finale, the world championship game, at the Olympiastadion, and that's the one I really wanted to miss. Unfortunately, the latest in a series of professional catastrophies has all but guaranteed that I'll be here for the entire month of June and the first week of July, which is when the event happens. Besides the fact that this means that my move to France may be delayed by as much as another year, it depresses me that I'm going to have to stick around here for this silliness.
I've never been a sports fan, of any sport whatever. Maybe this is because of the fact that I'm one of those people of whom it can be said that the only thing me and my friends have in common is that we were the ones picked last in gym class in school when it came to choosing teams to play anything, be it baseball, football, basketball, volleyball... But even sitting in front of a television screen watching people who make in three months more than I'll ever make in my lifetime run around to the cheers of thousands is brain-numbingly boring to me. Going to an event is different. There, I'm much more likely to watch the crowd. In fact, I vividly remember the last baseball game I went to because of the three-generation black family which sat in front of me, all engaged in a lively discussion/debate about arcane baseball happenings that made no sense to me but certainly engaged all of them -- including the women -- to the max. Who was playing (well, it was at Yankee Stadium) I can't recall, nor can I remember who won. Or even if we stayed to the end of the game.
There's another element to this, too, which is more than a little puzzling, and that's the national team aspect. Germany is a place where expressing pride in the country is Not Done, or, rather, it's done, but gingerly. There was the "Du Bist Deutschland" campaign which I commented on a few months back, and there's the current "Germany: Land of Ideas" campaign that's resulted in, among other things, a giant aspirin being erected behind the Reichstag (aspirin having been invented in Germany, after all). But these campaigns have been viewed as rather radical and audacious moves.
It's no great revelation that soccer and nationalism can go hand in hand. After all, in 1969, El Salvador and Honduras fought a war for about a week which grew out of a melée at a soccer match. I can still remember the spontaneous parade of cars flying Brazilian flags which came out of nowhere as I was walking down Kantstr. the night that Brazil clinched the last world championship. Who knew Berlin had that many Brazilians? And I also remember German intellectual friends of mine a couple of World Cups back talking about how they hoped Germany lost because a German win would promote all the wrong things about the country, including the inflexible coaching the team had received. There's no doubt whatever that the kind of soccer fan who waves the German flag and paints the red, gold, and black on his face is viewed with suspicion by many. And given how poverty and nationalism can interact, there are reasonable fears being expressed at the moment about the potential for problems with darker-skinned visitors to the playoffs.
So beneath the commercial blitz, there's a feeling of unease. People want to support the German team, but maybe not too much. Every German win is a double-edged sword. It's part of the national neurosis, that good old Burden of History.
With these thoughts, I went back to the Bethanien with a painter friend the other night, and saw a couple of so-so installations. Afterwards, we went to a very good pizza joint on the banks of the Landwehrkanal and talked about -- what else -- the World Cup. He filled me in on some stuff I hadn't been aware of, most notably that Germany's coach lives and works in America, where he's been under the sway of some New Age-y kinds of influences which he's imparted to the team, much to the deep suspicion of German traditionalists. "What I'm hoping is that Germany has to drop out early, but the American team gets into the next round of playoffs," he said. "It'd serve them right." Not that he's rooting for anyone himself; he sees another Brazilian victory as a foregone conclusion.
After dinner, I was wending my way back to the subway when he said "Hey, you gotta see this bar. I hope it's still here. It's the smallest bar I've ever seen." We went down a street and, naturally, walked right past it, but it was there. Called, appropriately enough, the Mini-Bar, it has room for about ten people in it. (It may be the smallest bar he's ever seen, but he's obviously never been to Tokyo). We decided to go in and have a beer, just because the place had a couple of empty seats, and a few minutes later, two guys came in with a stack of flyers for the bar to put up. They, too, decided to stay for a beer, and one of them pulled a box out of a shopping bag he had with him. It was a cheap plastic toy called Euro-Kicker, and was...a miniature soccer game! The two struggled to assemble it, and it became a small playing field with regular circular depressions, in which you mounted a little player on a spring. The goalie went back and forth on a slider, and the idea was that the ball could be "kicked" by flipping one of the players, which would hit the ball in the depression and move it to another player. Hard as it was to believe, these two adult men got seriously into this game as we watched. I was certain it was ironic, but the painter said that he doesn't believe irony exists in Germany, and, whether or not he's right in general, he might have been right in the specific with this one.
Anyway, it's going to be hard to miss, much as I might want to miss it. The only billboards that are really speaking to my needs right at the moment are the ones from EasyJet, who are offering "Escape the World Cup" bargains to their various destinations.
Tempting, but I have to figure out a way to raise €3-4000 to get out of here. I've endured Berlin this long, I can endure a mere World Cup.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Fresh Air In Berlin
No, this isn't a Berliner Luft joke. It's a commercial.
For over 18 years, I've contributed to what rapidly became one of America's top radio shows, Fresh Air. Its success is due to Terry Gross, the woman who invented the show, and her amazing interviews. She gets great stuff out of just about everyone she talks to (although Monica Lewinsky memorably walked out in mid-interview), and that's why millions of people tune in each day.
Now, National Public Radio, the American network which carries the show, has taken over the old RIAS frequency here in Berlin, 104.1 FM, and is broadcasting Fresh Air several times a day:
Tues-Sat. 0400, 1000, 1800. The 1800 show is the current day's show, picking up the feed from Philadelphia as the show goes out at noon over there. Monday's first two shows is the weekend "best of" edition.
You can get the show over the internet, a day late, and if you'd like to hear some of my pieces on your computer, you can just click here.
Since I've never lived anywhere I could pick up my own pieces on the radio, I consider this a sign that, finances and professional catastrophes notwithstanding, I'm about to move.
For over 18 years, I've contributed to what rapidly became one of America's top radio shows, Fresh Air. Its success is due to Terry Gross, the woman who invented the show, and her amazing interviews. She gets great stuff out of just about everyone she talks to (although Monica Lewinsky memorably walked out in mid-interview), and that's why millions of people tune in each day.
Now, National Public Radio, the American network which carries the show, has taken over the old RIAS frequency here in Berlin, 104.1 FM, and is broadcasting Fresh Air several times a day:
Tues-Sat. 0400, 1000, 1800. The 1800 show is the current day's show, picking up the feed from Philadelphia as the show goes out at noon over there. Monday's first two shows is the weekend "best of" edition.
You can get the show over the internet, a day late, and if you'd like to hear some of my pieces on your computer, you can just click here.
Since I've never lived anywhere I could pick up my own pieces on the radio, I consider this a sign that, finances and professional catastrophes notwithstanding, I'm about to move.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Bethanien Lied
It started like this: a friend in Arizona told me that the son of some friends of his was here in Berlin, working for a composer I'd never heard of, and suggested I get in touch. I did, and he turned out to be a smart guy, and he told me he was working on some concerts. I asked him to keep me in the loop.
Well, the first one was last night, so the dancer and I went. It was a nice evening, so we walked there. Always nice to get some exercise.
I knew in advance it wasn't going to be any normal thing. For one thing, it was being held in a squat, New Yorck Reloaded. For another, it was a concert of music by Cornelius Cardew, one of those composers who sounds a lot more interesting on paper than I had any reason to believe he'd sound in person.
Some background is in order here. First, Cardew. Cardew (1936-1981) was one of the leading British avant-gardists of his generation, and was an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen for several years. At some point, he became seriously politically radicalized, espousing Maoist principles. In the mid-70s, he was awarded a DAAD grant and came to West Berlin. One of the causes he became involved with here was that of the Bethanien Hospital, a children's hospital in the Kreuzberg district which the city had decided to close and turn into an arts center. The surrounding community was alarmed because they figured they needed a hospital nearby, and Cardew, not unexpectedly, took their side. It was, after all, the side of The People. DAAD, being a government-funded organization, was not amused.
The Bethanien Hospital, and the part of Kreuzberg it inhabited, was in a sort of pocket in the East-West line, a bulge surrounded on many sides by the Berlin Wall. Thus, the real estate wasn't particularly valuable, and there may well have been good reasons for moving the hospital facility to a more central location. At any rate, an arts center it became, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, and it was a prime venue for avant-garde artists in all media.
Now, the other half of this story is Yorck 59. This was a squat at Yorckstr. 59, also in Kreuzberg, albeit a different part of it. (Back in the old days, Kreuzberg was a large Bezirk -- borough -- and was divided into two postal zones, Kreuzberg 36, the part nearest the Wall and where Bethanien stands, largely Turkish and radical young Germans, and Kreuzberg 61, closer to Tempelhof Airport and a good deal more gentrified. I used to say that people paired off in K36 and when the first kid came, moved to K61. Yorck 59 was in K61).
Now, as I understand it, there is a thing known as the Berlin Plan, which was successfully used in K 36, among other places in the city, and imitated and reproduced elsewhere, most notably Amsterdam. This was a situation where the city attempted to locate the owners of abandoned buildings which had been squatted, and, once they'd accomplished this, ordered them to make improvements by a certain deadline or lose the buildings. Many of K 36's buildings had been abandoned for years, and the owners were either unable or unwilling to maintain them. Once the buildings came into the city's possession, they worked with the squatters. The squatters had to make improvements themselves, which they were often highly motivated to do because they were living in the buildings. The city, which was rolling in money in those days, gave them grants for these improvements, and then helped them buy the buildings on ridiculously easy credit terms. Some of these former squats are model residences today, pioneering green building technologies like passive solar electricity and the like.
But for some reason, the Yorck 59ers didn't buy into this. Maybe they were ideologically opposed, or maybe their landlord decided to play ball with the city. At any rate, last summer they were forceably evicted by the police, and so they relocated to the empty buildings of the Bethanien. The walls of Berlin bloomed with posters about this, screaming about the fascist lackeys of the state and the like, and some enterprising anarchists printed up signs in an identical typeface to that used on the street signs of Berlin and overnight loads of streets became Yorckstr. (Of course, if you were lost, this was annoying, but these people seldom think about details like that).
And now, ironically enough, the cash-strapped city has decided to sell the Bethanien complex to a private developer, who wants to turn it into a multi-use, for-profit development with offices and small companies renting renovated space in the old brick buildings. Thus, the arts center -- and the Yorckers -- have to go.
So what we had last night was a "solidarity concert" in which the members of the Zwischentöne Ensemble, joined by pianist John Tilbury, one of Cardew's old pals, and Aleks Kolkowski, a violinist who also acts and plays around the improv scene, performed a number of Cardew's pieces on the premises of the Yorck squat in the Bethanien. Me, I was there because I was in solidarity with Bill the composer, and that's about it.
Once we finally found the place (no longer in its Wall-bubble, this part of town has become incredibly central, and is being developed like crazy, so all the landmarks I'd had from visits a few years ago had been either removed or changed beyond recognition) it was just as I feared it would be. Political slogans were scrawled on every flat surface, and although some were the expected support-for-Yorck variety, there were also loads of anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, anti-globalization ones. You weren't even safe in the bathroom from being reminded of the struggle in Chiapas and the imminent fascist threat, although I saw no one in black ski masks or brown shirts during my brief stay there.
The concert venue was very much a hospital corridor, narrow, with windows lining one side, and numerous small rooms. A couple had been blocked off for use by the bar, which was by donation only (I gave them five Euros for a beer, figuring to make a little contribution to the cause; I got three back), and in the one on the left of it, a cello, a marimba, and some music stands were set up. A guy with an accordion and a woman with a harmonica strolled around, making random bursts of dissonant sound. Kolkowski set up a music stand in the corridor and played a Cardew composition for solo violin. Then, some musicians filed into the left-hand room, and for a few minutes, improvised blasts of sound came out. (I was sitting down, tired from the long walk and not wanting to cram into the room with the majority of the crowd). After about ten minutes, a guy gave a hand signal to someone standing outside the door of the room to the right of the bar, and a piano-violin duet started up. This was followed by some more consonant music, which I would have recognized, had I been Chinese, as "The East Is Red." A couple of similar pieces followed, and another piano-violin duet, then the focus switched back to the other room for some more improv. Finally, all the musicians filed into the corridor and sang a revised version of Cardew's "Bethanien Lied," one of the kind of compositions that got him into trouble with the classical establishment of his time.
It was a catchy melody, ingeniously structured, and this, more than its content, was what pissed his contemporaries off: he was writing what amounted to popular music, protest folk music, instead of using his acknowledged virtuosity and the knowledge the Great God Stockhausen must have imparted to him. But I heard something else. Not only did I hear the word "gegen" (against) far more than I wanted to without ever hearing a balancing "für" (for), but, both in the words Cardew had written and the new words which, half-way through, turned from supporting a hospital over an arts center to supporting an arts center over an office building, I heard a naked attempt to link what is clearly (to me) a local issue to the international anti-this-and-that movement. As I listened, my eyes scanned the photos of Chiapas, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and other trouble spots on the wall and then I looked at the Yorckers, children of one of Europe's fattest economies who could choose to live in the squalor they were living in because there was a social support system in place that really reduced the risk of doing so, looking righteous and self-satisfied, and I decided that when they stopped singing, I'd get out of there as fast as I decently could. The young composer was going to lead a discussion with Tilbury and Kolkowski, and another guy I knew was going to translate (Berlin really is a village sometimes), but I hope neither was insulted. I'd just had enough of radical politics, K 36 style, for one evening.
For the record, from what I know, I think it's both cynical and short-sighted for the city to abandon the Bethanien arts complex. Cynical because it's being done for the cash, short-sighted because it's yet another blow to the dying Berlin arts scene, where the opera companies get the money and the rest of the more innovative artists can fend for themselves. I'm less inclined to be supportive of the Yorck 59 movement, (again, from what I know) because there seems to be an element of "we're righteous so you owe us" to their situation, in common with a couple of other similar institutions around town which, unsurprisingly, are united in solidarity with them. I think it would be a great idea if these people could focus on the strictly local issues involved in the Bethanien problem because then, and only then, can a decent solution come out of it. Save Bethanien, and then worry about Chiapas, because -- and this time it's only a surmise -- I don't think the Chiapas Indians are much concerned about Bethanien?
Well, the first one was last night, so the dancer and I went. It was a nice evening, so we walked there. Always nice to get some exercise.
I knew in advance it wasn't going to be any normal thing. For one thing, it was being held in a squat, New Yorck Reloaded. For another, it was a concert of music by Cornelius Cardew, one of those composers who sounds a lot more interesting on paper than I had any reason to believe he'd sound in person.
Some background is in order here. First, Cardew. Cardew (1936-1981) was one of the leading British avant-gardists of his generation, and was an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen for several years. At some point, he became seriously politically radicalized, espousing Maoist principles. In the mid-70s, he was awarded a DAAD grant and came to West Berlin. One of the causes he became involved with here was that of the Bethanien Hospital, a children's hospital in the Kreuzberg district which the city had decided to close and turn into an arts center. The surrounding community was alarmed because they figured they needed a hospital nearby, and Cardew, not unexpectedly, took their side. It was, after all, the side of The People. DAAD, being a government-funded organization, was not amused.
The Bethanien Hospital, and the part of Kreuzberg it inhabited, was in a sort of pocket in the East-West line, a bulge surrounded on many sides by the Berlin Wall. Thus, the real estate wasn't particularly valuable, and there may well have been good reasons for moving the hospital facility to a more central location. At any rate, an arts center it became, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, and it was a prime venue for avant-garde artists in all media.
Now, the other half of this story is Yorck 59. This was a squat at Yorckstr. 59, also in Kreuzberg, albeit a different part of it. (Back in the old days, Kreuzberg was a large Bezirk -- borough -- and was divided into two postal zones, Kreuzberg 36, the part nearest the Wall and where Bethanien stands, largely Turkish and radical young Germans, and Kreuzberg 61, closer to Tempelhof Airport and a good deal more gentrified. I used to say that people paired off in K36 and when the first kid came, moved to K61. Yorck 59 was in K61).
Now, as I understand it, there is a thing known as the Berlin Plan, which was successfully used in K 36, among other places in the city, and imitated and reproduced elsewhere, most notably Amsterdam. This was a situation where the city attempted to locate the owners of abandoned buildings which had been squatted, and, once they'd accomplished this, ordered them to make improvements by a certain deadline or lose the buildings. Many of K 36's buildings had been abandoned for years, and the owners were either unable or unwilling to maintain them. Once the buildings came into the city's possession, they worked with the squatters. The squatters had to make improvements themselves, which they were often highly motivated to do because they were living in the buildings. The city, which was rolling in money in those days, gave them grants for these improvements, and then helped them buy the buildings on ridiculously easy credit terms. Some of these former squats are model residences today, pioneering green building technologies like passive solar electricity and the like.
But for some reason, the Yorck 59ers didn't buy into this. Maybe they were ideologically opposed, or maybe their landlord decided to play ball with the city. At any rate, last summer they were forceably evicted by the police, and so they relocated to the empty buildings of the Bethanien. The walls of Berlin bloomed with posters about this, screaming about the fascist lackeys of the state and the like, and some enterprising anarchists printed up signs in an identical typeface to that used on the street signs of Berlin and overnight loads of streets became Yorckstr. (Of course, if you were lost, this was annoying, but these people seldom think about details like that).
And now, ironically enough, the cash-strapped city has decided to sell the Bethanien complex to a private developer, who wants to turn it into a multi-use, for-profit development with offices and small companies renting renovated space in the old brick buildings. Thus, the arts center -- and the Yorckers -- have to go.
So what we had last night was a "solidarity concert" in which the members of the Zwischentöne Ensemble, joined by pianist John Tilbury, one of Cardew's old pals, and Aleks Kolkowski, a violinist who also acts and plays around the improv scene, performed a number of Cardew's pieces on the premises of the Yorck squat in the Bethanien. Me, I was there because I was in solidarity with Bill the composer, and that's about it.
Once we finally found the place (no longer in its Wall-bubble, this part of town has become incredibly central, and is being developed like crazy, so all the landmarks I'd had from visits a few years ago had been either removed or changed beyond recognition) it was just as I feared it would be. Political slogans were scrawled on every flat surface, and although some were the expected support-for-Yorck variety, there were also loads of anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, anti-globalization ones. You weren't even safe in the bathroom from being reminded of the struggle in Chiapas and the imminent fascist threat, although I saw no one in black ski masks or brown shirts during my brief stay there.
The concert venue was very much a hospital corridor, narrow, with windows lining one side, and numerous small rooms. A couple had been blocked off for use by the bar, which was by donation only (I gave them five Euros for a beer, figuring to make a little contribution to the cause; I got three back), and in the one on the left of it, a cello, a marimba, and some music stands were set up. A guy with an accordion and a woman with a harmonica strolled around, making random bursts of dissonant sound. Kolkowski set up a music stand in the corridor and played a Cardew composition for solo violin. Then, some musicians filed into the left-hand room, and for a few minutes, improvised blasts of sound came out. (I was sitting down, tired from the long walk and not wanting to cram into the room with the majority of the crowd). After about ten minutes, a guy gave a hand signal to someone standing outside the door of the room to the right of the bar, and a piano-violin duet started up. This was followed by some more consonant music, which I would have recognized, had I been Chinese, as "The East Is Red." A couple of similar pieces followed, and another piano-violin duet, then the focus switched back to the other room for some more improv. Finally, all the musicians filed into the corridor and sang a revised version of Cardew's "Bethanien Lied," one of the kind of compositions that got him into trouble with the classical establishment of his time.
It was a catchy melody, ingeniously structured, and this, more than its content, was what pissed his contemporaries off: he was writing what amounted to popular music, protest folk music, instead of using his acknowledged virtuosity and the knowledge the Great God Stockhausen must have imparted to him. But I heard something else. Not only did I hear the word "gegen" (against) far more than I wanted to without ever hearing a balancing "für" (for), but, both in the words Cardew had written and the new words which, half-way through, turned from supporting a hospital over an arts center to supporting an arts center over an office building, I heard a naked attempt to link what is clearly (to me) a local issue to the international anti-this-and-that movement. As I listened, my eyes scanned the photos of Chiapas, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and other trouble spots on the wall and then I looked at the Yorckers, children of one of Europe's fattest economies who could choose to live in the squalor they were living in because there was a social support system in place that really reduced the risk of doing so, looking righteous and self-satisfied, and I decided that when they stopped singing, I'd get out of there as fast as I decently could. The young composer was going to lead a discussion with Tilbury and Kolkowski, and another guy I knew was going to translate (Berlin really is a village sometimes), but I hope neither was insulted. I'd just had enough of radical politics, K 36 style, for one evening.
For the record, from what I know, I think it's both cynical and short-sighted for the city to abandon the Bethanien arts complex. Cynical because it's being done for the cash, short-sighted because it's yet another blow to the dying Berlin arts scene, where the opera companies get the money and the rest of the more innovative artists can fend for themselves. I'm less inclined to be supportive of the Yorck 59 movement, (again, from what I know) because there seems to be an element of "we're righteous so you owe us" to their situation, in common with a couple of other similar institutions around town which, unsurprisingly, are united in solidarity with them. I think it would be a great idea if these people could focus on the strictly local issues involved in the Bethanien problem because then, and only then, can a decent solution come out of it. Save Bethanien, and then worry about Chiapas, because -- and this time it's only a surmise -- I don't think the Chiapas Indians are much concerned about Bethanien?
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