Crumbs From Behind The Wall

First, I would like to make extra sure that readers of this blog realize that it has nothing to do with the dining-out column by the same name in the wretched Ex-Berliner magazine. It’s really not even worth wasting electrons on those people and their amazingly myopic view of Berlin’s anglophone communities, but it probably is worth highlighting their astonishing lack of originality.

Those who are interested in my dining-out experiences here should a) wait until I can afford doing it again and then b) check over at Dishola, the Austin-based experiment in restaurant blogging or whatever it is. I’m the official Berlin Editor over there, and I’ve really got to get some stuff up about Toca Rouge and that ramen place on Neue Schönhauser and a couple of other places I’m thinking would appeal to their readership.

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As promised some time ago, a new work by Nike, this one on Brunnenstr. near the park. Is this an hommage to Gaugin, or…?

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I’m headed to Texas and California via Paris for a couple of weeks, starting in a week, and walked over to Hauptbahnhof recently to buy my ticket to Paris and see if I could get beaned by a piece of falling steel so I could sue Deutsche Bahn and get myself free tickets for life. I did manage to accomplish one of those goals, but it was the one that cost me money, not the one that cost them money. Whatever: I’m leaving this place for a while, and that always feels good unless I’m headed to someplace even worse like Frankfurt/Main.

At any rate, I was amused by a rather ambitious currywurst budde over there which calls itself Berliner-Curry.de. Around the name are listed cities: New York, Dubai, Paris, and so on. Interesting; an entrepreneur actually attempting to franchise Berlin currywurst around the world? That actually could be a winner (although not in Dubai unless the sausages were beef). Naturally, as soon as I got home I hit the URL, and was disappointed, as you no doubt will be. It is emblematically Berlinish, though, to hop on a trend without really understanding it. I remember years ago when a new office supply company opened here in Mitte calling itself Papyrus.com. Naturally, they hadn’t registered the URL, and didn’t even have a website. But that dot-com stuff was trendy, right?

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One thing you can always say about Berlin is it’s a really safe city. Violent crime here is almost unknown in most places, and I’ve only been burgled once, which was pretty much my landlord’s fault. But that’s not to say there isn’t an undercurrent of anger here which blossoms forth every now and again in unpleasant ways. Currently, the trend seems to be throwing paving stones (easily dug out of the sandy soil here with a pen knife) through windows. Just in the past couple of days, I’ve seen smashed windows at the hookah bar on Chausseestr. and Tieckstr. (although this is probably just the tip of a larger story involving the huge number of these places and shops to supply them which have sprung up virtually overnight: do people really enjoy sitting around sipping sweet tea and smoking perfumed tobacco if they’re not Arabs?), at the huge SAP software company building on the corner of Rosenthaler Str. and Gipsstr. (where you can see the place they dug the stones right in front of the building), and at the former Beate Uhse porn shop on Rosenthaler Str. This last suddenly sprouted some weird art-like installation in the windows almost within minutes of the Uhse folks pulling out, and it was apparently part of some viral marketing scheme by one of the game box companies — I’ve lost track of Playstations and Nintendos and so on, but one of them has put up fake street art, opened a fake art gallery on Torstr., and now this. Not only did the windows go, the bricks were still there when I walked past, and someone was filming it.

I have to admit, I understand how street artists can get irked by this sort of thing, because the paper art with the URL was just bad enough that it stood out as fake. It was as annoying as the ad campaign for the new Toyota auto which has — and I’m not exaggerating here — taken up about 95% of all advertising space in this city for most of this week, and which will, if there’s any justice, disappear tomorrow when the car is actually introduced. The Toyota campaign is yet another one which presupposes the utter stupidity of the consumer, the “Hey dumbass, buy this” attitude that’s at the basis of so much German advertising, as opposed to the “You’re clever enough to want this” approach the Brits pioneered and the Americans eventually figured out. Trouble is, there aren’t enough paving stones to take this one out.

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Yes, I know Berlin is changing, but… One night not very long ago, I was walking down Invalidenstr. and there was cheesy pink light streaming off a ginormous disco ball inside the staid walls of the old DDR post office. A couple of weeks later, I saw that Volkswagen was staging an event there. Now, when I first moved here, that was my local post office, and I’ve (naturally, because it’s what one does at the post office in Germany) stood in lines there many a day, admiring the strange metal sculpture on the polished marble walls. After Deutsche Post went private and the post office moved into a MacPaper outlet (I am not making this up, for those of you who don’t live here), the building was empty for a long, long time. But apparently it’s been rescued by a club which will give the lie to all those reports of hip! edgy! Berlin! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bangaluu! (Warning: cheezy handbag house music when you click the link). Opening a branch of this — or even an imitation of it — would soon empty Friedrichshain of hipsters, and the flights back to Williamsburg would be packed. I kept clicking links on that site out of sick fascination. And to think it’s right next door to where, many many years ago in the Paleolithic Era, the Technics Club was…

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And finally, the pictures to explain the headline. Some months ago, I posted a picture of some graffiti “artists” spray-painting the wall of the building next to me, which I have to walk past on my way to my front door. I thought they were done — surely it couldn’t get any more hideous than that — but they kept working at it until there were all sorts of horrible details: a little green head of some depressed-looking guy, a woman-robot…who knows what they thought they were doing? But they signed it and left their phone numbers, in case anyone else wanted their house desecrated.

Then, as I guess artistic collaborations do on occasion, this one went south, and one of the “artists” came back and obliterated his former partner’s work and re-did it to his own liking. Not only that, he also went to work on the wall next door to it, so now we have a diptych with the theme of the Berlin Wall. Now, just why someone would want to spray-paint a new Wall, I cannot tell you. In fact, besides the eyesore factor, the depression this horrible set of murals sets off in me every time I have to see it (which is, of course, every day) is hard to even verbalize. What is the point of this? Who on earth would pay someone to do it? And just in case you think I’m making this up, here’s the wall closest to the street:

And here’s the wall on the rear building:

There’s only one solution I can think of. The original Berlin Wall attracted graffiti artists from around the world. Not just the collection who did the stretch known as the East Side Gallery (which was all post-Wall anyway), but Keith Haring over by the Gropius-Bau, and the French guy who did all those heads that wound up in Wings of Desire on that stretch in Kreuzberg. So maybe Nike can come and stick a nude or two up on this “Wall” and make it that much less depressing to look at.

I still liked our wall better when it had a big billboard on it featuring the Puhdys shilling for Berliner Pilsner.

Principal Edwards Magic Theatre – “Soundtrack” CD (Cherry Red)

Medium Image

The third release on John Peel’s Dandelion imprint was this ambitious art-rock outing from a collective of one-time Exeter University students whose classical instrumentation, archaic literary themes and erratic time signatures rendered them too weird for mainstream notice, despite light shows and pretty stage dancers. Their debut heavily features Vivienne McAuliffe’s precise operatic vocals enveloped by staccato Indian-tinged arrangements. The hard rock Shakespeare adaptation is an amusing, if overwrought, novelty, with some lovely medieval vocal passages, but like the rest of the disk, gears shift before one can get comfortable. Live, with the visual treats of twirling girls, swirling oils and psychedelic costumes, these elaborate set pieces might have held the audience’s interest, but on record, something’s missing.

More Psst!

Indeed an offer was tendered on my book. I spoke with the publisher for about forty minutes last week and liked what I heard. I hope he did, too. But, being the moderately optimistic yet pragmatic fatalist that I am, I’ll resist talking about it further until the contract is in front of me and pen has been put to paper. Once that happens, I’ll return with the details.

Until then, let’s just say that it’s an extremely satisfying experience, watching everything come together. On one hand, I’ve only worked on this project for seven months; on the other, I’ve carried it with me for over thirty years. And, thanks to the research required to write this book, I’ve made some terrific new acquaintances and some bona fide friends to boot (plus, with the invaluable help of Maggie, our GPS, I’ve learned my way around NYC).

Who said writing had to be a solitary business?

OLLA – “SEPTIC HAGFISHâ€Â 45

OLLA were a very short-lived New Zealand group comprised of several individuals, most notably NZ band-hoppers Chris Heazlewood and Sean O’Rielly. Their 1992 7â€ÂEP on Flying Nun is one of my favorites of the era, which was a time when great, challenging, noisy music from the two islands was arriving in bursts. This EP, like so much from around that time & from that country, was scattered between retro-ish, analog keyboard, drone-heavy pop, and clattering & often improvisational noise. I feel like the whole record’s aged better than most of their peers’ did, and when I put it on the other day I said, “I gotta share this with the peopleâ€Â. So here’s the best track.

Download OLLA – “Septic Hagfishâ€Â (from 1992 7″EP)

Record Nerds in a tizzy.

A Fall song on a Nissan commercial. The Buzzcocks peddling AARP. The Pogues and Cadillac.

Please, who really gives a shit? Calm it down. At least be happy for the artist. “Goodâ€Â does not equal “starving.â€Â When this happens, record nerds act as if they were cheated on by a once-faithful lover. Please find a more interesting avenue for your arm-waving tantrums. What will put this crutch to bed? The Dead C pushing Huggies?

My friend John’s band the Dexateens playing a song…

My friend John’s band the Dexateens playing a song that John wrote 12 years back when we were in a band together. My various bands since have always covered this song and my current band, Parks & Wildlife has, in fact, recorded it for an upcoming ep. John, who sings the song, does not appear in this video.

Aaron Bore

Just a note of thanks to NBC for once again pulling Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip from Monday night’s schedule, thereby freeing me to watch Family Guy reruns on TBS. Aaron Sorkin’s original concept a behind-the-scenes look at what purportedly goes on in the production of a weekly live comedy show à la Saturday Night Live quickly revealed that, as interesting as it might have sounded, and despite how good the first episode was, perhaps there really isn’t that much of interest going on backstage to support 26 one-hour episodes (or whatever constitutes a season these days). Alas, it appears that the grind of putting together a TV comedy show week after week, with the clock on the wall counting down from 168 hours to zero again and again, is exactly that: a grind.

So the show went on hiatus for a little bit of retooling and, when it returned, had been reduced to an occasionally funny but overall pretty boring romantic comedy with all of the TV production stuff taking a decidedly backseat. On the positive side, it made those early episodes look much better in retrospect; the bad thing was that the show had become a colossal bore. By downplaying the let’s-put-on-a-TV-show aspect, Studio 60 lost what made it potentially fascinating in the first place. Rather than concentrating on the love lives of characters who are not as funny or cute or, especially, interesting as Sorkin thinks they are, he should have found a way to refocus his original premise. Who knows what form the the series will take when it reincarnates if it does at all. Hopefully, three will indeed be a charm.

Last time Sorkin tried this (what goes on behind the curtain of a TV show) the amusing and witty Sports Night it worked; this time, it doesn’t. For now, if I want funny and smart, I’ll stick with Brian and Stewie.


DEMOLITION DOLL RODS DEBUT

In 1994, for about five minutes, I fashioned myself a budding record label entrepreneur to some extent. I’d heard pals wax rhapsodically about how incredibly easy and cheap it was to put out a 45, and for the most part – since I put out or helped put out all of two – it totally was. I started a label called WOMB RECORDS, and was lucky enough to be allowed to put out MONOSHOCK‘s first record, “Primitive Zippo” – a searing, wild-ass overloaded mindfuck that kicks off their posthumous CD, a disc that you simply must get. What was I gonna do next? Well, I kind of knew the folks in the GORIES a little bit, as I’d interviewed them for the fanzine I did in the early 90s, and I also met & hoisted beverages with Dan(ny), their guitarist, in Detroit in 1993. My friend Anthony, who ran PAST IT RECORDS and was in the Icky Boyfriends at the time, also knew Danny & the flaunting ladies from his brand new band, the DEMOLITION DOLL RODS. We decided to team up and put out their debut 7″EP together, so it ended up being a Womb/Past It co-production.
What was cool was that the two of us got to pluck the songs that would kick off this still-active band’s recording career from a tape they gave us, and the Doll Rods gave us full rein to select our favorites, track order, etc. I think we chose pretty well. The band never really touched the Gories for raw, unadulterated stripped-down soul power, but I feel to this day that this is the closest that they came. It sold well enough that Anthony & PAST IT did a solo re-press of another 500 copies with a blue-tinged cover; I opted out and threw in the towel for record mogulship. If you ever see the black-and-white cover pictured here, that’s the one that we did. If you never see it, well, here are the songs.

Download DEMOLITION DOLL RODS – “We’re The Doll Rods” (Side A, Track 1)
Download DEMOLITION DOLL RODS – “Give It Up” (Side A, Track 2)
Download DEMOLITION DOLL RODS – “No Tickets, No Passes” (Side B)

Went to see my friend Che’s new band the other nig…

Went to see my friend Che’s new band the other night. Just great stuff, riding the wave between dissonant and melodic in all the right places. The new album, Iron, is also brilliant, and the only place to get it right now is at a live show. The man’s going on tour, so go see him when he comes to your town.

Feb 28 2007 8:00P Club Congress Tucson, Arizona
Mar 1 2007 8:00P Modified Phoenix, Arizona
Mar 2 2007 8:00P Scolari’s Office San Diego, California
Mar 3 2007 8:00P Scene Bar Los Angeles, California
Mar 4 2007 8:00P The Smell Los Angeles, California
Mar 5 2007 8:00P Thee Parkside San Francisco, California
Mar 7 2007 8:00P Sunset Tavern Seattle, Washington
Mar 8 2007 8:00P Towne Lounge Portland, Oregon
Mar 9 2007 8:00P Neurolux Boise, Idaho
Mar 10 2007 8:00P Kilby Court Salt Lake City, Utah
Mar 11 2007 8:00P Hi-Dive Denver, Colorado
Mar 12 2007 8:00P Launchpad Albuquerque, New Mexico
Mar 14 2007 8:00P (SXSW) Habana Calle 6 Patio Austin, Texas
Mar 17 2007 12:00P Epoch Coffee (Sick Room SXSW Day Party) Austin, Texas
Mar 22 2007 8:00P WC Dons Jackson, Mississippi
Mar 23 2007 8:00P Bottletree Birmingham, Alabama
Mar 24 2007 8:00P Drunken Unicorn Atlanta, Georgia
Mar 26 2007 8:00P Pilot Light Knoxville, Tennessee
Mar 28 2007 9:00P Alley Katz Richmond, Virginia
Mar 29 2007 8:00P North Star Bar Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Mar 30 2007 8:00P Guero New York, New York
Mar 31 2007 8:00P Rudy’s New Haven, Connecticut
Apr 2 2007 8:00P Gooski’s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Apr 5 2007 8:00P Empty Bottle Chicago, Illinois
Apr 6 2007 8:00P Kryptonite Rockford, Illinois