Category: Ed Ward

I’ll admit it, I’m weak. I’ve been looking for someone who’s interested in art to go to museums and galleries with ever since the last person I knew who liked to do that moved, so when I noticed that the Hamburger Bahnhof has a free admission policy from 2 til closing at 6 on Thursdays, I mentioned it to a young woman I knew and she actually seemed enthusiastic, so we made a date for this past week.

My interest was primarily in the Brice Marden retrospective because I’d read a great review of it by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker, yet I’ve never “gotten” Marden at all. (True trivia fact: for a number of years he was married to Pauline, Joan Baez’ older sister.)

Her interest, though, was in pain. Or, rather, Pain, the current blockbuster occupying both the Hamburger Bahnhof and the Charité’s Medical-Historical Museum. Well, she’s a health professional, I said. At any rate, we got there at 4 on Thursday, and went in first to the Marden, which she didn’t get, either, and which is so large that I knew I’d have to dedicate a whole trip to it in order to break through the surface.

Thus, we clomped up the stairs to Pain. Now, at its heart, this is a good idea. Western art is filled with images of pain, from warriors slicing into their foes to probably the most famous and universally-distributed image of pain, Christ on the cross. It’s this image which the show starts with, cleverly mixing art history with science — or at least pseudo-science. Apparently there have been dozens of works written over the centuries about Christ’s wounds, and certainly there have been plenty of representations, not only of the crucifixion itself, but the scourging beforehand, the lancing of his side on the cross, and, of course, the procession to Golgotha, wearing the crown of thorns.

Right down to the present day, there have been scientists — or perhaps “scientists” is a better way to put it — investigating the exact method by which a crucified person dies. In the past, they’ve used cadavers, but there’s a guy in upstate New York who’s invented a painless cross on which he can fix his volunteer subjects and wire them to measure their stress levels in various organs and muscle groups. Some of his apparatus is on display here, and it looks like something out of a very specialzed S&M club.

The Bahnhof wusses out, however, when it comes to presenting an actual crucifix. If you want to see pain and agony represented, you go directly to the experts, the Spanish. Their crucified Christs bleed, drip with gore, twist in agony, and wear facial expressions that are disturbing. The closest this show comes to that is a tiny wax model whose chest comes off to serve as a kind of guide to the internal organs for the medieval doctors it was created for; it isn’t even as big as it appears on your screen on the exhibition’s website. But in order to get a Spanish example, the museum would have had to engage in a loan, and pay for transportation and insurance, and, as we all know, the city’s culture funds are broke. Hence, there not being a Spanish crucifix in Berlin, apparently, we get a German one. Small potatoes. Further (and more salutary) Germanness is a room in which Dürer’s engravings of the Stations of the Cross are on display with little stands containing a miniature score of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion showing how Bach indicated pain in his score, which excerpts you can listen to on headphones. I will, however, take exception to the wall caption stating that the Passion is universally regarded as the greatest piece of music ever written, or some such balderdash.

It could hardly be said that the show wusses out much more, however. The end of the Christian part has Francis Bacon’s renowned Crucifixion, a sordid, gory piece of self-loathing that is nonetheless extraordinarily powerful, once one works out its iconography. (In case you’re having trouble, the cross has apparently toppled over, and Christ is lying on his back on the ground, still attached). You won’t miss the Nazi armbands or the two guys sitting at the bar, either. More subtle is Bill Viola’s video Observance, in which actors slowly move to the foreground, looking at something tragic, which is a cousin to the piece of his I saw in Rotterdam six years ago which re-enacts Hieronymous Bosch’s painting of the crowd mocking Christ as he carries the cross, and was similarly extraordinary thanks to the actors’ skills of facial representation of emotions.

Then it’s on to the rest of it, and a painfully mixed bag it turns out to be. A room-length spread of surgical instruments. Votive offerings, little wax representations of “where it hurts” which were left at shrines or in churches, so that divine intercession might relieve the pain. A film about scarification. A cartoon from the DDR about a guy with a pain in his knee. A vitrine with medical specimens preserved in formaldehyde. And the hard-core room, in which we get to see police photos of men who’ve died in auto-erotic situations, more photos of devices confiscated from S&M clubs, a rather sedate martyrdom of St. Sebastian, Tiepolo’s Martyrdom of St. Agatha, whose breasts were sliced off (she’s pressing a bloody cloth to her chest, but the breasts are sitting on a plate like twin puddings), and Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s Aktion Nr. 6, which may or may not show the artist slicing off his penis (all of the online sources I’ve found are coy about this, although all debunk the story that it caused his death, which was actually from jumping out a window). Oh, and a video of Josef Beuys boxing a television screen. I have no idea why this is included, except there’s probably a law in Berlin that no major art show can be mounted without something by one of my nemeses, and its connection with pain is probably explained somewhere in a 75,000-word essay referencing loads of arcane theory. (At least there’s nothing by Pippilotti Rist, who is a pain).

On the way out, you can try your skill at the Painstation, a Pong game rigged so that it ceases to operate if either player moves his hand from a metal plate. Keeping your hand there, though, subjects you to whipping by a rubber-clad piece of wire or heat from the plate when you miss a shot. People were thronged around it, waiting to try. I saw it at Ars Electronica some years ago, and passed then, too.

All in all, I thought the show more sensationalistic — and meretricious — than enlightening. That the crowds were thick didn’t surprise me in a city which celebrates guilt and punishment as much as this one does, and I left, convinced that next year’s blockbuster will be Suicide, with guest performance artists from Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Sri Lanka all competing for a posthumous prize. And nobody, no matter how good-looking she is, will get me to go to that.

Anyone up for Brice Marden?

I seem to have abgeficked my e-mail. If you write me on an address not the one posted here and not my Well address (if you do, you know what I mean), please have patience. The best minds in Australia and India are working on moving my e-mail from the evil GoDaddy folks, who’ve been losing my e-mails, to a decent e-mail provider that’s not trying to sell you stuff all the time and, as far as I know, does not run a NASCAR car. However, this apparently takes time, especially when the client (me) is a total idiot when it comes to things like virtual domains and aliases and stuff, so please be patient.

I had the pleasure last week of playing host to Baron Wolman, who was Rolling Stone‘s first staff photographer, helping to found the magazine with Jann Wenner 40 years ago. Wolman was an “old guy” back then — 30 freakin’ years old! — and he turned 70 last Monday, the day he arrived in Berlin from an exhibition of his work in a tiny German town called Nordhorn.

The reason he was here was that this is where his career started. As a young soldier stationed in Berlin and assigned to Military Intelligence, he’d taken some pictures of the Berlin Wall being built and on an impulse sent them to the newspaper in his home town of Columbus, Ohio. They printed them on the front page and sent him $50 — and he was astonished that he could get good money — and that was good money in 1961 — for doing something he’d fooled around with since he was a kid. After he mustered out, he became a photojournalist for big-name magazines like Life and Look. Living in San Francisco, he gravitated towards the exploding music scene there, and already had a good book of photos when he and Wenner joined up.

In the years that followed, he became one of America’s top music photographers, and, after he and Wenner quarrelled after Wenner shut down Earth Times, the ahead-of-its-time environmental magazine Wollman started under the Rolling Stone umbrella, he, along with several other former staffers and some rebel fashion writers in New York, started Rags, which was, improbably, a hippie fashion magazine. If that seems an oxymoron, consider this: the day Rags was shut down — I was present when it happened, although I’d only recently come to the magazine — it was, in the words of either the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal — I can never remember which — “the fastest growing magazine in the history of American magazine publishing.” I’ll never forget the business manager, Phil Freund, coming out of his office to read those words and then declare that because the bills from advertisers weren’t being paid fast enough to pay the printer, he was, after consultation with Baron, shutting the magazine down, effective immediately.

I lost touch with him after that, but he continued to photograph, gradually getting out of music photography because access to both performances and musicians was increasingly being limited by record companies and artist management. But because he still owned his images, he’s continued to make a good living, because the photos he shot have become icons of their subjects. Check out the gallery on his website, or the one Rolling Stone put up recently, and I’m sure you’ll see what I mean.

At any rate, he hasn’t lost his verve or his sense of humor, as he demonstrated all last week, and he was avid to explore the side of town his last gig here prevented him from visiting, and we had a great time. True to his maxim of “mixing business with pleasure,” he sat down with the folks at the /pool gallery to talk about their then-upcoming show of photos sponsored by Gibson Guitars, called Gibson Through the Lens. He’s got three shots in the show, including one of Jimi Hendrix playing a left-handed Flying V at his debut performance at the Fillmore Ballroom in 1968 which was being used to promote the show.

The vernissage was last night, and, since the gallery’s only a couple of blocks away, and because I told Baron I’d report on it, I went down. Given the large number of photos and the gallery’s limited wall-space, they’ve done a good job hanging the show. It takes a little work to look at: the photos don’t have quite enough room to breathe, for the most part, as can be easily demonstrated by looking at the few which have their own chunk of wall to hang on. The rest have to be concentrated on individually, because they’re chock-a-block up against one another, and because inevitably, mixing color shots with black and white means that the colors draw your attention quicker. Once you learn to isolate them, though, they’ll come into focus a lot better.

The show should also be looked at for what it is, not what it’s not. What it’s not is a “rock photography’s greatest hits” or a history of the guitar in rock and roll, where Fender’s Stratocaster and Telecaster would have at least equal footing. It’s Gibson showing how many of rock’s important guitarists used their products, plain and simple. Elvis? In his Vegas period, with a Gibson acoustic. Look at the early shots and you’ll see he was playing a Martin acoustic — and almost never played electric. The Beatles? Also the later period, because, as everyone back then knew, they played Hofners and Rickenbackers, which were cheap, and, in the case of the Hofner, not all that good. You’re on solider ground with people like the Stones and, especially, Eric Clapton, who took Gibson’s biggest flop, the Les Paul, notorious for feeding back and being way too loud, and turned those “defects” into features that defined his style. He made the Les Paul so famous, in fact, that 24 out of the 66 photos in this show feature them — if you include the knockoff that Kurt Cobain’s diving with in the parody of their Nevermind album cover. (There’s even a picture of Les Paul with a Les Paul!)

The photographers themselves are a who’s who of rock lensmen (yes, men: Jill Furmanovsky and Kate Simon have one shot each, but that’s the rock press for you). Besides Baron Wolman, there are pictures from Henry Diltz, Bob Gruen, Jim Marshall, Neal Preston, Barrie Wentzell, Mick Rock, and many others. Plus, there are two autographed guitars (one by Slash, and I couldn’t figure out who the other one was from), and one lonely amp in the corner.

The gallery itself is sort of the new kid on the block (almost literally, given that the block also contains one of the neighborhood’s eminences grises, Wohnmachine, which used to occupy the space next door), and seems to be an outgrowth of a magazine, also named Pool, which seems to be targeted towards the fashion industry. But it’s also already given something back to the neighborhood: during the course of the meeting Baron and photo-rep Dave Brolan and a Berlin-based photo rep and Gibson’s German guy had in the gallery’s basement, Baron noted that he’d had a remarkable meal the night before at a strange Chinese fusion joint just up the street. “Oh,” said Sascha, the gallery’s manager, “do you mean Toca Rouge? I designed that place.”

Damn, this is a small town…

Because my mind only works intermittently, particularly as the weekend approaches, I often find myself having to buy one or two grocery items on Sunday, having spaced them out in the Saturday shopping, which I still approach with the same panic as when everything shut up at 2pm on Saturdays, as it did when I first moved here.

This means a trip to a train station, as generously defined by Deutsche Bahn. There’s an Edeka market in the Friedrichstr. station which has a lot of stuff my regular supermarket doesn’t, but is often so jammed that security guards close it down until it empties out some, resulting in a huge line in the station. The other alternative is the Kaiser’s in the Hauptbahnhof, which doesn’t have as much stuff, but isn’t such a mob scene most of the time.

When I go there, I usually walk down Invalidenstr., but after I do my shopping, I generally walk back another way, a discipline I learned long ago driving through Italy with a friend who repeated the mantra “never go back the way you came,” which I find excellent advice. So since there’s always something to see, I generally head back by way of Reinhardtstr., the lonliest street in Berlin. I also use it when I walk to the ARD studios on Reichstagufer to record my stuff for Fresh Air, so I’ve been watching it for a while.

All in all, it’s a pretty depressing walk, particularly if you approach it from the Hauptbahnhof. You cross the (re-channeled) Spree via a bridge, and then approach an intersection which gives you the option of heading south towards Unter den Linden or east on Reinhardtstr. Right there at the corner is a large, modern office building with a huge poster on it offering, as it has for over a year, offices for rent. “Here’s where decisions are made!” it says, not forgetting to mention the stunning views of the government quarter, the Reichstag and the Spreebogen complex. But mostly, it looks like the decision has been made to rent somewhere else.

The first block is desolate, even during the week. It’s kind of an orphan, not too accessible by public transportation, and with one empty apartment and office building after the other. One or two of the streetside apartments appears to have a tenant, but I also know that real-estate folks hang curtains in empty apartments to make it look like they’re inhabited. There’s a nice store selling 20th Century antiques, Art Deco and Art Nouveau, from Vienna, a tiny car-rental company, and a “design center” with occasional exhibits. Then you hit the corner of Luisenstr. and there’s a restaurant called Kanzlereck, “Chancellor’s Corner,” serving up German cuisine in a room in which photographic transparancies of past and present Chancellors of Germany are printed onto the window glass. This is probably a ploy to keep people from overeating.

On an island stands a statue of a naked guy wrestling a dragon down, in honor of Rudolf Virchow, who, with Robert Koch, put the adjacent Charité Hospital on the map by pretty much inventing the germ theory of disease and the science of pathology.

Keep going and you’ll see that the Kanzlereck was the gateway to Little Bonn. Actually, the whole area south of Reinhardtstr., particularly along Albrechtstr. and continuing to Schiffbauerdamm, can bear this title. Most of the restaurants are branches of popular ones in Bonn, and they and the bars hang out signs for Kölsch, the beer of choice for transplanted Bonners. Those Bonners are supposed to be living in these apartments, but as you continue to walk to Friedrichstr., it becomes evident that not very many are. The parade of empty buildings and “For Rent” signs just continues.

Which is not to say that nobody’s rented. There’s a store specializing in ostrich products (non-edible ones) like novelties made from ostrich eggs. There’s a very tiny musical-instrument repair shop. There was a brave Persian restaurant, with an authentic-looking menu, but it closed for lack of customers and is now a “Thai” restaurant. There’s the headquarters of the FDP, Germany’s Liberal party, and branches of a dozen or so media companies from around the world, Switzerland, Japan, and Frankfurt among them. Probably weirdest of all is a huge store that sells nothing but glowing balls. How they pay the rent is beyond me. And almost at Friedrichstr. is another mind-twister, a cellar store selling Luxembourg wine and Persian groceries. I didn’t even know Luxembourg was big enough to support a vineyard. And, inevitably, there are a few businesses that have hung on, probably since the DDR: a couple of cafes, a keymaker, an ancient stamp shop.

But mostly, Reinhardtstr. is about failure. The “Residence at the Deutsches Theater” was one such grandiose project, a gleaming white complex of luxury flats which is now, at least partially, an apartment hotel. It’s depressing to see the dust bunnies through the plate glass windows of the stores which remain empty despite every effort to rent them, the way their For Rent signs have yellowed around the edges. The sad fact is, a sizeable percentage of government workers never wanted to move to Berlin in the first place, and those who did go home for the weekend. They don’t like Berlin and they don’t like Berliners. They have their own restaurants, bars, and clubs, but mostly, I suspect, they do their jobs and pine for retirement.

It’s almost a relief to get off the street and start heading home, although as I pass the corner of Oranienburger Str. I always remember that line about tourism being like prostitution, in that you make your most attractive features available to all for a price and hope you don’t invite disease or destruction.

But that’s a rant for another day.

Last Saturday, because we found ourselves each in possession of a couple of extra Euros that would permit a very inexpensive restaurant meal, the dancer and I decided to try the new ramen joint next door to Cuchi, the superb sushi place on Gipsstr. After all, it was under the same management, and ramen can be a wonderful experience.

Sad to say, this place wasn’t. My soup was pretty bare-bones. Although there was some pickled ginger in it, and, unlike the place we usually go, there were the right condiment-adding things (chili and black sesame, a sesame-seed grinder) on the table, it just wasn’t very interesting. Hers was even weirder: although I don’t think any tomato was involved, it was very much like a thin version of spaghetti bolognaise, with ground pork and a reddish broth. Both soups had corn in them, which didn’t endear the place to me.

But about three-quarters of the way through her soup, the dancer suddenly pivoted on her butt and lay down. (Fortunately, as she noted later, we had benches; otherwise she would have fallen out of her chair). “It’s my circulation,” she said. “It’s just dropped way down.” She was sweating and pale. Now, I know that every medical crisis in Germany is “circulation,” just as every medical crisis in France is “liver,” but I had a more exact diagnosis: MSG poisoning. Hardly surprising, of course, because MSG is a crucial part of Japanese cuisine, the “fifth taste,” umami, and something you expect to encounter. You do not, however, expect to pass out as a result of eating it.

Eventually, she sat up and sipped some water the solicitous waitress brought over, and found the strength to get up and leave. We walked around for a while so she could get her “circulation” back up, and finally got her to the U-Bahn, where she headed straight home and to bed. And, she reported the next morning, felt fine.

What happened wasn’t a “drop in circulation,” though, but a spike in blood-pressure. I have high blood pressure, so I try to minimize my MSG intake as best I can because it (and, of course, all other sodium, like salt) will raise your blood pressure. Certainly I’ve always been sensitive to MSG, and that night, I, too, had symptoms of muscles bunching up and a sort of caffeinated feeling, lying buzzing for a couple of hours before sleep came.

The thing is, though, although few people realize it, MSG is everywhere in Germany. It’s not just in the fake “Asia” food, or even the authentic Asian food; it’s found its way into German food so pervasively that I often avoid eating in German restaurants. I read labels of all prepared food products. It really is everywhere.

What I’m looking for in the supermarket is “Geschmackverstärker E 621,” which is in just about every brand of canned soup (which are already hideously oversalted), in plenty of sausages (I no longer buy from butcher counters if I can’t read the labels), in the formerly delicious smoked pork chops known as Kassler, in some brands of Maultaschen (those fantastic overstuffed pillows of pasta, one of my favorite discoveries in Germany), prepared chicken broth (Fond), and even in such weird places as black olives.

But at the restaurants, I’m helpless. What has happened over the past couple of decades is that restaurants have stopped making their own sauces, using cheats marketed by food giants like Maggi and Knorr. No doubt they cheated before with other prepared products, but both Maggi and Knorr base their entire product line on MSG, and their offering up condensed sauce bases that a good cook could make from scratch in a couple of hours has ruined German food. Nor can you assume that you’re safe at a high-end restaurant: friends of mine report strong MSG reactions after eating in some of Berlin’s toniest joints.

Germans are notorious for the amount of salt they consume. My doctor tells me that the numbers for high blood pressure are adjusted upwards in Germany, because numbers that would cause concern elsewhere are fairly normal here. And no wonder: from the Wurst you eat for breakfast to the Döner Kebap you have for lunch, to the schnitzel with gravy you have for dinner — not to mention the Bratkartoffeln and green beans boiled with Speck you eat alongside it — you’re at the minimum getting a ton of salt, and almost always even more sodium courtesy of the MSG in all that stuff.

The folks at the Wurst counter don’t know what’s in the sausages — and, worse, they won’t go look — and in restaurants you can’t even assume the server will ask the cook, or, if they do, that they’ll tell you the truth. Is it any wonder German food has the awful reputation is does? People go to a restaurant to eat something that sounds excellent on the page, and wind up dizzy or otherwise distressed afterwards.

Anyway, I’ll continue to make occasional visits to the ramen place on Alte Schönhauser, fully aware of what’s in the soup, but my desire to eat out elsewhere is always tinged with apprehension. I wonder if any of the other diners at this new place had a similar reaction, and, if so, how many will have to pass out before the owners decide it might be a good idea to cut the aiji-no-moto in half.

Note to self: Stop trying to accomplish anything here, stop trying to do good things for people here, save your energy and use it to get the hell out of here.

Details: Last year a couple of filmmakers in the States made a wonderful, if harrowing, film called Bound to Lose about the folk duo the Holy Modal Rounders, who changed my life in 1964 with their first album. They consisted of Peter Stampfel (fiddle, banjo, vocals) and Steve Weber (guitar, vocals), and were so far out there that they used the word “psychedelic” in one of their songs — recorded in 1963! (I thought the word was “psycho-belly,” but jeez, I was 15.)

The world of documentaries isn’t an easy one, so if you want your film to get seen you have to enter a lot of festivals and do a lot of screenings. Thus, they’re participating in the Rotterdam Film Festival in mid-September and bringing Peter along to perform, and, upon hearing this, I wondered if they were thinking of doing a screening in Berlin. Then it hit me: this was when PopKomm, the huge music conference, hits town, and, of course, so do the guys who run SXSW in Austin. Now, SXSW has a film conference, too, so I thought that a screening followed by a Stampfel show under the aegis of SXSW would be good for all concerned: SXSW gets to promote SXSW Film, the filmmakers get to promote their film, and Peter gets to introduce himself to a new audience.

So along with a friend, I started working on this after getting SXSW’s blessing. Wow, an actual fun event during PopKomm! Never mind that not too many people would come: it would have a lot of competition. The theater we were thinking of for the film only holds about 100 people, and the bar across the way from it where we were going to do the show only holds about 40. But we’d be handing out flyers at the SXSW stand at PopKomm, and publicity is publicity.

Then Peter said that he was going to play a folk festival here and the promoters had forbidden him to perform so close to that event. Further investigation turned up the fact that it was part of a concert series in the House of World Cultures’ New York program, which opens in August and runs through November. The HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) is a mighty institution in Berlin, funded by the federal government to expose Germans to foreign cultures, and very often their exhibitions and concert series are superb: I’ve enjoyed many of them in my years here.

Peter passed along the name of the woman at the HKW he was dealing with, and I recognized her as someone I’d dealt with myself when working for the Wall Street Journal in the past. Peter was due to perform several weeks later, and it really didn’t seem to me that our tiny show would hurt theirs. So I wrote her a letter (names have been changed to spare the guilty):

Dear Ms. X:

My name is Ed Ward, and I’m a freelance journalist here in Berlin. I think we’ve run into each other over the years, possibly through WOMEX or when I was the cultural correspondent for the Wall St. Journal here.

I’m writing you because in another capacity, as a representative of the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference (SXSW) in Austin, Texas. I’m setting up a screening of a film about the Holy Modal Rounders as part of SXSW’s presence at PopKomm this year. The screening will be held in a small cinema in Berlin-Mitte, and we were hoping to have a short performance by Peter afterwards.

Peter has informed us that you have asked him not to perform at this show because of a perceived conflict with an event at the HKW in October. He will be coming to Europe anyway at this time for a screening/performance in Rotterdam, and this is why we decided to set this up.

I’m asking if you could reconsider this prohibition. Peter is not very well known here, and this event could only build the audience for your event. Furthermore, he would be mentioning your event during his show, which could only help publicize it. The filmmakers are planning to go through with the screening in any event, but we feel that because the venue we’ve selected for the show is very small — with a capacity of only around 40 people — and because Peter will be in Europe anyway, it would be a shame not to take advantage of his presence and put on a short show which, as I said, could only enhance the visibility of your own, much higher-profile and better-publicized event.

If Peter were a superstar, or even a major cult figure, in Germany, I could certainly understand your position, as Peter has explained it. But we anticipate the largest part of our audience to be the Fachpublikum [*] who will be attending PopKomm, many of whom are not from Berlin (although the screening and the show will be open to the general public), and for many of these people it will be the only chance they get to see the film and Peter.

I’m hoping you can think about this and perhaps we can work out a solution that will be advantageous for both our small show and your (I hope!) bigger one.

With Friendly Regards,

Ed Ward

[* The word Fachpublikum doesn’t translate into English easily, but it indicates a specialty or professional audience.]

And so, except for the fact that the mail bounced back because Peter had spelled her name wrong, and one of the filmmakers finally found her on the HKW website (I still can’t find her there!), the thing went off as you see it above. “Your letter seems incredibly reasonable,” one of the filmmakers said. Yeah, well.

Yesterday in the late afternoon I got the answer:

Dear Ed,

thank you very much for your mail to Ms. X. We appreciate your initiative to show the film about Peter Stampfel during Popkomm very much. Unfortunately we must insist on our conditions that he should not perform before his show at House of World Cultures in Berlin. Even if the cinema is small. As you also underline, Peter Stampfel ist not so well-known in Berlin, so his audience is also small. A show during popkomm would be less then 3 weeks before our concert. And we really want to be the fist ones who bring him here these days.
As for popkomm visitors: we are not sure how many will come to the cinema, don’t expect too much of them.

Of course we would be very grateful if you mentioned the coming concert at House of World Cultures at the end of your film screening. We can also mention your screening at our website for instance.

Thank you very much for your cooperation.

Best regards,

Ms. X’s Boss
cc: Grand Poobah, HKW

In other words, we have rules which are not bound by logic. Rules are rules and Ordnung muss sein. We said no, and thus we cannot be flexible. As for PopKomm, you know nothing about it (despite my having participated in just about every one of them since it started in Cologne). You don’t know what you’re doing, and we do, so stop.

Oh: please give us publicity.

Well, to hell with that. As of this moment, SXSW has pulled out, the filmmakers are going to Glasgow instead (I think), and a situation from which every one of the participants could benefit has been nullified. And, once again, official Germany has shown itself to be rigid, inflexible, uncreative, and self-defeating.

No, not everyone here is like that. Just the people who run things. No wonder the country has a brain drain.

And I have to remind myself: stop trying to accomplish anything here. You’re just a stupid foreigner and your efforts are not appreciated or wanted. Use your energy to get out and start again somewhere else.

You can tell it’s summer in Berlin because when it rains you feel disappointed instead of resigned. The wet seems to be related to a distraction of the Gulf Stream which is related to climate change, but more technical than that I can’t get.

Still, you have to wonder how the rain affects Sandsation, the latest tourist attraction by the Hauptbahnhof, where a visiting Texan dragged me the other day. Massive sand sculptures by actual artists (some of whom appear to be professional carvers of ice, snow, and sand) are being made out of 2000 tons of the stuff dumped on the site, piled high, and carefully scraped into images. None of them are going to give Richard Serra sleepless nights, but it’s an amusing thing to walk around.

There are sculptors from all over, including a guy from India who heads a sand-sculpting school there and is recreating the Taj Mahal in ridiculously authentic detail. The theme is “Welcome to Paradise,” and sure enough, one of the Germans has sculpted an anti-paradise of miserable heads of boat people crammed into a tiny boat. Never enough misery, eh?

Most of the sculptors seemed to be spritzing their creations with some sort of stuff from an applicator that looked like the ones exterminators use. Maybe that’s rain-protection, or maybe they’re just resigned to re-doing their work from now until July 29, when the thing closes.

And inside the Hauptbahnhof, the Diplodocus skeleton has vanished, replaced by an information stand about the various (costly) wireless services German train stations are now offering.

* * *

On the rest of our walk, the Texan and I walked down Reinhardtstr., better known as Little Bonn, where I like to show people the Nazi air-raid bunker that continues to stand there because the price of demolishing it exceeds the value of the plot on which it stands. For some months, a luxury apartment has been under construction on the top of it, making me wonder who in the hell would want to live atop an ugly concrete hunk which is cold and damp inside. I got my answer last week in an article in the International Herald Tribune, informing me that an art collector named Christian Boros is moving into the apartment and housing his collection, which will be open to the public, in the bunker. I’ve been in this bunker, not when it was a gabba club, but afterwards when the irrepressible Hannes from the DNA gallery mounted a show in it a couple of years back. All I can say is, I hope Boros has some interesting stuff there, because this is one depressing interior.

Hope, however, springs eternal, etc: Best Western has just opened a hotel next door. That means guests have their choice of a view of the bunker or the Ukranian Embassy next door.

* * *

While we Berlin expats are seeking hamburgers now that Hazelwood seems to have gone the way of all good restaurants here, New Yorkers are warming to Currywurst. Really: a friend who works at the New York Times has declared it good, and just look at the rest of the menu:

The prices are even right. Not that I think I’ll be visiting New York any time soon, and if I do that I’ll be seeking out Currywurst, but I give these folks an A for effort.

* * *

Living alongside a straightaway on which speeding idiots race day and night, and given that Berlin drivers are hands down the worst I’ve ever come across (and yes, I’ve driven in Italy), I’m amused by the current anti-speeding campaign someone’s mounted. I looked for images on the Web, but there don’t seem to be any. At any rate, this features gorgeous women with their finger and thumb indicating a distance of about an inch, and the caption “Speeders are about this big.” I know, Sigmund Freud was Austrian, but someone here has hit upon something I’ve suspected for a long time.

* * *

I can tell the way this week’s going: today I took my last €40 out of the bank, hoping that one of the several firms I’ve worked for recently will be paying me soon, and went down to the market at Hackescher Markt. Standing waiting to cross at Rosenthaler Platz, a driver changed lanes so he could drive through a puddle and douse me head to foot. Undaunted, I pressed on, bought some Parmesan from the pasta ladies, bought some olives from a “Greek” stand, and headed home, at which point I realized that my wet hand had apparently stuck on a €10 note, and a quarter of my bounty was gone.

That’s okay. It’s going to rain all weekend anyway.

I was awakened around 8 am yesterday by a call from a friend in Prague, announcing that a friend of his, from Texas originally, would be coming to Berlin later in the day. After the call was over, I went back to sleep. I had a lot of work to do, and wanted to be fresh.

By the time I had had my coffee and was checking e-mails, the friend-of-a-friend had written me, and we went back and forth until we had a meeting set up later in the evening in Friedrichshain, where he was staying. Then it was time to get to work: totally rewriting a sample page of a brochure for a school here so it wouldn’t be so stuffy and yet would appeal to the right kind of students.

This, it developed, took a couple of hours, but I figured if the school green-lighted the project I’d have made a significant score. And I’d find out: the woman in charge was leaving for vacation at the end of the day. So after I’d whipped it into shape and e-mailed it to her, I realized I’d be stupid to sit around the house waiting to hear from her, so I strapped on the trusty Nikon and went in search of the Acid Icon artist’s other work.

It was just past Rosenthaler Platz, on the south side of Torstr. but proved maddeningly difficult to photograph, as you can see:

This gives a hint of the colors, especially in the face, but it obscures the majority of the piece.

This, on the other hand, gives an idea of the scale of the piece. The only proper way to photograph this would be from inside the industrial courtyard, unfortunately. Still, there are a couple of clues here. First, it’s copyright by Super Blast, which explains the SB on the other icon’s field. Second, the idiosyncratic spelling of “Maschine” makes it pretty certain the artist is German. And the mysterious inscription “Thanks to Play Station” doesn’t, I hope, mean that Super Blast was part of that lame promotion of a few weeks back. If so, there’s nothing overt in either image that indicates it.

I grabbed another couple of shots as I headed back home — the defaced Ronald McDonald, which I added on my post about the McDonald’s closing a couple of weeks ago, and a shot for bowleserised’s all-things-pony blog, The Ponyhof. She and I then spent an amusing couple of hours trying to figure out how to download the goddam photos from Gmail.

Finally, since it was getting towards 5 and I knew just how fast Germans depart the office on Friday, I called the school, only to discover that I’d been in competition with some other writers and the school had gone for one who had a degree. Because naturally, making your living by writing for over 40 years doesn’t mean that you know a thing about language. I wasn’t even particularly surprised, since I know how much store Germans — and, I suspect, Europeans in general — put in such things. Hell, I’d have graduated from college if I’d understood the weird experimental educational project they’d put me in. Or not, I don’t know. (It doesn’t matter now: the damn place is closing).

So the next order of business was to eat some dinner and head off to the bar to meet this guy, which I did. The new tram line by my house makes it easy to get to the hip! edgy! district of Friedrichshain, where every second person is from America and nobody’s much over 30. Trouble is, the new tram line, like all the tram lines in my neighborhood, are closed for the next couple of weeks for track work. Thus, I was wedged into a bus that was loaded well beyond its legal limit with drunken teenagers and ferried most of the way across town, where we were dumped to meet the part of the tramline that was running. Then I got there and there was a sign on the bar that there was a private party going on.

This turned out to be because apparently the place is officially not open for business, so I won’t identify it further, but at any rate the Texan finally made his appearance and we talked for a while until the trust-fund hipster vibe got to me and I realized that I’d be repeating the same arduous journey back home, so I said good-bye and caught the tram.

Boy, did I feel smart: by the time the (mostly empty) bus pulled up at the terminus at Nordbahnhof, I could see lightning flashing in the sky, and by the time I was half-way down my block, tiny raindrops were intermittently hitting my skin. I opened a nightcap beer, sat and read with the windows open as gentle rain started to fall, and then went to bed.

Now, I don’t know about you, but thunderstorms, for me, are like the best sleeping-pills ever invented. I think it’s the rapid drop in air pressure that does it, and I was asleep in no time.

The beer, however, wasn’t, so after lying there listening to a really bad storm pounding down, I got up to recycle it. Although all the lights were out, I could see that the entire bathroom floor was slick with water. Worse, it was copiously studded with dark lumps. Yes, folks, the sewer had backed up, the toilet had overflowed, and my bathroom was covered with the Waste of Others.

German mop technology, I’m sorry to say, isn’t very good. All I have is a so-called Wischmop, a primitive thing with semi-absorbent cloth shreds which need to be wrung out every couple of seconds. Over the next 90 minutes, until after 3 am, I was angrily swabbing, pushing the, um, souvenirs, against the wall, and praying not to get cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A, or some other dread disease. When things were somewhat under control, I took a long, hot shower and collapsed back in bed, where I remained until 10:30.

Why the city of Berlin’s sewers are so bad, I can’t say, although you’ve got to admit that a city so broke that it’s begging other police departments for their cast-off uniforms probably can’t maintain them. This kind of thing has happened before, but it’s never escaped the toilet before, and I was genuinely glad upon rising to note that there wasn’t much of a smell. I spent my early afternoon swabbing the bathroom down with Mr. Clean (Mr. Proper over here) and a healthy dose of Clorox (DanKlorix), and, while it dried, went off to buy some coffee.

Some time ago, I lamented the demise of the Malongo Coffee boutique at Galleries Lafayette here, where you could buy superb whole-bean coffee cheaper than at Starbucks or Einstein or Balzac or any of the other similar “quality” coffee joints. Well, in the past few weeks, they’ve returned as a presence at the bakery counter there. The prices have risen so that it’s no longer €4 for 250g, but more like €5, so they’re on par with the others (except Starbucks, which is €6), but I can once again make my famous blend and breakfasts here at the house are far more enjoyable.

Walking home, I made sure to avoid Friedrichstr., which has apparently been entered in an international competition for auto and pedestrian inaccessibility, and instead made my way over to Museum Island. At Bebelplatz, there was a book fair going on, and if I’d stayed til 4, I could have met Rolf Hochhuth and punched the old man out for awakening an interest in Germany in the teenaged me, but instead I wanted to get home. Walking up Tucholskystr. I saw yet another horror: a Hollywood Boulevard-style star, with a Vanity Fair logo, for Damien Hirst sunk in the sidewalk outside a gallery. Yet another there-goes-the-neighborhood moment — and Brangelina have yet to move in, as far as I know.

I was contemplating the messages the past 24 hours had brought when the doorbell rang. A young woman in a Deutsche Post uniform handed me a large, soft package of the sort I never get. It was postmarked Montpellier. In it was a huge towel, with Languedoc.com embroidered on one corner. I was puzzled until I realized I’d won it weeks ago in this contest, which I play when I’m bored in hopes of winning. (Yeah, I know the page doesn’t work all that well and most of the “clue” links don’t work: it’s French, for heaven’s sake!)

And it occurred to me: the students are leaving Montpellier right now. The apartments will be available all summer. Once again it’s time to strike.

Now to raise the €12,500 I need to do it with.

So this morning I found out that one of my favorite authors, Chinua Achebe, had won the Man Booker Prize. It said so on the BBC, so it must be true.

This made me happy, although I was sorry to hear of his paralysis. Achebe drew me into the world of Nigerian authors writing in English, which drew me into a world of my very own language, artfully re-cadenced, where aphorisms said things in a way that deflected anger: “Since men have learned to shoot without missing, said the bird, I have learned to fly without perching.” Chew a kola nut and think about that for a minute.

Anyway, as I often do when I hear news, I headed over to the Well to post this in the Books conference, where I was astonished to see there wasn’t a topic devoted to African literature. Surely I’m not the only one of those folks reading this stuff when I can find it! And I concluded my post by saying that now that Achebe had the Booker, it was time to get a Nobel into Ousman Sembene’s hands before it was too late.

A couple of hours later, another fan of his work noted that it was already too late.

My reaction to this is twofold. First, I urge you to go out and find any of this great man’s books that you can find. Second, I urge you to rent as many of his films as you can find, because he was an amazing filmmaker as well as an amazing novelist. Usually he’d write a novel, then film it, but be warned that his early masterpiece, God’s Little Bits of Wood is, thank heavens, unfilmable. Nor is it an easy read, but in order to understand Western Africa, and Senegal in particular, it’s a mandatory one.

Now, what does this have to do with Berlin? Something. Because after reading that superb obituary, an anecdote came back to me, and I stuck it on the Well, and now I’ll put it here.

There used to be an African restaurant here in Berlin on Pappelallee called the Chop House. It served West African food — Senegalese and Ghanian, for the most part — and, like many restaurants in East Berlin, scammed tax credits by being a “gallery,” in this case for African artists.

Because it was cheap and good and one of the few places where they’d actually put enough chiles in stuff, I went there often, and one night I went there with a couple of friends, only to find out there was some sort of gallery opening going on, and most of the tables were filled. We were seated at one with some Germans and Africans talking animatedly and minded our own business until one skinny, tall African guy said “Hey, are you speaking English? I need to practice my English because I
have a scholarship to a university there.”

So we did the conversation thing, and of course, I asked him where he was from. “Senegal. Dakar,” he replied. “I’ve always wanted to go to Dakar, ever since I saw a film by Ousman Sembene called Xala,” I said. The guy’s eyes got real big.

“Ousman, he is my father! He is my mother! He saved my life!” I figured this was metaphorical, but he went on. “I was a little boy, living on the streets. I never knew my parents, like a lot of street kids in Dakar. They just throw us there and if we live, we live. And I lived by begging, because Muslim tradition is to give to beggars.

“One day, I went into a bookshop and begged the man behind the counter for some money. He laughed at me. ‘You’re a strong young man,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you work if you want it.’ And of course, I told him yes. ‘I edit a magazine, a literary journal, and it’s printed across town. I never have time to go pick it up for my shop here, and they’ve just told me the latest issue is out. I can make money if I have copies here to sell, but I have no time to get them. I have a cart in the back. If you can go to the printer, I’ll give you a note you can hand them, and they’ll load the cart with my magazine. Then you bring it
here and I’ll pay you.’

“So I did. It wasn’t hard work, and when I got back to the shop, he asked me if I’d like a copy. I had to tell him I couldn’t read.
Naturally, he said that a young man like me should be in school, and he knew a church-run school that would take me. He told me that once I could read, he’d give me a job in the bookshop, and that was how it was: I learned to read, and I lived in the back of the shop.

“Now, that man was Ousman Sembene, as you’ve guessed. But what you probably didn’t guess is this: Do you remember the scene in Xala where the businessman is arguing with his daughter, who says he should stop speaking French and talk to her in Wolof?”

I said I did.

“And you remember that there’s another child at the table, doing his homework, his son, who’s younger than the daughter.”

Yes, I remembered that. The kid was obviously having a horrible conflict between the father he idolized and the sister who he knew to be so smart.

“Well, that child, that boy there, that was me! Mamadou! And that was really my homework!”

He’s not listed in the IMDB, and Senegalese can be notorious scamsters and hustlers, and it had been 20 years since I’d seen the film, but I figured it was okay to believe him. Because what if it were true?

So why do you suppose Berlin has so much graffiti? Does it contain large gangs of disaffected black or Latino youth? That’s one demographic from which graffiti springs in the States, and although I do think there are some Turkish-German posses behind it, that’s only a part of the answer.

And why do you suppose so much of Berlin’s “graffiti” actually falls under the rubric of “street art?” Sure, there’s a large contingent of international artists who work in this fashion, and even the suddenly oh-so-fashionable Banksy has his rats around my neighborhood, but that, too, is only part of the answer.

And I’d say that another part of the answer that’s being ignored is simply this: because Berlin’s official public art sucks. Really: I’ve never been in a place with so much bad outdoor sculpture, eye-straining murals, and, of course, all those damn bears.

So I want to spend just a minute here examining three works of art. The first is public:

This sucker sat under a tarp for I don’t know how long before being unveiled at the Hauptbahnhof a few weeks ago. It should have stayed there. There’s a plaque on the side, which explains that it’s a memorial to the Lehrter Stadtbahnhof which used to stand where the Hauptbahnhof now does, and was created by a Prof. somebody or other using stainless steel and “high-tech elements” to symbolize, ummm, this and that. The horse has a clock-like face set in its side with bad mask-like faces which revolve, so I guess having an electric motor is high-tech. Underneath, in the base, are various gears the “artist” has modified with more faces, as well as bits of the brickwork from the old Lehrter Stadtbahnhof, although whether they’re original brick from the old building or part of the multi-million-Euro reconstruction which was torn down a couple of years after it was finished is hard to tell. The whole thing, towering over an outdoor eating area, is of such amazing ugliness that it’s breathtaking. Hard to figure how the Ponyhof missed something this size.

Now, Exhibit B is a very small piece, currently hard to find because trees obscure it.

Yup. Nike again. What’s disarming about these paintings, besides the lack of formal skill, is the feeling one gets when one comes upon them, always in an unexpected place, and almost always cheering you up by the very act of discovery. That’s something I think public art should do, and it informs my own reactions to things like, say, the wall rabbits or the long-gone, intricate cutouts by the New York master (mistress?) Swoon.

And then there are the works which proclaim mastery:

I have no idea who’s behind this (and another one I’ve found), but a huge Russian icon-on-acid popping up on the corner of your street (this is at the end of Torstr. at Oranienburger Tor) is something you notice. It’s taller than I am, and, needless to say, many times wider. The palette of color is quite basic, but used with the kind of skill any commercial artist would envy. And the subject matter, well, it makes you think.

If I were running this city (and there’s a nighmare I’ve yet to have) I’d discreetly channel funds to the likes of Nike, Swoon, and the Acid Iconist in hopes that they’d continue to beautify what’s not a very beautiful cityscape. The more obscure the place beautified, the bigger the fee. Meanwhile, it’s encouraging that you don’t actually have to walk past the Iron Horse to catch your train, although it’s hard not to cast it a glance if, as I do, you take the bus to the Hauptbahnhof (well, when I have luggage I do, anyway). And it’s further encouraging that these other artists are out there, continuing to surprise us.