Category: Ed Ward

When I first moved here, I lived in a neighborhood known as Moabit. The name is a corruption of the French term “terre maudit,” or cursed land, but it’s most familiar to Germans as the name of a prison, which, sure enough, stood right up at the end of the block. It was where many of the Baader-Meinhof Gang were held, for instance, and, during my tenure in Moabit, it was the home of the famous folk-hero/extortionist known as “Dagobert,” which is what the Germans call Scrooge McDuck. Dagobert had extorted money from several department stores, and kept getting away with it. Once, the cops were hot on his trail, and in a very Berlinisch moment, lost him when they slipped in dogshit on the sidewalk while chasing him. One of the buildings there is quite old, and has classic barred windows. Women gather in the park across from the prison on good days and have their kids wave at Daddy.

So I thought that was all there was to Moabit Prison, and my obsessive walking through the neighborhood during several months’ total unemployment saw to it that I knew the surrounding area very well. Leave it to Berlin, though, to confound that idea.

Last week, I had an appointment on Kantstr., way over in scary West Berlin, and, for old time’s sake (and because I’m once again totally without work), I decided to walk. The easiest way is to head to my old neighborhood via Invalidenstr., past the Hauptbahnhof, then across the Spree and follow the S-Bahn. I gave myself lots of time so I could take the occasional diversion down back streets for old time’s sake.

But I’d no sooner gotten just past the Hauptbahnhof and all the myriad new streets the tunnel there has spawned, when I found something which must have been there in the old days, but which I’d totally missed. It was now a new park: Moabit Prison Historical Park. I took a glance in and told myself I’d be back. And today I was.

The bland outside, it must be said, masks an even blander inside. Had it not been for the glass-encased explanatory posters, I’d never have guessed what this was. I was shocked to find that it had once housed Wilhelm Voigt, the “Captain from Köpenick” himself — the Dagobert of his day. Several notable Socialists were also thrown in the klink there by the Nazis as was one of the 1944 Hitler plotters. But most of the inmates were just run-of-the-mill criminals, something Berlin never had a shortage of in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Inside, there isn’t much to see, mostly because the thing was almost totally destroyed by Allied bombs. Instead, it’s filled with symbolism.

I forget what the cube represents, other than the center of the buildings’ wings. The trees planted within the walls all have symbolic meanings, as, no doubt, do the small concrete posts with constellations etched into them. A couple of the building’s wings are represented by trenches, one of which you see here. I kept having to run outside to one of the entrances to see what symbol I was standing next to at any given time. There’s a dolorous poem whitewashed across one of the walls, the beginning of which is visible here:

The tall building is one of the houses where the “civil servants” (ie, the guards) lived. I have no idea why the signage uses that name. Here, however, is where most of the folks lived:

Well, not actually. That’s a reproduction of the dimensions of one of the cells, and, according to the list of symbols, contains a sound installation. I not only couldn’t hear it, I couldn’t find any means by which it would be broadcast, so maybe that’s a coming attraction.

Although the place is pretty stark and uninviting, there’s a climbing wall and see-saw for kids, and a couple of nicely shaded picnic tables. Despite the fact that it was a nice day, I was usually sharing the park with no more than two other people — on one occasion two huge women and their three huge dogs, one of whom came up to me to get his ears scratched, which I did, but apparently not enough, since he refused to leave until he felt he’d been properly appreciated.

Maybe it just hasn’t been discovered yet: it only opened last year, apparently. Or maybe the symbolic sculpture and landscaping make it hard to use. Or maybe Berliners are getting tired of feel-bad monuments, since this one certainly does evoke the starkness and isolation of imprisonment.

Naaah. Can’t be that last one. Berliners love to feel bad.

For a city that doesn’t like food, Berlin’s sure got some action on that front these days. Maybe it’s just the dream of grabbing the tourist dollar, but a lot of new restaurants and delis (many with the inevitable English “Free Wireless Internet” signs) seem to be opening up, and not just the faux-French ones I commented on a while ago.

More to the point for residents, though, is the war shaping up on and near Senefelderplatz in Prenzlauer Berg, where two well-funded organic food shops are practically next-door neighbors.

It started about a year ago, when viv BioFrischMarkt opened pretty much next door to the former Polish Consulate, which is now a (very good) pizzeria. It wasn’t one shop, but three: a Drogerie (a term meaning basically a drugstore only without drugs: cosmetics, brushes, stuff like that), a “Lounge” (ie, a restaurant-cafe), and the aforementioned BioFrischMarkt. I investigated the latter, of course, and found it a nice, if unexciting, health food store. (A note on the term “Bio,” incidentally. It does not mean “organic.” That’s öko. Bio is a step just below. It could be that the EU has more stringent “organic” labelling laws than the U.S., too, and for something to be öko it’s got to jump through more hoops. My readers being who they are, I’m sure we’ll all find out in the comments section soon…) One decided advantage was that it didn’t have That Smell. I don’t know what it is, but it’s found in most health food stores. (Some speculate it’s from brewer’s yeast, which might be true). But it also didn’t have anything particularly interesting that would induce me to walk all the way over there.

Then, on the triangle of land where Kollwitzstr. and Schönhauser Allee come together, an apartment building started going up. As soon as the outer walls were firm enough to hold it, a big vinyl sign announced that LPG would soon open “Europe’s largest Biomarkt.” And open they did, albeit a month later than announced, and, being bored, I decided to head up there this afternoon and see if they’d started fighting yet. (Two Italian restaurants in my neighborhood once had a showdown with knives right in the middle of the street, after all, so I was wondering if mellow organic German hippies might become similarly riled).

Well, LPG’s new store may be the largest in “Europe” until tomorrow, when Whole Foods London opens up (unless England’s no longer part of Europe: it’s been a while since I’ve been there). But, more to the point, it’s not much more exciting than viv is. Oh, it’s got an escalator you can take your shopping cart on. But so does that supermarket in the suburbs I visit with friends when Heribert Kastell gets a wild hair and sells wine in the mall. It’s got organic frozen pizza, so they know their neighborhood (I estimate that around dinner-time, at least 30% of my neighbors on any given evening are cooking frozen pizza). It’s got a good selection of organic wines and beers — every organic beer I’ve seen in Germany, in fact, is in stock. It’s got lots and lots of potatoes and not very many green vegetables, and lots and lots of bread. Upstairs, it’s got a lot of stuff in jars (including — gack! — natto), but, the Japanese stuff (yes, natto!) aside, nothing else exotic, not even Indian stuff, which is the backbone of a lot of organic food stores these days, Indian food being heavily vegetarian and all. And while viv segregates its Drogerie in a separate shop, LPG segregates what looks like a women’s-and-children’s store with low internal walls, which I found distinctly unfriendly.

Now, maybe it’s because I grew up with Whole Foods in Austin (John Mackey ran the organic grocery store a block from my house before he joined with the others to open the first Whole Foods down the hill), and have sort of internalized their philosophy, but the reason I’m not moved to consider either viv or LPG for my shopping is simple: their stock is boring. Whole Foods always introduced new items, and always had someone on hand with samples. There was, eventually, a sampling station where either a WF team member (they don’t call them employees) or a representative of the product being sampled could stand and give stuff away. This meant that people were gradually introduced to new flavors, and, over time, added them to their shopping lists. I remember when Dean (the vegetable guy — now a vice president) introduced me to jicama. If jicamas didn’t weigh about ten pounds I’d have had one on call all the time: that stuff’s good.

But Germans, by and large, don’t like variety in their food, and certainly don’t like trying unfamiliar things: someone giving away samples of something unusual would probably stand there all day watching the stuff go bad. If the local cuisine (which is not to say I mean all German cuisine by this, just the local variety) were something precious, I’d say this is a good thing: this is how traditions get preserved. But it always disheartens me to realize that the yuppies who, by and large, make up the Prenzlauer Berg population may be young, may be affluent, but they really don’t have any interest in expanding their culinary boundaries past German and their conception of Italian food. LPG isn’t going to challenge that, nor is viv. And Whole Foods, during their promotional blitz for their London flagship, announced that, while Europe is definitely on the list to conquer, Germany, in particular is not.

The other thing that’ll discourage me from LPG is that it’s yet another extremely expensive co-op. Check out the membership costs: €51.13 to join (and where’d they pull that number from?), and €17.90 per month for a normal adult, €12.78 for low-income and unemployed adults. A single person would have to do a lot of shopping there to make that worthwhile — and, like I said, the stock doesn’t invite that.

Not my problem, anyway. There’s no way to get to either place with public transit, which means I’d have to walk. I’ve got two places (with That Smell) within a couple of blocks, although I rarely shop at them, either. But lifestyle wars like this do interest me, so let’s see who’s the fittest and who’ll survive. And if the knives come out.

Saturday night I was invited to dinner at the dancer’s house, way down in Tempelhof, and after the thunderstorms cleared, I started walking. It’s only about three miles, and economics dictated shank’s mare. This meant walking over to Friedrichstr. and then walking the entire length of the street, which is usually fascinating, because after Checkpoint Charlie it turns into a fairly tawdry, largely Turkish/Arab neighborhood, a part of Berlin the tourists don’t see. That culminates in a really seedy housing project at Hallesches Tor, after which you cross over onto Mehringdamm, and into the old Kreuzberg 61.

Anyway, I’d no sooner started out than I got a rude shock. The McDonald’s on Friedrichstr. was gone. A sign for some GastroImmo firm announced it was for rent.

Although I’d never patronized the place, the McDonald’s was a landmark. Visitors coming to my place via the U-Bahn would always get the same instructions: “Okay, take the U-Bahn to Oranienburger Tor station” — and then I’d have to spell Oranienburger, of course, down to the last letter, as if there were lots of similar stations on the line — “and walk in the direction the train was moving and go up the stairs. Okay, now, look left and you’ll see a McDonald’s, so you know you’re in the right place. But you walk right, towards the pizza place…”

That pizza place had been a Burger King, locked in the usual corporate war against McDonald’s, but it probably lost the battle because the word got out that its upstairs bathrooms were ideal places to shoot up, and the local junkies took full advantage. (This came to light, pardon the pun, when it was announced that they’d installed black light in the bathrooms, which supposedly made it very difficult to shoot up. Why this was supposed to be so I can’t say.) Then it was dozens of other things before falling into the hands of the pizza guys. But McDonald’s was always buzzing. It always is in Europe: no other symbol of what makes American pop culture so desirable seems to come close. Maybe if someone would take the time and trouble to learn how to make a good hamburger on this continent this wouldn’t be the case.

(Oh, and this is the place to mention that the place with the great hamburgers I wrote about some time ago, Hazelwood, on Choriner Str., has lost the chef who designed the menu, taken a swift turn towards the Deutsch, and is no longer hamburger heaven in Berlin. The chef says she’s going to have another project soon, and meanwhile your indefatigable BerlinBites team is investigating several rumors of better burgers. Stay tuned.)

The thing I noticed about McDonald’s is that it’s a status symbol for teenagers. A Big Mac is a good deal more expensive than a Döner Kebap (€3.70 versus around €2), and that, along with your fashionable clothing, helps identify you and your posse as the cool kids you are. In Europe, that’s who McDonald’s seemed to be marketing to, too: in America, it seems to be younger kids, but here, the promotions were all about hit CD compilations and iTunes downloads.

So, is this changing? Or is all the construction in the immediate vicinity driving customers away? Why did McDonald’s close at what would seem to me to be a perfect location — especially given that it had traffic all the time? Did one too many Germans see Supersize Me? Do they even supersize in German McDonald’s?

I mean, other than having a familiar place vanish, it’s no big deal for me: I haven’t eaten at McDonald’s since the ’70s, when one opened up on Market Street in San Francisco, the first non-freestanding McDonald’s in America. At the time, I was writing for a brand new magazine called Mother Jones, whose offices were immediately above, and whose elevator was one of the slowest I’ve encountered outside the Communist world. (Soviet elevators are a whole ‘nother tirade.) The exhaust from the McDonald’s fries leaked into the vestibule, where you waited and waited for the elevator to make its mammoth three-story descent, and a certain amount of the grill odor did, too. It was like standing in the middle of a Big Mac and fries, and, like the doughnut bakery that vented directly into two (unusable) rooms in an apartment I rented in college, the smell permeated my memory to such an extent that I can taste McDonald’s fries (or doughnuts) just by closing my eyes and concentrating for a couple of seconds. Plus, of course, until I moved here, there were always much better burgers to be had when I wanted them.

This leaves the pizza place, Dada Falafel (run by Iraqi refugees from Saddam), and, of course, the great YumMee bánh mi sandwich joint (now serving pho!) as the only fast-food alternatives in that vicinity. But it doesn’t make the mystery of why McDonald’s would vanish overnight from such a plum location any clearer.

Well, I’m still here. I guess that’s the good news.

I’ve survived May Day, with its illiterate marchers:

These posters (above) were everywhere. Everywhere. You just have to wonder about people who’d represent themselves like that. Let alone march with a huge banner with a boner like that in it. (You may have to click the photo to get my point here). Thanks to Kean for snapping this.

* * *

I’ve survived Christi Himmelfahrt, the silliest-named German holiday, on the 14th, which is also “Men’s Day,” with men roaming the city drinking beer until they can barely stagger. This is, as you may have parsed, Ascension Day. What that has to do with men in particular I have no idea. But it’s a good day to hole up inside. I had to go to Hauptbahnhof, though; I had no idea it was a holiday.

Modest suggestion, Germany: In America, you’ll find signs on many businesses saying, for example, “We will be closed all day on Tuesday, December 25, Christmas Day.” Now, Christmas is not only a date everyone in the U.S. recognizes, but it’s one that never changes. It’s always December 25. Things like Ascension Day and Whitsun (which is this weekend: stuff is closed on Monday, folks) change according to Easter, the date of which is different every year. I know courtesy isn’t big around here, but if Berlin is, as it pretends, a “world city,” perhaps it might actually act like one and tell those of us who practice other religions, or no religion at all, when the religious state holidays are.

Hauptbahnhof was jammed, of course, but not with as many drunks as I’d anticipated. The downstairs is still dark and gloomy, but the Diplodocus skeleton upstairs is a nice touch.

* * *

I survived the reopening of Tresor, although, of course, I didn’t go. For me, Tresor will always be the basement of the bombed building it’s named for, and even that turned into a bridge-and-tunnel-kid club before it closed down. Several people sent me an IHT story about Dmitri’s plans for his new location. Not that he’s ever asked my advice, but first I’d do something about the name. By the time he finally finds the dough to make this happen — if he ever does — people will have long ago forgotten what a “modem” is.

* * *

I’m surviving Spargel season.

I have to say, I don’t see the attraction of white asparagus, which is what Germans invariably mean by “Spargel.” It seems fairly tasteless, is often quite fibrous (not always: when my pals Ranya and Susanna had a restaurant they could make it well), and is served in such boring ways — with ham and boiled potatoes, with schnitzel and boiled potatoes, with Béarnaise sauce dumped over it most of the time, or just plain butter — that I tend to avoid restaurants during the season. (Well, being broke has something to do with it, too).

Fortunately, the Vietnamese guy I buy lots of vegetables from has a good supply of superb green asparagus at remarkable prices, and thanks to him I’ve discovered roasted asparagus, which gives it a totally different flavor, due to the caramelization of sugars I’d never guessed existed, although, in retrospect, they’re certainly there. There’s just so much flavor in green asparagus I’m eternally grateful it’s not in such high demand around here, making it easily found and affordable for the likes of me. But, if a recent trip to the outdoor market in Hackescher Markt means anything, the Germans may be catching on. I just had to snap that label!

Fitness: yes, actual vitamins’ll do that to you…

* * *

And I expect I’ll survive Burger King’s unsettling campaign for its new sandwich: Long Chicken. No relation — I don’t think — to Long Pork.

As if the weekend weren’t bad enough — and it’s looking less bad as I’ve billed out three or four months’ rent in work — I had a real shock on Monday.

As many of you know, I’ve been trying to sell a book based on my adventures as an expat. By the end of last year, it had been through three agents who were awful: first there was the agent who turned out not to be one, then another who held onto it for six months without reading it and only responded when I went to New York to talk to him (a trip which, in most respects, was a total disaster), then one who thought it was a novel (among other weird tics which disqualified her).

A friend suggested a guy who was a former student of his, and I sent it to him next. Twenty-four hours later, he wrote back that it wasn’t the kind of book he could sell. Fair enough; no agent knows all the markets out there. He wrote me that he’d been idly thinking of relocating to Berlin because Manhattan had gotten so expensive, and I suggested he read the blog here for some snapshots of what he’d be getting into. He wrote back and said I’d thoroughly put the kibosh on that idea. He also said he’d just had lunch with a publisher who told him he’d be willing to pay [large amount of money] for a book on [subject], and that it would be perfect for a younger version of [noted scholar].

I wrote him back and said that although I wasn’t young, and I certainly wasn’t [noted scholar], this was a subject I knew a lot about, and I’d welcome the opportunity to take a crack at it. In return, he e-mailed me several proposals which had resulted in advances of over a million dollars for each one. That was more than we’d talked about, but hey, it was indicative of a certain level of quality. I studied them and again I thought, I can do this. So I did.

Not off the top of my head, of course. I bought several books, big ones, and read them. I pored over documents, and confidentially sought help from people I knew and trusted. They, in turn, made very helpful suggestions. I did more research, watching films and talking to others. And I started to write.

It took two and a half months, but at last I had something which, although I felt it needed work, I couldn’t improve upon without some professional feedback. It was 35 pages long, detailed, filled with data, scrupulously researched. On February 15 of this year, I sent it off to him. He replied immediately: he had a pile of stuff to go through, and it would take him probably a week to get back to me. No problem, I said; I wanted his undivided attention.

Just before I went to SXSW, at the beginning of March, I was at a bookstore and there, prominently displayed, was a book on the same subject. I didn’t have the money to buy it, but I did thumb through it to see what was in it. As I’d suspected, it was very much the predictable approach, dull and unremarkable. I jotted down the author’s name and when I got home I fired off an e-mail to the agent, telling him the book existed, and how mine was different — and, I believed, superior — to this one. He asked how he could get hold of me in America, and that was that.

I didn’t hear from him the entire time I was in the States. When I got back, I wrote him — it was now the end of March — asking him when I could expect to hear from him. He said he’d read the proposal and get back to me. At the beginning of April, I asked him again if he’d read it and he said “I PROMISE to read it this weekend.”

A couple of weeks later, I got an e-mail from him asking if I’d heard of this other book. I reminded him I’d sent him an e-mail at the beginning of March. He replied that he was at the London Book Fair and his brain wasn’t working. I figured I’d wait til he got back and then write him again.

The London Book Fair ended on April 18. I waited and waited, meanwhile doing other work to pay what bills I could and keep my own brain active. Finally, I decided it was time to move. On Monday of this week, I wrote and said look, it’s time to get this thing going. I’m losing momentum, I’m getting new ideas all the time, and I want to get to work. He wrote back almost immediately, saying he’d decided the other book would do for the moment and he’d lost interest in the project and wasn’t going to pursue it.

Without even so much as reading my proposal. The one he’d encouraged. The one I spent two and a half months on and waited another three months for him to read.

Almost six months of my life, in other words, down the drain.

There’s nothing I can do about this. What he did was wrong, what he did was unethical, but I have no recourse whatever. And, in a profession based on trust, so much for his “PROMISE.”

I spent the next couple of days feeling like I’d been kicked by a horse. I’d already given up on the expat book after yet another agent I’d sent it to said he didn’t understand what it was — but wasn’t interested in my explaining it. I began rewriting the proposal based on what I’d learned from the other project and then just gave up. I’d spent over two years on it, and was sick of it.

But now I’m without a book project, and magazine work really isn’t happening. As I’ve said before, none of the writers I know have any work. It’s nothing personal except as it affects me personally.

Yes, I own the mammoth book proposal. Yes, I have the names of other agents. Before I send it out again, though, I’m going to have to get that other book, read it, and develop a counter-argument on why mine is better. I’m not even sure I really want to do it at this point; it’s not a particularly pleasant subject, and it would entail my maintaining a presence in Berlin part-time.

Some week, huh?

The old woman left her apartment, looking about her as she always did for danger, her mouth screwed into a rictus of anger. In her right hand she clutched an envelope. In it, the culmination of six years’ agitation rested, folded in thirds. She grabbed the handrail with her left hand and gingerly let herself down the three stairs to where the postboxes were. Reaching up on tiptoe, she slipped the envelope into the box with the hated name on it. At last! Soon the foreigner would be gone.

As for the foreigner, he was doing what he’d been doing all week: waiting. Waiting to hear if any of the seven publications he’d pitched on the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, to which he’d been invited by its publicist, had responded. Waiting to hear from a literary agent to whom he’d pitched a book three months ago. Waiting for money to arrive into his American and German bank accounts so he could buy some food, which was running out. Waiting for it to stop raining. Waiting to see if the guy who bought his used CDs was going to come.

Waiting isn’t something you have to spend a lot of brainpower on, though, so when he heard the sound of somebody sticking something into his postbox he at first thought the mail had come. Not that, in these days of e-mail, anything of interest ever showed up in the mail, but you never know. More likely, it was yet another pizza menu. When he’d first visited Berlin, back in 1988, pizza delivery had just been instituted. He remembered his girlfriend’s about-to-be-ex-boyfriend exulting about it. “The pizza was horrible!” he’d said. “But they bring it to you!”

He cracked the door, looking for the crone, who’d appeared in the middle of the previous night, awakening him with her door-slamming. She wasn’t there, so he rummaged for his key and unlocked the box. He knew what was in the envelope without opening it, but he opened it anyway as soon as he was back in the apartment. It was as he’d feared:

“At the moment, you are eleven months in arrears on your rent: €5,547.41. You also owe maintenance costs for 2006 in the amount of €783.57. Total is €6,330.98. Please remit, within ten days of the date on this message, €3,809.43.” (This amount is just over $5000 at today’s rate). The date was May 10.

He knew what to do from past experience. The first thing to do was not, under any circumstances, to panic. The next thing to do was to get back to work.

***

Which, admittedly, was easier said than done. But I’ve got two more radio bits to write, and, once that’s done, I can voice them and bill enough to pay off two months’ rent. I’d been planning to do that already. One is as good as done: Swamp Dogg, that elemental force of nature whose early recordings — including a blues he’d made on a disc-cutter at the age of 11 with his mother playing drums — I’d listened to the night before. The other is a matter of listening to a CD and knocking the elements together.

The bad news was, the Fes thing was now officially down the drain. Of the seven editors I’d written, only one had responded, saying he’d get back to me, and he hadn’t. (Another checked in last night, and said no). But in order to pay two months’ rent, I’d have to use the minimal money I’d have had to spend for food in Morocco. Possibly this was for the better. I’d wanted to see the place — hell, even Marie hasn’t been to Fes! — but to tell the truth the bill looked kind of anemic this year. Of course, it was more than just losing a trip to an exotic location; I was really hoping to make contact with a new outlet for my work which I could develop and thus be able to increase my earnings. This may yet happen, though.

The other bad news was that I’m not at all sure what I should do at this point, from the legal side. If I can only pay off a thousand Euros by the end of the month, does that mean the landlord (who’s, to his credit, been very reluctant to do this and was no doubt pushed by others) will now instigate legal proceedings? If so, should I just hoard the money against the eviction? Or, if a judgement is found against me, does this mean dealing with the bailiff again? Probably so. At any rate, it’s the weekend, and there isn’t a thing I can do about any of it right at the moment.

Which makes the injunction against panicking all the more sensible.

Another thought occurred to me, too. This is the start of the season in which the students in the centre historique of Montpellier start to leave and vacancies of affordable apartments start. They’ll be gone until late August. Maybe this situation can be turned to good effect in getting me out of here: find an accommodation with the landlord and leave by a given date.

Of course, all of this hinges on work to pay for it all, and that’s the sticky part. There just doesn’t seem to be any. And the weird behavior of the dollar versus the Euro makes budgeting of even a minimal sort very tricky.

What I’d really like is some good, meaningful, involving work, of course. I’d hate to think that it’s all gone forever, and that, at the age of 58, I’m going to be forced to find another way to make a living. Plus, of course, the mental stimulation that working brings means that the creative functions start up again, and I get more ideas, which lead to more work, and so on and so on. Sitting here writing e-mails — and blog posts — is hardly the highest and best use of my time and talents, after all.

Unfortunately, if things take a legal turn here, it’ll eat up time I could be spending doing what work I get. That will mean a reduction in the theoretical amount I’d earn which I’d need for the move. And I also realize that if I do move I’m going to need a financial cushion to smooth things out until I get used to the costs and rhythms of a new place.

This isn’t going to be easy. Or, I suspect, fun.

But, whatever it is, it’s going to happen. And the first thing to remember is, don’t panic.

One of the true joys of living in Berlin is the upbeat, positive attitude that is constantly being forced on us lucky inhabitants. A few years ago, there was the memorable academic get-together called The Power of Negation, which was such a groovy time that it had its own program of death-metal bands. Last year, the big art show — sold out, lines, extended because of popular demand, the whole bit — was called Melancholie. This year’s just opened at the Hamburger Bahnhof and the Medical History Museum at Charité, and it’s called Schmerz, thoughtfully subtitled by its curators in English: Pain.

I guess the art part is at the Bahnhof (whose central collection, particularly the Beuys, is painful enough), and the actual infliction-of-pain-and-relief-therefrom part (I hope that last part’s included) is at the Medical History Museum, a place I’ve yet to see. They’re walking distance from each other, across a bridge that was an important German-German checkpoint while the Wall was still up (the Hamburger Bahnhof, being smack up against the border, was maintained, but rarely used: I saw the awful Garland Jeffreys there once, surrounded by a display of vintage airplanes someone had rented the space for), and the path is lined with little poster-kiosks donated by one of the sponsors, Wall Advertising, each of which shows a picture of someone in pain or a means of inflicting pain.

Yup, I guess springtime’s in the air in Berlin, all right!

* * *

In line with the theme of pain, commercial forces are making themselves felt, too. All over town, billboards showing athletes in pain have gone up: woman collapsing into the arms of friends, guys writhing on the ground — all courtesy of Reebok. They’re not claiming their sneakers will keep you from hurting, just urging a little moderation on the exercise front, with their Go Run Easy campaign.

Living, as I do, in a neighborhood in which you can sometimes actually see people exercising — a far more uncommon sight than it is in the States — I have yet to see anyone pushing it much past an amble, let alone collapsing from torn ligaments or whatever. That said, there’s one thing every German jogger considers essential: the proper costume. Back when I lived on the edge of the Tiergarten, I used to exercise walk (just cardio-vascular stuff, nothing fancy) there, and would get the blackest looks of contempt from Germans who’d trot by, clad in hundreds of dollars worth of lycra, spandex, Gore-Tex, Nike, and so on. I had the temerity to wear normal sweat pants and a t-shirt or sweatshirt, depending on the weather. These days, an inspection of the contents of my iPod would, I guess, be another mandatory test — although I don’t own one and hope never to, but that’s another discussion entirely.

* * *

Just about a year ago I wondered about the building on the corner of Torstr. and Prenzlauer Allee, and, thanks to my great network of readers, had the answer almost immediately. Given the ghosts and other Burden of History appurtenances inherent to it, this article (also sent in by an observant reader) ought to make your skin crawl. The thing is, what evidence is there that there’s any demand whatever for something like what these Brits have planned for the building? The last real-estate bubble I lived through, in late-’70s/early ’80s Austin, featured a couple of joints like this, but they went bust practically before they opened (although not before robbing Austin’s great painter/poster artist Guy Juke of about six years’ worth of paintings, in one case). My prediction: despite the noises they’re making right now, the new owners will quietly change their plans and it’ll become mixed-use office and residential space. Meanwhile, just cleaning up the pigeon poop is going to be a major project.

* * *

And on the neighborhood restaurant beat, two additions. Bandol on Torstr. has opened, looking very, very authentically French. However, it’s going to be a long, long time before I set foot in there. For one thing, the menu is only available in chalk, written on the walls. This means that you have to actually be inside the place to figure out what’s on the menu at any given time. Not that they actually want you in there; there’s a huge, thick reservation book prominently placed at the entrance, something I’ve never seen in a Berlin restaurant — or one in my neighborhood, at any rate, and the minute you approach, you start to get the fish-eye from the guys working there. From what I’ve gleaned walking past the place, which I do nearly every day, the prices will run around €40-50 a person, with wine (no wine list in evidence, although presumably once you’re seated you get one). It seems to be doing well late at night with a bunch of West Berlin-looking folks, the sort one used to see around Grolmannstr. in the old days. And, given that the first main dish I saw written on the wall there was a cassoulet made of fish, I’m not in a particular rush to go there even if I do stumble upon the money. Fish??

But I hope they never get a website, because I get about 35 hits a week from people looking for them.

The neighborhood’s other addition is as light and airy as Bandol is dark and crowded. Alpenstueck (no prissy umlauts for them!) opened in a hurry on the corner of Gartenstr. and Schröderstr., hardly a high-traffic area, in a space that was first a jolly DDR chess-club bar which was rudely turfed out to make room for a succession of eye-blindingly awful art galleries, the last of which lasted something like three years, and caused me to dub it the Gallery of Mildly Talented High School Students. I’m not sure what’s going on at Alpenstueck, which is austerely undecorated and offers chairs that look like they were lifted from a high-school cafeteria. They’re not taking any chances by offering southern German food, although I do like the fact that the kitchen seems to be open to the dining room, which is very unusual in this country (although maybe there’s a law against it, knowing the German food-phobias). Dunno if I’ll ever be in the mood for it, with Honigmond so close at hand, and the sourish middle-aged crowd it draws not looking like the most congenial company.

Berlin’s best pizza, too, has, whether temporarily or not I can’t figure out — new quarters for the summertime, at least. Pizzeria la Rustica, the low-priced member of the stunning Muntagnola restaurants, has moved into an S-Bahn bogen on the edge of Monbijoupark. They have more than pizza there at all times, too, so this partnership with the Ampelmann folks looks like a win-win situation. I haven’t checked it out — hell, I haven’t been to La Rustica in a long time, sad to say — but allegedly there’s info here.

Oh, and one last tantalizing sight: the place next door to Kuchi, the “extreme sushi” joint on Gipsstr., which is called — get ready… — “Next Door To…”, has stuck up four articles from a Japanese magazine showing four regional styles of ramen. It’s a tiny space — it’s where M. Vuong started, in fact, all those years ago — but it’d be nice to have another ramen joint in the ‘hood.

I’m big enough to admit when the New York Times gets it right, and it seems that a couple of weeks ago, that’s just what they did with their recent article on Brunnenstr. as the new art district of Berlin. Actually, it’s one of several, and the more serious one is down on Zimmerstr. by Checkpoint Charlie where the big guns have huge spaces inside some kind of old warehouse. And I’d say there’s a reason that the Times used a picture of a cute beagle instead of any of the art on display, because most of what I saw on a recent walk up the street from Rosenthaler Platz to Bernauer Str. was pretty boring. I’d say that the Brunnenstr. galleries are sort of an arts lab, where talent can be developed.

And it’s kind of not fair for Peter Herrmann to have moved his exquisite gallery for African antiquities, currently showing some astonishing Ife bronzes from Nigeria, onto the block. It just makes the other galleries’ daubings and scrapings look sick. Definitely worth a visit, though. (Interestingly, I’ve been in that building before, since it once held the Amiga recording studios, the place where all the DDR’s pop acts recorded for the state label. A friend was recording a DDR dissident band called Die Vision there, as the tea-ladies cringed.)

But what’s really not fair on Brunnenstr. is the blatant move by Sony to co-opt Berlin street art. A few weeks ago, I mentioned in passing that I’d noticed a lot of broken windows around town recently, one of them in the old Beate Uhse shop at the start of Brunnenstr next to the collection of greasy spoons. A little research shows why this has happened. First, we started seeing brown-paper circles that said www.dont-forget-the-game. com all over the place. When you go there, the first thing you come upon is a blog, which purports to discuss street art. Fine, but click on the photo gallery link and it gets more insidious.

It’s an ad. In fact, if you go down to Brunnenstr. to the old Beate Uhse place, there’s a bilingual sheet of paper posted there bragging that Sony has gotten Berlin street-artists to cooperate with them in promoting the new PlayStation Portable System (PSP) device. So we have a huge number of stencilled brown-paper women caressing huge PSPs, many of which have been defaced by street-artist 6, and everywhere you look, someone’s stuck a PSP-shaped sticker with their custom design on it. Other “artists” have made PSP-shaped art which is on display around the corner on Torstr. in a fake art gallery.

Now I understand the rocks through the windows. And it’s depressing to walk around and have to wonder if the latest piece of street art is, in fact, some lame-ass viral marketing campaign. I wonder how they enlisted these guys. Just handed ’em a PSP? Was money involved? I have to say, I saw one of these in action when I flew to America last month, and although the game being played was that moronic car-crash one, the graphics were extremely impressive. I wouldn’t mind having one (well, if there were a game that could hold my interest for more than ten minutes, anyway, which there rarely are on these systems), but would I viral-write an article about it for one? I don’t think so.

So boo to the supposed “street artists” who let themselves be pimped by Sony, hooray to the ad-busting graffiti artists who are sabotaging the campaign, and, like that car whose ads were everywhere a couple of monts ago — what was it called again? — may this fade from view as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, a bit of street art from Brunnenstr. that I really find impressive:

The e-mail came last night at quarter of midnight: “Rollo died two days ago from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was a few days shy of turning 65 and been in bad health for a long time.” It wasn’t even signed, but it didn’t have to be; the sender was a long-time friend.

Rollo came into my life, and those of my friends, when he married Margaret Moser, Austin’s queen of the groupies, and a talented journalist whose career I’d helped get started. Thinking back on it, I have no idea how they ever met, but they made a great couple, two larger-than-life people who’d collided and stuck together. I thought it was fate: Margaret’s a large woman, and Rollo was a tattoo artist. “He must see a canvas waiting for a masterpiece,” I kidded her. Actually, she replied, Rollo wasn’t at all turned on by tattooed women.

To say he was a “tattoo artist,” though, diminishes him in these days when every teenager has some blob of ink on his or her skin. Rollo (whose real name was Mike Malone, and who was born in Fairfax, in Marin County, suburban San Francisco) was the designated heir of Sailor Jerry, whose China Sea Tattoo was the pioneering studio in Honolulu’s Chinatown. Jerry opened in the 1930s, and developed a huge number of designs in what might be called the American Classic mode: anchors, mermaids, the “battle in the sun” showing two eagles fighting in mid-flight, skulls and dice, cocktail glasses. These designs were first worked out on paper, where they were called “flash,” and Jerry was astute enough to copyright them. This, of course, didn’t keep lesser artists from stealing them, and counterfeit or unattributed Sailor Jerry flash is rife in the world’s tattoo studios. Jerry was also something of a chemist, and developed several new colored inks that were safe. Purple, in particular, had been a problem, as I remember Rollo telling the story. There was a studio in Hong Kong that used a particularly brilliant purple, which was admired by all except for the unfortunate fact that it eventually gave you blood poisoning.

China Sea prospered because of its location: sailors love tattoos, and Honolulu is mid-point for the Pacific Fleet. Sailors on leave get drunk, drunk sailors get tattoos. Sailor Jerry did great work, and his fame spread. How young Rollo came to apprentice with him I’m not sure, but I do know that his first experience with humans (as opposed to potatoes, which is what tattoo artists traditionally learn on, leading to the disparaging description of someone who’ll let you ink anything on them as a “potato”) was inking people’s names on them. This was something the “local boys” liked, and Rollo quickly came to loathe: “They’d ask me, ‘Hey, boy, you got plenny many alphabet?’ which was their way of letting me know they had one of those incredibly long Hawaiian names.” He also made them write the name down, every time. “I now how to spell Jim, but if you write it wrong, that’s your responsibility, not mine.” And in this respect, he’d tell a story about a tattoo artist he’d known in England who’d had a particularly inebriated young man come into his shop demanding to be tattooed — in really big, black, thick letters — with the name of his new idol, an American pop star who’d just taken England by storm, and whose name sounded odd to the artist, who’d never heard of him. He made him repeat it several times, but wasn’t sure how to spell it. Finally the customer passed out, and the artist, thinking he had it, went to work. The young man woke up to see his brand-new tattoo, huge block letters praising ELVES.

Stories: the pit is full of them. Rollo used to encourage me to try to sell a book of tattoo artists’ stories. Thanks to him, I spent a lot of time around some of America’s greatest tattoo artists, and he was right: besides a steady hand and a flair for color, it seems that having the genes for being a natural raconteur was part of the package. Since tattooing is an incredibly slow practice, talking to the customer is part of the service, and given how colorful the customers were before tattooing became a teenage fad, you got great stories back in exchange.

Sailor Jerry passed China Sea Tattoo on to Rollo, who himself eventually took on protegés. Over the years, Rollo got plenty of tattoos himself, a whole body suit, as they’re called, mostly in classical Japanese style, from what I could see. Unlike today’s exhibitionists, Rollo kept his tattoos covered, because, like Rembrandt drawings, they fade with exposure to light. Nowadays, in the summer, I’ll see some kid with thousands of dollars’ worth of work on him running around with his shirt off, and remember Rollo talking about how that not only faded the colors, but smeared the black outlines, turning the work into one huge multicolored blotch in just a few years. Rollo had too much respect for the masters who’d worked on him, one of whom, Horiochi, was considered Japan’s greatest master, the latest in a centuries-old lineage.

And although the American Classic designs (not only on people, but as flash, which people buy and trade for good money) paid the bills, Rollo also paid attention to the Japanese masters. After he moved to Austin to be with Margaret, he set up shop near the Austin Chronicle offices, and that drew musicians and other scenesters to the little house with the China Sea shingle out front. Among the people drawn there was a local eccentric who owned Atomic City, a shop selling Japanese monster-movie figurines and other Japanese pop culture artifacts. The guy’s name was Jim, but everyone in town knew him as the Royal Hawaiian Prince, or Prince, for short. He swore he was what his name said, a member of the Hawaiian royal family, although that seemed really unlikely. But he was flamboyant, and had some tattoos, and wanted Rollo to create a masterpiece on him. Rollo rose to the challenge, and admirably: over a year in the making, Prince’s back-piece was the culmination of everything Rollo had learned about classical Japanese tattoo art — with a twist. It showed Godzilla destroying Tokyo as airplanes swirled around him. Waves in the style of Hokusai broke behind Godzilla, exquisitely stylized flames leapt from the broken skyscrapers, and tiny people writhed in the monster’s hands. In the bottom left corner, three Japanese characters spelled Go Ji Ra. When it was finished, Prince, Rollo, Margaret, and I went to the National Tattoo Convention, held that year in New Orleans, and, as I reported in the Wall Street Journal, they took home a prize.

Austin loved Rollo, who did a number of covers for the Chronicle, particularly for Chinese New Year, and Rollo loved Austin. I cooked for several Thanksgiving parties at Rollo and Margaret’s house, and I remember one where Rollo, rather sozzled, yelled my name. “Ward! I want you to know something. There are people who I just know are going to get tattoos. There are people who are thinking about it, and might do it and might not. And then there are people who, if they’re going to get tattooed, they wouldn’t come to me, they’d go to some art faggot like Don Ed Hardy [Rollo’s purported arch-rival, master of the classic Japanese style, with a Master’s degree from the San Francisco Art Institute, who’d been written up in several high art magazines]. Now, you, you’d probably go to Hardy if you were gonna do it. But I don’t think you’re ever going to get a tattoo. And I just want you to know that that’s ALL RIGHT WITH ME! I got enough work! I don’t have to tattoo everyone in the world. So it’s okay that you’re not going to get a tattoo.” And he was right: if I was ever going to consider it, I probably would have gone to Hardy — Rollo, I believe, had. But he was also right: as much as I was fascinated with the world of tattoo artists, thanks to the entrée Rollo had given me, I wasn’t going to be anybody’s potato.

Eventually, Rollo and Margaret put their heads together. China Sea wasn’t doing all that well in Austin (this was, as I said, well before the fad began) and the home shop on Army Street in Honolulu’s Chinatown needed shaping up. The couple moved to Hawaii, and Margaret got a job with a firm which produced those freebie tourist magazines which clog up free space in hotel lobbies down there. It wasn’t very demanding work, but it paid well enough, and she loved Hawaii. I pitched a story on traditional Hawaiian music to an airline magazine, and they bit. Margaret set up the hotel and rental car end, and offered to research where I could find slack-key guitarists and falsetto singers. It was a week filled with adventures off the Hawaiian tourist trail, as I interviewed the Samoan-Hawaiian slide guitarist Tau Moe about his 40-year tour which had only recently ended, found Hank Williams’ former steel guitarist Jerry Byrd teaching in a small music store in a corner of Honolulu, visited a high-end ukulele factory, and, in fact, managed to do everything except find a slack-key gig, although Margaret ransacked the local media for clues.

One of the most magical days, though, came towards the end of the trip. Rollo had wanted to show me around Chinatown, as much to dispel the guidebooks’ characterization of the neighborhood as insanely dangerous as anything else. So I met him at 6:30 one morning and we toured the place. There was the all-night dancehall, where a motley orchestra played sleazy music and you could really rent an Okinawan girl for 50 cents per dance, although the real attraction was the little pavilions off to one side where the same girl would give you a blow-job for considerably more. I remember the orchestra’s drummer was sound asleep, although still playing with one hand, while the other picked a scab behind his ear. We went to a strange antiques/curiosa store, filled with dusty Chinese stuff, open, for some reason, at that odd hour. We met a Samoan lawyer who’d just come back from burying another of his brothers whom his father had shot in an ongoing dispute about some land. And, finally, we visited the wholesale market, where they were wheeling in tuna for the inspection of the local sushi chefs. (Actually, I’ve already mentioned this trip in my post about bánh mi a couple of months ago). When we got back to the shop, there was a line down the block because the fleet was in. I don’t know what I did for the next few hours, but Margaret had, at long last, found a gig, by the amazing slack-key guitarist and singer Ledward Ka’apana at a locals-only club, where we sat for a couple of hours mesmerized by his voice and by the table full of lesbians next to us who were well-versed in traditional hand-hula and were performing for each other — and their mother, this being Mother’s Day. The only reason we left was that Margaret realized she had both sets of house keys, and Rollo was trapped at the shop, unable to close and go home. By the time we got there, he was exhausted and he quickly chased everyone out of the studio and shut it. As he got in my rental car, he handed something to Margaret. “Put this in your purse,” he said. “I got no way to carry it.” It was his wallet, so stuffed with $20 bills that it was bursting its seams and incapable of folding. Fleet’s in.

Margaret and Rollo didn’t last. She came back to Austin and got her old job at the Chronicle back, and the grapevine had it that Rollo had started using other kinds of needles. Another wife apparently helped him get clean, but I lost track of him after I moved to Berlin. But I remember the stories and the characters he’d introduced me to, and always felt a lot of affection for him for doing that.

When I was back in the States last month, I noticed a lot of kids wearing t-shirts with Sailor Jerry flash on them. The words “Sailor Jerry” and “China Sea” were on the shirts, and I thought, hey, great! Rollo’s licensed the flash now that tattoos are so popular, so maybe he’s making some money. I don’t know if he was or not, or what the details of the deal might have been, but whatever happened, it apparently wasn’t enough to keep the darkness away.

I can only hope that he’s gone somewhere where the colors never fade, there’s always a cold beer at hand, and there’s always someone to listen to the stories and tell some more. And the fleet comes in only when you need the cash.

And so it came to pass that a consortium of Berlin bloggers purchased Jim’s Adlon gift-certificate for the full price. I took possession of the cash on Sunday.

And then I did an incredibly stupid thing: I put it, and some money I had in my pocket, in the bank.

Monday I got up, wrote a transfer-slip to the Obergerichtsvollsieher, and took it to the bank. On a whim, I checked my balance. The €220 I’d deposited twelve hours before had turned into €150 and change.

I hiked back home, picked up the receipt for the deposit, and went back to the bank. €74 and change had been taken out that morning, the woman told me. A few more clicks on her computer disclosed the culprit: Deutsche Telekom.

I have no idea how this happened. I have never authorized them to do this. I’m not completely sure how they got my account number, although it’s been the same since before I moved here (I got it when I did a short-lived “Letter From America” for the late Radio For You station here).

So I was still short.

Fortunately, this morning, a notoriously undependable magazine I write for deposited $300 in my American account, so in a few minutes, I’m removing more than enough to pay this guy when he shows up on Thursday. I’m not taking any more chances.

And today I picked up three hours’ proofreading work on a newsletter and brochure from a German sausage-seasoning company. Not what I want to be doing with my time, but it’s work.