Category: Ed Ward

There are times when things are so bad that I think the worst mistake I ever made was moving to Germany in 1993. But then I reflect that, for a while, at least, I had a very exciting life as a writer for the Wall Street Journal Europe who got to travel all over the place and write about art and culture. I also had a radio show which I really enjoyed, as did my many listeners, some of whom still remember it seven years later.

There are other times when I think the worst mistake I ever made was loaning a great deal of money to a friend who has still not paid me back, and who may never do so. But neither of us could have forseen that the sure thing would be cancelled when some people flew planes into the World Trade Center. I mean, what civilian could have predicted that?

But two years ago I made a mistake which has finally caught up with me, and which has cancelled any remaining affection I may have had for living in Germany. It’s a mistake anyone living here might make, so let me explain.

When I was whizzing around Europe for the Journal, I nearly always took the train. My territory was central Europe and Scandinavia, so it made sense: one day going there, one day reporting the story, one day back — and the story would inevitably get written subconsciously on that return journey. So it made sense for me to obtain a Bahn Card, the discount card you can buy from Deutsche Bahn. Back then, there was only one kind of Bahn Card: it gave you 50% off of every ticket, and it had a Rail Plus supplement, which gave you half off of tickets on rail lines in a number of other countries. It wasn’t cheap, but, as I once realized, one round-trip ticket to Copenhagen paid for it.

I bought one in 2004, but that was around when the work started to fall off spectacularly. My editor at the Journal had been replaced, and suddenly I wasn’t getting any work at all from them. Or, for that matter, from anyone else, at least not the kind of work that required me to travel. I missed travelling — I still do. But when 2005 came around, I realized I had better uses for what little money I had than a Bahn Card.

Nonetheless, although I hadn’t ordered one or renewed it on the website as I’d usually done, one came in the mail. Then Deutsche Bahn tried taking the money out of my bank account, but failed, because there wasn’t enough. They sent me a notice. I replied that I didn’t want the card and wasn’t going to pay for it or use it. And that, I thought, was the end of it.

I didn’t pay for it, and I didn’t use it. At the end of April, 2006, I got a stern warning from them ordering me to pay them. I wrote back and repeated that I had not requested the card, and had not used it. And that, I thought, was the end of it yet again.

It wasn’t. Shortly thereafter I started getting bills from lawyers. The €64 Bahn Card debt was now encumbered with legal fees, fees for, as far as I could tell, writing me a letter. And they were big fees, too. Now, I’d gotten letters like this before from mysterious phone companies who thought I owed them money. I ignored them, and they went away. That’s what I decided to do with these letters.

Big mistake. In October, they told me I owed €116.42. In November, it was suddenly €169.70. In December, it was €185.67. On December 7, I was found guilty of indebtedness by a court in Baden-Baden and a judgement was mailed to me in a jaundice-colored yellow envelope.

Now, in America, this would be a black spot on your credit record. My credit here is already terrible. For one thing, I am considered very unstable because I don’t have a regularly occurring income. I live in a country where nobody is self-employed, where if you don’t draw a regular salary, there’s only one bank (the one I use, of course) which will allow you an account. (I once knew a guy who was hired on a freelance basis to come to Germany to teach corporate communications to a major bank. After he was ordered to close his account with them because he wasn’t making regular deposits, he asked his clients what kind of message they thought they were sending. They shrugged and told him to go to another bank. He had plenty of clients in the States, so he just up and left instead.)

So I didn’t think anything more of this until last week. That was when I got a letter from an Obergerichtsvollzieher, one of those words whose individual components you have to look up in the dictionary, but which eventually revealed itself to be “high court bailiff.” I mentioned this to someone and was told “You are in terrible trouble. You’re going to have to hide your computer and all your CDs. You’re going to have to empty out your apartment. They have the right to seize everything you own in payment of the debt — and they will. They can take your bed. They can take your silverware. They have unlimited license.” I thought this was paranoia.

It’s not.

They really can do all of these things. No matter if the value of the goods seized is many times the value of the debt. They will do it because they can. Can they deprive you of your means of making a living? In the United States, the law is very clear about this: you can’t impound a violinist’s violin, or a mechanic’s tools. But in Germany, you can.

A couple of friends rushed over to help. They perused the letters, made notes, hemmed and hawed. “You know,” one of them mused, “when it comes to stuff like this, Kafka was a documentarian.” No kidding.

Making it worse was the fact that it was Easter weekend. One of my friends wrote a letter for me to send to the bailiff explaining things. I had a copy of the letter to Deutsche Bahn. I faxed both to the bailiff, and got ready to call him during office hours. Or should I say hour: he is available for one hour, two days a week. And my last chance for any mercy was to reach him on Tuesday.

It took thirty minutes, but I got him on the phone. Miraculously, he spoke a little English, enough to tell me that there was nothing he could do to mitigate my guilty sentence and that all I could do was pay him before April 19. Oh, and the price, which now included his fee, which was nowhere in any of the paperwork in my hands, was now €225.

A couple of weeks ago, when I got back from Texas, I found yet another note that the postal customs people had seized yet another package of the CDs people send me for review. I’ve taken to letting them send them back, because in most cases it’ll be yet another singer-songwriter I’ll wind up tossing after a couple of tracks, and the Postzollamt is way the hell down in Wilmersdorf. But this was from a label that puts out stuff I like, so I schlepped down there to rescue it. I was confronted with a sign stating that, due to a lack of personnel, waiting times had increased significantly, and that after registering, I was to wait in the new, utterly undecorated, waiting room next door. Which I did, for over an hour, a fourfold increase in their previous record. When I finally had my name called, the woman with the package asked me to open it. I told her (and pointed out on the customs label, which never does any good) that these were promotional items, that I was a journalist, and so on. She grabbed one of the CDs and pointed to the bar-code. “This has to be blacked out so that this item can’t be sold!” she yelled. I told her I wasn’t the one who’d sent it. “You tell them that they have to do this!” She seemed genuinely angry. Or maybe it was just the stress of working somewhere where you knew everyone you met hated you.

What these incidents drove home for me was that there are two Germanies. One is occupied by the people who are my friends and my friends’ friends and husbands and wives, the ones I met when I had the (German) girlfriend who led to my moving here, the ones I hung out with when I did move, the ones I’ve worked with and for. Then there are the ones who run the place, obsessed with a perverted, rigid, narrow need for “Ordnung,” which translates directly as “order,” but is much, much more. Ordnung is conformity; Ordnung is submission; Ordnung is the petty regulations that don’t let you recycle glass on Sunday, that make all onions the same size; Ordnung is why I’ve stopped listening to music, because I have to use headphones after 10pm no matter what, or my neighbors next door will call the police. Not because they’re disturbed by it. No: because they can.

Thinking about Ordnung leads to a lot of other places I’m not going to go right now, mostly because it’s a nice day and I’m trying very hard not to slip down the slope of depression that is almost inevitable when I think of what I could be doing with that €225 I’m going to be parting with soon. I’ve already been for a long walk (my CD player stopped working, so I went to Alexanderplatz to price a new one: looks like about €60 goes out the window on that one) and although my landlord’s mother (one of the Ordnung Germans if there ever was one, as the bitter gurn that suffices for her face makes clear) is here, so far I’ve avoided contact with her. If the checks come in on time, I’ll have the money in time for the bailiff, and — in one of those too-good-to-be-true coincidences — there’s even a possibility that Jim’s Mistake will pay for My Mistake in part.

But I’m very, very tired of Ordnung, and very, very tired of living here. I gave a lot to this city, and I never got a whole hell of a lot back. It’s time to move on, to somewhere with just a little bit less Ordnung and a lot more capacity for fun.

In 1970, I lived in Sausalito, which is the town that’s at the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Despite what the town is now, back then there were still little enclaves of funk, and my apartment, needless to say, was one of them. It was set on a steep hill, so that although it was technically a basement, there was still a nice view of Richardson Bay, the fishing fleet (yes, there was still a fishing fleet), and Mt. Tamalpais.

One person I’d always inevitably get to know would be my mailman, because back then I was inundated with free records, and, less frequently, books. The records would come sometimes in outrageous boxes with promo trinkets in them, the books were always heavy, and so there was always a lot of mail at my house. At one point, my mailman was a jolly young guy with wire-framed glasses, who seemed too smart to be in this for a career — you saw a lot of folks like that working in the Post Office in those days. This one’s name was Jim, and sometimes he’d stop to chat for a moment. Nice guy.

But one day he showed up and announced that he was quitting. “Yup. I’ve saved up enough money and me and my girlfriend are going to do something we’ve always wanted to do: go to Africa.” Now, this was a surprise, especially since Jim was white (and I presumed his girlfriend was, too). There was something of a vogue for middle-class black Americans to visit Africa back then, but you didn’t get many white tourists from the States. It was also a surprise because I’d gotten a book in the mail called Bright Continent, by Susan Blumenthal, an American woman who’d done the same thing and published a guidebook to sub-Saharan Africa. Remember, this was in the days before Lonely Planet and so on — it was 1974 or so, and books like this just didn’t exist. I’d taken a look in it and gotten hooked; it was not only useful as a guide, but it was fun to read.

So I mentioned this to Jim, and he said sure, he’d love to look at it. “Take it with you,” I suggested. “Bring it back when you get back.”

And he did. It remains one of my treasures: beat up, bookmarked with odd bus tickets and harissa-can labels, annotated with corrections and amplifications. I’ve never been to sub-Saharan (or super-Saharan, for that matter) Africa, but I’ve got a book that has.

I’m not sure what happened next, but I lost track of Jim and eventually moved to Texas.

Fast forward.

Last year, I heard from Jim again. He’d found this blog, and was bemoaning the fact that he’d been in Berlin some months earlier, and hadn’t known I was here. He was in Portland, Oregon now, selling real estate and hoping to find something else to do, but loving Oregon and hoping I could visit. Well, that was sort of out of the question, but it sure was good to hear from him, and yes, it was too bad that he hadn’t known I was here. But, I said in my e-mail back to him, I had a friend in Eugene, Oregon, who constantly fantasized about moving to Portland but didn’t seem to be doing anything about it. Not only that, I figured Jim would like this guy and maybe he could kick his butt gently enough so that he’d move and realize his dream while putting a couple of bucks in Jim’s pocket.

And that’s just what happened: Brett and his wife Carole had dinner with Jim one evening when they were in town for some musical event and Jim wound up showing them a place that they wound up buying. Everybody’s happy: Brett’s doing a lot more good work and is much happier being out of the decaying hippie/university surroundings he was in, Carole’s doing fine with her artwork and other innumerable projects, and Jim’s got a couple of people he likes to hang out with.

I like happy endings, myself, but there’s more. To thank me for sending him customers, Jim sent me a gift. It’s a €200 gift certificate redeemable at the restaurant Quarré or the “gourmet restaurant” Lorenz Adlon at the Hotel Adlon. It expires on April 19 and cannot be renewed.

And when I saw it, my heart sank. I knew he meant well, and yet the Adlon pretty much represents a huge hunk of what I don’t like about this city. It’s got a horrible reputation as a place to stay: I once helped an editor for Conde Nast Traveller research a story on Berlin, and he was staying there, went for a walk, and was refused re-entry because he wasn’t wearing a jacket. He finally convinced the doorman to accompany him to the front desk, where they conceded that he was, indeed, a guest. Then there was the young African woman who was fired for wearing her hair in an “unconventional” style, albeit one traditional to her people — and hardly outrageous. The stories go on and on; the high-end travellers I know avoid the place.

The idea that I could get into one of their restaurants without a jacket and tie, too, is ludicrous. That’s not the way I dresss, nor is it the way you have to dress in most restaurants here. One nice thing about Berlin is that, outside of government circles, anyway, it’s very informal. I don’t want to eat where the Bonners eat anyway, so they can have their jackets and ties.

Jim was, understandably, distressed that I was upset by this gift. Why, he said, he’d been to the Adlon and it didn’t seem like that kind of place. And couldn’t I borrow a jacket and tie? (Answer: no. From whom? Nobody I know has one either!)

I’ve tried not thinking about this for a while, but it occurred to me recently that the clock was ticking on this gift, so I took it down the other day and saw the date. I honestly don’t know what to do. I don’t think they check ID when you cash it in, so maybe I should sell it. But I don’t know anyone who’d want to buy it, either. Should I hit Craigslist? Just let it expire quietly in its folder here by my desk? It’s only eight days away.

Some day, I hope, I’ll visit Portland. I also hope I’ll have enough money to take Jim out to dinner and explain the cultural nuance behind all of this. Meanwhile, I’ve got a white elephant with a Quadriga on it making me feel guilty.

The other day, I made a hasty decision to leave the S-Bahn at the Wedding station due to an expired ticket, and figured that, since it was almost a nice day, I’d just walk home. Reaching the former East-West border, I was gratified to see that one of my favorite bits of unknown Berlin was still intact. The last time I was around it, the sidewalk was under construction, and I figured that, being unauthorized, this delightful installation was probably long gone.

But no. And since it’s Easter weekend, I went back to shoot it today.

This little fellow is set in the pavement just beyond this familiar marker:

In fact, that’s why he’s there. He and his brothers and sisters decorate a swath of sidewalk where Chausseestr. meets Liesenstr. — a pretty obscure corner of town occupied by not much:

This patch of earth was a no-man’s land. Now, as all Berliners know, and few outside of town do, there were two Walls. There was the big, thick one with the rounded bits stuck on top, and, some dozens of meters away, there was a thinner one with less fortification. Inbetween was no-man’s land, with a path down its middle. This area was filled with all manner of impediments, with the aim of making an escape over the thin wall, across the bare area, and over the big wall to West Berlin, impossible. As we know, it was pretty effective, and it not only sealed Berliners out, but it sealed the no-man’s land in.

And that’s where the rabbits come in. I remember my first visit to Berlin in 1988, and climbing one of those observation towers at the edge of the Tiergarten, from which I could see the area which had once held Potsdamer Platz, the lonely scrap of a once-grand hotel the sole witness to what had stood there before the War. Inbetween, dust, rocks, scraggly shrubs and weeds, and rabbits. Lots of rabbits.

Given that I saw the Wall as a symbol of terror, as a structure which had added immeasurably to world tensions, as a (literally) concrete representation of the Communist Threat back then, it was unnerving to look over it and see…cute.

“Oh, yeah,” said one of the friends who were showing me around, “they got in there somehow, and since there’s nothing to threaten them, they, well, they did what rabbits do.”

The Berlin Wall. And lots of rabbits. Apparently they were everywhere.

It’s not that there were no threats, though. There were trip-wires attached to automatic firing devices. Hip hop hip trip, KABOOM. One less bunny.

And what about the guard dogs who patrolled with the guards? They must not have had a lot of fun: if they caught a skinny East German trying to defect, they had to give him to the humans. And since Germans love dogs — even the brutal youth who were conscripted for guard duty on this extremely unpopular assignment must have loved dogs, being German — who could begrudge faithful Odin a rabbit now and again?

Mmmmm! Bunny sushi!

And that’s how the rabbits got in the sidewalk. After discovering them for the first time, I mentioned them to a friend who told me that an artist — an American woman, as I remember — had installed them in memory of the rabbits who used to live between the Walls, and who, of course, vanished as soon as the Wall was dismantled. When I first saw them, they were a bright coppery color, but as you can see, they’ve tarnished. There’s no signature, no tag, no nothing. Just rabbits. (And just today, this friend said she had no knowledge of the rabbits or the artist, so my information may not be correct, although it’s what I remember from four or five years ago). I love that this group exists in a place almost nobody has any reason to visit, on the edge of a garbage-strewn lot, on the corner of a street nobody lives on.

Not that Liesenstr. is without interest: maybe nobody lives there, but there are a bunch of graveyards, one of which has a French chapel, a French war memorial for soldiers who died in defense of the “King of Paris,” and the gravestone of Theodor Fontane. I once collected some big pieces of Wall in this graveyard, and still have them in storage in Texas.

And, at the end of Liesenstr., where it stops at Gartenstr., there are two rotten railroad bridges and, recently stripped of its protective coating of vegetation, a rather large remnant of the Wall:

And, at night, rabbits. Maybe.

The highlight of my SXSW this year was getting to interview Joe Boyd, the legendary record producer, on-stage as part of the panels program. I do wish he’d read less from his book (hey, it was on sale right there in the Convention Center; whet the audience’s appetite so they’ll buy!) and given me more time to ask him about stuff that wasn’t in the book (and about his next one, which’ll cover his years as a world music pioneer), but it was an enjoyable time, and he mentioned that he’d be in San Francisco at the same time I was in Marin, so we agreed to hook up at Village Music, the great and soon-to-be-defunct record store.

Which we did, on Tuesday morning. Showing remarkable self-control, Joe only bought a small stack of records and arranged to have them shipped to his house in London. Then, in one of those remarkable coincidences that happen all the time at Village Music, in walked an old friend of his, the woman who’d given him the biggest hit of his career, Maria Muldaur! She scampered back to her house to get him an advance copy of her new record, and Joe and I went for some coffee at a nearby shop. She met us there, and I got to snap a pic:

After we went our separate ways, I sped over to Berkeley to meet my friend Jaan for lunch at the remarkable Vik’s Chaat Corner, a place I’d heard about but never gone to. It’s basically a South Indian snack bar, and I was numbed into indecision by the choice. I finally settled on Bel Puri for myself, a dish I’d read about in countless Indian novels.

Described in the takeaway menu I picked up as “Crisp puffed rice mixed with onions, cilantro and potatoes with tamarind, mint, and garlic chutnies,” it wasn’t as exciting as it sounds, as perhaps the photo hints. Jaan, though, went for the Dahi Batata Puri, which rocked:

The description on the menu is “crisp puffed puris stuffed with potatoes and garbanzos covered with spices, yoghurt, and tamarind chutney,” and it was one of those great South Indian things that balances a whole lot of different disparate elements perfectly. Afterwards, we hit the grocery store next door, and I marvelled at how much fresher the spices in there were than the ones at the Indian markets here. I also picked up a couple of those tiny Indian regional cookbooks (I’m a sucker for them, always have been) and once I decode them (ingredients often have Hindi names, but I’m getting better at them) I see some great meals in my future.

* * *

Probably the best discovery at SXSW was that Bobby Patterson, a legendary Dallas soul singer, is alive and performing. He was on the Ponderosa Stomp showcase, but went on at 1:30, which is too late for me, but the Stomp also had a day party on 6th St., so I made it over for that. The man is in top form, he had a great little band, and his between-song comments, delivered in rapid-fire surrealistic jive, made me want to hear his radio show. I managed to get a few performance shots, one of which even came out!

My old pal John T. Davis took two pix of me and Bobby afterwards, but I forgot to show him where the zoom button was, so I’ll spare you those. It doesn’t look, from the current Ponderosa listing, as if Patterson’s playing this year’s show, which is a shame, but I have to say, the lineup is, with the exception of the previously-unknown-to-me Jay Chevalier (a man with no discernable talent except for irritating the audience), absolutely incredible. If I were going to be in New Orleans on May 2 (and I’m not), I’d be there!

Another great singer and songwriter who won’t be Stomping closed out SXSW for me: a rare performance by the enigmatic Swamp Dogg, who, I’m glad to say, is still in rare form. He’s got a new album out, Resurrection, which I haven’t listened to yet, but at least one of the songs, “They Crowned An Idiot King,” is as angry as the Swamp Dogg of old. “It’s 1970 and he’s mad again,” enthused Art Fein, who’s been pushing the Swamp Dogg cause for years. I’ll be doing a Fresh Air piece on him shortly. Swamp, I mean, not Art.

* * *

There were other highlights, musical, culinary, and social, and as always SXSW was overwhelming enough that I was glad for the week after so I could come down and do something else, even if that something else was an almost equally frantic trip to California. Everywhere I went, people asked me the same questions, so I felt like passing out a FAQ card:

* I thought you were moving to France. So did I; I’d anticipated selling my book proposal, but the woman who helped me develop it misrepresented herself as an agent. She wasn’t, so I fired her. I’m now on my fifth agent, and he told me just before I left that he doesn’t get it, either.

* So what’s keeping you from moving? At the moment, €12,441.57, which, at today’s Euro-Dollar exchange rate, is $16,569.65. That figure includes paying back debts, paying all my back rent, getting a new apartment in France, moving, and buying a new washing machine and couch.

* That doesn’t seem like a whole lot. I hear you on Fresh Air. Don’t you have any other work? Actually, no. Most editors no longer even answer queries. There’s almost no work out there that I can see. That’s why I’m trying to sell the book.

* Yeah, I know what you mean. I lost a lot of work this year, too. Thank heavens my wife has a job. Thank heavens you have a wife. With a job. Wouldn’t mind having one of those myself.

Okay, it’s Monday, New York’s almost awake. Time to start moving that book forward again. One thing the past few days of being back here brought to my attention is that I don’t want to be here any more. Thus, better start dealing with the cure.

Just when you thought every real estate bargain in Berlin was gone, up pops this one!

It’s got a lot going for it. Location, for one: it’s directly across Invalidenstr. from Nordbahnhof, which is twice as busy now that they have the tram line running. On one side of it, there’s the historic Reichsbahn building, with its heroic statues of workers ready to build Germany’s railroads, and on the other side, there’s a nice park the locals use for sunbathing, with a kiddie pool that’s jammed all summer long. So it’s easy to get to and has nice green space.

Of course, the view’s sort of hard to see, given that the windows are so high, but that’s just a clue about the main thing it doesn’t have going for it: if you look at the top photo, you’ll see that there’s a little sign high on the wall. It says WC.

That’s right, folks: this is your opportunity to buy a genuine DDR public toilet.

It’s been standing there, locked up and stinky, for as long as I’ve lived here. Not that that’s stopped anyone; today as I shot this photo, I realized that the best sun was from the other side, and as I was headed in that direction, a gentleman from the building trades appeared, loosened his belt, and, um, proceeded to use the outside in the manner for which the inside was intended, if you catch my meaning here.

Maybe it’s the jet-lag, but my normally rich creative faculties have frozen at the challenge of coming up with a use for this property, a reason to buy it. But I trust my dear readers will be able to think of something.

But I’m pretty sure I didn’t.

I landed in Paris Tuesday afternoon, and found the hotel I’d reserved with a service I’d never used before. Pretty dingy, as was the neighborhood, which was close to Barbes, the largely African quarter. If I’d had more time, like another day, I’d probably have gone in search of the place where a man who claimed to be “the spiritual leader of the entire Senegalese community here in Paris,” told me, in perfect English, of his training with the French Air Force in Oklahoma and Texas. They had great fish baked with lemon there, and I bet they had other good stuff, too.

But I knew that in 24 hours I’d be back in a place which, next to California and Texas, would have extremely limited food options, and I wanted to celebrate the possibility of gastronomic greatness one more time. Which, considering I was in Paris, shouldn’t have been too difficult.

If only. Well, okay, when I woke up from my jet-lag nap and splashed some water on my face and decided to get out of the nasty room and go look for something to eat I left my indispensable Michelin Map 11

behind, not the smartest move in a city I only know in bits and pieces.

I figured, hey, I didn’t have a lot of money, so I should just find some brasserie or cheap joint with a blackboard out front with some appealing choices, go in, and enjoy myself. I was tired, I’d go back to the hotel, read a little, and pass out. Seemed like a plan. Surely the neighborhood, so close to the Gare du Nord, would have plenty of places like that.

So I walked down the street the hotel was on, the rue du Faubourg du Poissonnier. After a few blocks, I saw a tiny place that looked like it hadn’t changed in fifty years, but the prices — no “menu,” or multi-course, single-price meals, a la carte only — seemed a bit high. I glanced at it and moved on. And on.

I walked down the rue des Incredibly Fat Prostitutes and wondered whether the forty-ish men who were striking poses in Calvin Klein yuppie wear on the same block were in the same business or the girls’ “business managers.” I made a turn and found myself on the rue du Wholesale Clothing. I found a sign which said I was in the Marais, a neighborhood I not only know, but which is stuffed with restaurants, but I couldn’t figure out where I was. An hour had passed, and I was now officially hungry, not to mention somewhat lost. But luckily, I almost always have a compass in my head, and it wasn’t like I’d never been in this general neighborhood. It’s just that except for kebab houses and the occasional designer sushi place, there didn’t seem to be anything at all to eat.

Further walking brought me to République and loads of dining options: Quick, Mac Do, Kentucky Fried… This was getting ridiculous. I decided to head back to the hotel and hit someplace by the station. I found myself on the rue du Château d’Eau, which is one African barbershop after another, men’s and women’s alternating, with the expected amount of socializing. Even on a Tuesday night, it was churning. But nothing to eat.

All of a sudden, I was back on the rue du Faubourg du Poissonnier. Now, that place I’d seen hours ago — well, 90 minutes ago — didn’t seem so intimidating. I hesitated over the menu, then said to hell with it and walked in.

The front room was very small. A tiny bar was off to the left, as well as a spiral staircase pitched so that I was praying they didn’t seat customers up there. A very morose middle-aged Indochinese woman (I use the word because you could tell that the country she’d left behind when she first got to Paris was French Indochina) was bringing out some panniers of raspberries. An old woman sat on a banquette to the right wearing a fawn cloth coat which one could say had seen better days except that it was also evident that it had never been anything but drab. Next to her sprawled a large dog, boxer-like but with a graphite-colored coat. She held its head in her lap and was stroking it. Between her and the bar were the entrance to the dining room and a table loaded with stuff to be served cold: some sort of terrine, something jellied, and the berries.

A stout, no-nonsense woman with pixie glasses emerged from the dining room. “Are you still open?” I inquired. She stared at me, giving me a top-to-bottom assessment. “Of course,” she said. “What are you afraid of?” Huh? Was my French that bad? “Well,” I said, “I’m hungry,” and she smiled and led me into the tiniest restaurant dining room I’ve seen. Part of the problem was a huge party of perhaps 15 people against the back wall had taken up a lot of the room. I wound up wedged over by the silverware and bread service, scrutinizing the same menu that had been posted outside. The prices were still stiff, but it seemed that you could do okay if you were careful. And surely there was a house wine so I didn’t have to order a whole bottle of one of the three on offer.

So: from a very basic menu, two very basic choices. Rabbit terrine and beef Bourgignon “a la ancienne,” made the old way. Like I was aware there was a new way. The stout woman’s male counterpart was a short, busy man who was obviously her husband, and it was he who took my order. “No, no rabbit terrine,” he said. “Poultry. Even better.” His eyebrows shot up when I ordered the beef, and I asked him if there were a house red I could have a pichet of. The eyebrows went up again, and he said “Of course!”

The wine and a basket of excellent bread appeared right away. I have no idea what the wine was except I suspect it was a Bordeaux, and it was better than any house wine I’d ever had. The terrine appeared next, and it was perfect: lots of elements mixed in, pistachios and peppercorns, organ meat and meaty bits, the whole thing finishing with a slight tang of alcohol which I suspect was marc, the grape-skin liqueur. As I was savoring it, I was presented with a crock of cornichons, a touch I’ve never really gotten, and one I’d never seen before which was perfect: sweet-sour pickled cherries. You don’t want to eat a lot of them, but they do wake up your tongue.

Monsieur appeared again to take the empty plate, and informed me, gesturing at the long table, that it would be several minutes before the next course arrived. That was fine with me. I sipped the wine, ate a bit of bread, and looked at my dining companions. I couldn’t make sense out of the long table, and in fact the only definite impression I had was that I was going to bop the kid who was sitting nearest me, who took to leaning waaaay back in his chair to the point where his arms, which were behind his head when he did this, almost touched me. The group was mostly young, mostly very square-looking, and utterly forgettable. Not so the woman who was at one of the tables directly on the other side of the room from me, dining with a male companion who was impeccably dressed. She looked to be in her mid-40s, and her unlined face and high cheekbones bespoke a sense of humor and an intelligence which was telegraphed by her facial expressions on occasion as she talked with the man. She was wearing a ring with a stone which, if it were a diamond (and how can you tell from across the room?) would have kept me alive for a year. It was big enough that I wondered if it were real. Next to her were two guys, one young, one old, who were just finishing, and right by the entrance to the room was another pair of men who were always taking out hand-held devices and running figures. Both were speaking English, one with a notable French accent, one with the kind of accent native speakers get when they’ve been speaking another language for a long time. I never did figure out what kind of business they were in.

The Bourgignon appeared at last, and with it a round white thing with brown bits showing which turned out to be made up of potatoes, onions, and bacon, all molded into the shape of a cake layer. As for the stew, it was perfumed with the wine, cooked long enough that the bits of meat could be cut with a spoon, the whole thing topped with a few pearl onions and tiny carrots. I cautioned myself to go very slowly; this was too good to eat too quickly: the stew, the potatoes, the wine. It was, I began to realize, ridiculously old-fashioned, as was the decor. There was a shelf which went around the room on three sides. One part had ladies’ straw hats, the one above me men’s top hats, and the long wall against which the large party was seated was a hat miscellany which included a pilot’s helmet and a diver’s rig.

The two English-speaking guys were presented with a cheese plate and a new bottle of white wine, which they insisted on sharing with the hosts. Madame politely took a bit in a glass and they talked for a while. Finally, the American said something in French which ended with the word “mistress,” and Madame straightened up, grabbed her glass and stalked from the room. I could see her, though, as she staggered up to the bar, finally able to let loose the laughter she hadn’t wanted to let go in the dining room. She was laughing and gasping for air so loudly that the American wondered if she were okay. She eventually got herself under control, walked back in the room with a few tears still leaking out of her eyes, said something concise, and everyone laughed some more.

Even with the uptight bourgeoisie splayed against the back wall, I felt right at home in this place, which was inexplicable because I wasn’t really interacting with anyone. But there was nonetheless a feeling of being guests, not customers, and it was a groove that was easy to fall into. Before long, though, I was finished, and being uncertain of the eventual bite, I declined dessert or cheese. Monsieur presented the bill, a whopping €44.40 — 14 more than I’d wanted to spend, and just about half the money in my pocket.

I knew I was returning to extreme financial uncertainty, the possibility that I’d be completely out of money when I got back to Berlin. I knew I didn’t have any work ahead of me, and only one magazine owed me money and was so overdue that I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever see it. I had no ideas what bills would have come in the mail while I was gone. I suspected I’d have a letter from my landlord waiting — he hadn’t heard from me since December, after all — and as it turned out I was right.

But none of that mattered right at that moment. I’d had one of the best meals of my life, in surroundings that were eccentric and redolent of an age that’s definitely past. I’d felt at ease and happy to be alive. That’s what I’d paid for, and you can’t put a price tag on it.

Monsieur had opened the front door and was standing outside on the sidewalk. What, I asked him, was that potato thing? “Gallette Lyonnaise,” he answered. “Potatoes, onions, bacon. You put it on the plate to look like a cake, which is why the ‘gallette.'” “And the potatoes make it Lyonnaise,” I said. “Exactly.” The air was cool and bracing. “You are at a hotel?” he said, pointing down the hill. “The hotel,” I said, pointing up the hill. “Ah, rue Lafayette,” he decided. I didn’t disabuse him. He extended his hand. “Well, my friend, thank you very much. Come again.” I told him I would and he went back inside. I started the climb to the firetrap I was going to call home for the night.

* * *

Post script: In writing this, I pulled out my bill for the first time since I’d paid it. Weirdly, it looks like the wine, at 19.80, was the most expensive thing on the ticket, since I remember the terrine at 7.80 and the Bourgignon at 16.80. Clever trick, although I can’t prove anything because Monsieur’s handwriting is totally unreadable. And this Frommer’s review confirms that this wasn’t just a lucky find — if nothing else, the award from the French tourism folks confirms that there may be some calculation in what I saw. Still, the chef’s credentials from places like the Cordon Bleu were genuine, and showed. It was a great way to end the trip.

Restaurant de la Grille, 80 rue du Faubourg Poissoniere, 75010 Paris. Reservations: 47 70 89 73

And the debate on the websites continues about SXSW — did they shut down parties they didn’t control by releasing a list of them to the police and fire departments? is music doomed? did Iggy suck or not? — while I think that the most shocking music-related shark-jump happened sometime in the last year without anybody telling me about it: Gibson Guitars seems to have donated a bunch of 8-foot-tall guitars for local “artists” to paint or otherwise decorate under the aegis of a corporate sponsor in much the way that Berlin’s got its stupid bears, Chicago its stupid cows, and so on. Ever since Austin declared itself the “live music capital of the world” I’ve been waiting for the city to make a really boneheaded gesture in that direction, and now I can relax, because they sure have.

* * *

Food in Austin’s been mainly on the go, with no great new discovery yet, although it’s wonderful to see that my pal Sappachai has opened a Madam Mam’s in South Austin. I’ve known him since he was the manager of my local supermarket in Austin, and got passed over for promotion and was certain it was racially-based. He decided to open a Thai restaurant, of which we had none at the time, and arranged a partnership with a cousin, as well as backing from some rich Thai guys. He confessed, though, that he was scared: they didn’t think Americans liked spicy food. I told him that the solution was to take them to a Mexican place — I think I even recommended one — because the first thing that would happen would be that the waiter would plonk down some chips and salsa (and I recommended a place with good fiery stuff). When the Thais noted all the gringos (and farangs) around them nonchalantly eating fire on chips, they’d get the picture.

And thus it was that Satay was born, a sort of pan-Southeast Asian restaurant which spawned a family of sauces and other jarred groceries. Sap and his cousin argued, though, and he went over to the UT campus area and opened a little hole-in-the-wall place called Thai Noodle, which, despite its near-inaccessibility, did very well. But a long-lost romance re-bloomed in Thailand, and Sap went back for a while, returning married to his high-school sweetheart, whose mother, Madam Mam, was a masterful cook. Along with his new wife, he had a bunch of Madam Mam’s recipes, and, in an incredibly audacious move, he rented a huge storefront on Guadelupe — “the Drag,” as UT students call it — and opened a vastly expanded version of his old Thai Noodle joint, with entrees starting at $3.00 and going up to $14 for an astonishing catfish soup with an incendiary, fruit-infused broth that rated 5 or 6 chiles on the menu (which markings are to be taken seriously) and remains one of the most amazing things I’ve ever eaten.

Needless to say, with a menu that pleased both impoverished students and high-end foodies, not to mention one so vegetarian-friendly that whole tables of various Indians and hippies were a full-time feature, he started printing money, so it was with great pleasure that I accompanied Patrick and Denise down to his brand-new joint for my second meal here on this trip. Denise really scored with a special, which I’ve just returned from enjoying myself: a sort of coconut custard made with salmon and a fine spice mix, with chunks of salmon stirred into it and a bed of collard greens. Again, an incredible achievement.

On the other end of the spectrum, I had another great oyster po’boy from Gene’s, which I so loved last year. My love was somewhat diminished by the fact that it took me an hour and forty-five minutes to get my sandwich. There was a young guy who entered after me who’d phoned his order in and he left with his order with five minutes to get back to work. It’s a great place, but apparently not at the end of the week.

* * *

And what’s a trip to the States without some bumper stickers and t-shirts? There are many, many Republicans for Voldemort bumper stickers around Austin, but the one that had me chuckling most was non-political and said “Yes, this is my pickup truck. No, I will not help you move.” And anyone who’s been around bands on their way up will appreciate the t-shirt on a kid who got on my Denver-Austin flight on the way back from California: “Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver.”

* * *

The California trip was short and sweet, mostly concerned with meetings and hanging around Village Music, having dinner with some folks from the Well, and having lunch with legendary CREEM writer Jaan Uhelski at Viks Chaat, which I’d long wanted to try. I’ll have some photos of all of this later, but if you’re looking at their page, the Dahl Batata Puri was the winner, and I scored a couple of killer tiny Indian cookbooks at the grocery store next door, which was paradisical — if impractical for my Berlin-based Indian cooking needs. More different kind of dal than I’d ever seen, though. And I also had a great meal cooked by my friend Bob, whose long service as art director of Salon hasn’t diminished the talents that once made him the Bay Area’s best-kept secret chef, at whose restaurants the celeb chefs could be seen dining contentedly on their days off. All in all, a nice trip.

There’s more, but it involves photos that are hard for me to download at the moment, so stay tuned.

So today’s thinking exercise was going to a SXSW panel called Covering Music In New Media, moderated by my pal Jason Gross. The participants were Michael Azerrad from eMusic, Erik Flannigan of AOL, Amy Phillips of Pitchfork Media, mighty Mark Pucci (one of my favorite publicists) and someone I think was Nick Baily of Shorefire Media, another great publicist. The panel description ended with this sentence:

“Without a reliable and financially sustainable model for online media, what is a rock critic to do?”

Well, yeah.

Naturally, all the folks with dogs in the online media fight — Azerrad, Flannigan, and Phillips — sought to assure everyone that their online publications were as viable as the print ones, as opposed to the many unreliable bloggers and fan-sites. The talked about coping with the flood of product, the fight to maintain some sort of credibility in the face of illegal uploads and rumor-mongering. They said that discussing which online sites will eventually work and which won’t is like asking if Rolling Stone would survive in 1973 — a good point.

What they did not discuss is what every single writer I’ve talked to here has been talking about: there is no paying work. Anywhere. Rumors of magazines going broke abounded, and the most-spoken sentence was “Man, I can’t remember when it was ever this bad.” When I’d respond that I couldn’t, either, I got a shocked look, since I was writing about music something like 20 years before any of these other folks came on the scene. Nobody is making a living any more. Nice to have spent your life learning a trade you can no longer practice and can’t make a living at, eh?

“Great audience at this,” commented the irrepressable Jim Fouratt, who’s been in this business even longer than I have (well, by a year or two). “Half of ’em are dinosaurs and half of ’em are 18-year-olds.” And what we old folks had in common with our spiritual grandchildren was that neither of us can figure out how to make a living doing what we want to do. What we did not have in common with them was that once, we actually did, even if it was never a good one.

In a way, I’m lucky. Writing about art and culture for the Wall Street Journal for all that while liberated me from rock criticism, and I’m less and less interested in writing about (and listening to) music these days. Rock criticism has always paid less than any other cultural commentary, and that hasn’t changed: one major indie-rock mag pays its writers a dime a word. That’s what I got in the early ’70s, and those dimes were worth a whole lot more back then. If I can make the right connection (and getting out of Berlin would help me subject-wise), I’ve got a lot more to write about than ever before. A lot of the poor souls trudging around here are a lot more committed to one subject than I am, or they really don’t want to write about anything else. Or can’t. I’m itching to write about a whole lot of stuff, and I’ve already proven I can.

But where? As general-interest magazines die like there was a plague going around (and actually, I guess there is), the options get more limited, and there are more people competing for less space than ever before.

I sure don’t have any answers, but then, after an hour and a quarter, neither did anyone on Jason’s panel. You either wrote for a website with good writing that doesn’t pay, or you squeezed yourself into someone’s idea that 700 words is just about all anyone needs to write about anything and got paid commensurately. Blender, the reigning paper rock mag, doesn’t allow record reviews of over 80 words, for the most part.

I’ve currently got two book proposals out, neither for a music-related book. I hope one of them will give me the lifeline to make the changes I need in my life so that I can keep on doing the only thing I know how to do well enough to get paid for it. Neither has an agent who’s committed to it yet, though, so I’m living in suspended animation.

And posting on my blog.

Which doesn’t pay.

I’m grabbing a moment before I have to head in to the Austin Convention Center to interview Joe Boyd to jot down some of the stuff that’s happened so far on this trip.

***

Paris was okay, although the restaurant I ate at wasn’t worth noting (although it was inexpensive and not bad). The hotel was convenient to the Gare Montparnasse, which is where the buses to the airport leave from, and it occurred to me that Montparnasse is worth a walk when I have time. There was a nearby bar called Le Chien Qui Fume, whose neon smoking dog I’d have liked to get a picture of, although whether or not I have the skills to do this is quite another question.

I saw a number of election posters for Segolene Royale, the Socialist candidate (and, potentially, France’s first woman president, although her chances don’t look too good a the moment) with the slogan “A fairer France is a stronger France,” and I mused that this is a slogan both stirring and, uh, empty. Think about it: what on earth does it meant?

The bus to the airport has a video loop it plays, presumably to distract you from the not-so-inspiring scenery after you leave the city limits, and, as on the other trips I’ve taken on it recently, there was a longish public service announcement about pedophilic sex tourism. A good cause, of course, but a strange thing to see over and over, the litany of how many years in foreign jails various men have gotten. Do a significant number of Air France’s passengers to Charles de Gaulle Airport have sexual predation in mind at their destinations? That seemed to be the message.

Spotted on the way out of town, another Parisian eatery we won’t be patronizing: Cheaper Food Sandwiches.

***

I haven’t seen much music yet here, mostly because I’ve wanted to re-read Joe Boyd’s book White Bicycles to prepare for this afternoon’s interview. Jon Hardy (who was turned down yet again for a showcase here this year) recommended I see some of his friends from St. Louis who’d moved to New York, a band called the White Rabbits, and it was a good tip. They feature a very intense piano-playing guy, a more serene guitarist, and three other guys who move back and forth among bass, keyboards, percussion, and three drum sets. I didn’t catch enough lyrics to see if the songwriting’s there, and there’s a bit of sameness to the material which ought to even out when they write more songs. I’d be very interested to see them in a year.

Last night, of course, there was no choice: I had to at least try to get into the Stax show at Antone’s. Although the line went around the block, by some miracle I got in, and at long last got to see Booker T and the MGs, who are probably the greatest band-as-band America has produced. I mean this in kind of a jazz sense: the way the four original members, Booker T. Jones, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Steve Cropper, and Al Jackson, Jr. (who was murdered years ago: his place was taken by one of his cousins)(and yes, I know Lewis Steinberg was the original bassist), interacted almost telepathically and could raise material as bathetic as “More” and “Summertime” to astonishing heights. Forty years later, Cropper’s let the guitar-hero thing go a little bit to his head (Steve! It was all about the minimalism of your playing!), Booker seems less invested in the results, and Dunn is still the greatest bass player around, but hey, what do you want after all this time? An hour of Booker T music was something worth waiting for.

William Bell has still got it, too, and his snazzy pinstripe suit, dark sunglasses, and soul-man show was way too brief. Hunger got me out of the building during Eddie Floyd’s set. I know he’s not as young as he once was, but this “clap your hands” schtick gets old fast. And I’d seen what I’d come for, and was glad.

* * *

And I was hungry. I’ve gotten some good food here, and will probably do a full post on it later, but so far the big discovery was just a couple blocks from my hotel. My friend Scoop, whom I hadn’t seen in eons, has moved here, and he came in from his Rancho Deluxe in Bastrop County to have lunch with me. We headed for the Tâm Deli, the superb Vietnamese place Jean Caffeine turned me on to last year, only to find it closed Tuesdays, so we decided just to cruise until we found a taqueria. Buried in a strip-mini-mall, bundled with a convenience store, an auto insurance agency, and a pool hall, was Jefe’s, which I picked because they also run a taco truck, which was parked out front. We had tacos al pastor, which is marinated pork, and the order came with two squeeze bottles of salsa, one kind of brick colored, the other a pale green. Both were astonishing, the red having citrus undertones and hellfire overtones, the green subtly fiery with a wonderful herb combination. Four tacos, $4.99. I’m going back.