a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Monday, February 28, 2005 I Heart My New German Dictionaryapeshit, ADJ "to go ~" (sl) ausflippen inf posted by Michael Scott Moore | 4:54 PMSunday, February 27, 2005 On the Down-LowThis made my day. There's an article about the guy in the New York Times, but I won't link to it, because he prefers to remain anonymous.WARNING: Romanian music. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:56 PM Friday, February 25, 2005 President Bush Laughs at SelfOver a question on democracy in Russia, Bush defended his good friend Vladimir Putin, but said he really stuck it to him about a few recent, ah, undemocratic decisions --We had a discussion about some decisions he's made. [laughs] He's had some interest in decisions I've made. And that's a very important dialogue.Couple of jokers, Vladimir and George. Ribbing each other about a little jailing of dissidents here, a little pre-emptive war there. Couple of democratically-minded guys, spreading the vote to all the world. Not perfect, maybe, but, workin' on it. And that's a very important dialogue. By the way, no one in Germany seems to know why Gerhard Schroeder met Bush in Mainz instead of Berlin. Imagine Margaret Thatcher flying to Memphis and asking Reagan to make a special trip out for a chat and a wave at the cameras. Of course the U.S. has a base in Wiesbaden, just up the road from Mainz; and moving the President is a dangerous undertaking in any part of the world; of course there were protests in Berlin anyway (not to mention Brussels and Mainz); and just imagine how the streets of Berlin might have looked with Bush in the way. Sure. But Mainz? By way of explanation I heard one BBC reporter say, "The president's father once visited Mainz." Oh. A kind of grand tradition. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:25 AM Thursday, February 24, 2005 But It Looks Like a Microwave One odd feature of the neighborhood is a "Babyklappe" in the side of the hospital they named after Hedwig. (Scroll down.) The very civilized idea behind a Babyklappe is that a young mother who really needs to abandon her child should have a full-service alternative to the corner garbage can. It works like this: open Babyklappe, insert child, close door firmly; run like hell. Since the hospital has a problem with curious pedestrians opening the Babyklappe just to see what sort of cupboard might have been devised for a tiny blubbering orphan, there's a note explaining that the door should not be opened unless you have a baby to abandon. (I assume it sets off an alarm.) And then a visual aid: "For your information we provide a photo of the interior of the Babyklappe."  Heat lamp, cotton blanket, steel door with window for nuns to observe the orphan: There are worse places to start a new life, I guess. But if the witch from "Hansel and Gretel" were alive today, she would own something just like it. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 3:31 PM Monday, February 21, 2005 Black Ass at the CrossroadsHow come our outlaw journalists keep blowing their heads off? Gary Webb hit a mysterious ceiling in his career; but I keep thinking of Thompson's brooding piece in The Great Shark Hunt called "What Brought Hemingway to Ketchum?" (Excuse any errors in the title; most of my books are on a ship in the mid-Atlantic.) A shotgun to the head was a way out for Hemingway after the juice had started to drain, and Thompson had just shown himself to be a lousy prognosticator with a cocky Rolling Stone piece retailing the reasons Kerry would win in November.But who knows? There's also the good old black ass, Hemingway's (and I think Winston Churchill's) evocative term for depression. UPDATE: Marc writes a fine obituary that remembers "Strange Rumblings in Aztlán" fondly but vivisects the big bad Thompson image, which of course dried up his genius. "The mourning" -- for the real Thompson -- "started long ago." ALSO: Walcott agrees that Thompson's death was "Hemingwayesque." But if you follow his link to Steve Gilliard you should also read Marc, as a tonic. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:33 PM Bad CrazinessThompson goes like Hemingway. Good night, sweet prince. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:26 AMSunday, February 20, 2005 Fluffy Mackerel PuddingYou think I'm joking. But no. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:05 AMSaturday, February 19, 2005 Boudins Noir aux Pommes2 onions 3 good apples 2 fresh store-bought Berliner Blutwurst Sugar Salt Couple of slabs of butter Chop onions and lightly fry until half-transparent and sweet. Add chopped apples. Simmer in own juice until apartment smells delectable. Add another slab of butter and Blutwurst. Cook 8-10 minutes until very hot, stabbing sausage skin to let black pudding spill into the onion and apple mishmash. Sugar and salt to taste. Invite over charming company. Serve with heavy dark bread and weissbier. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:53 PM Friday, February 18, 2005 Big Hamburger Street RevisitedAcross the street from the local burger joint is a weird trailer painted with "American" themes, including Elvis, the Statue of Liberty, Harleys, and a naked chick. I suspect the trailer's used as a travelling burger stand in summer and spring for the German equivalent of county fairs; but who knows. You can see from the paintings how basically pickled American pop culture can feel from across the chilly sea.
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
2:15 PM
Thursday, February 17, 2005 The Pleasures of East Berlin 2Last night I walked about twenty yards down the street from my apartment to see a new show by Peter Brook, Tierno Bokar, about an African Sufi Muslim who lived and taught in Mali around the start of the twentieth century. The set was a simple platform with wicker mats, a few wooden bowls, and a tree. The lights were hot and African. The actors spoke French, with German supertitles, which may have improved my French but distracted from watching the actors, who had a quiet, simple, unflamboyant style. Brook is known for his quiet ways, and in fact he came out personally to ask us to shut off our cell phones, treading the stage with so little fanfare that nobody clapped. (He likes it that way.) The production itself -- aside from the script -- was so close to perfect, and so effortless, that you wonder why everyone can't act that way. But at the end there was no applause. The stage emptied, the musicians put down their instruments, but there was no big flourish or curtain to say "show's over now -- clap," so nobody did. At first. After a minute the audience gave a big ovation, but in the discussion afterwards it was clear that some Berliners had found the play "didactic," and others had just liked sitting there for a few seconds without having to make a lot of noise.Tierno wasn't didactic. That word rolls out whenever the subject turns to religion. And the post-show discussion was like post-show discussions everywhere -- people stood up just to hear themselves talk. Brook ended it with impeccable manners, by saying: "Now I think we should come around to the point that I think we've all agreed upon, and that is the value of silence." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:04 PM Tuesday, February 15, 2005 These GermansBill Bryson seems to agree with me on at least one thing midway through his Europe book, Neither Here Nor There, in the deceptively-titled chapter, "Aachen and Cologne"*:I know an English journalist living in Bonn who was phoned at work by his landlady and instructed to come home and take his washing down from the line and rehang it in a more systematic manner. He told her, in so many words, to go fuck herself, but every time he put washing out after that he would return home to find it had all been taken down and rehung. The same man came in one weekend from cutting the grass to find an anonymous note on the doormat informing him that it was illegal to mow one's lawn in North Rhineland-Westphalia between noon on Saturday and 9am on Monday, and that any further infractions would be reported to the lawnmower police or whatever.* It's mostly about his unhappy memories of high-school German. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:41 AM Monday, February 14, 2005 58 percent... is the final turnout percentage in Iraq. Not 72 or whatever CNN reported at first, leading a few knee-jerk types to gloat. The raw total is still, oddly, about 8 million. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:01 PMUFOs Over IsfahanIt seems we're flying drones into Iranian skies to sniff around for nukes, and maybe learn what we can about the Iranian radar system. We've been doing it for a year. The story unraveled in December when Iranian villagers reporting UFOs became a national story:The drones were first spotted by dozens of Iranian civilians and set off a national newspaper frenzy in late December over whether the country was being visited by UFOs.I've been saying for a long time now that if anyone's responsible for UFO sightings around here, it's us. I just didn't realize the Pentagon was so intimately involved. Pravda publicized the Iranian sightings last month; here's another hysterically straight-faced Pravda report about the Soviet army engaging UFOs during the Cold War. It would all be just ticklesome if the drones in Iran weren't a prelude to war plans, which CNN -- duly, mysteriously -- keeps hyping. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:15 AM Sunday, February 13, 2005 When in BerlinLast Thursday was a matter of red wine, white beer, little peanut-butter snacks, and an evening of Brecht-Weill and Cole Porter standards in the rear of a smoky East Berlin bar. Sung by a sad-voiced woman who threw in some Tom Waits just to flatter the crowd. Ah, what fun. Except I had too much wine. I wound up in a bone-cold apartment on the western end of Ackerstraße, which used to be divided by the Wall. There was no behavior, as an old friend would have put it -- we were both too drunk. I wavered home in the cold sunshine and managed to teach a midday English class with a minimal headache.It was all a little too Christopher Isherwood. He had a way of spending time with women like a proper English gentleman, drinking too much and never quite having sex. But then Isherwood was a fruit. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:57 AM Wednesday, February 09, 2005 Dolly the Human?Ian Wilmut at the Roslin Institute has won a license in Great Britain to clone human stem cells for research into a nerve disease. Wilmut famously cloned Dolly the Sheep. If the forward march of cloning technology gives you the creeps, read this. It's my review of a book on cloning from about four years ago. The science has tromped on ahead, but most of the principles are the same.What should really scare you is not anything Wilmut is likely to do, but this development in another part of Europe: Spain's socialist Government announced details of a bill that would allow parents of a child with an incurable disease to conceive another baby to help save the sibling's life.As long as the second baby has full rights (and can't be killed or harmed for medicine), then in principle it's just like artificially conceiving a twin -- although one, weirdly, that may have old cells. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 4:54 PM Monday, February 07, 2005 One-Month Report
This place depressed me when I first moved in. It's cramped, drab, a little bare; the walls are East-German macadam and the view out the window is gray. The streets that seem foreign and charming when you visit (because of this patch of cobblestones, or that Wilhelminian church) seemed immediately -- I mean right away, while I still waited in the wet with my luggage for a friend to show up with the key -- mundane and oppressive. They felt like Old Europe in the worst sense: lacquered in history, finished. American streets always seemed a little slapdash and neglected, with unmended potholes or scars from the gas company, and I realized as soon as I landed that American unfinishedness was something liked and agreed with. It implies energy. If your streets feel temporary and utilitarian because your neighborhood, for example, butts up against the foggy temperamental Pacific -- if your city seems less than grand compared to the nature around it -- don't move. You're in the right place. That was my first impression. I hadn't boarded a plane out of distaste for America. I hadn't moved here because of George Bush. I also wasn't over the moon with reverence for Europe, German politics, or the so-called Berlin scene. Saul Bellow felt the same way about Paris when he moved there in 1948: I would not be boxing with Ezra Pound, as Hemingway had done, nor writing in bistros while waiters brought oysters and wine ... The Jazz Age Paris of American legend had no charms for me, and I had my reservations also about the Paris of Henry James.So what the fuck was I doing? Germans everywhere wanted to escape this potato-growing weather and go live in the place I had just abandoned. I'd given up an unfinished city and a beautiful group of friends, a position as a critic, a lyrical affair, an audience for my novel, two cats, a well-equipped kitchen, and a stereo system. Was I insane? A new friend here said, "You used to live near the beach? Aha." My ex-Communist bachelor pad felt like a stern demotion, and all it took was a live version of Thunder Road coming around on the laptop to remind me of all the youthful American energy I'd left behind. But after the collapse of my marriage -- something I couldn't control and still don't understand -- the home with the kitchen and cats no longer truly existed. In a way I had no home. Instead of living like a divorcé in a cheap Mission studio I wanted to learn from a place connected with toughness, hartnäckigkeit, sardonic humor, survival. Berlin, I have to say, hasn't let me down. The city doesn't feed your eyes with sunlight or dazzling views. But it does have massive, mazy, Prussian libraries, and more bookstores than I can count, and strong coffee that goes by the simple name of Milchkaffee (instead of something Italian); shops for woodwind instruments, shops for cigars, shops for bells; ordinary people who can describe what Poland was like before 1989; sophisticated women in boots; an assortment of unusual bars; tourists from Byelorussia; cinemas like you wouldn't believe, more museums than I can get to, simple earthy greasy food, stinking cheeses, and not just Cuban cigars in the corner restaurant but also Cuban rum in the local pool hall and an Irish drinking whiskey I could never find in America. You'll say this is all a distraction. Maybe so. But it's also a great cleansing agent. Berlin is a dark and sometimes appalling town, but it has a sensuality and a northern gloom that Bellow noticed in Paris, too -- "a spiritual force that acts not only on building materials, on walls and roof-tops, but also on your character, your opinions and judgments. It is a powerful astringent." 
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
8:23 PM
Saturday, February 05, 2005 The Dreadful Story of Mike and the Basement DoorThere's one thing about Germans that grates, if you're not ready for it: They like to criticize. They have no shame about staring at you in public and then passing summary judgement. I got through about three weeks in Berlin without a single note of censure from anyone, even after jaywalking once or twice. But a neighbor in the building yesterday must have realized my time was up, and finally let me have it. I came up from the basement storage room and he was waiting for me.He said, "Did you lock the door?" I nodded vaguely. Hadn't I? "Because someone hasn't been locking the basement door, and that's very dangerous." He went on about people stealing from the basement storage room. He was a middle-aged man with glasses and a scruffy beard. He spoke in some northern accent I wasn't familiar with, so I understood only every third or fourth word. He said he lived on the fifth floor. For some reason this made it even worse for him when people didn't lock the basement. In case of fire -- still worse. Or was an unlocked basement door actually a fire hazard? Either way, in his very civilized and patient complaint, the building had somehow caught fire, and he was trapped in his fifth-floor apartment, and this was all my fault. I must have looked confused. He said, "Well, you know, concrete also burns." Now I just wanted to go back to my apartment. I said, "I locked the basement door." "Aha! You did?" "I think so." We both went down to check. I had not. He smiled, tolerantly. After a few more mild remarks about fire, he let me go. Now I know all about this man's temperament, I know what his nightmares are like, and I know where he lives. But I still don't know his name. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:24 AM Friday, February 04, 2005 Thanking Christ for the BBCThe worst thing about BBC broadcasts in Europe is the sheer volume of sports coverage. It is exotic for me to hear that the West Indies resumed 5 for 149 on the third day of a contest in Pakistan, with bowlers pitching two wickets apiece, not that I have the slightest idea what that means, but do we have to hear it every hour?The Beeb does good features, though. One this week was about fleas. The reporter, who seemed terribly excited by his own topic, asked one expert off-the-cuff: Q: Does anyone know just how many species of fleas there are?Gripping radio, really. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:25 PM A Stupid Fucking Place to BeThe Florida home of Linda and John Dollar, for example. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:00 AMThursday, February 03, 2005 Oh, BrotherI just bought a printer off Amazon.de -- a no-nonsense Brother laser writer, for book-length jobs -- and had it delivered "overnight." No sooner did I send off my money than an e-mail came saying the printer would arrive in 2 or 3 days. ##%$$#!!@! How is that "overnight"? This was German efficiency? Well, never mind. The printer hurried right over the next morning. And it hums. Lovely. In some ways I'm easy to please. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:03 PMWednesday, February 02, 2005 Mea CulpaI was wrong. Big Hamburger Street does have a burger joint, even an American (sorry, "American") one, called The Sixties Café, right down there at the the corner of Oranienburgerstraße, overlooking Monbijou Park. But are the burgers any good? No. Well, they're OK. But for a place with Marilyn portraits and Route 66 scenery on the ceiling, the burgers have an awfully civilized, warmed-over taste. They're the kind of afterthought you'd expect on a Sizzler menu. You can order one with white wine, if you like.But still: better than the "burritos" on offer at Zoo Station. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 2:54 PM | |
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