a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Monday, May 30, 2005 Ooops!Sorry for the blackout. You'd think, wouldn't you, that a hosting service might have no trouble contacting a webmaster with some sort of paperwork problem as long as that hosting service was also in charge of his e-mail address? Surely the webmaster can't be that hard to find? Anyway, GoDaddy.com has been dumped, and now you're being served up every day by the fine people at TextDrive, a division of Textism. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:46 AMThursday, May 26, 2005 OMG So we turn the corner on like this old bridge in Berlin and we look at the river and there's, like, a bunch of Germans in beach chairs. Getting their groove on to Michael Jackson or whatever. I'm like, "Where'd this sand come from?" and somebody else is all, "Maybe they shipped it over from Manhattan Beach. [Scroll to the bottom.] Or, like, the Baltic Coast." UPDATE: Photo credit Lisa Drostova. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:25 PM Wednesday, May 25, 2005 More on Rosenthaler Platz Here's an image of the old Berlin wall, with Rosenthaler Tor front and center (under the "H"). The map looks south, toward Alexanderplatz and Museum Island. The triangle or trig-compass shape at the right is formed by Auguststrasse and Oranienburgerstrasse. The circle marks the site of future courtyards near Hackescher Markt; the image comes from a little book about one of them. Moses Mendelssohn would have entered Berlin from this direction. Mendelssohn blended strains of Jewish thought with liberal Enlightenment philosophy, paving the way for future writers like I.B. Singer and (sorry!) Saul Bellow. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 3:13 PM Monday, May 23, 2005 AlsoEd Ward at Berlin Bites has a moving description of Austin as it used to be (for you Texan readers) as well as a post about Rosenthaler Platz, near my apartment, which centuries ago (at the time of the old Berlin wall) was the site of the only city gate Jews were allowed to enter. For some reason I learned this tidbit almost as soon as I moved to Berlin -- I think it's the reason this neighborhood was traditionally Jewish -- but Ed's right; you'd have no way of knowing it from the public signage. Berlin has a glowing chance to post a sign that says, "Moses Mendelssohn entered Berlin here in 1743 and changed the course of European thought." But all the memorials are negative, shameful, and dark. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:08 PM (0) commentsStrange Rumblings...Some people have noticed the blogroll-reshuffle. It doesn't mean a thing. If you've been moved from "Berlin" to "Friends," it's because you're blogging more about Irvine than Berlin (Desyl). If you've moved from "Friends" to "Los Angeles" it's because you have cool photos of L.A. on your blog, not because we've quit being friends (Greg and Molli). From now on "Friends" will include any friend of mine not blogging relentlessly about Berlin or L.A. -- not likely, in other words, to give my readers a sense of either town.Speaking of L.A., here's the video blog of a woman who set out to walk most of L.A.'s neighborhoods, without a set schedule, without hotel reservations, with only a vague idea of where to go. She's had one false start, but the project may still be interesting. For all you urbanists! posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:56 PM (2) comments Sunday, May 22, 2005 ZingGerhard Schroeder's party lost an election in its home state today, North Rhine-Westphalia -- which it's led for almost 40 years -- and that's enough for Schroeder and other leaders to suggest moving the next national poll up a year, to this fall, perhaps because they're sick of having jobs. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:49 PMFriday, May 20, 2005 Asparagus SeasonEast Berlin's sci-fi antique, the Telespargel, in various spring moods.From Monbijou Bridge:  From Sophienstrasse:  From Oranienburgerstrasse: 
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
12:43 PM
A morning with the Berliner Dom:  Nochmal Oranienburgerstrasse:  Nochmal Sophienstrasse, only shrouded: 
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
11:05 AM
Oh, and here it is in 1978, next to a sparkling-new Palast der Republik: 
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
7:59 AM
Foreign Correspondence 2Hey look, I'm headlining over at the Pacific New Service this week. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:52 AMThursday, May 19, 2005 Political DiseaseSome people who've gotten e-mail from me in the last few months have been hit by a barrage of German spam. This is extremely strange -- I get no German spam, and I never open weird attachments -- but Sober.Q is an epidemic in western Europe, and right now it's spreading right-wing propaganda with the idea of swaying an election in North Rhine-Westphalia. Here's a technical description. When I find e-medication I'll post that, too.UPDATE: OK, so maybe I'm not the source of this virus on certain computers in California. But I'd like to remind everyone that Radio Free Mike gets hilarious and insightful reader commentary, every day of the week. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:44 AM Tuesday, May 17, 2005 Time for a Dirty Picture From Erotica Universalis, from Taschen. Allegedly a real tomb painting. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:01 AM (9) comments Saturday, May 14, 2005 "Bellow is a fucking bore"A couple of readers don't much like Saul Bellow, so I'm extending Bellow Month into mid-May for a final example of why we got so worked up over his death here at Radio Free Mike. If this won't convert you, I quit trying. All-y'all will just have to humor my quirky little obsession.A Chicago bathhouse, from Humboldt's Gift: ... The patrons of the Russian Bath are cast in an antique form. They have swelling buttocks and fatty breasts as yellow as buttermilk. They stand on thick pillar legs affected with a sort of creeping verdigris or blue-cheese mottling of the ankles. After steaming, these old fellows eat enormous snacks of bread and salt herring or large ovals of salami and dripping skirt-steak and they drink schnapps. They could knock down walls with their hard stout old-fashioned bellies. Things are very elementary here. You feel that these people are almost conscious of obsolescence, of a line of evolution abandoned by nature and culture. So down in the super-heated subcellars all these Slavonic cavemen and wood demons with hanging laps of fat and legs of stone and lichen boil themselves and splash ice water on their heads by the bucket. Upstairs, on the television screen in the locker room, little dudes and grinning broads make smart talk or leap up and down. They are unheeded. Mickey who keeps the food concession fries slabs of meat and potato pancakes, and, with enormous knives, he hacks up cabbages for coleslaw and he quarters grapefruits (to be eaten by hand). The stout old men mounting in their bed sheets from the blasting heat have a strong appetite. Below, Franush the attendant makes steam by sloshing water on the white-hot boulders. These lie in a pile like Roman ballistic ammunition. To keep his brains from baking Franush wears a wet felt hat with the brim torn off. Otherwise he is naked. He crawls up like a red salamander with a stick to tip the latch of the furnace, which is too hot to touch, and then on all fours, with testicles swinging on a long sinew and the clean anus staring out, he backs away groping for the bucket. He pitches in the water and the boulders flash and sizzle. There may be no village in the Carpathians where such practices still prevail.posted by Michael Scott Moore | 4:04 PM (9) comments Friday, May 13, 2005 Stateside Politics Trickling Through the High Brandenburg CloudsThe most-forwarded piece this week on the LA Times site is about that British memo on war plans for Iraq in 2002. Is there any defense for Bush about the memo? Any hoax theory or some other smokescreen? Hard to tell; Instapundit is blogging about video gear.Meanwhile, Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes turned up on the Tonight Show to spit out a protest song, "When the President Talks to God." People have used the word "Dylanesque." Yeah, well. As a ballsy, eloquent protest gesture, it is. As a song, it's not. And the Washington Post has a jarring piece on the sudden death of a whole Marine squad in western Iraq. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:37 PM Ding, Dong the Witch is DeadThe critic John Simon has been dismissed from his post at New York magazine. Playbill doesn't say why. But in general Simon made a career of losing friends in Manhattan, which is roughly a stage critic's job. When I was a critic I read the old Simon for inspiration, even if I didn't agree with him. But "the old Simon" means his writing from thirty and forty years ago -- when he was still pungent. For at least the last decade he's just been sour.In any case the artist-critics are still the best: George Bernard Shaw's bombardments still rattle the bones even if the plays he saw (never mind the symphonies, or early films) have retired. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:15 PM Wednesday, May 11, 2005 Nazis Raus! 2On Sunday Berlin had a "Day of Democracy" party with beer and wurst and outdoor concerts in front of the Brandenburger Tor, to celebrate -- or commemorate -- V-E Day. The party shoved aside a rally by neo-Nazis, who wanted to march past Berlin's new Holocaust memorial and show their faces at the Brandenburger Tor. Instead, they gathered at Alexanderplatz, behind the train station. Here you see them registering with Berlin cops, in a tent, as a prelude to marching down Unter den Linden:  The police blockaded the area around Alexanderplatz to keep other people from throwing things at the Nazis. I wound up at this blockade, at the top of Unter den Linden.  It turned out to be a flashpoint. Thousands of people gathered -- up to ten thousand, not all at this blockade -- to turn the Nazis back. People broke into the condemned Palast der Republik. People flew Israeli and American and anarcho-socialist flags.  In the end the police made a loose count of the people here, then compared it to the number of neo-Nazis (under 3000) and cancelled the march because of "riot danger." The Nazis wouldn't have gotten past this crowd; but they never even left Alexanderplatz. The police had to haul them away in vans.  The sign says, "Anyone who marches here has understood nothing." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:31 PM (1) comments Sunday, May 08, 2005 Nazis Raus!Today on Unter den Linden several thousand Berliners turned out to prevent a couple of thousand neo-Nazis from marching through town. "Journalistically speaking, you're in the right place," one of the activists said to me. Now AP is running a story and photo of the crowd. If the resolution were good enough you could probably find me right there near the Israeli flag (which caused some controversy). More photos, & story, later. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:46 PMSaturday, May 07, 2005 The Italian Dog-Washing MachineI was going to post something about a dog-washing machine unveiled in Italy that will apparently torture your pooch with a half-hour spin cycle -- I heard the story yesterday on BBC -- but I can't find a link. So you'll have to content yourselves with an op-ed by Günter Grass on the occasion of May 8, the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II. It's like getting oatmeal instead of cannoli, I realize. Tough. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:32 PMMonday, May 02, 2005 Free at LastThis week in 1945 Germany lost the war: Hitler shot himself in the bunker and Berlin capitulated. The photograph above shows the Gendarmenmarkt, near Checkpoint Charlie, on a pretty evening last month. The photograph below shows the same plaza in May 1944. "The population decided -- out of sheer panic at first -- to carry on as if nothing had happened," writes W. G. Sebald in A Natural History of Destruction. Sunday, May 01, 2005 Test PatternNo use blogging right now, but you may be interested in what Radio Free Mike looks like in German. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:31 PM (3) comments | |
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