a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Tuesday, August 30, 2005 Good HousekeepingFirst, blogging may fall off some in September; I start a bit of work for Spiegel Online, editing, translating, and writing. But when I publish something good, I'll link to it.Second, my novel. Just, you know, it's there. Links to Amazon in Britain and Deutschland have been added. Third, the neo-Nazi piece gets debated, sort of, on a Southern kinist site. Just search for the word Salon to find the 3 comments. Kinists are (mostly) American neo-Confederates who think people should keep with their own kind. What else they believe you can read for yourselves. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:49 PM (5) comments Hey, LookThe FedEx Furniture Guy -- mentioned over here by Derick, but independently famous -- is defended by our friend Jen Granick. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:45 PM (1) commentsWhy I Loathe CNNThe woman on TV just said said something about New Orleans' Garden District and added this bit of trivia: "You know, A Streetcar Named Desire, that's where that was, uh -- based out of."You mean set? Williams' play took place in the Garden District? Christ on a stick. A bank or a news network might be "based out of" New Orleans; you might even say a stage franchise like Beach Blanket Babylon is "based out of" San Francisco; but a story doesn't need to set up corporate HQ or pay state taxes in Delaware. It's just "based out of" your local library. Gawd. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:26 AM Sunday, August 28, 2005 A Cycle Tour Outside BerlinLast weekend, as promised, I took a spin through the Brandenburg countryside, with my friend Beth Wilmurt, who's been here all year with her scriptwriter / director / boyfriend Mark Jackson.We started in Spandau. The bike-only lane ran close to the narrow highway to Potsdam:  We passed through some pretty countryside,  and what I'm told are extremely rare wildflowers:  We discovered a mysterious castle facade, riddled with graffiti,  ... and passed a phony piece of the Berlin Wall. I suspect it's a placeholder for what not long ago was an actual remnant of the wall. Here's a map of the wall's path; we rode near the far left edge. People forget there was a wall on this side of West Berlin. But of course the concrete went all the way around.  Here's a picture of Beth, who can normally be seen onstage in San Francisco:  I should be clear that I didn't take cycling tours with Beth while I wrote for SF Weekly. I got to be friends with her and Mark only after we all merged, by accident, in Berlin. Mark set me up with my first apartment here, and now that I'm moving to a new one I'd like to take this chance to thank them both for helping out. The bike ride ended in Potsdam, where we passed a rhinoceros hanging from a scaffold. Have a look at this if you don't believe me. (Scroll down.) I can't explain why there was a rhinoceros hanging from a scaffold in Potsdam. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:48 PM (3) comments Saturday, August 27, 2005 Bush House, CrawfordTwo Headlines:Sunnis Urge Voters to Reject Constitution Bush Urges Compromise Over Iraqi Constitution I wonder if this will be the pivot-point in history books, the vacation month when Bush lost control of the war. Between the stagnation in Iraq and the mother camped outside his ranch, it looks very bad. From a distance it sounds to me like the Sunnis have acted like spoiled children, boycotting the polls in January only to fuck up constitution talks now; but they have a few legitimate grievances, and they do need to live semi-contentedly in the new Iraq. The thing to do is scuttle the constitution, start over, and think of this process as a lesson for the Sunnis that they have to participate. But Bush has no time for that. His own people are restless, and he wants his army out sooner, not later. Yet if he shoves through this patchwork constitution he not only risks all-out civil war in Iraq; he has to admit that his own party's notion of original intent is nostalgic bunkum. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 2:14 PM (6) comments Friday, August 26, 2005 Bush House, London This is the home of the BBC World Service. Note armed guards at the gate. If it looks like the headquarters of some sort of empire, I suppose that's no accident: The building sits near "Australia House" and "India House" on Aldwych Square. An American named Bush put this one up in the '20s -- no relation to the Connecticut cowboy -- and the statues stand for British-American friendship. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:53 AM Talkin' Bare Mountain Picnic BluesThe Augsburg Zoo may have had a tasteless African Village, but London has Londoners. No, really. It seems a few young Brits have volunteered to spend the weeked "almost bare naked and on display" at the London Zoo.Hat tip: Kuchen. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:23 AM Thursday, August 25, 2005 Gas Thief Escapes on Tricycleposted by Michael Scott Moore | 5:09 PM (1) commentsHey, Angie, Get Offa My CloudAngela Merkel's been stepping up and down from the podium at her campaign speeches to a Rolling Stones tune -- "Angie" -- meant to loosen up her dull, Christian-Democrat image. The Stones' legal department doesn't like it:The only ones not smiling however, are the Rolling Stones. "We didn't grant permission" for Merkel to use the song, a spokesman for the musicians told Time magazine. "We are surprised that permission was not requested. If it had been requested, we would have said no."But "Angie" is a desperately sad song -- it's like campaigning to Martha by Tom Waits or something by Leonard Cohen. Trying to buff your image with a break-up ballad seems somehow very German. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 3:36 PM Tuesday, August 23, 2005 He is Risen Detail from a lush and atmospheric cemetery in Prenzlauer Berg. The St.-Marien-Nikolai churchyard sits north of the Platz am Koenigstor, or King's Gate Plaza, which means that back in the day it would have been built just outside the city wall. The place is full of family mausoleums like this one, heavy with the Catholic pomp of death. Berlin's answer to Pere Lachaise? But no rock stars. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:32 AM (10) comments Monday, August 22, 2005 Harmonic ConvergenceHere is a lead to an anti-grieving mom rant.And now, here's another: Cindy Sheehan's son Casey died in Sadr City last year, and that fact is supposed to put her beyond reproach. For as the New York Times' Maureen Dowd informed us: ''The moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute."... by Mark Steyn. Think it's possible Hitchens and Steyn got the same memo on Cindy Sheehan? Hmmm. In any case, Steyn goes on in this vein: Ever since America's all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterize them as "children." If a 13-year-old wants to have an abortion, that's her decision and her parents shouldn't get a look-in. If a 21-year-old wants to drop to the broadloom in Bill Clinton's Oval Office, she's a grown woman and free to do what she wants. But, if a 22- or 25- or 37-year-old is serving his country overseas, he's a wee "child" who isn't really old enough to know what he's doing.I'm sorry, but everyone refers to soldiers as "kids." Our kids in uniform is just wartime jargon, and Steyn thinks he can make silly-liberal hay out of a trope Republicans know damn well how to exploit when they need to. That shit won't fly here at Radio Free Mike. Steyn goes on to compare the collapse of Sheehan's marriage to a rift within the Democratic party, then seems to notice his lapse in taste, backpedals, and lurches into something worse: Sorry about that, but, if Mrs. Sheehan can insist her son's corpse be the determining factor in American policy on Iraq, I don't see why her marriage can't be a metaphor for the state of the Democratic Party.Right. Cindy Sheehan's vigils may become a determining factor in American policy on Iraq -- disastrously -- and so men like Hitchens and Steyn have to make idiots of themselves blaming her for the shift, as if she had it planned this way all along, as if you couldn't have predicted a peace movement swelling around a grieving widow back when the "weapons of mass destruction" thing fell apart in 2003. It absolutely doesn't matter if Cindy Sheehan's "take on Iraq" is right or wrong. Rational debate isn't what got us into this war in the first place, and what the pundits are helplessly watching in Crawford is a natural human answer to Bush's insulting leadership, which has treated the whole nation like kids. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:48 PM Sunday, August 21, 2005 For You American ReadersSomething in the Plattenbau has woken up my asthma, so I've gone looking for a new apartment. I found one with a nice big fridge and a balcony around Helmholtzplatz, which as it turns out was the first part of East Berlin I ever saw, six years ago. We walked from Prenzlauer Allee to a restaurant called Frida Kahlo and felt like we were in Poland. Back then I wrote: "Prenzlauer Berg at night has silent streets walled in by vast Mietskaserne; the buildings are graffiti-ridden and lit in a brooding Communist orange ... [It's] the city's next candidate for gentrification by yuppies -- the German capital's East Village -- but the neighborhood where we found a lone Internet cafe on a darkened street still had a satisfying edge of danger."Yes, and one of those same streets now has a big store for children's clothes. The neighborhood crawls with pregnant mothers. Here's what it looks like in the sunlight:  Does this make me a yuppie? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:21 AM (12) comments Friday, August 19, 2005 The Pope in Cologne?Huh? Does he even wear cologne? I looked up "pabst" and "koeln" on Google Image and came up with this.UPDATE: Yes, I know, Papst and Pabst are different. But how was I supposed to come up with a sinful pope reference by spelling it correctly? Sheesh, people. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:08 AM Thursday, August 18, 2005 Sinister PiffleWith all his usual sensitivity and none of his usual intelligence, Christopher Hitchens tried to dog-pile Cindy Sheehan last Monday for being -- oh, not a grieving mother per se, but a grieving mom with the wrong point of view. A sin like that can get you, let's see, 1) insulted for your faulty logic, 2) dismissed as a shallow PR sorceress, and 3) linked with David Duke! All in the same op-ed! But wait -- how is Cindy Sheehan like David Duke? By announcing in a letter that her son was "killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel."Hitchens scolds Sheehan for writing this letter and buying the oversimplified "Michael Moore/Ramsey Clark school of Iraq analysis" wholesale. He says she therefore can't be taken seriously as a pundit, or a public figure, or a "PR-knackish" tool of the left, or whatever she is. Especially since David Duke buys the same ball of wax. My answer to this was going to be that Michael Moore and Ramsey Clark aside, Cindy Sheehan or someone like her was bound to occur, because American kids are getting blown up in an unpopular war. Everyone sees that Bush lied; Americans can't see anymore why we're there. It's really that simple. It was a massive failure of leadership after September 11, when the world was largely with us. I don't like the Michael-Moore school of analysis; I think the Iraq War was just the easiest response in front of Bush after 9/11, since the brave and honest response -- facing down the Saudi family and liberalizing Arabia -- was such an intractable bitch. (And still isn't resolved.) We had a military lock on Iraq, after all, and Saddam was a bad guy, and wouldn't it be good to have a democratic regime and a few bases and some friends there in charge of the oil? Yes, of course. I thought so, too, in theory. I also don't think the troops should come home right now, since Iraq will collapse if they do. But let's not pretend Cindy Sheehan is a surprise. Because Bush went to war not by talking sense; not, as Retired General Anthony Zinni has said, by arguing the strategic merits; but by telling a lie -- the sort of paranoid sinister untruth about bombs that got Jean Charles de Menezes executed in cold blood on the London tube last month. This is not funny. It's not small. It's not a minor suspension of disposable freedoms or credibilities for the larger good of defeating terrorist thugs. What happened to the Brazilian could happen to you or me. But Hitchens goes further. He writes: Then there is the question of civilian control over the military, which is an authority that one could indeed say should be absolute. The military and its relatives have no extra claim on the chief executive's ear. Indeed, it might be said that they have less claim than the rest of us, since they have voluntarily sworn an oath to obey and carry out orders.In a neat bit of legerdemain Hitchens sweeps Cindy Sheehan into the military, along with her dead son, and turns the "question of civilian control" against her, when the whole fucking point of civilian control is to ensure that civilians like Cindy Sheehan don't lose their sons in a frivolous war. Anyway. That would have been my response, if I hadn't learned that Sheehan may not have written the letter. Either she signed some boilerplate thing, or it's a hoax, or she's backpedaling. In any case, she denies holding the views Hitchens bashes her for. Now that Hitchens has stepped boldly onto the faltering pulpit reserved for those who would associate a soldier's mom with a former Klan Grand Wizard just to score a political point, his line of argument has vanished, which makes him look not just sinister but full of the same rhetorical piffle that seems to possess the rest of the right when it comes to defending this war. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:45 AM (1) comments Wednesday, August 17, 2005 The Discombobulated CantabridgianIn Cambridge I lived like a Trinity College fellow for one night in the Masters' Lodge, where you get a small garret with nice furniture, towels and soap, a private bathroom in the hall, and a "gyp room" -- not quite a kitchen, but stocked with tea -- for not really all that much money. Here's the front yard: You also get an invitation to breakfast in the dining hall, but I had to catch a bus before breakfast. On the gatehouse to Trinity there's a small statue of Henry VIII with a chair-leg in his hand:  And crossing the Cam River behind Queens College is the "mathematical bridge," designed by Isaac Newton or something. Note punter struggling with his boat at a weird angle to the stream:  You'll also notice the weather is glowery. Cambridge is impossibly posh and old, with more snob appeal than I can really handle, and more history than I could absorb; but it also felt English in the best way -- placid, clear, rain-washed, rational, cool as clotted cream. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:30 AM Tuesday, August 16, 2005 Why Do Neo-Nazis Hate America?And related questions are considered in a piece of mine on the far-right scene in Germany, over at Salon. I encourage everyone to buy a pass; otherwise you have to sit and stare at an ad for a minute or so. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:38 AM (3) commentsMonday, August 15, 2005 This is the Gherkin ... in the middle of London. It's a Norman Foster creation, meaning it's related to the Reichstag dome. London is unrecognizable to me now. When I was there sometime last century I remember the city feeling less intense than Manhattan. But now people are pushy and rude, just like New Yorkers. I suppose that's because the economy's booming. The mainstream nightlife feels like L.A.'s -- meaning silly, vain, expensive, and coke-fueled -- which depresses me, because I thought London would have something to teach California, not the other way around. But when I brought this up to a Pennsylvanian in a sushi restaurant, she said, "Oh -- no. It's not. I don't like LA." I think I'd stained her idea of London, or herself in London. "I'm an easterner at heart." But she was the pushy MBA student who affected a British accent and said, "Thanks, you're such a dear," to a waiter after cajoling him into adding some avocado to a tuna roll. I felt right at home. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:49 PM (3) comments I Like the Shotgun Guy in CrawfordHe won't commit to really liking Bush. He said -- not quoted in this piece, though I saw it on tee-vee -- "Ah think of it like comp'ny. If yer brother-n-law came over fer five days, wouldn't it start to stink after a while?" At least the man's honest. Another thing he said, which is utterly undeniable, was, "This is Texas." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:30 PM (5) commentsThursday, August 11, 2005 Pause Off to London. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:02 AM Den Kindern ein Gutes Vorbild Geben!Sattva over at Raskal Trippin breaks down the possible motivations of German adults who yell at her for jaywalking in front of children. This is a serious problem in Germany. It's not as bad in Berlin, though, and I think maybe things have improved nationwide in the last few years. A decade ago in Cologne I got yelled at by the kids themselves, in this case a pair of 14 year olds on bikes. Those were dark times. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:00 AM (3) commentsWednesday, August 10, 2005 Ostalgie Detail of my apartment yard in Berlin. Why "Made in GDR" in English? But notice the manufacturing symbol in the middle: ED fused with a little Communist hammer. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:39 PM (2) comments I Heart My German Dictionary 3ab • ge • fuckt ADJ knackered (Brit slang) posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:34 PMTuesday, August 09, 2005 Tor Here's a good photo of the Brandenburger Gate around the May 8 commemorations of World War II. It's an optical illusion -- a photo from just after the war was spread out as a canvas in Pariser Platz, and from the right angle you could juxtapose the rebuilt gate and the ruin. Picture credit goes to Rachel, when she was here with my old friend Mike. UPDATE: Anyone know why the quadriga on top of the gate faces across Pariser Platz, towards the east? If it was like that in the days of the old Berlin wall -- the one that circled the city in the 17th and 18th centuries, when this was a real entrance -- the horses and chariot would have faced into town instead of outwards, to impress visitors. Isn't that weird? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:40 AM (6) comments Monday, August 08, 2005 HastaIbrahim Ferrer just died. I know, I know, so did Peter Jennings. And believe me, I'll miss him. CNN seems to think "news" means "flatten your audience with a sense of drama and self-importance" -- something Jennings avoided. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:11 PMSunday, August 07, 2005 Bear!I came across this a few months ago utterly by accident, riding my bike around by the Maerkisches Museum. I swung into Koellnische Park, and suddenly three yards away was a great man-eating animal in a sort of well-appointed pit. Sure, they're a city symbol; but I wonder if Berlin's the only world capital with public bears?
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Thursday, August 04, 2005 More Evidence of Berlin's Cultural Decline The slogan at the bottom says, "Play it again Dieter, and remember the old times!" Good Lord, who is he? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:45 PM (5) comments Tuesday, August 02, 2005 Snobbery in Berlin1. "There are no good bakeries here." 2. "Berlin's not really a bicycling town." 3. "Finding an apartment is getting so hard." 4. "Mitte ist Scheisse." 5. "The days have gotten shorter already, I swear it's dark by 9:30." 6. "Bavarian beer?" 7. "What's wrong with Beck's?" posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:40 PM Monday, August 01, 2005 Oh Good, I'm Safe NowGermany Imposes No-Fly Zone Over Central Berlin. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:33 PM | |
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