a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Wednesday, May 31, 2006 Boheme Sauvage Here's a belated furtive camera photo from the Weimar burlesque thing at Bassy Club last week. It was hot, dad. Berlin does have a swing scene! (Sort of.) posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:59 AM (0) comments Tuesday, May 30, 2006 Oprah Goes to Auschwitz!I thought it was a joke, too. But no. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 4:59 PM (2) commentsSunday, May 28, 2006 The Horror Berlin's slick new glass Hauptbahnhof opened this weekend, complete with solar cells embedded in the roof-panes and vast shopping opportunities. Here's how it looked on Sunday. It's the largest station in Europe. Also Berlin's first central station (where Paris-to-Moscow passengers can theoretically step out and wave to people traveling from Copenhagen to Istanbul). That's a little weird, since trains were as important for Berlin's industrial boom as they were for Chicago's. But a customs wall still surrounded the city's core when the first stations went up in the 19th century, and later of course a wall ran down the middle; so smaller stations like the Hamburger Bahnhof, Lehrter Bahnhof, Anhalter Bahnhof, and eventually Zoo Station served passengers riding in various directions. Berlin Hauptbahnhof makes Zoo Station obsolete, at least for long-distance trains.  Crowds infect me with a low-frequency madness, so I'm glad I wasn't at the grand opening on Friday night. Some distant acquaintance of my cousin's friend said the fireworks were better than Sydney's miliennium pyrotechnics; I could give a shit. It seems a teenager went nuts with a knife and slashed twenty-odd people before the cops got to him, and one of the victims was HIV positive. And people are swarming here so they can cluster with even more people at a soccer stadium? And we hope this will be fun?  I think maybe no photo can capture the full horror of the Hauptbahnhof's new food court, but this comes close. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:48 PM (2) comments Introductions All AroundOn racial "no-go areas" in and around Berlin, I'd like to introduce the philosophizers over at Anglofritz to the plainspoken Raskal Trippin. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:24 PM (6) commentsSaturday, May 27, 2006 Paranoia Key of DCYesterday cops in Washington shut down the Rayburn Building at the US capitol complex for five hours and warned everyone in Congress (and their staffs) who was still at work that a gunman might be in the building. One woman had a panic attack and got wheeled out on a stretcher. Heavily-armed capitol police shouted at reporters to "get back in the room" when they peeked out the AP office door, and an e-mail message went around to everyone in the Rayburn House Office Building --1. If you are in the Rayburn HOB then Shelter in Place. Quickly move into the nearest interior office space or interior hallway and away from windows. The Capitol Police are investigating reports of gunfire in the Rayburn HOB.This set somewhere under a thousand news outfits rolling on a story that the capitol was "under lockdown" because of a reported gunshot in the Rayburn garage. There were more official e-mails, including: 1. During the search, the police officers will knock 3 times on each office door, announce "United States Capitol Police", knock 3 additional times, and then voice the code word.But the "gunshot" was just a loud noise from an elevator repair crew. "House member Jim Saxton (R-N.J.) later revealed that he was the one who heard the sounds," the Washington Post reported. Saxton, who thought a pneumatic hammer "sounded like a 9mm handgun," defended his image as a brave Republican by saying he "grew up with firearms." It might have been better for everyone if he'd grown up with power tools. Yahoo has a photo essay. (OK, one photo.) posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:53 AM (0) comments Wednesday, May 24, 2006 Picture of the Day From this week's Spiegel. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:11 AM (4) comments Monday, May 22, 2006 Border Fences and the Berlin WallI just heard Charles Krauthammer on NPR. People are still talking about a wall or a "fence" along the Mexican-American border, because it seems both bills cruising through Congress call for some kind of barrier. The House bill calls for a full-scale Berlin Wall; the Senate version wants 370 miles of a triple-layer "fence."Krauthammer defended the idea of a fence because "fences work." Look at Israel, he said (again). (Does he think we're at war with Mexico?) He also repeated his clear, plain-spoken, rational distinction between an American border wall and the decidedly un-American Berlin Wall by saying the Berlin Wall was a prison, meant to keep East Germans in. The American border wall will be like a garden fence, meant to keep illegal strangers out. The trouble with this plain distinction it sounds no different from East German politicians back in 1961. Remember that the Berlin Wall, back in the day, also fell under the euphemism of "sealing" or "securing" a border. Officially, it was meant to keep imperialist pig-dogs out. In real life, it was a wall against market forces. The Communists wanted to seal off an area where their economy could be controlled, and stem the flow of people moving west for a better life. Later it became a prison. The American wall idea is like the Berlin Wall in the first two ways. Yes, it's every nation's natural right to secure its borders, as both Krauthammer and Walter Ulbricht have argued. And of course, it's a dam against market forces. The US economy needs cheap illegal labor; if it didn't, people wouldn't flow north. Krauthammer admits the problem's economic and thinks our free-trade agreements might fix the problem "in about a hundred years." But until then, he said, we gotta do something. Here's my question: Why? Where did this whole debate come from? Europe doesn't have walls. UPDATE: Submitted to the Carnival of German-American Relations. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:48 PM (16) comments Sunday, May 21, 2006 Do These Make My Thighs Look Big?-726994.jpg) Even better than these pictures of a digitally-scanned Britney Spears are the comments underneath ("technology is sure weird! LOL cool and amazing but weird"). We refuse to stoop low enough here at Radio Free Mike to post crass paparazzi shots of Britney almost dropping Sean Preston, but we really don't mind this series of her at Rite Aid. UNRELATED: Is Berlin really an expensive dot-com boomtown? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:53 AM (8) comments Friday, May 19, 2006 Like Pieces of the True Cross L.A. Observed points out a segment of the Berlin Wall standing practically in my old backyard. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:34 AM (2) comments Thursday, May 18, 2006 "Small and Mid-Sized Towns"No one seems to know if it'll be a violent World Cup or not. English soccer fans are under strict orders not to provoke German fans with a Nazi salute; the neo-Nazi NPD has promised to march in crucial tournament cities to raise their profile; an Ethiopian-born German citizen was thrashed to an inch of his life on the night before Easter just for being black, drunk, and alone in Brandenburg. Now an ex-government spokesman under Gerhard Schröder named Uwe-Karsten Heye has outraged people in the (fairly huge) state of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin, by saying dark-skinned World Cup tourists shouldn't venture too far outside the city. "There are small and mid-sized towns in Brandenburg and elsewhere where I would advise anyone with a different skin color not to go. They might not make it out alive," he said yesterday.It is possible to write commentary that's so full of snark about Heye and Germany in general that a firm, substantiated opinion is hard to discover. It's also possible that the threat of violence is real. And not just in the provincial towns: The tolerant baby-friendly Bezirk of Prenzlauer Berg is being slowly invaded by Nazis who don't shave their heads but still beat you up if you look too "left." That explains a recent anti-fascist march through the neighborhood. Heye, I'm afraid, just said out loud what most people already know. It's always hard to gauge the fearsomeness of the German far right -- it swells and recedes like a tide, partly because so many Nazis are cowards. But one thing that's always true in Germany is that drunken white shits pose more of a threat to foreigners than foreigners ever do to drunken white shits. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:22 PM (0) comments Wednesday, May 17, 2006 Lola Montez and King Ludwig I "One of the most beautiful and notorious women of her time," according to an old book called The San Francisco Stage, "made her debut at the American [Theatre, in 1853] as Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal." Not even a day had passed after her west-coast debut before Lola Montez was giving Californians her famous Spider Dance, a scandalous burlesque routine that apparently got the men hollering and the local moralists in a twist. "To slow but provocative music -- based upon a mixture of the polka, waltz, mazurka, and jig -- Lola dramatized the plight of a woman attacked by spiders. Sometimes property spiders made of cork, whalebone, and rubber were used; at other times they were left to the imagination of the audience. Then again, Lola would herself impersonate a spider and bound grotesquely about the stage. The stage business that seemed particularly outré to the moral-minded took place when the dancer, with mingled horror and loathing, tried to locate a spider that had invaded her petticoats and was crawling somewhere about her person." Legend had it Lola was an illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron. (She wasn't.) She was an Irishwoman who grew up in England and India, but then -- after a divorce -- moved to Spain and learned to dance. She took a Spanish stage name and returned to London to make a career as a Spanish dancer, "with no success." Franz Liszt had an affair with her, though. So did "a brilliant Parisian journalist called Dujarier, who unfortunately was killed in a duel." And: "Her supreme triumph took place in Munich, where her dancing brought her to the notice of Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, who installed her in a palatial villa and created her Countess of Landsfeld. Lola's sympathy with liberal and anticlerical elements involved her in the Revolution of 1848, and she was forced to flee to England, where in 1849 she contracted a second and equally brief marriage. Seeking fortune and adventure in America she arrived in New York in 1851, where her dancing was not too well received. The following year she appeared as herself in a supposedly autobiographical play, Lola Montes in Bavaria." At last she moved to San Francisco, and hit it big. As far as I know she never lived in Berlin, so any connections to Lola Lola are tenuous. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:00 PM (5) comments Tuesday, May 16, 2006 Oh BrotherFor anyone who thinks a government collecting phone lists is no big deal, really, if it helps keep the nation safe, here are two stories about Big Brother spying on journalists:1) In Germany -- at Spiegel, no less (and other places). 2) In the United States. The idea in each case was to find traitors within the government who were leaking information to the press. Let's trace this logic: Collecting citizen phone records is OK if it helps intelligence services establish patterns of phone calls to terrorist groups. Leaking to journalists, however, is not OK, because it might compromise national security. So misusing those phone lists against domestic journalists who benefit from leaks of top-secret information might also be OK. Except when leaking is OK -- or not "leaking" but singing like Pavarotti from the Vice President's office, to a favorite right-wing journalist, about the identity of a CIA officer -- to bolster a government's fraudulent case for war. I mean, wait. We are still OK, right? We haven't crossed the line into treason or anything, even though we're the government? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:12 AM (1) comments Monday, May 15, 2006 Drop the Rice and RunThis article in the London Times explains how some Indonesians traditionally try to appease Mt. Merapi by tossing "rice, jewellery, and live animals" into the fiery pit under a full moon. I'd like to advise anyone doing that now to start running. It think we're just past a full moon, though, so, apparently: "In one of the villages in the shadow of Merapi, holy men lit incense and set rice, fruit and vegetables floating down a river in a ceremony they believed would appease the spirits and prevent an eruption."Seriously, people. Make a break for it. Here's a picture I took from the top of Borobudur, unfortunately not in the direction of Mt. Merapi. I don't have any good pictures of the volcano. (How does that happen? I was standing on a ruin that had once been buried in ash from Merapi, and I didn't snap a picture of the beast? What was I thinking? At least in Pompeii I had the presence of mind to snap Vesuvius.) (Which was terrifying.) 
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
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Sunday, May 14, 2006 Home of the Kraut Dog This place on Kastanienallee used to have an intact statue of a badass-looking hot dog squirting ketchup onto his head. As you can see, it's been vandalized. (Is nothing sacred? Etc.) Hot Dog World features the Kraut Hot Dog, which isn't made of processed Krauts but a standard Frankfurter topped with perfectly average sauerkraut and those roasted "onions" you get out of a box. The New York Hot Dog is different: perfectly average sauerkraut and, well, relish. (Is that a New York specialty? Do they do really good mixed pickle in Manhattan?) If I had a ratings system for stands in Berlin I'd give Hot Dog World a 3. UPDATE: Here's the intact statue, in all its horrible glory:  Thanks to Indri. "Vandals," as we all know, were a Germanic tribe. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:13 PM (15) comments Wednesday, May 10, 2006 World Cup Fever?Hard to tell: "Unknown perpetrators over the weekend painted a Maltese dog black, red, and gold -- the colors of the German flag -- in Schleiden-Oberhausen (near Cologne). On Sunday afternoon a 47-year-old woman brought the animal to a police station in Schleiden. She had let the originally white dog out of the house around 11pm on Saturday and waited until 5am for it to come home. (Normally the dog spent only a few minutes outside.) She decided to bring the animal to a veterinarian, where its entire coat had to be sheared in order to remove the paint, according to reports."I don't know how much help we can be from Berlin, but there's a phone number: "Hinweise nimmt das Kriminalkommissariat Schleiden unter der Tel. Nr. 02445-858730 entgegen." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:35 PM (0) comments Monday, May 08, 2006 Hot Dog BloggingMy neighborhood in Berlin, for some reason, has more than its share of hot dog stands. I realize hot dogs got their start in Germany, and there's no shortage of variations on the venerable wurst-in-broetchen formula; but what explains the apparent craze for American-style hot dogs? A new Radio Free Mike summer series will investigate.Here, to start things off, is a Mister Miller stand on Schoenhauser Allee:  As you can see, Mister Miller is an "American" nostalgia product, with (however) an international menu of French and Mexican-style hot dogs, chili dogs, etc. It's all processed Frankfurter meat. What makes one item French and the other Italian has everything to do with whether you want relish or pepperoncini on the dog. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:23 AM (3) comments Saturday, May 06, 2006 Blogging Britain This is from a train station in Newcastle last month. Does anyone know what "American" muffins are? Are they some kind of revenge for "English" muffins? (Or "Swiss cheese"? Or "French toast"?) I have solved the puzzle of "cafe americano," though. Whatever Starbuck's serves under that name, it's not just a cup of filtered coffee, and it's not (unfortunately) a bottomless cup of okay-but-not-great diner coffee. No, a cafe americano is diluted espresso. Completely disgusting. I assume it was invented in Italy after the war, with a dose of sarcasm, when American soldiers roamed the streets looking for styrofoam cups of translucent sock juice and the locals had to water down their local product. (Filtered coffee is still largely unknown in Italy.) Why it's on the menu in some Berlin cafes I won't ever understand. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:19 AM (4) comments Thursday, May 04, 2006 How Kaavya Viswanathan Got ScrewedThis New York Observer piece explains, sort of, how the Harvard-girl plagiarism scandal happened. The story seems to involve a sweatshop of writers called who churn out "content" for young-adult titles under somebody else's name. The sweatshop's called Alloy, and in one way or another it sits behind How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.According to William Morris sources, Ms. Viswanathan first signed with agent Suzanne Gluck, who then passed the author to a junior agent in her office. The junior agent worked with Ms. Viswanathan and eventually hit a wall in terms of developing a commercial proposal. The junior agent then suggested that the writer speak with Josh Bank at Alloy. The Opal Mehta idea emerged from Ms. Viswanathan’s conversations with Mr. Bank; once an outline was ready, it was decided that another William Morris agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, would try to sell it to publishers, which she did, to Little, Brown.The details don't really matter. Notice how this has everything to do with publishing, and high advances, and fancy New York agents, and "deals," but nothing to do with writing. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:58 AM (0) comments Wednesday, May 03, 2006 What's He Talking About?Thanks to the miracle of the Interweb, I can stream Bob Dylan's debut as a DJ right into my old-fashioned(-looking) radio here in Berlin. Bob's organized each show around a theme; he introduces each song from "his own record collection" with a story or a few cryptic words. Today's theme is The Weather. "You Are My Sunshine" was up right after Muddy Waters' "Blow Wind Blow," and now Dean Martin is giving us, "I Don't Care If the Sun Don't Shine.""We forget how much Elvis wanted to be like Dean," Dylan says. And: "Sometimes the wind whispers Mary, sometimes it cries Mary ... They hear it cry 'Mariah' south of the border." And: "Not sure what kinda clouds they mean, could be alto-cirrus or alto-stratus, I don't know. Alto-cumulus might be in there too." And: "Come on in, Frank [Sinatra] ... 'The Summer Wind' was originally a Danish song." And: "'Many a man curses the rain that falls upon his head, and knows not that it brings abundance to drive away the hunger.' St. Basil, def poet." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 4:07 PM (1) comments Tuesday, May 02, 2006 Pramoedya Ananta ToerIndonesia's best-known writer, who spent fourteen years in a tropical gulag for having the wrong politics under the right-wing Suharto dictatorship, died last weekend in Jakarta. Mike met him two years ago. For some reason the photo's not working on that link, so scroll down over here for a snapshot of the lovely old man. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:21 PM (4) comments | |
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