a berlin blog
|
a berlin blog |
|
|
Monday, June 26, 2006 Bear-Free ZoneThe first wild bear known to wander into Bavaria since about 1835 has been shot dead. It's not as simple and grim as I make it sound, but still. I think everyone feels the loss of Bruno, especially German news editors. There's a condolence blog auf Deutsch. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 4:43 PM (6) commentsSunday, June 25, 2006 Boheme Sauvage Reprise Sitting at the roulette table, having paid the medium behind a Ouija board to tell me who would win the World Cup ("a player number 7, in a jersey with blue"), losing millions of phony Reichsmarks to the platinum-haired croupier while my moll got me drunk on Scotch, I glanced up through a fog of smoke and boa feathers to find a stocky, crew-cut American looking a bit confused. I made out the legend on his T shirt: E.T. Surf. "Hey, are you from Hermosa Beach?" I said. "Yeah, where are you from?" "I grew up in Redondo." "Where in Redondo?" "Pretty close to Mira Costa High School." "Hey, I went to Costa! Whoa. So what is this, like a Weimar Berlin thing?" "Kind of." "Cool." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:28 PM (2) comments Saturday, June 24, 2006 Abriss OstA filmmaker called Jason Springarn-Koff has a short documentary on the end of the Palast der Republik posted on the Frontline "Rough Cuts" page. Good film. Except for a hemmed and superficial one-sentence summary of what might have been wrong with the East German government ("Some say the social and cultural events [at the Palast] were largely propaganda to build support for the Communist regime ..."), and a slight mistranslation of the German above, well -- spot on, actually. The best one-line argument against tearing down the Palast comes near the end: "Why should we tear down a financeable palace of culture to make way for an unfinanceable plan for a luxury castle?" Erm, because German politicians seem to adore unfinanceable visions of the future?This is what always in the process of becoming means, people. It ain't pretty. Thanks to Kean. UPDATE: I see Ed got to this before I did and made almost the same point. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:08 AM (2) comments Friday, June 23, 2006 Zurueck Nach Kalifornien, Klinsi!I just heard on American public radio -- for whatever it's worth -- not only that the US soccer coach will be canned in the wake of our embarrassing loss in the World Cup; but also that a certain German coach would make a natural replacement. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:33 PM (4) commentsThursday, June 22, 2006 Winning Hearts and MindsThank God for Bill O'Reilly. Another tough American patriot spreading grand old American values around the globe:See, if I'm president, I've got probably another 50-60,000 [soldiers] with orders to shoot on sight anybody violating curfews [in Iraq]. Shoot 'em on sight. That's me. President O'Reilly, curfew in Ramadi, 7 o'clock at night. You're on the street, you're dead. I shoot you right between the eyes. OK?The idea seems to be that we need to put a brutal headlock on Iraq, for maybe a few months, "so the Iraqi government can get organized." And any weak-kneed liberal who quails at the idea of resorting to Saddamist tactics can take a hike, even if we were all yelling about Saddam as "Hitler lite" three years ago. So what if we gotta kill people! We're still better than those A-rabs, no matter what we do! And we gotta show um who's boss. Of course, O'Reilly is not just nuts. He's unaccountable. He'll never have to back up a word he says. "That's me. President O'Reilly." Can you say "just another exercise in sissified self-promotion by a posturing member of the media elite"? O'Reilly himself, in his earlier posture, wrote, "Evil has a way of killing people; that's a fact. And the only way that evil will be stopped is for just and courageous people to confront it." Thanks to Kuchen. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 2:28 PM (2) comments Hey LookMarc's blogging again. I mean, semi-regularly. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:26 PM (0) commentsWednesday, June 21, 2006 Too Many Hot Dogs? Is There Such a Thing? This place has gone out of business, I assume because Berlin's hot dog market is saturated. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:19 AM (0) comments Tuesday, June 20, 2006 Heavens to MurgatroydIt seems oceans of US taxpayer money have been sucked away in boondoggles with corrupt American contractors who don't even have command of the English language, much less their own prison and hospital contracts:In some cases, the reports found, the clinics [built by Parsons Corporation] were little more than empty shells of uneven bricks and concrete that were already crumbling into dust.What does the contractor have to say for itself? "Parsons performed our work in Iraq in conformance with the contract terms and the direction given to us by the U.S. government," said the spokeswoman, Erin Kuhlman, by e-mail.Conformance, my ass. Parsons is the proud architect of 300 million dollars' worth of rubble. And so, in a sense, is Washington. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:47 PM (4) comments Saturday, June 17, 2006 WahnsinnAt least one cafe in Berlin wants no part of it: "Summer break until after the World Cup." Dude. Their widescreen must be broken. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:38 PM (0) comments Changes at the Radio Free Mike MegacomplexSome of Mike's articles from last year are steadily going up in the archives, at last, and we rejiggered the front page in advance of a radical redesign. Don't be surprise if we even change the address of this blog in the near future... posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:07 PM (4) commentsThursday, June 15, 2006 Americanizing Old Europe This may look to American readers like a soccer stadium. Maybe even one of those massive sports and music venues that go by pompous classical names in the US -- "Forum," "Coliseum" -- when they're not named after office-supply-store chains. In fact, as Berlin readers already know, it's just the Adidas Arena, a smallish model of Hitler's Olympic Stadium and a "branded environment" thrown up near the Reichstag for the duration of the World Cup, where people can watch a bit of soccer. Live soccer? Like in the real Olympic Stadium? No. Soccer on TV:  Note the red couch in the middle of the (unused) field. Two guys sitting there were served McDonald's by two hot chicks at the half. I think you have to be first in line for that or something. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 3:47 PM (2) comments Tuesday, June 13, 2006 Fussballidyll, Berlin 2006
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
9:51 PM
(3) comments
Monday, June 12, 2006 Zarqawi Successor 2Looks like the French-language press was offsides on life in Iraq after Zarqawi. BBC (and everyone else) as a fresher story.PS: Note American football reference in the above. Completely accidental, since I'm obsessed with soccer now. Today I watched the US play a lousy game against the Czechs, then watched Ghana lose a heartbreaking game against the Italians, at a level that looked (to me) far above both the Americans and the Czechs. (But maybe the Czechs weren't challenged.) The US is in the same group as Italy and Ghana, so I think we're doomed. MSNBC reports a possible reason for the embarrassing loss: The Americans got a pregame pep talk from President Bush, who called from Camp David and wished them well.PPS: Most of the American players speak pretty good German, since their careers are here. PPPS: Spiegel Online combines thorough World Cup coverage with political context, wherever appropriate. If you're into that kind of thing. PPPPS: This interminable bear story could be ended by importing a cat from New Jersey. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:33 PM (0) comments Sunday, June 11, 2006 It's Piss Off France Day Bernard-Henri Levy, or "BHL" as even he calls himself, was attacked by two cream torts at the Paris Book Fair back in March. BHL put out a pompous book in January about his high-profile trip to America "in the footsteps of de Tocqueville." While he signed copies of it in Paris a man called Noel Godin threw a pie. "No sooner had Levy changed his clothes to resume the interrupted book signing than a second pie assault occurred," according to the pages of Spiegel, where I also got this photo. (I've been meaning to post this for months.) Goldin has creamed BHL now seven or eight times, because he considers the celebrity-philosophe "pompous." He's my new hero. Levy, for his part, has sworn never to go to the Paris Book Fair again.l posted by Michael Scott Moore | 5:42 PM (5) comments Saturday, June 10, 2006 Zarqawi "Successor"No one seems to be reporting this in the US, which may mean it's not confirmed. However: "Abou Ayoub al-Masri successeur de Zarqaoui," according to Belgian RTL. Here's something on Al-Masri in English. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:28 PM (0) commentsHot Dogs in BerlinThe ongoing mystery of why Berliners seem so keen on American-style hot dogs, when they have their own venerable Bratwurst-in-Broetchen, has led me to this page, full of no-doubt apocryphal legends of the hot dog's German heritage. The timeline goes all the way back to "850 BC," when Homer supposedly works "sausage" into the Odyssey -- the first instance of product placement in western narrative? Anyway, here's one Likely Story about transatlantic hot dog relations:1880 - A German peddler, Antonoine Feuchtwanger, sold hot sausages in the streets of St. Louis, Missouri. He would supply white gloves with each purchase so that his customers would not burn their hands while eating the sausage. He saw his profits going down because the customers kept taking the gloves and walking off with them. His wife suggested that he put the sausages in a split bun instead. He reportedly asked his brother-in-law, a baker, for help. The baker improvised long soft rolls that fit the meat, thus inventing the hot dog bun. When he did that, the hot dog was born. He called them red hots.  Nothing but good times at the Mr. Miller stand under Alexanderplatz.Submitted to Carnival of German-American Relations posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:30 PM (4) comments Friday, June 09, 2006 It's Piss Off Deutschland DayTo celebrate the start of the World Cup I have a US flag flying from my balcony in Berlin. I assume it'll get egged. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:38 PM (0) commentsAngie on the iPod, YoAngela Merkel kicks off the World Cup with a podcast from Berlin. Should be the first in a regular series of podcasts by the (suddenly hip) Kanzlerin, who apparently came up with the idea herself. "Germany," she drones here, "is a world-welcoming, modern, and lively nation..." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:39 AM (0) commentsOverheardManager: "The customer always comes first. Always." Employee: "Oh, the customer came three times." The Overheard Lines blog in San Francisco is at least as good as the one in New York. For a string of the best ones in San Francisco scroll down to 29 March ... posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:55 AM (0) comments Wednesday, June 07, 2006 It's Piss Off England Day 2The right word for the game, I'm afraid, is soccer. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 2:19 PM (8) commentsIt's Piss Off England DayA new (German) documentary argues that the UK's controversial 1966 win over Germany established a curse that hangs over British "football" to this day. Notice, please, how England hasn't won a World Cup in forty years ... Personally I think the controversy is warped, since England won by more than the goal in question, but curses in sports can be nasty. The Curse of the Bambino -- Babe Ruth's revenge on the Red Sox for trading him to the Yankees in 1918 -- has lasted almost ninety years.More in a minute. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:49 AM (13) comments Tuesday, June 06, 2006 Summer Hot Dogs We seem to have fallen off the wagon with our summer hot dog series here at Radio Free Mike, but don't worry. Here's another Mr. Miller stand in Berlin, blocks away from the first one, and even closer to the sexually ambiguous Fiberglas hot dog on Kastanienallee. One Radio Free Mike commenter has previously noted the disturbing Mr. Miller motto, "Eat Here, Diet Home" -- clearly visible in this photo. Smithsonian argues that hot dogs are quintessentially American, but has no idea where the name comes from: Hot dog history, warns author Donald Dale Jackson, is a compendium of myths, guesswork and public relations inundating a scanty dossier of facts ... The product was originally called "dachshund sausage" for its resemblance to the low-slung German dog. One story has it that a newspaper cartoonist drew a picture of barking dachshunds between buns and labeled them "hot dogs" because he couldn't spell "dachshund." Trouble is, no one has ever found the cartoon.Yeah, whatever. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 2:01 PM (5) comments Sunday, June 04, 2006 A Day at the Races Hoppegarten on the outskirts of Berlin has cut-rate horse racing every several weeks in the summer, and today, on an all-blogger field trip that included Ed Ward and Bowleserised, I won just about enough for a cup of coffee. Ed remembers Hoppegarten from the days when it was virtually still a DDR track, and Bowleserised is a horse expert. All I could do was nod my head. In my triumphant fourth race, Romantic Man pulled ahead of River Woods to surprise everyone and hand me a winning ticket; but here I think we're watching Pushy Guest shove in front of Tassilio and Miss Anita for a Sieg in the second. UPDATE: Hoppegarten has its own stud farm, and most of the horses are local, although some come from Poland and Sweden and even the United States. Horses have raced here for almost 130 years. Nazism and Communism managed to kill the glamor of the place, but Louise Brooks remembered the track as a high-society attraction as late as the 1920s. The context -- since we're quoting Brooks -- is sex: "Sex was the business of [Berlin]," she wrote. "At the Eden Hotel, where I lived, the cafe bar was lined with the higher-priced trollops. The economy girls walked the street outside. On the corner stood the girls in boots, advertising flagellation. Actor's agents pimped for the ladies in luxury apartments in the Bavarian Quarter. Racetrack touts at the Hoppegarten arranged orgies for groups of sportsmen." It ain't like that now, I'm afraid. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:23 PM (2) comments Saturday, June 03, 2006 Plain SpeechNewsweek's next issue has a good piece on the problem of just discussing neo-Nazis in Germany. "Strangely, Germany's debate over racism seems to be less about racism than about what one is (and isn't) allowed to say about it. ... When one western politician in Brandenburg, Jörg Schönbohm, dared to suggest last year that there might be a relationship between the east's higher crime rate and the moral vacuum produced by Communism, he was vilified." Yeah, and Schönbohm seems to have learned his lesson. He was one of the guys who jumped on Uwe-Karson Heye for "insulting" Brandenburg in May.Here's a piece I wrote last year for Salon on the NPD rising in the east; the interesting stuff comes near the end. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:56 PM (0) comments Karneval!I've entered a couple of posts about US immigration and the Berlin Wall in the "US-German Relations Blog Carnival." I know the posts aren't directly about US-German relations, but the rules seem to be loose, and since the Berlin Wall has been used in America as a rhetorical device, someone has to clarify terms. I might drum up something else in the meantime. The actual day of the "carnival" -- when selected posts go up on a single host blog -- is July 2. Anyone can enter, apparently. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:57 PM (0) comments Friday, June 02, 2006 A Year of Living Dangerously If you want to help out the rescue efforts in Yogyakarta, the Asia Foundation is a reputable charity along with the Red Cross and Oxfam. I know a few people in Jogja. I haven't heard from them, but that could mean they're just not reading their e-mail. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:28 PM (3) comments Real LiveI don't know why I never stumbled across this before, but the best part of Bob Dylan's website is the Performances and Rare Recordings page. The old crow's people have posted terrific recent versions of "Ring Them Bells" and "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine," in RealPlayer format, along with an absolutely kickass cover of "A Simple Twist of Fate" by Jerry Garcia. The Grateful Dead bores me most of the time; I still have bad memories of their 15-minute cover of "Louie, Louie." But this song brings Garcia out of his usual stoned-guitar rut, and his voice sounds so coarse and sweet that the cover almost beats the original. (Almost.) The only man who does a better cover song, in general, is Johnny Cash.Most people know I'm an incorrigible Dylan fan. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:13 PM (0) comments | |
|
|
 Too Much of Nothing, a novel  Politics and Prose  about our editor 
The Underground Grammarian  current Berlin blog page  |
