August

Gone Country

If nothing else, the eerie quiet tells me that I'm back in Chicago--the gentle whirring of cicadas and occasional beeping from the freightyard. I'd never have thought of Chicago as an especially quiet place, but after three and a half months of Berlin's 24-hour boisterousness, where crowds of drunken boys paraded past dawn down Revaler Strasse, where tehcno music was always thumping at least off in the distance, Chicago sounds like farmland.

Berlin gave me something of a raucous farewell, a nearly sleep-free weekend that I am not yet recovered from. Trying to stuff as much adventure as we could into a few short days, Yony and I ran all over town--visiting B-list attractions like Pfaueninsel (Peacock Island), where the Kaiser built a bunch of tacky pleasure-palaces and assembled an exotic menagerie of animals which straggles on to this day; examining the elusive German shopping mall; going to lesbian bars and exploring post-war wreckage. I had what I felt to be an archetypal Berlin experience, which I'll relate if only because it makes a ripping good story: Yony took me out to a bombed-out building near Ostkreuz, a roofless labyrinth so littered with soiled mattresses, broken bottles and nasty detritus as to be authentically spooky. We poked around for a while, messing around and taking photographs--
--but left abruptly when we noticed a burning tea-candle sitting on the floor, where there had been no such thing mere minutes before--it was too witchy even for hardened urbanites like us. We ended up returning to the neighborhood that night, for a party in a factory-turned-dance-club, and, emboldened by drink, decided to wander back over to the labyrinth. As we entered the premises, we began to hear a terrible, horror-movie rumbling emanating from the cellar. It sounded like some infernal machine, the evil churning of some secret laboratory--and a tea candle was still burning at the top of the stairs. Feeling very brave, I tiptoed down the steps into the dreaded cellar, where I found--it should have been obvious--an electro-noise generator show in full swing, complete with cash bar. Everyone seemed deliriously happy. My friend Al Burian, who has lived in Berlin intermittently since the early 90s and came out to the labyrinth with us, seemed particularly pleased by the surprise, the hidden party a part of a grand Berlin tradition that has become harder to hunt down over the years. I imagined the illicit partying that must have been widepsread as early as the mid-1940s, when horny youngsters, bored with the War, must have swing-danced and tippled in cellars much like this one. Even the music was a cut above techno--techno rhythms and textures so blown-out and manipulated as to become a totally abstract rhythmic pallette.

Early Sunday morning found the party-life cast in a totally different light. I'd gone to bed early and woken up at 5:30 for a job way out in Brandenburg herding goats. Almost any other city in the world would be quiet and peaceful at 6:00 on a Sunday morning--it's a famously tranquil hour. But in Berlin, the streets and trains were packed with dawn-revelers seemingly unfazed by the growing brightness of day, unapologetically drunk. The goats in question resided in a small, medieval village called Glowen, a herd some 30-strong owned by a colorful Berliner named Barbara who splits her time between the city, where she runs a wine shop and sells pot on the side, and this small farm where she could breathe deeply and tend to her beloved animals. The morning of my visit, the local livestock vet was coming out to take blood samples, administer deworming medication and castrate six of the young kids. We herded them into the barn and then, goats being particularly skittish creatures, had to catch them one by one--devilishly quick little buggers, they were--and drag them by the horns out into the yard for their date with the doctor. The castration was, as one might imagine, a bit of a nasty business. There's no real polite way of castrating an animal; I held the poor fuckers down while the vet, with a nightmarish pair of oversized medical pliers known as Burdizzo, crushed the blood vessels leading to the testes, which would cause them to shrivel up and eventually die. The goats, needless to say, weren't especially keen on this--in fact, they screamed absolute bloody murder, their eyes rolled back in their heads and they thrashed about in violent spasms of pain and horror. The vet, a greying East German who spoke little English, managed to keep an impressive sense of humor about him throughout, as I suppose anyone who's been castrating large animals for half a century must. I was amused, as my plane approached Chicago the next day, to find an item on the customs-declaration form asking whether I had come into contact with any livestock in the course of my travels. If only they knew, that only hours ago I'd been castrating goats, that my clothes were still flecked with fresh goats-blood! No, I marked, opting to make my trip through customs + immigration as streamlined as possible--no livestock whatsoever...

Goat-herder that I am, I don't so much mind Chicago's rural vibe. Unlike Berlin, which has been cultivating urbanites for nearly a millenium, Chicago is quite new as a city, and many Chicagoans are only a generation or two removed from the farm. The Great Migration in the 1950s was largely of rural, southern blacks; in more recent decades, huge numbers of agrarian and small-town Mexicans have settled here; geographically sprawling and relatively low-density, Chicagoans have always had space to stretch their legs, an affinity for beer-n-barbecue and a certain all-around bumpkinishness. People have always told me that I have an inexplicable twang for someone who grew up in the big city, and I long chalked this up to my taste for country music; but more fundamentally, I think, Chicago is country, a heavily-populated blip surrounded by vast prairie. Anyway, I'm glad, in many ways, to be back in my hometown, at summer's end at with a gloriously blank slate. Wave if you see me in the street, and if you have any large animals you need fixed feel free to give me a call.

Klaus and Me

Scenic Marzahn

My friend Al Burian asked me to write about my experiences in Berlin. I hope he won’t mind me letting my response do double-duty by posting it here. I have been here all of three months. Ah, the outsider’s perspective, pristine in its naivete! But what is it, more particularly, that Al is after? What insights that he, as a fellow (more entrenched) Berliner, cannot glean on his own? After all, the newcomer’s eye is attuned to so many perplexing details. Do I find small faults, dredge up petty grievances? I was, for a while, baffled and annoyed by the shoppers at my neighborhood Rewe, who insisted, almost without exception, on placing plastic dividers between each set of purchases on the checkout counter--even when each purchase was small, compact, and kept a wide berth from neighboring purchases such that there was no possibility of confusion or intermingling. It seemed a blind and nonsensical adherence to the Rules. I noticed, around the same time, that Berlin pedestrians tended to wait for a walk signal before crossing an intersection, even in low-traffic areas with nary an auto in sight, and such is a foreigner’s sensitivity that I found this extremely unsettling. What chilling brand of Teutonic lunacy was this?, I pondered--what nefarious social contract prevented otherwise sane people from crossing an empty street?

But I don’t think this sort of dimestore anthropology is what Al is after at all. Mightn't I dig for something deeper? And yet, I have only been here three months, which is really no time at all--a vacation, a lark. And now I’m leaving. They have a word for people like me, and by “they” I mean the embittered expatriates who people a popular online forum called Toytown Germany: 90-day wonders, cultural tourists who come to Berlin for a season, buy a bike at the flea market and take out a short-term sublet, piss away their savings drinking in the parks, and then leave abruptly when their tourist visas expire and they haven’t found a job or any practical way of extending their residency. The expatriates here, clannish and prideful, can hardly be bothered with the masses of English-speakers who wash over Berlin each summer and then recede with the cooling weather, having left no discernible mark.

I have tried to live here as if I live here. Berlin is, after all, according to whatever voodoo math determines these sort of rankings, one of the world’s most Livable Cities--though it’s been nudged off the Index’s Top 10 for 2010, falling just behind Melbourne and Madrid. Have I any right to complain, really, about the way Berliners cross the street? Could it even be that their manner of crossing the street is superior to mine? My hometown of Chicago, after all, does not appear on anyone’s livability index. In Chicago a person is permitted to cross the street as they wish--and they may well get plowed down by a renegade SUV, or caught in gang crossfire, before reaching the opposite corner. The idea of a social contract is a novel one to me, one that’s taken some getting used to--Berlin’s honor-system approach to paying for public transit or preventing bike theft. The only social contract I’ve ever known is Dog Eat Dog.

I’ve tried to live here as if I live here, tried to venture beyond guidebook parameters, not always fruitfully. My boyfriend and I ride our bikes out to Marzahn, as almost an exercise in guidebook-defiance--it’s the one area of Berlin that’s universally sneered-upon, when anyone bothers to think about it at all. Marzahn’s history is gloomy and sordid: home, in the 1930s, to a labor camp for some 2,000 gypsies, it was the first Berlin district to fall to the Red Army in 1945. Huge, mind-numbing housing projects were built under Soviet rule, and after reunification the district became known as a haven for neo-nazis. Yony promises me an American-style ghetto--boarded-up windows, fried-chicken stands--but our bike tour fails to yield even this; Marzahn is spectacularly drab; a vast water-treatment facility, some sad little shopping centers, Burger King, a lot of old people.

Or: we get some psychedelic mushrooms from a guy in Yony’s neighborhood whose business card advertises ‘healing arts’. But rather than waiting for a nice day and eating them at, say, sunny Schlachtensee, we take them on a cold, drizzly afternoon and end up in Treptower Park. The mushrooms are not especially powerful, but they are strong enough to lend some otherworldy dreariness to the park’s already-grim main attraction, the imposing and monstrously tacky Soviet War Memorial. Much of the gold leaf has been painstakingly removed from inscriptions on the park’s sarcophagi, presumably by desperate junkers. The memorial grounds are meticulously groomed, but the surrounding parkland is overgrown and litter-strewn.

What does Al hope for me to excavate? And why spill yet more ink over a city that is already so self-consciously hip? There is plenty here, of course, that is worthy of praise--the world-class street food, the robust public sphere, the myriad squats, the radical politics, the total bikeability... dashing gay mayor Klaus Wowereit famously sums up the contemporary atmosphere as “poor but sexy,” and indeed, the street-level vistas, thoroughly graffitied, have the effortless shabby-chic of a music video, the sort of grungy patina that a place like Williamsburg cultivates so carefully. I mean, I like it here, but why advertise it? People are already wondering how long it can last--the “artists”, according to no less stodgy a source than the Guardian, are already “pouring in” to this low-rent paradise, and we all know what follows in that wake. Already there is a sense of panic among the older-school expats. Exberliner magazine runs a sneering feature on Berlin’s “post-tourism tourists”--“place consumers,” members of a “creative class” who skip the whole Brandenberg Gate-Reichstag itinerary in favor of hanging out and drinking beer on the Admiralsbrücke or gallery-hopping in Friedrichshain. It’s easy to sneer along with the article, but I can’t help seeing a bit of myself in it as well.

I mean, I like it here, but am I doing the city a disservice by announcing this in a public forum? Shouldn’t we be trying, maybe, to stem the tide of hipster immigration, accentuating the negative in an attempt to dissuade the sunglass-wearing masses? This, at least, is the presumed tactic over at Toytown Germany, where been-there expats do their best to discourage would-be Berliners. There are no jobs here!, they insist. There’s a housing shortage! And indeed, so there is! I’ll attest to it myself! The only gainful employment I’ve managed to find, in my three months here, was a one-day gig, hooked up by my friend Al (alley-oop!) herding goats somewhere out in Brandenburg. And the only place Yony and I could find to live, on arriving here, was a two-month sublet which turned disastrous--our landlord, an American expat named Dr. Dot (who turned out to be the sex-advice columnist for the aforementioned Exberliner) proved to be alpha-pyschotic. Yet the party, in booming Berlin, seems to just get bigger by the day (but keep it under wraps, Liam!).

Not that everyday Berliners seem to be doing much hand-wringing--Berliners, needless to say, love a good party, and as long as there’s enough kleingeld for a few beers and some late-night döner no one seems to be complaining. Still, there’s a feeling of unrest on the breeze sometimes, I think. Kunsthaus Tacheles, the city’s most visible and visited squat, a major tourist attraction unto itself, is facing imminent eviction--the property’s “owners,” HSB Nordbank, are planning to build luxury-something on the site. Sure, the city of Berlin has survived through some difficult times these last 100 years ago, and one should hope it will withstand whatever mega-trendiness may be coming its way. Better poor-but-sexy than poor-and-unsexy; I can’t imagine many East Berliners nostalgic for the pre-reunification days when the city was decidedly uncool, when a person couldn’t even buy a bar of chocolate or bottle of shampoo.

This is perhaps less personal an account than Al had in mind. The somewhat embarrassing truth is that my time in Berlin has been dominated, in more-or-less equal parts, by mindless summery fun--swimming, drinking--and by mundane personal, financial and relationship problems that shed no light on Berlin as a city. I have not spent my summer taking anthropological notes, other than occasional scribblings on architectural oddities or the baffling club-scene.

Speaking of which, I may as well air my greatest cultural complaint: the music scene here--take note, would-be Berliners!--is total shit. Whatever indigenous music-scene exists here between the omnipresent pillars of electro and hardcore-punk has about the width and breadth of the infamous “death strip” that separated the parallel barriers of the Berlin Wall. Why this should be the case I couldn’t begin to say, other than noting a possible inverse-relationship between Quality of Life and Rock and Roll, a bit of a pet theory of mine--New York or LA in the late 70s could hardly have scored very high in any quality-of-life index, but they certainly produced some enduring music. It does make me long, perversely, for Chicago, where daily life falls somewhere between boring and hellish, but where, when night falls, some tortured and beautiful voices can be heard singing somewhere above it all. I don’t even have a stereo here, only a crappy radio that’s tuned to NPR Berlin, the perpetual emergencies and eccentricities of the States beaming, through a haze of static, into my kitchen.

I don’t know, Al. By all accounts, Berlin is a world-class city, and I suspect it’s only my relative provincialism which prevents me from embracing it fully. It’s certainly a viable place to consider settling-down, if the proverbial crap ever really hits the fan back in the US of A. I’m continuing my German studies, just in case.

Spreepark 2010

A few photographs I took recently at Spreepark, an amusement park in Planterwald which has been abandoned since 2002: 

Abandoned amusement parks may be a bit passe, as photo-subjects go, but the Spreepark at least has a bit of a sordid backstory. Opened in 1969 as Kulturpark Planterwald, the park was sold, after German reunification in 1989, to a company called Spreepark GmbH, who redeveloped the facility along more western lines, adding a modern roller coaster and several additional attractions. Despite the makeover, revenue fell dramatically, leaving Spreepark with a mountain of debt by the time it was shuttered in 2002. Company head Norbert Witte, along with family and associates, fled to Peru in early 2002, shipping along several of Spreepark's more popular rides for a doomed amusement-park venture in Peru's capitol. In 2004 Witte was caught smuggling 180 kgs of cocaine from Peru to Germany, hidden in the masts of his "flying carpet" ride. He was sentenced to seven years in jail. 

Today the park stands in a state of charming dilapidation, being slowly reclaimed by the surrounding forest, and is understandably popular among would-be photographers like myself. The entire perimeter is fenced off, though not particularly well, and it was with few reservations that I hopped over a weak spot and began exploring. Most of the structures remained intact, if slightly worse for the wear. Concession prices were listed in deutschmarks. My favorite was the eerie Grimm Haus, pictured above with frosted roof, and it was from this building that I was emerging when I was accosted by a security officer and his beastly, toothsome dog, who seemed more than ready to tear me to pieces. The security officer was not amused by my presence. He demanded that I either delete all of my photographs or fork over 20 euros, which he claimed the park's owner needed for upkeep. I was being shaken down! I tried to protest; he changed his story--he was the owner of the park, and I'd give him 20 euros or he'd call the cops. Not one to argue with security guards and their murderous dogs, I reluctantly parted with my 20 euros and beat a hasty retreat. Corruption at Spreepark, it seems, continues to this day, and I can only imagine what a tidy little extra income is earned in shaking down hapless shutterbugs like me.

I'm trying to take more photographs in general--Yony got a fancy new camera and kicked me down his old model, a Sony A-100 that is far beyond anything I've ever used before. But I can't seem to get over my misgivings about the photographic process. People love photographs, I think, but are innately suspicious of photographers. German speaks of "making pictures," but I think the English "taking pictures" better sums up popular attitude, with its connotations of theft. One is still expected to ask, generally, before taking a stranger's picture--to do so without permission is considered rude, even a bit perverse. Encounters like mine at Spreepark only enhance this aura of criminality; my transgression, it seemed, was not being on private property but rather photographing it, trying to take an elusive little piece of it along with me. One is made to feel greedy, a hangup I'll have to overcome if I ever intend to get serious with a camera...

Techno Prisoners

Berliners are quite rhythmic. At nearly every street party and public event there are groups of drummers; Germans are champion, marathon dancers; and the omnipresent techno beats are highly, purely rhythmic. But Berliners seem to scarcely acknowledge any form of music other than the percussive. Rock and roll is a rarity. You do hear teenagers playing guitar in the parks, but they're usually Russian. "Germans don't play guitars," says my new friend Everett, matter-of-factly. Parties are maddeningly techno-oriented, a Berlin cliche whose truth must be ceded. The beat goes on--and on, and on, the bpm never-changing, a relentless thump-thump-thump that eventually overpowers all resistance.

To belabor the point: I think of disco's golden years in the States. Disco was in many ways survivor's music, its grooves a steady and reassuring antidote to the tumult of the 60s. I will survive, sang Gloria Gaynor--even if it meant only, to cocaine-snorting revelers, surviving until the end of the night, riding the groove 'til dawn's first light. This German techno music makes a similar impression, an endurance-soundtrack for a whole nation of survivors whose recent history is indeed tumultuous. What do you do, really, having emerged from a century of warfare, terror and disintegration relatively intact? You party!

Saturday was Transgenialer CSD, the politicized alternative to last weekend's big-bucks, Ikea-sponsored Christopher Street Day gay pride parade. Considerably younger and grimier, the tCSD march snaked through Kreuzberg, fueled by heavy techno grooves, the party pausing periodically for impromptu speechmaking on the oppression of trans people or homopohobia in World Cup football. In lieu of any constructive contribution to the parade, I pick a bouquet of flowers from the median as we amble down Kottbusser Damm. I'll hand them off to some cute boy, I figure, or just to anyone who looks lonely, like they could use a bunch of freshly-plucked blossoms. The parade continues, settling in at Oriennenstrasse for an epic street party. The hours drift by, more speeches are made, the techno music continues blaring and the indefatigable fags keep dancing, the street a massive disco-floor. I wander through the crowd, clutching my rapidly-wilting bouquet--I can't seem to find anyone to give my flowers to, no one that quite fits my stringent criteria. The sun beginning to set, I try to pawn off my sad bouquet on a cranky two year-old, but she's spooked and won't accept them. I wander back through the crowd, my hand-picked blossoms by now virtually dead. In what feels like a grand symbolic defeat, I end up leaving them in the gutter. I can't spend my life trying to give away flowers! The dance party beckons, the sweaty throng huge and orgiastic. Thump-thump-thump--I will survive!

I dance my heart out. Everywhere you look people are succombing to the all-powerful groove. Even old ladies--especially old ladies--can't help themselves; shopping bags and all, they dive into the fray, sporting rave-worthy dance moves. And there are certain lifers, tanned and shirtless men with a manic, burned-out aspect which says they've been partying non-stop since at least '89. Already drunk, they throw their arms up toward the setting sun as if in supplication to the Techno Gods. Yes, Lord, keep on with that Almighty Groove!, they seem to say, eyes closed in total bliss. Is this the march of history, this pitiless beat that varies only slightly, always returning to the thump-thump-thump of the human heart? Antisocial as I am, I can't help hoping for some malfunction in the DJ booth, some computer glitch that will throw a wrench into the groove. Please don't stop the music, begs the refrain from a mid-00s hit which haunts dancefloors to this day, as if even a moment of silence would be the ultimate bummer. But please do!, responds the contrarian in me, even as my own feet continue moving. Please do stop the music! I'm trapped in a techno Hell and I can't seem to escape! Someone stop that fascist DJ!

Resilient Color

Good evening, cyberspace! I am not dead, I have not vanished into the ether; I spirited away, about a month ago, to Berlin, where I'd never been and where I speak the language only haltingly. I'm living here with my mostly-wonderful boyfriend Yony. It's been a mild but pleasant June here. Not every moment has been a bowl of peaches, but I have gotten to engage in a whole spectrum of high and low culture-type activities, from performance art at the squat bar to getting high at the beach at Wansee, a picturesque lake just southwest of Berlin where the Nazis convened to plan the Final Solution. I've partied and paraded and danced until dawn many nights--at this advanced stage of hedonism I'll even dance to techno music.

I'll spare you lengthy details of Berlin life. Of the various literary caps I'm willing to try on, Travel Writer is not one of them, and I still feel very much a traveler here. I've yet to develop any of the stubborn pride of theexpatriate, though I've witnessed some of these specimens at close range; they gather for weekly dinners at an English-language bookstore in Kreuzberg, and even after years or decades in Berlin are still very much the Americans or English that they've always been. "He can order a beer," laughed one of them, teasing a friend who's been slow to pick up the language even after several years here. Nor do I need to patronize my readers with primers on the European Lifestyle. Yes, everyone drinks and smokes, and virtually everyone is wild about football, though these superficialities don't yield any real human insight; I can't much speak on the national character, the fact being that I'm not yet particularly acquainted with anyone here other than a couple of fellow expats. I've not made any friends, though I've spent meant hours reclining in public parks, perfecting my come-befriend-me look, and since Yony has been back in the states for the last two weeks I've been flying more or less solo.

But photographs are much more immediately gratifying! I've taken a few, and will share them here with some identifying markers. A few tone-setters, filed under "City Life":

A selection from last weekend's Christopher Street Day parade, Berlin's major pride march--I read today that queer American intellectual Judith Butler rejected a "civil courage" prize offered her at the march, decrying the event as overly commercialized; I won't argue with her basic premise, but commercialization doesn't seem to have overly dampened the resilient human color:

And some general summery living:

I'd promise more frequent posts, but publishing on my obscure blog is not, honestly, at the very top of my list these days. While this site has been long-dormant, I do have a new issue out of Secret Beach, the paper-and-ink edition. You can order one from me, or if you're overly computer-minded you can read it as a pdf (lame):

Hope everyone is well!