A More Detailed Take on White Night

I wrote this in my journal, and not my blog. This is why I should never be allowed to do things - any things; you name the thing, I will agree that I should not do it - in parallel tracks. My dream of one day being a railroad track? Dead. My aspiration towards one day being a parallelogram? Kaput. I can think of no other things that a parallel. Here are some words I wrote, for you, my secret friends:

France was fun, and uniformly hassle-free. The expected pitfalls – rude Paris waiters, long lines at museums, tedious political discussions with earnest British co-hostellers – all failed to materialize, and except for one miserably rainy night, the weather was unimpeachable. I had time to take a couple of long, aimless walks, as well as for extended visits to the Louvre and Musee D’Orsay, and a couple of nice cafes. I happened to be in town for Nuit Blanche, a four-year-old Paris street festival that brings pretentious, occasionally incomprehensible new art together with pot-smoking, wine-swilling French youth. In Paris, incidentally, it is impossible to be unemployed. Men are merely spending some time away from professional opportunities to give fuller attention to their awesome ponytails, while the women are taking a sabbatical to ride the metro and look wistfully at fellow passengers, advertisements, and the little metal poles they have to steady yourself on. In conclusion, France is the only place where the entire population is just shy of an actual job offer from being a classics professor at a small, Midwestern college with a horrible football team. C’est la vie boheme!

I think my favorite, and the most generally indicative, part of Nuit Blanche for me was the 15min. film being projected over and over again, from dusk ‘til dawn, onto the wall of the building opposite my hostel. The film - entitled The Dukes of (Industrial Age Misogyny) Hazzard Ride Again!!1[sic]!! – was silent and consisted entirely of a 30ish woman in a long-sleeved mesh shirt and panties running away from the camera man through a power plant. She was running in slow motion, so you know right off that the cameraman has an early advantage, an advantage he entirely squanders by taking a number of breaks to film close-ups, split-screens, and shots that seem to be shot through a great deal of humidity, which I imagine would prove hazardous to the efficacy of the power plant if it wasn’t some sort of special effect. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. In case you were wondering, yes, all of the special effects shots were of random pieces of machinery in the power plant.

Also there was woman lying on top of some sort of big, cylindrical power supply device, dead, half wrapped up in a body bag, with a blood-pressure cuff attached. A no-less than two minute shot was devoted to the metrics on this cuff. For the record: Systole: 0. Asystole: 0. Dead!

SPOILER ALERT!

The film ends with the woman – the mesh shirt and panties one from the opening acts - doing standing-up ab work-outs of some sort in front of the camera. There is a cycle of close-ups of her abs, her eyes and her lips. In the penultimate cycle, we see a drop of blood run from the sad young lady’s lips. Bummer!

The best part, and maybe I should have mentioned this earlier, is that the whoever was in charge of Nuit Blanche had shut down an entire street to allow as many people as possible to sit, in the middle of the street, drinking French bier, and watch cycle after cycle after cycle of this masterpiece.


Nuit Blanche (Night of Self-Loathing) is set up as a series of walks through the center and innermost outskirts of Paris, each walk leading from one free, open-all-night installation or museum exhibit to another, to another, to another. Many, many cafés and stands are open all night, as well as the Paris metro system. It’s a pretty neat idea, especially as a lot of corporate sponsorship has started to flow in – the festival costs each Parisian taxpayer the price of half a cup of coffee (espresso, cappuccino, or mocha?), according to an official brochure I was handed by a young gentleman at Chaletet Des Halles. The gentleman then tried to sell me some grass.

Around 4am things started to get a little iffy on the not-getting-a-bottle-thrown-at-your-head front, as all the college professor types returned to their underdecorated, over-sculptured flats and drunk, angry Paris youth took control. I saw a fight break out between a guy in a van and a guy specializing in drunkenly pulling people out of vans and punching them – guess who one. Making things a little more dangerous was the apparent absence of police officers for the whole affair – there were a bunch of what appeared to be privately hired security people, but by the time things got rowdy, they were clearly stretched beyond their capacity.

I had a train to catch at 8 something in the morning, so I skedaddled to my hostel and read in a common area until the sun came up, which was fun, as I was occasionally harassed by members of the Swiss high school group who were taking up much of the hostel, all of whom cycled through four or five languages in which to ask me for a cigarette before settling in English. One of these guys passed out on the floor near my table while waiting for his friend to use the vending machine – his friend decided to leave him there, which was a move I tacitly endorsed. A few minutes later the security guard came by and told me, in French, that I was going to have to do something with my friend. I told him he was mistaken, that my only friend was adventure (I couldn't tell him about you, my secret friends, for obvious reasons), and we shared a good laugh. Then he showed me his cellphone's phonebook, to indicate that he had many, many friends. C'est la vie.

A Day At The Market

Where are there a lot of Turkish people? This is a question that follows me around like a cocker spaniel, exactly like a cocker spaniel save for the fact that not once has it provoked furious anger in me. Just curiosity, warm and perplexing. My first guess (vis a vis where Turkish?) was Istanbul. No, you’re right, too obvious. Ankara? That is a made up name. My third guess struck gold – Berlin. Because Berlin is vastly underpopulated – before WWII it had 4.5 million people, now it has 3.5 - and because there’s more work here than there is in most of former East Germany, which isto say some a lot of immigrants come here. Specifically Turkish immigrants. Much has been made about there being more kebap stands (doner, falafel, etc) than wurst stands in Berlin, but this ruckus ignores the fact that wurst, for the most part, is sort of gross, and kebap, when done well, makes Jesus Christ our savior look like gutter trash.

One of the best things about Berlin is a market held every Tuesday and Friday in Kreuzberg, near Jesse Andrews’ old apartment. This market is a Turkish market. I go at least once a week to purchase hummus and sesame rings and the occasional set of ingredients for a misguided curry. Once we got butter cheese there, my girlfriend and I, under the correct rationale that if someone offers you cheese with a higher fat content, you should purchase it or die trying.

The best thing about the Turkish market is the cheap and plentiful food goods. One of the worst is the crowding, the shoving, the loudness that emerges from tourists who don’t speak German well or at all arguing with vendors who don’t speak German well or at all. An amusing but still somewhat horrible thing about the Turkish market is the abundance of 70ish Turkish and Lebanese women, the tallest of whom is 3 ft. tall and the least square of whom is completely cubical, wandering like enchanted concrete barricades through the narrow central aisle, pushing either their grandbabies in strollers or a large personal shopping valise, or both. Sometimes they bring friends along, to walk around them in circles pointing at things and knocking into people.

In Berlin, nobody has cars, and at Berlin stores, you have to pay quite a bit for bags. So when people completely flip out and try to buy more food than they can fit in whatever shoulder bag they have with them, they either have to have a canvas sack on them or, in emergency situations, they have to carry this huge wheeled carrying case with them. If they don’t have someone to watch their children, and they almost unexceptionally don’t, they bring their kids as well. To make this somewhat difficult aspect of shopping more harmonious, most Berlin supermarkets have complicated gates to push through in order to get into the store.

Which is fine. But sometimes a crazy capitalist fever comes over me when I’m in the Turkish Market, and I become convinced that the hummus stand I like will either run out of hummus or burn down before I get to it. And having to wait for people negotiating a small, inanimate army of packaging becomes mad stressful.

Usually after the ordeal of the Turkish Market I treat myself to a falafel at KING OF FALAFEL, a small stand Jesse claims is the best Falafel provider in the city, but is in fact second to Babel, a falafel stand near my apartment. Why go to KING OF FALAFEL, then? Because it’s adorable. KING OF FALAFEL is run by the King and Queen of Falafel, both of whom are constantly bemused, if a little frustrated, by the task of creating and selling falafel sandwiches. Every step – adding the garlic sauce, frying the chickpea balls, wandering to the back of the stand to look for something they don’t actually need, scratching their head between their hairline and the cool fez the King of Falafel wears, prompts a fair amount of consternation. Yet the finished product is high quality. High enough, anyway, to make up for the occasional 30 minute wait for a food that should take 2 minutes to prepare from scratch. The last time I was there they made me free tea – an act that, while appreciated, added another 5 minutes to my wait, to apologize for their slowness. Or at least I think that’s what happened – the Queen doesn’t seem to have cottoned to my not being a German speaker.

James Joyce Can Suck It

And so can Jesse, for that matter. Inspired by a number of things, mostly suffering as documented by several of Berlin’s topnotch museums and a long walk down the most touristed stretch of oh-so-touristed Paris, I’ve managed to put together, at least somewhat, a few of the story ideas I’ve had so far into what I think might eventually become something worth reading. I’m not quite ready to start writing the first draft, but I’ve outlined a basic mythology and story arc and am doing character work right now. I don’t know what any of this means. Sure, my topnotch education can define mythology for you, can hunt it down like Dog the Bounty Hunter to it’s greek routes, pin it to the terra cotta floor, and mace it! Mace! But I don’t know what it means in terms of preparing a story of any scope. But, having blogged about it, it will happen. More to come? Surely.

Since this would be a very short and even-more-than-usual self-congratulatory blog post, I’m going to take some time to describe what is either the coolest or most horrible, depending on whether or not you’re a real estate appraiser/Basquiat fanatic outlet of creativity I’ve discovered in Berlin. This passion – mania? No, just passion – don’t get carried away, Sparky – is shared by virtually every inhabitant of this troubled, vibrant city, from the 2 foot tall Lebanese ladies who constantly throw themselves at my shins when I try to walk past them in Kreuzberg to the good shoppers ant ExtraX, the goth superstore – no joke – next to our apartment. I speak, of course, of writing indecipherable things on things you don’t own.

The most famous example of this is the Berlin Wall, specifically the still impressive East Side Gallery – 1.1 km of the wall left standing to preserve the bright, peace-and-freedom celebrating graffiti put up on it surely before much of the rest of the wall fell in 1990. The least famous example is the obscure tagging done in plain sight of me and anyone else who happened to be walking by the front door of my apartment on a pane of murky glass by an otherwise unremarkable German lad.

Quick note on how to look German: wear a Yankees cap. No joke. It’s also very important to respond to any question including the words “ball” “championship” or “you must be pulling my leg with this faux-New Yorker crap, goateed Berlin hipster” with “Go Yanks!” or people will begin to suspect that you know nothing of baseball, having a job, or not listening to the entire Sean Paul song you just downloaded on your cellphone, which, look at you, you’re actually doing even as I type this
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In any case, this eighteen or so years old German kid sees me sitting outside my apartment, sees me seeing him, then tags the door, opens it, walks out towards me, giving me a faintly confrontational look – not threatening, really, but more of a “what’s with you, bro?” – and walks off. And I came off feeling weird.

Correctly, it seems, because virtually all of Berlin – and, please remember, this city is somewhere between 6 and 9 times the size of Paris – is covered in graffiti. Most of it is what I refer to as “banal tagging” – the kind of stuff you see everywhere in big cities, except more so. Some of it, however, shows signs of being the result of some sort of mass hysteria. On, for example, the East Side Gallery, which, as you might have guessed, draws its share of non-artistic graffiti, somebody saw fit to write a crude slogan, a command – let’s call it “dance with my cousin” for proprieties sake, in Spanish. And then, for no apparent reason, most of the people who passed that oh so clever ejaculation felt the need to write the same thing, again in Spanish, somewhere near by. Sometimes they would try to outdo each other with emphasis: “dance with MY cousin, friend” etc. Like hundreds of times. What? What?

Shhhh, darling. Do not ask that. It’s Berlin. The answer to your question - to all questions? Maybe - is “Berlin.”

All Apologies

Thus far, my blogging of my trip to, through, around, and under the surface of Europe has been lacking, if only because I have made no blog entries about the trip. Was I going for minimalism, you ask? Shut up.

In reality, my failure – and there has been exactly one (1) – has had more to do with two insidious forces acting upon my otherwise charmed life: the lack of discipline that comes with travel and the lack of internet access that comes with living in an apartment 20 minutes or so from free wireless. At this point you may have some objections, two objections, to be specific, both of which are valid, but stupid at the same time. Objection one: you blogged New Zealand, and you were traveling then – what’s the deal? Yes, this is true, but when I was traveling in New Zealand I was working and writing and sending copybatches through the internet all the time. All three of these factors made a) having indisputably blogworthy things happen to me, b) having a natural reason and opportunity for blogging and c) having regular access to the internet just sort of happen, like magic. Your second objection: if you have access to free internet, shouldn’t that make it more likely that you’d post blog entries, not less? O-ho, merry prankster, not so fast. I have free internet available 20 minutes away. By subway.

An aside about socioeconomics and societal mores in Germany, particularly in Berlin. For the most part, they don’t exist. There are two items of etiquette I’ve discovered to exist so far: don’t cross the street on a “don’t walk” symbol, even if there are no cars coming, even if the traffic lights are clearly malfunctioning, even if your joke friend Hans has put a crudely drawn don’t walk symbol in lipstick on your bathroom mirror, just to see how long you will stand silently, waiting. Hans has some gender issues, but you probably do too, so lay off. Jesse described this phenomenon as part of a sort of a “why hurry” approach to life shared by the cosmopolitan, enlightened Berliners. In my mind, a fatal flaw to this characterization is that German people are robots.

Another item of etiquette: don’t eat on the subway. Europeans, in general, don’t seem to be so much down with the walking while eating/eating on the go thing as Americans, possibly because literally two of them have jobs, and both of those guys work at a restaurant under the Eiffel tower. That said, you will occasionally see people chowing down on falafel as they walk down the street. But until I caught a glimpse of myself in the window opposite chowing down on some delicious fried rice (3.50) between the Senefelder and Rosa-Luxembourg-Pl. stops on the U2, I had yet to see anyone eat on the subway. It was something of a revelation – I had never before thought of myself as a rulebreaker. It is permitted to carry open bottles of beer around with you all the time, including the subway, however. Especially if you’re prone to angry shouting. In any case, riding the U-Bahn in Berlin is not what one would refer to as a “pleasure sport,” which explains my reluctance to take the 20 minute ride down to the free wireless in the SonyCenter – shaped, no lie, like Mt. Fuji, on purpose, wow – to check internet.

But, of course, because I have free internet theoretically available, I’m loathe – loathe! – to pay for it at any of the many cheap internet cafes near by. Complicating matters is that every week or so – literally three times since we’ve been in country – a random tendril of wireless connectivity will snake its way down through the Soviet-era pavement that encases my apartment in Prenzlauerberg, and we’ll have free internet at the apartment for 20 minutes or so. Free internet in the apartment means no s-bahn ride, no scary germans, and, perhaps most importantly, no pants.

In any case, apologies for the lack of bloggy goodness so far. I’ve got a bunch of stuff written down, which I’ll congeal into a really, really offensive take on the continent when I get back. I’m about to put together a few more blog entries to add to this one, and I’ll put them online soon, certainly before you read them.

Awesome. Until you scroll down (up? I don't know. Look, a kitten!) a bit…

(I apologize for lying to you about the kitten.)