Capital Glamour (pt.2)

Went to Berlin again for the Golden Prometheus Award show. Hey! I was nominated, of course I went. Vanity is my middle name. There was some ex-president and the former terrorist lawyer turned German answer to Richard Ashcroft Otto Schily and his jailbait daughter, a whole bunch of TV stars I've never heard of and when I was named newspaper journalist of the year my ego swell to the size of Florida. Ha! Thank you very much Golden Prometheus jury people. Rather nice welcome.

Afterwards I went to party all around Berlin with some weighty gold colored statue. We had Markus' chauffeured BMW 7 limo to cruise around in. Very academy awards, although one of my fellow travellers the magazine journalist of the year was too shy to carry around his statue and hid it in his coat, even though the coat check girl at the Borchardts bar & grill was chirping an admiring "Ooooh, is that a Golden Prometheus" at me, before propping it up the bar counter. Otherwise it was definitely more Berlin than Hollywood, with rallying cries like "Hey! The Turntable Rockers play at the Weekend tonight and I got tickets!" coming from the backseat. The rallying crier was 48 years of age by the way, so I guess partying is fate in this most existentialist of all cities. Niklas and I tried to get a last drink at the re-opened Cookie's in the basement of the Westin Grand, but were told that gentlemen can only get in if in the company of ladies. Wow. How ghetto. Reminded me of the Brooklyn nightclubs which used to advertise on 105.9 FM with lines like "dress for success! Tight, tight security. No jeans, no sneakers, no jewlery."

At The Circus

Watched the Valuev-McCline fight on TV last night. Gotta admit that boxing on TV's much more prominent over here. Three networks compete for market share right now, so they'll show even mediocre fights on Saturday late prime. Valuev fought some cannon fodder named Jameel McCline who seems to have an exclusive subscription to bad news, so by round three that guy's kneecap snapped out of it's socket, since it was obviously too much to have 120 Kilograms of meat bouncing on some gristle for an extended period of time.

Somehow Valuev fights always feel like tha last gasp of heavyweight boxing as big business. Next exit mud wrestling with dwarfs? Well, next weekend we're off to Göteborg to see some real pro fight. Asa Sandell will be featured in the historical first pro bout on Swedish ground since professional boxing was banned there in 1970. It's gonna be a riot of a weekend. Asa's trainer Blackmore's one of the greatest partiers in the Western hemisphere (he sure helped to give us a fun send-off from Brooklyn), plus Fred's trainer Grant Seligson will be there cornerman. Can't wait..... P.S.: On a note of pure inside jokerism - anybody ever notice the distinct similarities between Valujev and German journo scammer Tom Kummer? Didn't Spy magazine invent this 'seperated at birth' column in the 80s?

Capital Glamour

The largest daily newspaper of Germany threw a party the other day. Not exactly a party, more a function. For politicans and clients, so the staging was quite regal. They had rented the Bode Museum in Berlin, an opulent place with massive halls overloaded with stucco and statures and treasures from mideaval times. Since the fine cuisine situation in Berlin is even more dire than in Munich, they had hired Käfer, the Bavarian equivalent of Dean & De Lucca, to do the catering, so there was great meats and finger foods and the signature dish of Bavarian pretension, pasta with truffles drowned in heavy cream sauce.

For me it was of course quite exciting to mingle in a room full of political A-list celebrities who I've known only from news photos. Our chancelorette Angela Merkel stopped by and since she lives only across the bridge from the museum hung out for quite a while to chat in length with the editor in chief and his deputy. There were her fierce social democrat counterparts in the grand coalition Mr. Müntefering and Mr. Gabriel, who sport Viking beards and the swagger of cruiser weight champs. Well, their grand coalitioning ain't no picknick, so it's good to know we got some Social Democrats in fighting condition there. Of course one shouldn't be blinded by the glamour of the moment and forget, that those were the Social Democrats who sold the German middle class down the river of big industry under a chancellor who not only had the time to sue the press for stories about his alleged unnatural hair color, but also the chutzpe to join Swiss media moguls and Russian oligarchs just weeks after stepping down from office. And despite her no-nonsense approach Chancelorette Merkel is of course a hardcore neo-liberal, shifting the tax burden further to the middle and lower classes, while neglecting her leadership responsibilities in the EU becaus of some anachronist Eastern European trust in the mighty US of A as her saviour.

Otherwise the capital glamour of Berlin tends to reconfirm the troubling news about German society's overaging. American functions like this tend to be sprinkled with the best, brightest and cutest of the young generation. All Berlin had to offer on the non-political celeb front was a graying director of TV comedies and an aging starlet named Jenny Elvers whose only claim to fame is that she got knocked up by one of the inmates of the local Big Brother TV show franchise. Well, there were some young, bright and cute people, but they were fellow journos, so that doesn't count as glamour.

My friend Niklas took me for a latenite spin around the city though. He's the art and architecture critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung's main competitor Frankfurter Allgemeine. Architecturally Berlin is quite glamorous. More in Grandmaster Flash „Adventures on the Wheels of Steel" kind of sense, than in the Frank Sinatra city hymn style. Still, we did some speeding on the twenty laned Stalin Allee (ok, it felt like twenty lane and it's not named after Stalin anymore), where the former Communist government built fabulously modern appartment high rises to pretend all's groovy in the Socialist world. There's an interesting mix of people living there now. On the one side you still have old party faithfuls and remnants of the high cadres of East German secret police, on the other side you have hip thirtysomethings who like the moderinst touch and urban feel of these places. Looking at their appartments you might think there's only few distinctions, since both tend to live in fabulous 60s and 70s furniture. Only the window drapes are an instant give-away, with the old commies hanging lace and the hipsters sporting aluminum or cotton.

We had some drinks at the Greenwich Bar, where everybody I visit in Berlin always has drinks, we drove by Reem Koohlhaas' fabulous embassy for the Netherlands and the beautiful rows of Gründerzeit houses in Berlin West, the next morning I met his incredibly cute new daughter, who know how to play her toddler charm to the max, I had lunch with one of Germany's star scribes Lothar Müller, whose anglo-saxon writing sensibilites are a refreshing non-ideological breeze, I visited my old mentor Markus whose new offices have a direct view of the zoo, so he looks out on Flamingos and beavers and monkeys, who make surreal tropical noises, I collected juicy stories and rumors about German media, where the fight for a pole position in the run to be the successor to newsweekly Spiegel's editor in chief Stefan Aust has blessed us with some infighting and scheming worthy of a Hollywood bitch battle. I left in the afternoon from Berlin's main airport, which still looks like the airport for Kalamazoo. Hey! This is our capital. By very recent choice.

The Hunger

When you come from a cosmopolitan city (like New York, Tokyo, London, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Bombay or Sao Paolo) to a second tier city, you tend to notice a certain hunger in the conversational tone. It’s not that people aren’t informed, well read or experienced. It’s not a hunger for what’s hip and happening either. It’s more a longing for the free flow of conversational sparring. I used to notice this hunger whenever I came to LA, San Franisco, Hamburg and Berlin and mostly in people who were trapped in professional peer groups, which tend to happen rather rapidly in second tier cities.

Can happen here rather swiftly as well. There’s the famous Schumann’s Cocktail Bar where most media people hang out at night and where I recently found myself surrounded by people who not only told me in detail how to do my new job (well, it is a new job, so some advice was definitely appreciated), but also quite adamently who sucks and deserves to get fired asap. German media talk tends to run in circles around topics like that and despite everybody’s insistence that we’re all a gang of brothers and sisters tends to get quite nasty and spiteful.

So here we are, feeling the first pangs of this hunger. Although contrary to Fred I really can’t complain. The new job’s overwhelming, but actually quite exhilarating. It’s like banging out a whole magazine every single day. Great team of sophisticates. My co-chief turns out to be as easily excitable for good ideas as I am, plus he is super-connected here in Germany. And there is of course a whole cast of characters who are happy to escape the trappings of peer pressure talk. Michael, the jazz musician who travels the world to produce archive music. Albert the poet and playwright who gets invited to readings in Colombia and Afghanistan and who gets commissions from faraway places like Korea. Michi the Yoga teacher who runs the local Shivamukti branch, a vegan restaurant and a crowded disco where old faves like Little Louie Vega and the Body & Soul crew spin. Ralf the quantum physicist who gave up his particle accelerating career to write novels. Clemens who's the Munich deputy editor of the pitbull tabloid Bild and of course knows all the juicy details not fit to print. Markus the former Foreign Legionaire now boxing trainer who fought in the Seoul Olympics.

Ethnic Studies

The longer we're here, the more it's evident that Munich's an ethnic town. We took a tram car last night and every face had this distinct Bavarian flavor. Never occured to me before. Maybe because it makes me ethnic too. Which was actually confirmed numerous times in New York. During the first years there cab drivers would ask me, if I'm Swedish. Sometime in my mid-thirties they started to ask, if I'm Russian and soon shopkeepers started to address me in wild Eastern European languages with a distinct lack of vowels. One day in the locker room at Gleason's Boxing Gym that huge Russian boxer started to even scream at me in a Russian commando tone, staring me straight into the eyes. It think he reminded me of my loyalties to some brotherhood or ethnic group or Red Army unit and it took a bit of convincing until he believed me that I don't speak a word of Russian.

While just mean that I'm not aging too gracefully, final confirmation of Bavaria's ethnic make-up came, when we took a trip to Weilheim, small town deep in the Southern Bavarian plains leading to the foothills of the Alps. Weilheim's only claims to fame are the Electronica band Notwist and it's offshoots and a Christian Conservative vote approaching 90 percent. The buildings there are small and compact. There is a creek running through the middle of town, a market square with a few stalls and the churches sport onion spires. It reminded me very much of those Serb towns and Bosnian villages on the way to Pale, Fred thought it looks very Hungarian. But it was the people who gave us this distinct feel of visiting some remote Easter European place. Sullen, stern faces, some looked like extras from 'Borat'.

Of course there are some pockets of cosmopolitanism. My friend Eckart and his American girlfriend Susan just moved here from Paris the same week we arrived here. We gonna start a support group for recovering cosmopolitans. First therapy results soon...

Culture Shock Used To Be A Friend Of Mine

Culture shock used to be a friend of mine, which made my job as a free roaming reporter much easier. There was nothing more exhilarating than being dropped in a strange and exotic place, exchanging the crammed comforts of an air conditioned Y class seat for a new reality, where you had to instantly get along with Sudanese Islamists or Colombian generales, with Senegalese interrogators or Russian bratva enforcers. Mostly it was a rush and that first moment of friendly bonding, be it through booze, drugs, prayer or sports talk, could be a real fun high.

Moving to Germany after nineteen years in New York is not quite as exciting. I did grow up here for starters. Although it's definitely not the country I grew up in anymore. Actually, the country I grew up in doesn't exist anymore, since I was born and raised in West Germany, which was part of Western Europe, while today's unified Germany has found it's way back into the cultural realm of Central Europe. For me there's of course something strangely familiar to Munich. It's not that sweet nostalgia of childhood and youth though. It rather throws me back to that suffocating feeling, when some aunt or grandmather surrounded by the waft of heavy perfume and caked with old-school make-up smothered my three-year old self with hugs and wet kisses.

For Fred it's quite different. First of all her last hometown of Frankfurt is one of the few German cities that still feel Western and cosmopolitan. She first noeiced how large and strangely expansive Munich is, and how that January gloom, the heavy-set buildings and the eery quiet in the city create a strangely threatening mood. There is something offestting in this citiyscape. On the one hand Munich is very cutesy and slightly claustrophobic, on the other hand there are a lot of architectural traces of second-rate empires with illusions of grandeur, who crammed some half-baked palaces and monuments into this place. If New York was an elegant heavy-weight champ with lots of charms and a big mouth like Muhammad Ali, Munich would be that short, stocky Bulgarian wrestler with a perennial grudge.

Well, this was just the first week, spent trying to get our bearings in Munich. Soon this will be our base for life in Europe rather than life in Munich. Soon there will be sunshine and trips to the lakes and mountains and the aforementioned Italian border two hours South of here. Whole different chapter.

Velcome to Germany

So there we arrived on that pleasant Emirates flight in Hamburg, standing in long line of Middle Eastern and Arab passengers waiting to be frisked for our transfer. It must have been fatigue, when I greeted that Northern German security with the Bavarian greeting 'Gruess Gott', which literally means 'A greeting to God'. Northern German security was quite delighted. 'Well, finally a righteous greeting' the large Teuton said, winking at his colleague. 'All those other guys just say salaam aleikum'.

Dinner at the historic Weinhaus Neuner was pleasant. Even though a whole room full of mono-ethnic guests is always a bit disturbing at first. In this case it was obviously company policy. A few friendly Itlians asking for a table were told that kitchen was closed, despitte the obvious fact that it was 9:30 and a few empty tables were still laid out with silverware. No reservations accepted for the next day either. I think I overheard a muffled 'fuck you' from the departing 86'd Mediterranians.

New Year's eve we spent in Munich with our friends from Milan. We ended up in quite a nice lounge bar with a DJ spinning Disco worthy of a Long Island wedding (in a good sense). There was Andrea and a few of his Italian friends with us, having such a good time that a lot of people seeing us through the large window pane joined the party. The proprietress, a short, stocky and very drunk Bavarian woman who reminded me of my old landlady on the Lower Eastside. She bought us a round of 'shorties' (German code for sweetish liquors in fancy colors with a guaranteed hangover), screaming 'oh those fucking Italians. I can't stand those fucking Italians', going into a tirade against that nation two hours South of here that our friends were from. Who took it in stride by the way. I guess they're used to that type of German behavior.

Had I mentioned the special section on 'the black body in Hip Hop' a German paper recently featured? It'll be a long way to modern cosmopolitan social skills around here I'm afraid....