Summer Hit (1978)

Driving by former CBGB's the day Hilly Kristal died is not even in hindsight a particularly interesting story. But it wasn't called the "Blank Generation" for nothing.

Brooklyn Nostalgia

Sitting on the deck at 136 Coffey not getting a boat, driving down Cadman Plaza in a Dodge Charger with white leather seats, David's got a new poetry volume out, three rounds with Charlie, John's still sad, but very funny I still got credit at Sunny's, Zohey's and Ben's daughters name is Jasper, El Cantante's playing at the Cobble Hill, the soccer field vendors have not been driven out, but badly beaten by Rich's Caha China pork, Saturday afternoon beers at the Red Hook Pier Park watching the Seastreak pass by Liberty Island, hearing that Sniffy's in the pokey, dumplings at Do Wha with the heartbreak posse, collectively missing - Fred!, driving back from Connecticut with Freeman Dyson. And, oh yeah, Darwinian evolution was just a phase.

Furor of the People

While lounging the Sunday away a great drama of Munich style class warfare unfolded below our window. The tram car couldn't pass, because some Porsche with double wide sports wheels was parked just a bit too far into the street. Aaah, the furor of the people. Some tattooed mullet head coming to the help of the tram car conductor went as far as activating the Porsche's alarm, then tried to lift the car to no avail, which got him to resort to a wonderful tourette cascade of Bavarian expletives. When the blocked tram cars were finally four trains deep a rather embarrassed young yuppie in short shorts appeared and sped away in horrified silence.

The scene reminded me of one of the latest editorials of German Vanity Fair editor Ulf Poschardt. His editorials are a treasure trove of fun quotes somewhere between "Neo-conservatism For Dummies" and serious contenders for the Marie Antoinette Award (we read them to each other aloud almost every week). So there he was complaining in length how some "eco squares" let out the air of the tires of the Alfa Romeo he was test driving that week, not realizing how little gas such a sports car uses and how many solar panels can be found on the roofs of the mansions in the posh neighborhoods around Berlin. Hard to capture the brilliance of the original.

So far German Vanity Fair's been quite a fresh air in the German magazine landscape though, which has been dominated by lad mags and TV guides for the past ten or something years. It's weekly and has been projecting a kind of worldliness missing from German media. Well, it's not quite up to par with the US original. Besides the fact that the editorials make you wonder, if liberal doyen Graydon Carter knows what rabid neocon ideologue has been hired as his German equivalent, there's the chronic lack of glamorous celebrities in Germany (chancellorette Angela Merkel and orphaned polar bear cub Knut being the only German covers of international relevance so far).

The latest issue had fun failure of marketing though. Attached to the issue was a CD with 10 "Vanity Fair summer music hits 2007". Now American Vanity Fair has enclosed CDs before, which mostly featured music for people who are too rich, too successful or otherwise too busy to pay attention to the latest evolutions of pop history, i.e. white jazz vocals, maudlin indie Rock that has made it to the Top 10 or retro soul from Britain. So it's quite compatible to the brand and target group of Vanity Fair. Something went seriously wrong on the German compilation though, which starts with Mungo Jerry's "In the Summertime" and ends with Kool & the Gang's "Celebration", two songs that have no redeeming values, no matter how much camp irony you put into it. Neither do Euro Dance classics like Chocolate's "Ritmo de la noche" or Shannon's "Let the Music Play". The key to this strange array of margarita party faves is found on the cover. "Selected by you", it says there, so there must've been some readers' poll or sweepstakes. Which reveals the real reason why there hasn't been a German equivalent to Vanity Fair or the New Yorker before, even though German journalists have been fantasizing about doing them for decades.

The reason for the lack of sophisticated general interest magazines other than two or three newsweeklies in Germany lies in Jean Baudrillard's quote: "America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version." As a consequence German glamour rags regularly run out of native celebrities to cover, so they always come back to the same geriatric cast of polo tournaments and product placement galas. This is the only reason, why oddities like the countess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis and her offspring can sustain their status as hipster celebrities, even though the countess' only claim to Pop fame were hairstyles which she wore in the 80s, that would've made A Flock Of Seagulls look like a bunch of skinheads. Now that she's a rabid catholic fundamentalist, very much opposed to secular democracy, she maybe shouldn't be given the type of adulating coverage normally reserved for harmless film stars. But what you gonna do.

A Good Day For America

Carl Rove resigns. And it turns out that Cheney said it all along: occupying Iraq will turn into a quagmire.

Christopher Street Day

It's Christopher Street Day and since we live around the corner from the local kind of Christopher Street the parade came by in full swing. It wasn't that much different than back in New York. Some of the floats still played the same kind of music like twenty years ago, mostly that slightly Eastern European sounding Schlager Disco like Marianne Rosenberg's anthem "Ich bin wie Du". But that has more to do with Munich, than with local gay culture. After all Munich radio plays the same music like twenty years ago. Mostly the slightly Eastern European sounding power ballad genre.

There was some local flavor though - a gay Trachtenverein with a whole contingent of Kraftlackeln decked out in Lederhosen and Janker leading the procession down the Munich streets. That subsubculture just opened their first own bar called Inside. A place where the tradition loving gay can go and have a cold malted beverage of choice. Despite the rabidly homophobic Bavarian Catholicism and the rustic macho posturing with all those massive moustaches and rough attire Bavarian cultural history has long been dominated by gay culture. It truly started with King Ludwig, followed by Bavaria's favorite TV actor Walter Sedlmayr (slain in a brutal murder that was made too look like a botched S&M orgy), Munich's couturier Rudolph Moshammer (slain by a gay hustler from Iraq - no, you can't make shit like that up), and the Prada shoe wearing Bavarian pope Benedict XVI. and his "private secretary" Georg Gänswein.

Smells Of New York

Great new service - the Gawker's New York City Subway Smell Map. Click on any station and read vivid descriptions of the fumes and odors to be found there. Hardly any outter borough entries though. Brooklyn, Queens and Bronx gentrified to the point of odorlessness already? As if. Most poetic - Union Square. Reads like the Tourette version of Warhol's musings on the topic in "The Philosophy Of Andy Warhol:

When I’m walking around New York I’m always aware of the smells around me: the rubber mats in office buildings; upholstered seats in movie theaters; pizza; Orange Julius; espresso-garlic-oregano; burgers; dry cotton tee-shirts; neighborhood grocery stores; chic grocery stores; the hot dogs and sauerkraut carts; hardware store smell; stationery store smell; souvlaki; the leather and rugs at Dunhill, Mark Cross, Gucci; the Moroccan-tanned leather on the street-racks; new magazines, back-issue magazines; typewriter stores; Chinese import stores (the mildew from the freighter); India import stores; Japanese import stores; record stores; health food stores; soda-fountain drugstores; cut-rate drugstores; barber shops; beauty parlors; delicatessens; lumber yards; the wood chairs and tables in the N.Y. Public Library; the donuts, pretzels, gum, and grape soda in the subways; kitchen appliance departments; photo labs; shoe stores; bicicle stores; the paper and printing inks in Scribner’s, Brentano’s, Doubleday’s, Rizzoli, Marboro, Bookmasters, Barnes & Nobel; shoe-shine stands; grease-batter; hair pomade; the good cheap candy smell in the front of Woolworth’s and the dry goods smell in the back; the horses by the Plaza Hotel; bus and truck exhaust; architects’ blueprints; cumin, fenugreek, soy sauce, cinnamon; fried plantanos; the train tracks in Grand Central Station; the banana smell of dry cleaners; exhausts from apartment house laundry rooms; East Side bars (creams); West Side bars (sweat); newspaper stands; record stores; fruit stands in all the different seasons—strawberry, watermelon, plum, peach, kiwi, cherry, Concord grape, tangerine, murcot, pineapple, apple—and I love the way the smell of each fruit gets into the rough wood of the crates and into the tissue-paper wrappings.

El Cantante

If you read the reviews of J.Lo's and Marc Anthony's Hector Lavoe biopic "El Cantante" is a stinker about to surpass Mariah Carey's "Glitter". Great side effect of the movie's release is a massive influx of Lavoe bootlegs on the web in recent days. Album blog "The Sun Of Latin Music" for example uploaded the complete Hector Lavoe discography both with Wili Colon and solo, which hasn't been available for years. There's also many an unearthed video on YouTube. One of the best is an appearance of Lavoe with Tito Puente's band on some Venezuelan TV show doing a great version of his signature song "El Cantante". There's a yet unbespectled young Lavoe performing with Wilie Colón, footage from a Fania show at the Cheetah in 1973 and a great rendition of Juanito Alimaña in front of a Keith Haring mural, which looks fairly familiar. And then there's the bio from the Spanish E! channel, which is pretty comprehensive.

Call A Glacier

Ran into Kalle Laar who's done this sound installation for the Venice Biennal called Call A Glacier. He teamed up with the Commission for Glaciology at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and put a microphone onto the Vernagtferner glacier in the Ötztal Alps. So now, if you call

+49 - 89 - 3791 4058

you can hear the glacier melting. Rather noisy. Because it's melting. Fast.

Summer Hit (2002)

I always liked watching CMT and GAC for their broad range of earnest blue collar emotions wrapped in pedal steel driven softrock. In any given ten minute segment there's always plenty of sorrow and anger, loss and despair, an unusual class conciousness and that fervent sense of patriotism walking the fine line between rabid nationalism ( Toby Keith , Clint Black , Darryl Worley) and rebellious salt-of-the-earth-nostalgia ( Gretchen Wilson , Sammy Kershaw , and of course Montgomery Gentry's "My Town" above). White hinterland America always seems like a strangely sad, but proud place in those videos.

I always missed this kind of blue collar pride over here. Especially in Munich of course, since there's not much of a blue collar population in Beamer town, where teenagers go golfing and senior citizens drive Porsches. But I got a taste of local patriotism, when I made the mistake of writing the town of Augsburg up as a "Kleinstadt", which means smalltown. Haven't had hate mail rain on me that much in a while. Well, when I looked up the stats, they got 263.477 inhabitants, which doesn't really make it a city. But then I was lectured that anything above a population of 100 K is considered a big city around here. Which is actually based on definitions set by the International Conference of Statistics in the year 1887. Well you know what Augsburg? A few things changed since then. Women are allowed to vote now, vehicles powered by combustion engine are the preferred mode of transportation and the Germans lost the war. Twice. These days a big city is anything above a million. And you should have some urban features like variations in cultural and demographic makeup or at least a skyline. So Munich may not apply either.