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.

Shutdown

Today Sandalista fave Hugo Chávez closed down opposition channel RCTV, replacing it with a state channel, which started broadcasting twenty minutes after RCTV was pulled off air. First transmission was the national anthem conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, the 26-year-old Venezuelan who was appointed as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Sandalistas like Chávez for some good reasons. Using oil money to rebuild villages buried by landslides ain't half that bad. Mostly old school lefties applaud him for taunting Bush. Whenever he's clamping down Caudillo style it seems to be a surprise though. Maybe his cozying up to Fidel Castro and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could've been a hint. Or all those members of the Cuban secret police helping the Venezuelans to put in place some serious surveillance apparatus. Not that the CIA backed oil oligarchy opposition is comprised of heros of the working class. But it wasn't exactly the beginning of Chávez campaign against critical media.

Kraut Boys Can't Jump

Everybody including my editors is going nuts about this band Erdmöbel's No. 1 Hits album full of translated pop covers. How to put this politely now? You'll get it righ away, when you listen to their cover of Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade Of Pale" (above(. It's even more evident, when you compare their version of "Can't get you out of my head" with Kylie Minogue's original (which is pretty shlocky Eurodisco to begin with). Well, if you wanted to prove the Sprockets nature of German pop culture, you sure could play some Erdmöbel in class. Reminded me a bit of those Burmese, who smuggled in pop CDs nobody wanted to hear, because Madonna and Michael Jackson were just too exotic sounding. So they recorded them a bit out of tune with local musiocians and wrote some native lyrics. Since "Papa Don't Preach" didn't really translate culturally, they called the song "The Fish That Got Caught In The Net" and told the story of a rural love affair. The main hit when we travelled Burma was quite a different song though. Went to a Karaoke Bar near the Chinese border, where some opium lords had their girls sing for them and so we were treated to about five versions of "Always Coca Cola".

Alright, enough pop cultural chauvinism. Well deserved as it may be.

Hater's Club

Aaah, another entertaining chapter of ze Germans and ze inferior races. Went to see a play (the premiere of Swiss playwright Lucas Bärfuss' "Die Probe" at the Kammerspiele, actually quite a relief after years of New York Broadway and realist author's theater hell, besides the fact that both theater and afterparty were filled with hordes of hip and pleasant young Munichians) and later back to Schuhmann's, where we joined a group of fellow cultural editors, some of whom I've known for literally decades.

One I'll name Django suddenly went on and on about the mosque they want to build in his neighborhood. This formerly pinko colleague went immediately over the rightwing cliff, talking about those elements who would crowd his streets and that even the Turks in the neighborhood were against it. He praised ousted governor Edmund Stoiber's and interior minister Günter Beckstein's succesful initiatives to block the project. Those two are the Bavarian equivalents to rabid culture war nuts Bill Frist and Tom DeLay. Well, according to them and Django worst of all is the fact that the mosque would be built right next to a Catholic church.

Now my most favorite of all neocons David would most likely agree witht hem, but he would have tried to outdebate me, which was always fun. Django backpedalled right away when I played the atheist card and complained, that those omnipresent Bavarian churchbells insult my secular sensibilities just as much as back in the roaming reporter days the omnipresent calls to prayer in Middle East countries. He switched to the parking space and trafic problems a mosque might create. Coward. At least stick to your guns. Only thing comforting about this was the sense that people at Schuhmann's are not just full of envy and spite, but equal opportunity haters in the old school German sense.

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....