mverdone

Photo: Strausberger Platz on Karl-Marx-Allee, Friedrichshain, Berlin. This was the GDR’s most prestigious street. The communists (socialists?) loved putting on parades here with marching and drums and stuff. It links the nouveau-trendy centre of Friedrichshain with the bustling Mitte shopping district, but Karl-Marx-Allee itself has not yet founds its post-GDR niche. It’s an oppressive expanse of blocky East German apartment buildings with hardly a bar or café in sight.

My parents were kind enough to ship, at my behest, some of my music equipment in a large white metal roadcase to me in Germany. I opted for five day shipping and so it was the case was dutifully flown and delivered to Berlin on time and in one piece, most likely. I say most likely because I have yet to see it. It’s in a customs depot in Schöneberg, though it may as well be in the Marianas Trench for the difficulty of extricating it.

Let’s talk about the German penchant for rules and regulations, shall we? First of all, German people on the whole are extremely polite and helpful when it comes to rules. They are patient with me as I attempt through trial and error to navigate the activities necessary to perform an officious act like crossing the street or buying a loaf of bread. They believe in laws and rules here. Really, they do, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Rules and regulations are designed to promote efficiency and correctness, justice and fairness. These are admirable traits. Sadly, though, the rules themselves have tumesced and there is now a Leviathan of red tape just behind the curtain that all Germans are powerless to fight.

Last Wednesday I went down to the customs depot in Schöneberg which is about 45 minutes away by train at the exact opposite end of the city from me. Schöneberg translates, approximately, to “beautiful neighbourhood” which it certainly was with the birds chirping and the early morning sun rising (because unlike everything else in Berlin the customs depot is not open late). The customs depot itself was in a new-looking modernist building beside an overpass. What a joyless place it was. A set of chairs were laid out in six perfect rows upon which sat glum looking people awaiting their turn at a numbered gate in another room to argue their case for something or other.

There seemed to be a general inquiries desk so I went to it. Mercifully the woman spoke English and understood what I was trying to accomplish.

“It says here this package is returning to owner, ja? You are living in Berlin now?” I nodded. “Oh. Do you have your Anmeldbestätigung with you?”

I vaguely remembered this was a photocopied 8.5×11″ piece of paper with my address and an cheap-looking blue stamp on it. It was at home in my folder of very officious papers. I did, however, bring my passport which has some extra-officious certificates from the German federal government with gold leaf and holograms and microprinting to prove that I am legally allowed to live and work in Germany. The woman was unmoved. “We only accept the Anmeldbestätigung.”

She sent me away with some forms that were entirely in German. “You must fill these out,” she said. “You have a German friend to help you, ja?”

I took the train 45 minutes back and went to work for the day.

The form is a single page, double sided, in 9 pt. font. This, without a word of a lie, is what the form is called:

Zollanmeldung für die Überführung von Übersiedlungsgut in den zollrechtlich freien Verkehr zur besonderen Verwendung (Blatt 1 – Für die Zollstelle für die Überführung)

I totally got über but otherwise was not able to fill out a single line without asking my flatmate Rob for help. He stared at it and pronounced “this is so stupid.” Finally, a sane voice. My favourite very official German word on the form is this one:

Unbedenklichkeitsbescheinigung

It means an-official-certificate-to-prove-your-package-is-not-a-bomb.

This is not my first exasperating run-in with German bureaucracy. I have a thousand word draft of another blog entry regarding my experience at the Bergamt (city administration building) which I abandoned because I was plagiarizing a Kafka novel. (Most anglophones don’t know that all English translations of The Trial are in error: the book is actually about Joseph K. trying to get a change-of-address form recognized by the postal service.)

Hopefully by Wednesday I will have the papers in order to go and pick up my package. By then I will only have to pay a day’s worth or so extra storage charge at the customs depot. I hope they don’t have a form for that service.

Incidentally, besides the customs thing everything’s pretty awesome in Berlin. I mean, I could have told you about how I decided to go out for a quick drink on Friday night and ended up at a massive club until five in the morning (which the locals consider leaving early) but I figured the post office story was more interesting.

Tschüss!

My WiiToMidi music software + software by the company I now work for + guitar = awesome.

Photo: This 19th century water tower (Wasserturm) marks the center of Prenzlauer Burg. It’s also kind of creepy looking. Between this and the mind-control tower in Alexanderplatz you get the feeling this city was architected by space aliens.

Learning a new language is probably the most masochistic thing you can do to your brain. Yes, learning the piano is hard. Yes, learning how to snowboard or how to dance the charleston is challenging, but language is such a fundamental part of the brain’s processing that it utterly confounds the student who seeks to rewire it. It is very rare that I incur a headache from thinking too hard. Today I did.

I enrolled in the absolute beginners class at GLS, a large language school by my office. I was ten minutes late but somehow was the first to arrive. I chatted with my amiable teacher Heike for a few minutes, and then another other student arrived.

“Now,” said Heike, “we speak only Deutsche. It may be a little hard, ja?”

“Ja,” I concurred. Then we were off and I flashed back instantly to my first day of grade one French when the teacher announced “ici on parle seulement français.” The panic was as raw in me at 28 as it was when I was 6. There is something terrifying about not being able to communicate, about not being able to explain yourself when something goes horribly wrong. Like if you have to go to the bathroom.

Heike is an animated sort. She has a background in theater, I think. Between the hand gestures and the snippets of English-sounding German words that was the impression I got. I suppose it takes a strong personality to make yourself heard when your audience is a pair of slackjawed 20-somethings trying desperately to grab hold of anything you are saying at all like drowning sailors grasping for fragments of a once solid hull. Our Titanic was English and we sailed an ocean of what-the-fuck.

We started with “what is your name”, “where are you from”, “how long have you been here,” “what is your job,” etc. which sound like easy questions until you try to respond and your brain slams into a wall.

“Ich… kommt… de Kanada?”

“aus Kanada,” Heide corrected.

“Oh, ah, ja, umm, ja.”

Ross, the other student in the class, responded the same, and same again for how long he’d been in Berlin. Heike thought maybe he was just parroting but he was actually a Canadian in Berlin for one month so far.

The question of what I did for work seemed a little tougher.

“Ich… arbeite als… computer programmer?”

“Ah! Du arbeiten als Computerprogrammieren!”

“…Ja!” This seems to be the trick. If you don’t know the word say the English word with a German accent and hope for the best. Ross was ein Graphikdesigner.

We then went on into family relationships and I stammered that I had “zwei Brüder und eine Schwester” then Heike asked me to ask her a question about her family. (Amusingly the translation for “ask me” is “frage mich” which sounds kind of dirty. Potty humour and classrooms are hardlinked in my mind). Flailing for the first word I could grab hold of and stick into a sentence I asked Heike “Hast du ein Mann?”

I can’t give it to you in German but Heike responded that she had a husband, past tense. Not knowing the language I had no way to say “ooh, sorry” or make a joke. I just had to sit there while she dug me out of my own hole. I’m sure she gets the question every first lesson but boy is it awkward while your teacher attempts to explain divorce in German, gesturing to her ring finger for visual aid.

Then we did some workbook exercises suitable for German kindergarteners. They were hard.

After the class Ross and I attempted to talk but our speech centres were fried and we were reduced to speaking English no more complex than our German.

“My brain hurts,” I said.

“Do you come from the west coast?”

“No, I come from Calgary. Do you come from Vancouver?”

“I come from Victoria.”

“Ah.”

Language lessons are probably the most cost-effective way for an adult to feel young again. That is, overwhelmed, confused, and unable to communicate effectively. I get this privilege twice a week for the next month. Wunderbar.

A lesson in science: a sealed bottle of beer can be cooled to sub-zero temperatures without freezing thanks to the alcohol in the liquid and the pressure of the sealed container. However, as the beer becomes very cold the pressure inside the bottle increases. The minimum supported temperature of a bottle of beer is about -10 C. Last night it was -16 C outside:

The bottles of Hafferoder on the balcony experienced catastrophic container failure. The rapid loss of pressure actually cooled the liquid beer even further. This plus the sub-zero supercooled state of the beer led to near-instantaneous phase change. Also I’m out two Euro’s worth of beer. Damnit.

Yesterday I walked from my place in Prenzlauer Burg through the Mitte district to the Brandenburg Gate. I remembered the Brandenburg Gate and the sights around it from a walking tour of Berlin I took when I was here for the interview at the end of September. It was 28 C then, unbearably warm. This time it was somewhere around -10 and I was bundled up in my full Canadian winter gear. Despite the weather the Brandenburger Tor reminded me again just where I was. Holy crap you guys I live in Berlin. How crazy is that?!

The sights in the area are still there. The Jewish Holocaust Memorial is a bit less overwhelming when it’s covered in ice and your attention is spent trying not to slide and fall into the corner of a concrete block instead of taking in the grandeur of the place. I’ll be sure to walk through again in the Spring. I can’t really describe the memorial so I’ll ask you to look at it from the air on Google Maps:

View Larger Map

The memorial is amazing in that it doesn’t have any statues, any plaques, or make any specific statements about the holocaust. Everyone who walks through it will have a slightly different interpretation, but will remember the experience. The first time I went through I was very moved.

Today I went to a flea market in Mauerpark. Incredible! There were many booths selling vinyl records. Prices were high but selection was great. Crates and crates of New Wave and Punk records; highly sought after LPs back in Calgary. There were also a lot of artists selling hipster clothing: trendy print t-shirts and handbags, psychedelically coloured knitted gloves and toques, and fashionable retro junk clothing from 20 to 40 years back.

What was really neat was the junk. A few large tents held discarded housewares from generations of German families. Bowls, dishes, plates, cutlery probably full of leaded paint scattered pell mell in bins, no prices on anything. Suitcases, chairs, furniture from the 50’s. Junk, perhaps, but most of it from the GDR with that futurist/communist style looking like it was taken from a supervillain’s spaceship.

There were also shoeboxes of fading black-and-white photos of long-dead families. At one booth one could purchase whole photo albums full of pictures.

There was a lot of old Camera gear but no Nikon or Canon stuff. Again, it’s all GDR stuff: a lot of Praktica.

The GDR imparts a lot of weirdness here. I don’t know much about the communist state but I’m eager to learn. Of course it was a bad time for a lot of people and most would like to forget about it, but in terms of art and product design it bred an alien style. It reminds me of the 1967-era architecture in Montreal but a lot more awkward and a bit more menacing.

Now I’m gonna get back to slogging through my first book in German, Der Goldene Kompass. It’s a translation of an English book and I’m sure you’ll figure out the real title if you squint a little. I am about three pages in and I have a very vague idea of what’s going on. I scribble down dozens of words and every few pages stop to look them up. Then, reread the pages find more words and repeat. I’m on page three but I’ve read the first three pages about three times now…

I am slowly becoming aware of where I am. I mean, I’d been living so long in Calgary the change of Berlin was absolutely shocking (not to mention the language thing). But, as a wise Irish expat told me last week, with time builds confidence in a new city and I am building confidence.

I still thinking like a Calgarian, expecting cool things to pass me by. I need to start thinking like a Berliner who knows the cool things are always here. For instance, my (second) most favorite electronic music group in the whole world are putting out a new album in March and are going on a European tour. First I was like “oh well, that would be nice” but then I was like “wait, I’m in Europe now. I wonder if they’re playing Berlin.”

Well duh! They are only playing at perhaps the biggest club in town, Berghain Panorama Bar. It might be the epicentre of electronic music in world, period. Of course they’re playing here.

Every kind of culture in the world is around here somewhere if you know where to look. Walking along Shönhauser Allee I found a café that had teleported straight from Paris (but without the rude waiters) serving great espresso and croisants. You can get American fashion if you want: in Mitte, Rob pointed out an American Apparel beside the Diesel and Adidas stores. Berlin serves great hamburgers too (although the names of the restaurants wear thin after a while… marienBurger restaurant is on Marienburger Straße… get it? get it?) Oh, and in the organic grocery stores you can find every kind of cheese in the world. Relatively cheap, too.

There is even some Canadian stuff peeking out here and there. I noticed an ad for a music festival happening at the end of January which features Holy Fuck, my favorite improvisational electronic/loud-noises dance music group from Halifax.

Google Maps pointed me at a café named “Godshot – The Future Urban Coffee Klub” (the irreverent way people name stores here deserves its own blog post) that proudly serves Fratello coffee roasted at 4021 9th Ave SE, Calgary.

I’m in a real city and it’s cool. And you wouldn’t believe how cheap the beer is…

Today I found the English bookstore. Amazingly the store, Saint George’s, is only four blocks from my apartment. It’s a used bookstore, mostly, and the selection is frankly astounding. Anglo-Berliners clearly have varied and fascinating tastes, and the books they consign at Saint George’s are a testament to this.

I am relieved. The lack of English books, of English culture, was wearing down on me. The TV in my apartment does get two English channels, true, but they are BBC News and CNN. Nothing but half-hour loops of depressing news stories about suicide bombers and football (aka. soccer).

Truth is there are a lot of anglophiles in Berlin. At this point I’m not adept at noticing them because they look just like everyone else (of course) but occasionally in a bar or club I’ll hear a sudden chatter in a British accept like a bolt from the blue. You can survive in Berlin without learning German. You only need a few key words like kaffee (coffee), bier (beer), bitte (please), and entshuldigung (“I’m sorry”).

If, however, you choose to live here and don’t bother learning German you are a real Arschloch. What’s the point of living somewhere exotic when you can’t immerse yourself in the culture? When you can’t really communicate with the people? The fact that most young Berliners know very good English and are polite enough to speak to you in it is a wonderful thing, but after a while you feel guilty for expecting them to speak a foreign language in their home country. So, I learn.

At this point I am soaking up the words like a sponge, but the grammar completely eludes me. For many reasons, German is a difficult language. (For one, all words are gendered like French except they have three genders: male, female, and neuter. And the gendering is not at all logical. The word for boy, Junge, is male. The word for girl, Mädchen, is not female but neuter. It only gets stranger from there.) I am going to start taking some evening classes.

In the meantime, here are some words I’ve learned in no particular order:

• schön – beautiful
• straße – street
• Panier-mehl – what you cover schnitzel with (breadcrumbs)
• verkehr – traffic
• Krankenhaus – hospital (lit. sick-house)
• links – left
• rechts – right
• käse – cheese

More words later…

Currywurst is Berlin’s official food. This strange concoction can be purchased everywhere from semi-classy restaurants to weird stalls in outdoor markets and at events. Since you’re likely wondering what Currywurst is and can’t make time to fly to Berlin today to try it yourself (and, I assure you, it’s impossible to find outside of the city) here is a currywurst recipe you can make at home.

Ingredients:

Bratwurst. That is, sausage. You will probably not find succulent German bratwurst in your part of the world but that’s no matter. Traditional German bratwurst doesn’t have that many spices or anything (at least not the kind used in most currywurst) so you might want to get some Juicy Jumbo 100% All Beef hot dogs as a substitute.

Tomato sauce. The Germans are not Italians so using your mama’s famous basil and oregano pasta sauce is not acceptable for this recipe. I would suggest a 50/50 mix of Heinz canned tomato sauce and ketchup.

Curry powder. Indian curry? Malaysian? Chinese? Hah, no way. You want that supermarket generic yellow-brown powder you find in the spice aisle beside the cloves and the cumin. Get the mild variety. Let’s not be too ostentatious!

Method:

Cook bratwurst. Boiling or BBQing is acceptable but the traditional method is to pan-fry them in a little oil until the skin wrinkles up like fingers in the bath too long.

Cover bratwurst with tomato sauce. You want to use enough sauce such that you won’t have enough bratwurst to scoop it all up so a forlorn tomato puddle remains at the end.

Shake curry powder over tomato sauce and bratwurst mix until it is uniformly brown looking. Then shake on more. Like, a ridiculous amount. No, just a bit more, trust me.

Serve on a paper plate with french fries and a ridiculously small plastic fork.

I’ve had currywurst a few times here and it continues to mystify me. It’s not bad but it’s not good. It’s just… hot dog in tomato sauce. I just don’t get it… yet.

I arrived in a war zone. In the streets right now people are lighting fireworks from open windows and rooftops. Not chintzy little fireworks like you find in Canada. 3/4″ dynamite sticks that flash white and make such a noise it ricochets off the buildings. It smells like sulphur outside. Even as the plane was landing you could see glittering plumes of fireworks rising from the ground. Oh, someone just launched a massive bottle rocket from the doorway on my right. Nobody seems particularly perturbed.

Two seconds in an overheated, sweaty room trying to quietly make my bed while two guys attempt to sleep off their hangovers, beer-farting away, remind me exactly why I hate hostels. What was I thinking? Oh, right, I was thinking I don’t have a place here yet. That has to change. Fast.

The 3C “hacker” conference just wrapped up. The woman next to me is running her netbook fully in Linux terminal mode. It makes me jealous.

That is all I have the energy to say right now. More later, perhaps.

My curmudgeonly review of the decade was published in Texture Magazine this month. Ch-ch-check it out:

Noughties or Nice @ Texture Magazine

Like the title? I do too. I always forget to title my articles so the editors make something up for me. It’s way more clever than anything I could come up with.

Lots of great stuff in Texture if you haven’t read it before. I’m especially fond of Aaron Levin’s album reviews.

So I went to visit an accountant today, which is likely the most adult thing I’ve done in my entire life. I guess now I can call him My Accountant because I will be giving him money eventually. He’s a pleasant fellow with gray hair and a slight British accent.

I was thinking: paper is stupid. I was sorting through my mess of important documents at home looking for some tax records I’d likely erroneously recycled and I was thinking about how dumb it is. Like, these documents are just reflecting what’s in the CRA’s big ol’ database of taxes. Why do I have to keep them for seven years? Why can’t I just go to the CRA’s website and issue a query to get a PDF of them? Oh right, because some people don’t understand the Internet.

My personal filing system is broken because all I do is put my documents in a big folder marked TAXES and call it a day. That’s kind of how I sort my documents on the computer because I just hit command-space and type some words to find my document instantly. This does not work with paper. Instead I sit on the floor with a folder full of papers with tiny writing scrawled upon them, hunting for dates and information with my eyes. Come on! I am not made for this.

My Accountant, however, is. I could tell by the way he obsessively rearranged his sticky notes in my file. The ones on the bottom formed a left-to-right tabbing system to quickly visit various documents. The ones sticking out from the right side indicated action items.

This behaviour specifically was what made me respect the man, because there’s no way in hell I could stay so organized. Essentially I’m paying the guy to organize paper for me, and after a night of wading through dusty, crumpled pages looking for CRA Notice of Assessment 2008 pages one and three (and not finding them) I think his services are totally worth it.

I’ve been trying to go legit. Trying to stop all the illegal downloading and legally purchase my music and video. The first online media stores were primitive: overpriced, DRM’d, and with crap media quality. The illegal world was full of non-DRM’d high-quality media files for free. It’s hard to compete with free, especially when artists weren’t paid in either case.

Nevertheless, the industry has advanced to the point that the offerings of media sellers is comparable to what you can steal, and for me the guilt of downloading has finally got worse than the inconvenience of legally purchasing media. Here are a few online music worth shopping at. They are all completely DRM free and work in Canada. (Video stores don’t seem to be quite as advanced or prevalent, yet.)

bleep.com

This store was started by Warp Records and was designed by The Designer’s Republic (RIP). It is the premiere electronic music store on the Internet. The selection is not exactly limited as it is curated. You’re certain to be stumbling onto quality music instead of badly produced basement recordings from someone who isn’t very good, like me.

Prices used to be pretty high by North American standards but it’s now become quite reasonable at 10 bucks for a 320kbit MP3 album and 13 for a FLAC album. Yes, this is one of the few stores that sells lossless audio. For that reason alone it gets a gold star.

You can also purchase CDs and Vinyl from the same web store… provided you are willing to pay the brutal shipping costs from the UK.

amiestreet.com

Amiestreet has an interesting trick: crowdsourced pricing. When an album is first uploaded it’s available for free. After a few downloads it gets priced around a dollar, and then goes higher depending on the number of downloads and user recommendations it collects.

What this means is that if you are into niche stuff nobody else knows about then you can usually find it for cheap. We’re talking under three bucks an album. Also, if you know the next big thing before anyone else does you can download it for cheap, then recommend it to screw everyone after you. Oh, and you get bonus credit if you recommend an album before it becomes popular. It’s like a crazy speculative market of musical opinion. Yes, finally, there is accounting for taste.

Selection used to be very limited but now I can find everything from Animal Collective to Britney Spears on here. (Britney is region-locked to the USA. Oh dear!) Downloads are usually 256kbit MP3 minimum, but 320kbit MP3 is catching on, and FLAC will be supported “soon”.

Artists get 70% of all sales, and anyone can upload their crappy basement recordings. Because of the pricing model, crappy recordings stay at the bottom of the pile. Your lo-fi cassette taped opus could get popular and net you big monies… and if it doesn’t at least you’re not annoying other shoppers with it.

In conclusion, go legit. Pay for your damn art.