Loose Strife

An MP3 blog

Monday, September 26, 2005

#22 - Vegetarian militancy, sound magick, B&D, and the most astonishing live show of my life

"Bondage For Satomi Fuji" - Merzbow

I just saw the most incredible show of my life.

Or maybe, to be more precise, I had the most incredible club experience of my life.

That’s not it either, but hey---it’s a lead. Let me explain.

My friend Ethan, who is a psychology student at Queens College, emailed me out of the blue to ask if I wanted to see Merzbow---aka Masami Akita, the Japanese “noise artist” and writer---at the Knitting Factory, the multi-stage avant-garde coddling music space in Lower Manhattan. Ethan is interested in extreme behavior, which is curious because he is a very mild-mannered, non-extreme sort of guy. I said sure. I’ve never really gotten into this sort of music---it all sounds, well, like noise---but I figured it would be interesting. So last night we went.

Opening was Jim O’Rourke, occasional Sonic Youth member, who performed a duet with some guy using a bunch of electronic boxes. It was a mostly undifferentiated mass of electronic shrieks and rumbles which heaved in some interesting ways. Next was Circle, a Finnish prog-rock group who were pretty great, with lots of anthemic crescendos and Arctic Circle howling and an excellent, krautrock-literate drummer who looked wicked in a black turtleneck and a black cat-burglar mask, like Batman’s sidekick Robin if he was a skinhead philosophy grad student. Adding some visual amusement up front in the audience was a huge dude wearing a red headband, who was alternately taking pictures of the band and, during the really heavy parts, pumping both fists ecstatically towards the ceiling, presumably in a gesture of Finnish solidarity.

Merzbow came on precisely at midnight, and sat behind two PowerBooks, one 15” and one 12”. (For some reason I’d thought he used a guitar, but whatever.) On one was a MEAT IS MURDER sticker, and the word FUR behind a red circle and slash.

Akita had long straight black hair that hung down to the small of his back, and wore small oval glasses. As a writer, he is known for his writing on bondage and S&M, so it might strike some as odd that he is also an animal rights activist.

I guess it’s about consent.

The performance began with a stream, then a flood of sputtering low-frequencies which increased in volume until it felt like a hundred subway trains were running beneath the venue (unlike Joe’s Pub, in which you can usually hear only the #6 train during shows). Then higher frequencies came in: piercing laser-shots, screaming outbursts like buzzsaws against steel, lurching and grinding sinewaves bending like girders collapsing under the weight of buildings, and around it all a cloud of static like a swarm of giant bees, or the magnesium-flaring center of a pyrotechnical display that just keeps sizzling. It felt like---here comes a rock critic cliché, but I’m at a loss for any more precise description---the soundtrack to the apocalypse, of new buildings collapsing, calling to mind the World Trade Towers which fell only a few blocks away, and the German industrial group Einsturzende Neubauten, whose name in fact translates as “new buildings collapsing” and who I was thinking about last week while stepping around mounds of dogshit and high-end babystrollers in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, the group’s old stomping ground. I closed my eyes, and I basically saw the money shots from old Godzilla films.

Yet there was also a stillness and an austere beauty to it all, as the chaos merged together into something almost ambient. The volume was admittedly terrifying: I had earplugs screwed in to the hilt, with a 25dB noise reduction rating, and that made it easier to parse the subtle, sculptural moves he was making within each group of frequencies. (Never have I been to a show where earplugs actually enhanced the music). And there was the sheer physicality of it: the bass frequencies literally entering your body and massaging it from the inside, the high end grazing your skin like the tingle of ocean salt when it dries on your body hair after a swim.

With your eyes closed---almost the entire crowd stood that way---you felt like you’d been physically taken over and manipulated by some Alien – like creature, although more symbiotic that parasitic. The act of bondage has never rated very high in my erotic top-ten. But I imagine that it might create a sort of sensory-deprivation dream-state much like the experience of this performance, where immobility and sensory deprivation makes you acutely sensitive to your body while simultaneously freeing you of it, allowing you to step out of your flesh husk and watch yourself writhe.

It was pretty hot, actually.

But then things got weirder.

Whenever I’d open my eyes, I’d see the crazy Finn with the headband up front, holding a SLR camera with a flash unit about four feet from Akita’s face and firing off shot after shot----despite the fact that Mr. Merzbow didn’t change his bookish expression or move, except to pivot his head a few inches between laptops, for the entire 2 hour performance. When he wasn’t taking pictures, the Finn was bellowing and pumping his fist.

It was after about an hour and a half that the guy let out another moronic stadium-rock yelp, and with his fist still up in the air, projectile vomited across the front of the stage. It was the most spectacular upchuck I’ve ever seen: it came out of both sides of his mouth in a wide spray that somehow missed Akita---who didn’t so much as blink---and his equipment.

The music seemed to get even louder as the stench wafted back. People began moaning and moving towards the door, and soon half the room was empty. But Akita gave no indication that he’d even noticed, and there were still dozens of listeners who remained riveted to the floor, eyes closed, hands over their noses and mouths.

Then an even stranger thing happened.

Or maybe not strange at all. Other people began throwing up. A jockish dude near the left speaker cabinet puked violently into it. Two dreadlocked white guys, one following the other, hurled side-by-side against the side of the bar. And a beautiful Japanese girl, who I’d been watching bliss out whenever my eyes were opened, put her hand on my shoulder and hurled onto my left foot before being led away by her girlfriend.

At this point, the lights suddenly went up, the volume seemed to arc up even higher, like the sound of Godzilla hitting high-voltage cables.

And then it stopped. Akita stood up and walked off stage, seemingly unaware anything unusual had happened.

Maybe this wasn’t unusual.

Out on Leonard Street, the crisp night air returned my body to me, and relieved the nausea of being inside. People milled about, dazed, some hunched over, a few laughing and trying to find words for what happened. I saw the Japanese girl get into a cab with her friends, which was a bit of a letdown as I wanted to try and console her. I looked down at my shoe, and there was a chunk of what looked like unchewed yellowtail sitting in between the front laces and the toe. Disgusted, I kicked it off.

Then I had a fleeting thought: What if Merzbow’s frequencies, coming as they did from an anti-meat activist, were designed to attack and sicken meat eaters?

“Interesting idea,” said Ethan. “Good thing we had falafel. I’m going to Google that when I get home.”

Above, a 29-minute piece from Merzbow’s out-of-print Music For Bondage Performance 2, to give you an idea of what I’m going on about. Do not listen to it after a meal at Peter Luger’s.

But wait---I almost forgot the weirdest thing of all.

At one point during Merzbow’s set, I left to pee, and went up to the balcony for a different perspective. I stood next to a tall, handsome girl in the first row of seats who was typing speedily into a 13” PowerBook. She looked familiar, and when she looked up, she pointed in an accusatory way and smiled; a cute, snaggle-toothy smile. But given the volume, talking was out of the question. Since I couldn’t recall her name or where I knew her from, I pointed back to her, nodded in that universal nightclub nice-to-see-you-but-I’m-not-going-to-talk-to-you-now code, and left to renter the maelstrom below.

After the show was over, it hit me: She was the waitress from Minneapolis---the one who brought the Bloody Marys during my interview with Conor Oberst at Hell’s Kitchen, and who gave me a withering look when I chugged Conor’s leftovers. Her hair was half blonde and half green then---now it was growing out brown with white tips, which is maybe why I couldn’t place her at first. That and her out-of-context appearance in New York.

When I realized this outside the club, I went back in to find her. But she was gone.

I hope she didn’t get sick. Judging from her build, she looked like a carnivore.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

#21 - Hi, I'm back

"Tomorrow Is A Long Time" – Nick Drake

It’s been a long time, I know. We haven’t spoken since I returned from Berlin last week. Thanks for remembering me.

Looking back at my last post, I was a little shocked to see that I invoked Jesus Christ. I was raised Catholic---not too enthusiastically by anyone involved---but I did the First Communion and Confirmation deal, and went to confession a few times as a kid (at a certain point, it would have become too time-consuming). And I must now confess that I never really developed a relationship with The Guy.

So it was odd that I should beseech Him.

Nick Drake, the ‘70s British folkie, probable suicide, and musical patron saint of sad-sack aesthetes, would make more sense. Above, a Dylan cover from a 1968 (or '69) tape Drake supposedly made for his Mom shortly before recording his fiercely gorgeous debut Five Leaves Left. A nice thing, that; I further confess haven't burned my Mom a disc since her hairplugged dick of a boyfriend began jocking me for Tupac back catalog. Anyway, this track has turned up on various bootlegs; the one I have is called The Complete Home Recordings.

I wonder if there is such a thing as a small Nick Drake medallion that I could wear around my neck to worry between my thumb and forefinger in difficult times? Maybe I should look into manufacturing one? I bet they’d sell well---certainly give St. Christopher a run for his money in my little corner of the world.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

#20 - A meeting with a soulmate



M. Ward - "Let's Dance"

Yesterday was my final day in Berlin, and as usual when I travel, the final day is when you finally begin to feel comfortable in a place, like you could really stay awhile.

It’s not unlike relationships in that way.

I rode to Alexanderplatz (thinking of the Fassbinder epic) to buy a simple power adaptor---after a couple of hours, my fancy international converter gets hot enough to iron shirts with and shuts down---and some good German muesli to take home. As I’ve mentioned, this country really knows what to do with grain, from beer to bread to breakfast cereal.

Other foodstuff (to ape Jon Stewart)….not so much.

Although I must say: I had an excellent meal last night with the famous Michael Mark Wretch. He has been living in Berlin for about six or seven years now, having fled New York in the wake of a break-up with a beautiful, very intense, and---okay, this is a sexist cliché, but it’s true in this case---totally fucking crazy woman, Bobbita (ne: Bobbi) Birgisson, a music journalist-turned-publicist who used to do a punk/hip-hop ‘zine with Wretch called Def and Dumb that was totally hot and hilarious but somehow lost Wretch most of whatever money he had (which, being a trust-fund kid, is rumored to be a lot). By the end, you could find them having screaming, drink-flinging fights in the back of the Mercury Lounge or Irving Plaza, or find him haggling with the clerk at St. Mark’s Sounds over the price of some ‘80s post-punk import CDs he was trying to sell from his formerly vast collection.

This, of course, was before he realized how much more money he could make selling them online, on Ebay and Amazon. After which he pretty much stopped writing about music and became an online record seller full-time, often mailing off the free review copies he still received in the mail from record companies to whoever PayPal-ed his account in the same padded mailer (and with the same postage, if the stamp was uncancelled) that he received it in.

Wretch also did an early music blog called Berlin Is A Bitch (a nod to Linton Kwesi Johnson’s culture-kicking classic “Inglan Is A Bitch”) but he took it down after a couple of neo-Nazi art-punks recognized him and gave him a beat-down outside an Einsturzende Neubauten reunion show a few years back. It’s unfortunate; it was really good---smart and obnoxious and surprisingly sensitive and impassioned when the subject was music that really moved him, like Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society in their early-‘80s lineup (with smoking harmolodic kid guitarist/banjoist Vernon Reid, before he became a black metal god in Living Color)(that’s a black metal god, as opposed to a black metal god; I don’t know that Vernon ever worshipped Satan or anything). Being pretty much the first of its kind, was something of an inspiration for Loose Strife.

Which is why it was doubly disturbing to find him in such (sorry) a wretched state. After getting lost in an East Berlin housing project courtyard---and nearly set upon by a bulldog and two skinhead kids blasting old 50 Cent mixtapes on a boombox---trying to find his crib, I finally stumbled on his Soviet-style apartment block, rang his bell, walked down the dogshit-scented hallway, and came face-to-face with the man whose writing I’d revered for so many years.

His narrow halls were lined with stacks of CD cases of from the floor to near the ceiling, in various heights that made a sort of plastic skyline. In his bedroom/livingroom there was a laptop on a desk surrounded by more CD buildings, piles of padded mailers, and a bed covered with LPs lying flat. His kitchen was even more frightening. There was a burn mark about three feet up the wall behind the stove (“tried to make French fries,” he told me; “Germans make shitty French fries”), four open boxes of American breakfast cereal---Life, Raisin Bran, Captain Crunch, and Wheaties---on the dinette table, and across from the sink, which was filled with crusted dishes and all sorts of unspeakable filth, was a bookshelf packed with an excellent selection of international cookbooks and wine guides.

It looked, in fact, not unlike my apartment. It was ghost of Christmas future. I had to leave immediately.

Anyway, we went out for the aforementioned excellent meal at a non-descript Prenzlauer Berg bistro, which I wound up paying for, but didn’t care, because hell, it was the least I could do for a fellow culture warrior, especially one so evidentally injured in battle. It included two bottles of an excellent semi-dry Reisling (which sadly I was too drunk to note the name of), a plate of sumptuous white asparagus (from Berlitz, I was told, a town near Berlin reknowned for its asparagus, less so for it being the site where Jews were burned alive back in the 12th and 13th centuries, although I guess the history of ever inch of this country is bloodstained, not unlike like ours) and some excellent breaded veal (which I rarely eat in the U.S., but did here because I imagine the animals may be treated more humanely in Europe). (Again, this is the romantic in me; I’ve never been to a European abbatoir, but if I correctly recall the pro-vegetarian, anti-vivisection The Animals Film, which has a chilling soundtrack by seventies prog-rock guru and activist Robert Wyatt, they’re hardly resort spas.)

Anyway, drunk and stuffed, we rolled down to see M. Ward at a place called Tachles, an old department store-turned-anarchist-art-squat which, in addition to galleries and a bar, houses a small rock club. After our excessive meal I felt truly like an ugly SUV-driving American, and felt bad vibes emanating from the doorman, when I tried unsuccessfully to bluff my way in by claiming to be on the guest list (Wretch had no problem, of course). But once inside, beer in hand and Ward onstage, playing incredible Fahey-esque guitar figures and singing in his crazy, cracker-Americana Louie Armstrong slur, I felt utterly at home. And when he played his excellent cover of Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” (the CD version posted above), and a fat, sloshed pair of Germans began waltzing between the tables and knocking over beers---including mine, into my lap---I understood that, despite the sneers of German punk anarchist proprieters, I was part of an international brother-and-sisterhood of music-worshippers, an intractable blood-clan of gentle hedonists, and that nothing could alter that---not language, not politics, not drunkenness, not sanity. I looked over at Wretch, who was chatting up a tall, fine-looking German girl with blonde fraulein pigtails, Ben Gibbard nerd-boy glasses, and impressive cupcake breasts wrapped in a too-small vintage A&W root beer t-shirt. And while he was clearly, painfully, out of his league, I rooted for him. After all, he is my kin.

Jesus Christ Almighty. He is my kin.

Monday, September 12, 2005

#19 - The Wall



“I’ll Come Running” – Chica and the Folder

I realized I didn’t really write much in my last post about the music (aside from Barbara Morgenstern) at the Berlin Bedroom Beats festival. Well, it was really good. I liked Isan, especially. And Portable. It wasn't especially well attended, but hey---what do you expect from a bunch of agoraphobic laptop artists and their admirers? Our scene is small but quality.

I do notice that a lot of the artists at the festival sound like Brian Eno. Even if they aren’t covering his songs outright (like Chica & The Folder, above, who didn’t perform), they are unfurling his ambient drones, or his floaty, oddly-percussive, synth –pop (I never really thought of him as a “synth-pop” act, but I guess he is). Actually, Berlin’s highest pop-music profile probably dates back to the work Eno and David Bowie did here back in the ‘80s---the wonderful trilogy of Low, Heroes and Lodger. It’s no wonder local artists would look back to that. In my mind, it’s Bowie’s artistic high point. And “Heroes” has got to be burned into the consciousness of any pop-minded Berliner---that love story of two people meeting at the wall. Which now, of course---at least what remains of it---is a graffiti gallery which I see in the morning from the veranda of the hotel as I drink coffee and eat very good muesli.

German food is under-rated, I should note. At least their baked goods. Speaking to Michael Mark on the phone yesterday, he likened a culture’s bread to its philosophy. Germany’s dense, nourishing; France’s elegant, delicate, rich; America’s airy, cheap, lacking in roughage.

Sunday, September 11, 2005

#18 – Bedroom beats, a girl with a laptop.


“Aus Heiterem Himmel (Dntel Mix)” – Barbara Morganstern

It makes sense that Germany is both the birthplace (Kraftwerk) and a continuing hotbed---or at least warmbed (labels like Kompakt, Perlon, B-Pitch, Monika, etc.)---of electronic pop music: what country had more cultural impetus in the 20th century to push into the future and leave the past behind?

The Berlin Bedroom Beats Festival seems like the latest stage in the evolution of electronic music: people making “techno” that overtly refuses to do what techno generally does (make your pupils dilate and your legs twitch) the way indie rock---the sort I prefer, anyway---refuse to do what rock usually does (swagger, mack, pump its fist, wave it’s hard-on). Or at least this used to be the case; now, the line between ironic and deeply-felt rock posturing seems to have been erased.

Anyway, instead of making your head explode, the music at the festival is more head-imploding: dance music that looks inward, most of it probably made in apartments with touchy neighbors using laptops and headphones. Music for dancing in front of your closet-door mirror, or music about dancing rather than for dancing. Maybe that’s what made the dancefloor so unusual last night. Almost everyone, boys and girls both, seemed to have come by themselves, and happy to stay that way---this was not a cruising scene.

After thanking the festival organizers for the plane ticket and making some perfunctory chit-chat about my blog, I scoured the label booths in the record room for freebies, then went out to hear the music. There was not much to watch onstage, of course---basically interchangeable guys with laptops and other little boxes, with abstract video images bubbling up on the walls around them.

I began dancing with my usual on-ramp routine: head bowed down slightly, shoulders stooped, hands clasped together in low-expectation prayer mode (fingers interlocked, as opposed to upright), and shifting my weight from leg to leg with a bounce. This lets me peek my head up periodically, turtle-like, to scope the room, and drop it down again quickly so as not to appear too desperate.

I see a girl in a long-sleeve striped t-shirt and long pants---an impractical outfit she wears in spite of the heat and without any apparent sweating. She seems completely approachable, which I happen to think is one of the sexiest qualities a woman can possess.

I catch her eye and pick up my pace, lifting my head for a few seconds at a time, moving my upper body a bit more vigorously, unclasping my hands, raising my arms a bit and even doing a couple of Soul Train chuga-chuga hand-over-hand rotations. What the hell---I am probably one of the few Americans in the room, and therefore at least as funky as anyone. I throw my hands in the air, but pull them down before actually waving them like I just don’t care.

Suddenly I feel someone pressing against my butt, and I turn around to see a stocky woman of indeterminate age with a teutonic bob of blond hair. She grins in a strange way---not inviting me sweep her off her feet, and not looking to start a fight, but something in between. She begins a stiff, herky-jerky sort of dance, and her breasts, which are small but perfect, seem fixed and as impressively firm as the mattress in my hotel.

I am so flattered---astonished, actually---by this attention (I have never been hit on by a woman on a dancefloor), so I bust some moves in her direction, wondering what sort of sex she might be into and whether I might be into it, too.

Remembering the girl in the striped shirt, I turn and move away, doing a couple of coy, circling-the-periphery-of-the-room moves, trying lamely to roleplay a dancer being pursued. But she is gone. I turn back to find my butch fraulein and discover she has left too.

I walk outside. It’s a lovely night; the Maria Am Ufer club overlooks the Spree river, and the city lights flicker up and down its length. I keep an eye open for my dancefloor crushes. But then I smell good weed. I make a bee-line to its source, and attempt some lame conversation with a couple of stoned, broken English-speaking Germans that gets me a couple hits of very potent Berlin skunk.

Nightclubs. Like McDonald’s, they are pretty much the same everywhere in the world.

After thanking my friends and admiring the enhanced sparkle of the water, I walk through a door into the mainroom of the club and hear what sounds like a looped bit of Mozart swirling around some foamy beats. It’s beautiful. And there, up on stage, is the girl in the striped shirt, with a huge grin on her face, jumping up and down in front of a Powerbook G4.

Her name, I find out, is Barbara Morgenstern, and she records for the Monika label, a very cool indie electronic label whose roster is made up almost entirely women. This is unusual: there are very few women making electronic music, and the label’s aesthetic seems somewhere between abstract bedroom beats and singer-songwriter stuff. Musically, Monika is the most interesting outfit in Berlin at the moment; they are run by a terribly handsome woman named Gudrun Gut, formerly of the ‘80s post-punk band Malaria, who in fact has organized the festival.

Morgenstern is fabulous. She is performing with a guy who has a table full of chachakas, including a guitar, which he coaxes weird sounds from by rubbing various devices (a hand-held fan, a pocket-sized vibrator, a Magic Wand) across its strings.

Despite his use of electronic foreplay devices, I don’t pay much attention to him. I am transfixed by the music, and by the sight of this girl commanding an entire roomful of people (okay, half a roomful of people) by tapping and stroking a laptop computer. It’s like real-time blogging, storytelling with sounds instead of words. Her features morph as she jumps around: one minute she seems to be a woman, enveloping the crowd; the next a man, thrusting and jabbing. The music billows out like clouds. I don’t know if I want to have sex with her or be her.

Wow. I am extremely high.

When Morgenstern’s brief set is over, she closes up her computer and walks off stage. I debate trying to speak with her, then worry I will be too stoned to communicate, assuming she even speaks English. I eventually realize, per usual in this situation, that I would have nothing worth saying but “I love you music.” So I stay put, leaning against a pillar for the next two hours before walking back to my hotel as the night sky is just beginning to fade into morning.

Above (along with a shot of the Berlin Wall's East Side Gallery murals) is Barbara Morgenstern’s “Aus Heiterem Himmel,” remixed by Jimmy Tamborello (aka Dntel), the dude who did the beats for Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard on that wonderful Postal Service record. It’s from the excellent label comp Monika Force. The song title means something like “From Cheerful Sky,” and seems to be named for Besuch Aus Heiterem Himmel, an obscure 1958 West German comedy directed by Ferdinand Dorfler involving a rich American industrialist and ghosts. (Rich American industrialists being, I suppose, a perpetual bugaboo in European culture of the past fifty years.)

The title is familiar, but I can’t place where I’ve come across it. Needless to say, I must now add it to my long list of films to see, records to hear, books to read. Ars too damn longa, vita too damn brevis.

Saturday, September 10, 2005

#17 – Berlin, the rituals of memory, and America’s perpetual, pathologically fucked-up refusal to admit its guilt about anything.


There’s something very relaxing about being in a hotel room in a strange city watching the traffic eddy along below your window while trying to guess the approximate time of day---rather than simply turning your head to find the room clock---because in fact it doesn’t matter what time it is. You are on vacation alone, and there is nowhere you need to be, noone you need to meet.

Actually, I will need to be in one place, and meet one person, during my five days here. Later tonight I will attend the Berlin Bedroom Beats festival at the invitation of a local municipal arts group. It’s an event devoted mainly to people who sit in their rooms creating music with their laptops, musicians I feel a special kinship with. We have a number of things in common---probably first and foremost a need to get out of the house. Here we are now; let’s entertain each other!

I also plan to have dinner tomorrow with Michael Mark Wretch (yes, that’s his real name), a longtime zine/music writer and one of the very first music bloggers. He wrote a lot of great stuff back in the day, but lately he pretty much just posts crazy rants on his blog about his beloved electronic music (which has of course lost most of the hipster cache among music cogniscenti that it had back in its late-90s/early ‘00s heydey) and about how much he hates living in Germany. People say he’s an Ecstasy casualty, and that may be true. To repeat the point this blog keeps circling back on: Too much of a good thing is not always a good thing.

Today I rented a bicycle---the best way to see Berlin, a friend correctly informed me---and did what you might call the Holocaust hairshirt tour, hitting a series of buildings and memorials that, in their reflections on the past, were amazingly futuristic: The Judisches Museum, the new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the IM Pei Bau at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, the Reichstag’s clear glass dome (also by the overrated Pei, though I appreciate his metaphor here).

This seems healthy: a way to look backwards and forwards at the same time, to acknowledge the crimes of history and try to transcend them at the same time. Now more than ever---as even the landmark debacles of Vietnam and Watergate get pooh-poohed by conservatives trying to undermine their critics---our country could learn a lot from them.

The new Holocaust Memorial, originally designed by architect Peter Eisenman and sculptor Richard Serra, but ultimately the product of Eisenman and a team of architects after Serra dropped out (supposedly because of a reduction in proposed scale), is weirdly beautiful, disturbing, and huge. It was unveiled this past May---a city block packed with 2711 dark grey, high-density concrete stelae which rise to varying heights like so many abstracted caskets coming up from the ground in a wavelike dreamvision. In the indian-summer heat, it’s an unforgiving landscape, with virtually no shade---today, tour guides supplied parasols---which I suppose adds to the metaphor. The interactive computer stations in the exhibit below-ground is a good escape from the elements, as is the handsome Metzkes Deli across the street on Behrenstrasse, which has an excellent vegetarian antipasti platter for 8 euros that comes with slices of dark brot as big as loofa mitts. (They have burgers and wursts too, if you can bear the thought of eating meat in this context.)

Most impressive, though, had to be the Jewish (Judisches) Museum. And as spectacular as the building itself is, what struck me most was an installation piece by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman called “Shalechet (Fallen Leaves).” Completed in 1999, it is a collection of thousands of cast iron faces piled up on each other, and they cover the floor of one of the museum’s vault-like chambers. The sight is chilling, but it’s the sound that stayed with me: If you enter the room, which the signage encourages you to do, and walk across the piles of iron faces, they clang and echo through the space like the sound of a million chains reverberating over the years.

This being an audioblog, I wish I’d recorded a sample of it to offer you, but I didn’t. Instead, I offer a picture. This post comes with no sound, so you can imagine it.

Thursday, September 08, 2005

#16 – More little things (the last day of work before vacation is always a bitch)

“Baby’s On Fire” – The Venus In Furs
“Baby’s On Fire” (live) – 801

I’m psyched, and if I could write that en Deutsche, I would. I get on a plane to Berlin tomorrow----well, to Frankfurt, where I catch a connection; for some inexplicable reason, it’s nearly impossible to get a direct flight to Berlin. But why vacation in Berlin, you ask? Because it’s a great European city that I’ve never been too. Because it is not just knee deep in history. Because, in the immortal words of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, “Ich bin ein Berliners.”

Also because there’s an awesome electronic music festival there, and I scored a free plane ticket from a German cultural organization to cover it.

How about that? They consider me a legitimate journalist.

Actually, given all the things I read in The New York Times and elsewhere about how bloggers are “threatening traditional journalism” and “altering the media landscape,” I suppose I am legitimate, in a romantic-outlaw, money-means-nothing sort of way. Maybe more legit than those dinosaur music mags that never answered my query letters when I’ve wanted to write for them. Those fuckers can kiss my slightly overweight dot-com It-media ass.

(Jesus---does this mean I need to produce a weekly podcast too? I already have no life.)

This morning at work, I am greeted, per usual, by Caitlin Mathers’ mother Melanie: certainly, to use an admittedly piggish but emotionally honest term, the pre-eminent MILF of this year’s group at Small World Day Care. There is something about her slightly ravaged, blowsy, crow’s eyed sultriness, and that of certain older women like her, that melts me. Sure, I suppose I have some mother issues. But mostly it’s about the way they navigate a balance between an obviously strong sense of feminine vanity---cultivated during their twenties and thirties under what was surely the unrelenting gaze of countless smitten men---and a realistic air of “fuck it, I’m getting old” that frees them from bothering with make-up or fussy clothes or false daintiness. It brings a tear to my eye for the human condition and gives me wood at the same time.

Come to think of it, I have a pre-disposition towards music that does the same thing.

She senses this, I believe, and flirts shamelessly, but with a certain impunity, as if I were a special-ed kid. My guess is it’s payback for whatever action she suspects her realtor husband Joey is getting from that Japanese nanny that takes care of Caitlin when she isn’t here with me (the Jude Law incident seems to have definitely upped the paranoia quotient in Eastern Queens).

The morning scene went something like this:

Melanie clicks into the room in heels. “Caity look – it’s Bobby.” Melanie smiles a bleach-job smile (the gum recession is the giveaway) (okay, so she hasn’t abandoned all vanity) and stretches out my name like gum: Bah-bee.

“Morning,” I say, kneeling by the Lego shelf. Caity runs up and leaps into my arms. Her lower torso, and now my shirt, is soaked in pee.

“Did Caity go potty this morning?” I ask, pointlessly.

“She just doesn’t like peeing in the morning!” Melanie declares, turning her palms up in defeat. “I show her how good it feels”---here she puts her hands on her olive stockinged thighs, crouches, and makes a wizzzzzzzz sounds---“but no go. She just wants to play with her beach balls. Hmm…that sounded dirty!” She smiles sideways at her daughter and winks at me. I feel dizzy.

“Let’s get changed Caity,” I say, snapping out of it. I’m pathetic.

“No! I don’t wanna change!” She pulls herself out of my hands and dashes towards the playhouse. I grab her just before she plants her soggy butt on the daybed.

“IIIIIEEEEEEEEEE! NO CHANGE! NO NO NO NO NO!” Caitlin shrieks---half seriously, and half because she simply likes shrieking. She kicks her heels against my pelvic bone as I carry her toward the bathroom.

Melanie smiles at me pityingly. “Bobby, you are the best.” Her cell phone rings with an eight-note bleep sample of Usher’s “Yeah.”

“Gotta run – mwaa, honey bunnies! See you at 5-ish!”

Later, as I dabbed diaper cream on Caity’s rashy crotch (she evidently sits in pee a lot), I thought about how little time most parents spend attending to the needs of their kids, as opposed to paying other people to do it (admittedly what I do with my father). I also thought about how spending my workdays helping 3 year olds shit and piss has helped place penises and vaginas and buttholes in perspective. I mean, c’mon, really; why such a fuss about these funny, fleshy, funky things? They cause us so much trouble.

Anyway, two versions of Brian Eno’s proto-postpunk “Baby’s On Fire.” The first is from the soundtrack to Todd Haynes fairly amusing glam-rock faux-doc Velvet Goldmine, as played by a faux-group including my hero Thom Yorke (in fact, David Bowie’s money-hungry control-freak refusal to allow any of his music in the soundtrack actually forced the film’s producers to make a better soundtrack than they might’ve if the Thin White Duke had participated). The second is by a short-lived sorta-super group put together by Roxy Music guitar god Phil Manzanera back in the mid-70s. It included Eno, who sings and abuses his synthesizer on this version.

I am, of course, joking. I hope the presence of this song on my blog will not get me fired from the Small World daycare center. From where I sit, every parent---at least the truthful ones---will admit to wanting to throttle (if not torch) their kids from time to time but will of course never come near acting on it. But for a non-parent to joke about such things is highly suspect at best, like a white person using the word “nigger.” But since I’m a respected daycare worker with nearly ten years of experience, maybe I have the playground equivalent of a ghetto pass.

Ten years…

Auf weidersehen!

Saturday, September 03, 2005

#15-A visit from Michael Stipe

“So. Central Rain” (as played cheesily on piano by some dude that has nothing to do with R.E.M.)

He came to me last night in a dream. On the phone. I don’t know why. R.E.M. were my all-time favorite band for a number of years. Not anymore, alas, although there’s always something on their records that will get me teary.

Loose Strife: Hi Michael – what’s up?
Michael Stipe: Not much. I’m shopping for a couch.
LS: Really – what are you looking for? A sectional? Convertible?
MS: Sectional---even if you want to sleep on them, they’re more comfortable than convertibles. Those things are dreadful.
LS: I know. I sleep on a futon convertible, which is much better than the mattress ones. But I’m thinking of going back to a regular bed. It’s like the last vestige of college. My vegetarian phase didn’t last long, but somehow I kept sleeping on a futon.
MS: I gave up vegetarianism too; in fact, I just had a rack of ribs over at Blue Smoke.
LS: You’re kidding!
MS: No, I’m not. It was excellent. I need the iron.
LS: I’m amazed.
MS: Oh, and if you’re buying a mattress, try 1-800-MATTRESS. I’ve used them; they’re really good.
LS: Thanks. So what else are you up to today?
MS: I’m thinking about getting my face tattooed, so I’m going to talk to a tattoo artist.
LS: Wow. With what? That blue-black paint mask you’ve been rocking at shows?
MS: Yes, exactly.
LS: Wow – extreme. Wouldn’t that…I dunno. Wouldn’t it be harder to shop for furniture that way? I mean, in terms of people recognizing you? Not that they don’t now, but…
MS: Shopping for furniture is overrated.
LS: You must miss Bill Berry in the band, huh?
MS: Desperately. I see his eyebrow in my dreams, floating about his old kit. The eyebrow is holding drumsticks---like a ghost from one of those old movies. Have you ever seen Besuch Aus Heiterem Himmel ? It’s a film about this rich piggish American in Germany who gets visited by these ghosts...

I wake up afraid I'm going to be late to the airport. But I'm not leaving for Berlin until Friday (more on that later) so I settle back in for another couple hours of sleep. Still thinking of Michael Stipe, who was my first true rock-star boy crush back when he had long hair. If I can get him back on the line, I’ll tell him the tattoo is a bad idea.