The Berlinale is ongoing, one of the largest film festivals in the world, 500 flicks to be seen in a few weeks time, stars in town seeing the glamorous sights like the mall at Potzdamer Platz, and a whole host of genuinely great movies. We saw our first tonight, the Chinese “Getting Home,” or literally translated “Fallen Leaves Return to Roots” — a sweetly bitter comedy about a laborer who, thanks to a drunken promise, is bringing his friend’s dead body across the country to return it to his home. Much difficulty ensues. Dead men rise and walk, sometimes just roll down mountains in giant wheels. The director, who was there, described it as a “Chinese road movie.”

It’s strange that virtually all the festival movies are translated into English. The announcers speak in English. Barely any actual German around. No wonder the French hate Hollywood.

I rarely write about TV, because a) I don’t watch much and b) I can barely make ours work. But for the last few days we’ve been re-obsessing with the unparalleled Battlestar Galactica, getting into the third season via iTunes. It’s incredible, a sci-fi show that’s dark, with deep characters, and has managed to make one of the most intense anti-war, or at least provocative pro-thinking statements I’ve seen from popular art about Iraq to date.

For those who haven’t followed: Humans are on the run from the Cylons. There aren’t many humans left. They settle on a planet, but the Cylons catch up with them, and decide that they’re going to make amends for the whole genocide episode by occupying the colony and bringing stability, the hope of peaceful co-existence, and their superior religion. The humans here take the role of Iraqis; there’s an Abu Ghraib, there are prisoners with bags over their heads, there are despised police working with the occupiers, there are occupiers trying to figure out why they’re not being welcomed, and how to win over the locals’ hearts and minds by improving the quality of toilet paper. There is an insurgency. Even suicide bombings.

It’s utterly intense, heartbreaking, great drama. It doesn’t totally make sense (what war scenario really does, come on). But as a way to provoke role-reversal analysis, it’s beautiful, unsubtle, and necessary today.

From a Pittsburgh article a bit ago:

Instead of trying to out-do “Star Trek,” producers went back to the origins of science-fiction, taking their cues from the novels of Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. “Those were all about the allegorical and socio-political commentary, which we felt had been lost in contemporary science fiction. It wasn’t so much about us coming up with a new idea as going back to an old one, using science-fiction as a smokescreen to discuss and invest in issues of the day.” (sez executive producer David Eick)

More power to them. This is popular art done *well,* with a tradition that goes all the way back to Aristophanes’ bitterly anti-war comedies.

So — is it true there’s no word in German for “fairness?” Der Speigel writes about the debate over English infecting the German language, following a recent study looking at German words being adopted all over the world. Letting languages evolve is better than trying to keep out foreign linguistic influences (a la the French), the study concludes.

But in one of those eyebrow-raising asides:

While some English words used in German are superfluous, such as the “Service Point” signs put up at major train stations around Germany, others are useful because they have no adequate German equivalent, such as ‘fairness’, said Peter.

Not even really going to speculate on what that means.

When passing through England for Bill and Karen’s wedding a few weeks ago, we saw posters for a festival of Sofia Gubaidulina’s work, put on by the BBC. We toyed briefly (very briefly) with the idea of coming back, but then realized it would naturally be broadcast and archived online. So this weekend we’ve been listening. Another in the “Internet used for good” category.

We brought our dinners into our living room, sat on the floor and listened to violinist Gideon Kramer premiere the first part of her Triptych Nadyeka. He’s as brilliant as she is; we saw him in Estonia at Kancheli’s 70th festival, a modernist with the dynamic range and physical imagination not only to interpret, but to inspire and challenge these composers.

The third element of the Triptych bordered in places on melo- instead of drama, but was interesting still, integrating harsh phrases of recorded techno music blaring over the orchestra. Alluding (in the context of a plague epidemic) to soulless abandonment to pleasure, or perhaps to the sterility of art’s response. Either way, I’m not sure it worked, I don’t think she has the control of that idiom that she does of the orchestra; as a fragment of music meant to have meaning I think it is necessarily weighed down by the tensions between the genres, by mutual contempt and incomprehension.

And then last night to the Konzerthaus here in Berlin to see a string quartet play Mendelssohn, Kurtag, Schnittke. The final piece, Schnittke’s Piano Quintet, was the star, weaving between dissonant textures, through a waltz of insane clowns, finishing with a quaint one-finger pastoral melody on the piano that resolved in a way the strings never did: an only half-ironic reminder that simplicity, maybe even innocence, can make a path through complexity and chaos without being wholly lost.

Spotted at the store, and of course taken home: Hobbit cookies. Or biscuits, it was unclear first exactly what they were. Bright orange wrapper, with “Hobbit” written in bold letters. And no, as far as we can tell that means nothing in German.

Verdict: Oh, so delicious, for second breakfast AND Elevensies! Oatmeal cookie goodness. Made in Poland, naturally.

And so at last, writers, journalists, reporters, call us what you will, we’re being replaced by computers just like everyone else. The Thomson financial media group is using software programs to automatically generate earnings stories, within .3 of a second of the release of a company’s earnings statement. No chance of a John Henry moment there; it takes my computer longer than that just to load the page, much less for me to read and digest the information.

Reuters, too, is apparently using automatically generated pieces. Bloomberg says they’re not, but the conditions they have in their offices, and their stylebook, make the distinction a bit academic.

And so here we are. There’s propagation of information, and there’s storytelling. Newspapers and other media outlets are supported by people for whom information is a necessity. For them, the computer can do the job. Style doesn’t matter. Style and storytelling is a luxury, for people with time, like organic vegetables or free-range chickens. We shouldn’t kid ourselves about that.

My first start-to-finish World Cup now just 10 hours and a fitful sleep past, and I am already melancholy, conscious of its absence. But its final moment’s mystery remains: Why did Zidane, one of the world’s best players, in what was probably the final international match of his life, at a critical moment, give way to bewildering rage and blatantly headbutt an Italian player.

The moment dominates all discussions of the game. What did the Italian say? A crack about ZZ’s mother? Sebas suggests: “At least Camus was a good writer, a better goalie and didn’t sell out to the French like you,” or compliments to the Algerian Pied-Noirs.

This Cup was memorable not just for the sport, but for the community: watching with Kenji and Till, discussing it endlessly with Anders and Anna, Grigo and Keena and Sebas online. I thought I knew something about the game, but was wrong; they knew the players and the rhythms, the history and the personalities and endlessly enriched these last few weeks for me. I will miss that.

Moments and images: Waiting in a Berlin tent for the very first game to start, realizing that the efficient Germans had neglected to find a projector that worked, and migrating en masse. Kicking a ball with Grigo and Anders all the way home from Mitte in the middle of the night, Anders passing it off the side of a moving tram. Watching Ronaldinho in Dortmund pass more gracefully than any human ought. German keeper Lehmann’s last penalty save: He stands up, cool and disbelieving, and walks away with a beautifuly mild gesture of shock and triumph. Zidane’s headbutt.

And of course being here throughout. Fireworks and flags, beer gardens full of people and screens everywhere, an obsession that has taken over and transformed the country. The black-red-and-gold is still hanging on some of the balconies here, but it’s already coming down on others. Seeing what happens next will be almost as interesting.

Some of my random Flickrpics here.

Three weeks ago, whenever I talked to a German about their World Cup team, almost no one expressed much faith in their football team. They weren’t graceful like the Brazilians or the Argentinians, were young, had an inexperienced coach.

Last night they beat Argentina in shoot-out. When we went to bed at 1 people were still on the streets, honking deliriously, waving flags, drunkenly accosting each other, cheering. This wasn’t supposed to happen, but now that it has, it has galvanized this city and country in a way that locals say is totally new.

There are flags everywhere, draping from buildings, hanging from cars, attached to people’s hats. Three weeks ago this was unheard of, particularly in Berlin. Flying the black-red-gold here was like hoisting the red-white-and-blue in San Francisco — a sign that you were probably from somewhere else or maybe a little feeble. Overt nationalistic statements still strike Germans as dangerous, too close to evoking their own past to be comfortable.

Now even my leftie friends are waving flags. Till, an economics student who has never had a nationalist sentiment in his life, found a flag on the ground the other day and now carries it religiously to every game. He waves it at a honking van covered in flags after yesterday’s win, and says, “They’re all my friends now. Even if I’d hate them in real life…”

It is being discussed as a healing process. This World Cup has moved this country to a genuinely new stage in its post-WWII history. We note that it is mostly younger people carrying flags, and that older people still look on with concern. The test will be what happens after the Cup. Symbols are malleable; the German flag is waiting for a meaning that expresses something beyond the community of football fans.Back to football itself. German has a word for exactly this: Tuniermannschaft, which means roughly a team that plays better in the finals, when it has to. That’s Germany. On to Italy now, and people are as scared as they are happy. I had been hoping for Argentina to beat Brazil in the end, and am sad that they have been knocked out. Our friend Sebas in Buenos Aires sent a mournful, poetic email after the game. “The worst tango sometimes becomes real,” he says.

Here it’s the next morning, and radios are still blaring happily and uncharacteristically outside. Berlin gets four days of joy before the next test comes.

So. Tomorrow morning we get up early and take a bus to Dortmund, where we will see Brazil and Ghana play, with tickets care of Jim Hu. Needless to say, we’re excited. Overwhelmed. Brimming over with fussball anticipation!

Here’s our lovely, green spielkarten:

There are probably other things going on in the world besides football/soccer. Wars, Zarqawi’s death, violence in Palestine again. But around us here every day is football, which provides its own lessons in international relations.

A bit of texture first: All of Berlin, at least, is dedicated to watching as many minutes of the thrice-daily games as possible. Virtually all cafes and bars have screens. With Keena and Grigo in town, we have watched in tree-shaded beer gardens with hundreds of fans, in tiny cafes with just a few, and yesterday under the draining afternoon sun in a 10,000 seat replica of the Olympic stadium recreated in front of the Reichstag. All the newspapers cover it intensively, with even the intellectual sheets printing cheesecake shots of superstar Brazilian Ronaldinho emerging from the sea in shall we say tight shorts.

I’ve been a USA supporter, which isn’t a popular position here. I argued briefly (and somewhat drunkenly) with a German friend the other day about what role the US should play. She was genuinely fearful that the Americans would be good. What if they won, she asked. They invaded Iraq. They dominate everything. Not football too.

(Anders, a British activist and playwright, reassured her that Americans winning was about as likely as a cantaloupe growing a nose, so it wasn’t worth getting upset about. Which, as yesterday’s game showed, was probably generous.)

I argued that the US needs a way to be integrated into the world community, and that football could help provide this. Our sports, and most of our popular culture, are deeply insular. Our football takes no account of other countries. Basketball barely so. Baseball is excellent at inspiring players to come from Latin America and Japan, but who watched the World Baseball Classic? The rest of our pop culture sometimes allows movies or music in from England, occasionally from Japan or elsewhere, but they are marginal at best.

I still think it would be valuable for the US to become a persistent and contributing member of the international football world. But watching Ghana and Italy yesterday, I felt what a tragedy it would be if the USA did win. Talking to Anders this morning, I understood how deeply insulted the rest of the world, which literally lives, breathes, and drinks heavily to this sport, would be.

Of course if the U.S. team deserved it, they should win. Sports are sports, and must be treated first and foremost on that level. But football is deeply intertwined with both nationalism and internationalism in a way that I think Americans don’t fully understand. Victory in the World Cup entails a kind of responsibility to the rest of the world, an acknowledgment of reciprocal ties renewed every four years. Because the U.S. doesn’t feel those ties, victory would be too widely percieved at home only as victory, shallow and one-dimensional.

The World Cup is about the only thing these days that brings everybody together, except for war, Anders said this morning. It is a sad thing that the U.S. has such a paltry place in that first community, and is defined to the rest of the world by the other.