I don’t mind the rain so much. I grew up near Seattle, and I’m pretty sure I can’t remember a single instance when the near-constant drizzle got me down. It lends itself to reading, cups of coffee, jazz on the speakers.

I don’t even mind so much the lack of light. Don’t get me wrong, I like the sun, I like the beach, when it’s around. But when the sun goes down at 4:15, or I have to turn my desk lamp on at 3:00, well, I’m usually still staring at my computer anyway. What good is the sun doing me anyway?

No, what really bugs me are the wet socks.

If you’re allergic to cuteness, just move right along. I prefer to think of it as an study in parasitic evolution.

So anyway, I’m walking around Charlottenburg earlier this week, meeting some friends to go to an exhibit on the history of the Chinese population in Berlin (small exhibit, a few interesting historical notes, displayed “like an 8th grade science fair” as Ben rightly said). I’m hungry, so I stop in a Backerei for a quick belegte Shrippe.

I start to leave, but as I come to the door, three black, panting French bulldogs — squat, almost puglike creatures with bat-ears and bulging eyes –  set themselves expectantly in front of the door outside. I pull it open and step carefully through them; they look up at me impatiently, moving not a centimeter for me.

As I walk away, the proprietress comes out and bends down, talking to them too quietly for me to hear. She hands one of them a little bakery bag. It takes the package carefully in its mouth, and then all three trot off down the street, to meet an owner who is holding an apartment door open for them.

This takes the already very high standards of German canine malleability to an absurd level. No, I don’t have pics, because my camera was out of batteries.  But I’m sure cute overload has some that will do.

This is way too good to pass up. Reuters writes about a crackdown in China on firemen eliciting bribes, often sexual. It quotes Xinhua, the state news agency:

 ”For every 10 corrupt officials, nine are involved in illicit sex. This old tune has already been proved by statistics from disciplinary organs many times,” Xinhua said.

The third-grade mind boggles.

Two poles of Berlin existence yesterday, after sending lovely Ms. Peasant Glasses off to Hawaii for three weeks.

After a year of pretending it didn’t exist, it was time for me to visit the friendly Ausländerbehörde, Germany’s version of the INS, again. I had my docs in order; income statements, proof of insurance, rental contract. The works, in that peculiarly German paper-rich fashion.

Naturally, the woman who was helping me took one look at my stack and told me it was no good. She was quite friendly about it, and I was happy to see that my German was good enough to argue pointlessly with her about it. But it was no good. Apparently we freelance journalists can’t just shove check stubs at them to prove we’re making enough money to live on; we have to get an accountant, and have them sign off on everything, showing how much we’re likely to keep after taxes, and so on.

So it’s back to the termporary visa status for me, and time for accountant hunting. Any Berlin-ites know a good, reasonably priced, English-speaking Steuerberater?

Naturally, the best thing for forgetting a tooth-grinding bureaucratic experience is music that hits you over the head like a cartoon anvil. So it’s a good thing that Keiji Haino was in town last night.

Haino, who I’ve written about here before, is a Japanese guitar player who has roughly the same relationship to sound as a stick of dynamite does to a mountainside. Last night he was playing with electronic duo Pan Sonic, who kept a rumbling, dark and edgy texture underneath him at all times, sometimes sampling and chopping his work, sometimes creating their sounds from scratch.

Long- and gray-haired with straight, short bangs, always sunglassed on stage, Haino sings eerie high soprano notes, screams his throat out, plays rows of theremin-like instruments that give the impression he is swimming through or wrestling with a thick field of distorted sound. He brought out a detuned stringed instrument I’m unfamiliar with and beat oddly pretty horror-show dissonance out of it. Of course he played his guitar as though it were some alien trying to take over his mind.

The effect is both numbing and exhilarating. I remember the first time I went on Space Mountain at Disneyland, when I was very small. I was petrified, kept my eyes shut the entire time, so tense that I was exhausted at the end. But loved it. That’s Keiji. If I can’t scream about the Ausländerbehörde, at least he can.

Incredible how time sneaks by and I make excuses not to blog, like this is some chore or activity I might actually get paid for. Oh foolish reflexes…

It’s snowing outside (or at least it was when I was originally writing this), thick flakes filling the air like it’s the middle of winter, although the newscasters on N24 are adamant that this is only an Herbststurm. They call it a hurricaine too, and touted it for three days running on the morning news, which I can’t really say I agree with, but headlines are headlines, you gotta keep people watching the ads.

Last I checked, we were just barely coming back from Greece, or maybe bouncing down to Heidelberg and the Weinstrasse, and later Prague and Czesky Krumlov with my parents. Apparently a whole season came and went. Time now for serious work again. And Russian novels; as the first flakes came down yesterday we ritually went to visit St. Georges bookshop and I picked up a copy of “Anna Karenina.” Did I say work? I meant hot toddies and books thick enough to chew on.

And so before disappearing back into silence, I must recommend a recent new discovery, the pair of Soviet science fiction writers responsible for Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”, Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky. They’re the most famous Russians of the genre, yet not well known in English-speaking circles, or not as well as the far more widely published (and Polish) Lem.

Forget about that “Stalker” reference; they wrote it, and the book it’s based on, “Roadside Picnic”, but in fact they are closer to Philip Dick or a sci-fi Chandler. Their writing is smart and funny, dark and noir-ish, their jaundiced view of human nature and institutions reflected through characters’ helpless and corrupt responses to alien or fantastic events rather than simply our own decaying urban environments.

A page about them is here, with several English translations of their work available for download. “Roadside Picnic” is one of them, I highly recommend it to anyone with any taste at all for noir or sci-fi. If anybody in Berlin has a copy of the seemingly out-of-print “Monday Starts on Saturday”, can I borrow it?

The gray sky and sub-20 degree temperatures are all anybody really needs to tell that the summer is well over. Any serious sun we get from this point out will be cooler, and an undeserved gift, like finding that forgotten $20 bill in your pants pockets before you put them in the laundry.

But here are the real top three signs that it’s now autumn, and already heading quickly through to winter.

1) The rain hasn’t stopped dripping all day. No showers these, and the drops are chilly.

2) At cafe tables last week, everyone was wearing scarves.

3) (and most definitive) While I was sitting, shivering, sipping cold beers with visiting friends behind Tascheles late last week, the bartender began writing with white chalk on the giant steel letter that serves as a menu. She got as far as “G-L-Ãœ-H W-E” before getting distracted and moving away for a moment.

“What’s Gluhwe mean?” one my of friends asked, but I only groaned no, no, it’s too early for that…

I ran into this guy, India Bharti, playing in Alexanderplatz yesterday. He’s a wandering musician of uncertain (but distinctly sandy-graying) age, a white yogi type, sitting crosslegged, sunflowered, maybe deeply cliched right up to the point you looked at how he was making his sounds.

He was playing a pair of homemade instruments: one a small electric violin, the other something he calls a “Bhartiphone” (and yes, of course I thought immediately of Slartybartfast), which is essentially two long, thick strings stretched almost zither-style, which he both plucked and played with a little mallet.

The result, electrified, distorted, and processed through a handful of guitar pedals, was hypnotic and droning, exactly the kind of music I love these days. Listening to his recordings online, you miss the effect; his rhyming, anti-war, anti-power lyrics are mixed too high, and they are by far the least interesting part of what he’s doing. I stood and listened for a quarter-hour, and vowed to make my own instruments one of these days.

No pics or sounds, because I was unprepared.

It’s not that I don’t like Berlin. I do. It’s a fabulous place to live and work, to free yourself from the fetters of a daily office. But returning last night from a vacation in the Greek islands, the Hauptstadt’s foggy summer and distinct lack of crystalline blue Mediterranean shorelines were almost hard to take.

I’ve fallen in love with Naxos, the largest of the Cyclades, where we spent most of the last week. It’s a cliche, this feeling. It’s what you do with an Aegean island, the way you ride a bike or fly an airplane. Barely more than simple grammar. But who am I to be proof against the object of a verb, or an environment this strong?

Ludicrously emerald seas, a little house shared with good friends a few minutes off the beach, waters perfectly warmed, perfectly cooled to keep us from frying at noon, weird barren rocky hills, brown against the intense blue of water and sky, white walls and blue shutters on every dwelling, parodic and eternally lovely (my pictures don’t do the place any justice, particularly since I ran out of batteries and motivation to get new ones). A corner of the island shockingly empty, given the time of year. Chilled retsina, milky ouzo, grilled octopus, perfectly fried fritters of eggplant and zucchini…

Yes, I love Berlin, but how can a gray tattered lady compete with this beauty? Once again, I embrace cliche: Who wants to help us start our impoverished writer’s colony in Greece?

Is this a bad omen? I’m riding down Kollwitz Str. today when a big gray rat runs across the street in front of me, apparently gets spooked by my onrushing bicycle of doom, and turns back right into my tires. I swerve a little, and feel a bu-UMP. I look back; it gets up, shakes itself off, and limps off back the way it came.

Apologies here to whatever rat gods are listening. I have no love for rodents, but who wants a visceral thing like that on their karmic record?

We’re back from two weeks in Poland, Hungary, and Romania, of which more, including pictures, later. But first a bit about Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, or Witkacy, a Polish artist who dominated that portion of our trip.

The son of an impossibly stern 19th century artist and critic with Nietzschean ideas of modern education, Witkacy was allowed complete freedom as a child — with the single caveat that he grow up to be a groundbreaking artist. So, you know, no pressure. He turned out as a mischevious, creative, self-doubting wreck, but entirely unique.

His paintings, once he matured, lay somewhere between Chagall and the German Expressionists, a riot of color, and cartoonish, nightmarish absurd compositions. His main love was theater, in which he wrote from what he called a “Theory of Pure Form.” He essentially believed that the best art offers a kind of internal geometry that resonates with the reader/viewer/listener in a non-rational way. The actual content of a work is irrelevant, he believed; only the underlying form itself would trigger this “metaphysical feeling,” a state more important than a simple emotional or intellectual response to the work.

In effect, he saw art as a drug. Rational and emotional responses were traps. He spent his entire life looking for transcendence of one type or another, found it himself in a series of drugs, and saw art as the only path that didn’t bring with it a hangover and self-recrimination. If he could have been religious, he might have been happier.

This metaphysical response was theoretically possible in realistic writing, he thought, and he had nothing but praise for the old Greeks; but modern post-Enlightenment realism in the theater had dulled audiences senses, so that all they knew how to experience was an emotional or intellectual reaction. The only way to let audiences find the Form was to use the grotesque, the perverse, the absurd. And he did; his plays are in a sense similar to the later absurdists, irrational, confusing, sometimes hilarious, full of nonsense philosophy and gunfire and reanimated corpses.

None of this brought him money to live, unfortunately. Depressed, he started a one-man portait-painting firm. Several types were on offer: good, realistic ones for which he charged the highest prices, and then others done under the influence of a variety of drugs, which were brilliantly distorted. He published his “Rules” of the firm, with detailed explanations of the types, and strictures such as “Any sort of criticism on the part of the customer is absolutely ruled out. … Given the incredible difficulty of the profession, the firm’s nerves must be spared.” But he hated it, and saw his role as an artist diminishing. When the Nazis invaded in 1939 he fled to the east, and then killed himself on hearing that the Soviets were invading from that direction.

Dead, he offered an appropriately Witkacy-esque sequel. Rediscovered by avant-garde directors in the 50s, his plays were re-performed. As Polish national sentiment rose in opposition to Soviet control, the Communist government ultimately hailed him as a national hero. In 1988, the government finally decided to exhume his body and rebury him as a symbol of national pride; they “found” his body and buried it with honors in Zakopane, the mountain town where he’d mostly lived. An expert consulted looked at X-rays of the corpse and realized it couldn’t be Witkacy, who had lost teeth; the government tried to cover this up and went through with the ceremony, but the information leaked out, turning the whole event into a farce worthy of one of the playwrights own works.