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.

I won’t say it’s exactly amazing how often I hear music critics — or anyone — of a certain age lamenting the lost music of the ’70s. When I covered digital entertainment closely, I was on an influential mailing list full of ostensible music lovers, smart people, and every few weeks someone would argue that the problem with music biz today is that nobody’s making any good music.

Pah. David Brooks’ column in the NYT today is slightly smarter, but not much. He has interviewed Steven Van Zandt, Springsteen’s guitarist, and together they wistfully remember a time when big bands like the Stones and Springsteen meant something, or meant something to huge masses of people. Not like today, where music consumption is fragmented into micro-genres, bands can’t fill stadiums (remember how great the sound and view in those stadium shows are?), and the kids picking up instruments just can’t play.

He says that most young musicians don’t know the roots and traditions of their music. They don’t have broad musical vocabularies to draw on when they are writing songs.

As a result, much of their music (and here I’m bowdlerizing his language) stinks.

He describes a musical culture that has lost touch with its common roots. And as he speaks, I hear the echoes of thousands of other interviews concerning dozens of other spheres.

Did I say slightly smarter? Forget it. Music cultures change. Everything is fragmented. But why in hell is that bad?

A musical monoculture is like any monoculture. It stagnates. Innovation happens within a strictly circumscribed sphere. What really happens is that it produces rebels, punk, new wave, and then what happens… it fragments. I’m a deeply music loving music geek, who today has the ability to listen to everything from Johannes Ockeghem to Valerio Cosi’s Italian free-jazz drones (if you haven’t heard him, GO LISTEN NOW), with long detours through the Middle East, Africa and Asia. That perpetually blows my mind.

Kids can do this too. The ability to get in touch with musical roots beyond Zeppelin and the Doors and the Beatles and a bunch of very good 60s blues bands is overwhelming today. Not everyone takes advantage of this, but many, many do. It’s creating vast amounts of new and innovative music even despite the industry’s implosion. It ain’t the Stones, ’cause frankly that sound’s come and gone at least three times.

Music, and music culture, moves with the times. Brooks gets part of this. He finishes with this, which was his real point all along:

We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.

Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.

This is the old end-of-shared-culture argument. We listen to different things, think differently, read different Web sites. We don’t all watch the same TV news at 8, don’t listen to the same Rolling Stones albums. Terrible, right?

Pah. Before, “technological and commercial momentum” created the impression of cultural monocultures — although underneath, unlistened to by Brooks and his besuited buddies, were other vibrant scenes. Maybe the culture business wasn’t fragmented back then, but culture was — what were the jazzheads listening to, or the folkies, or the deeply weird Tony Conrad or Eternal Music drone aficionados? They sure weren’t in stadiums.

Diversity of cultural opportunity allows people to stretch their minds and expand their experiences, and breeds creativity. Even if people who want to hear the same thing over and over again don’t want to hear it.

Thanks to Alex Ross for the pointer.

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.

The Guardian wrote this weekend about Picador’s plan to stop publishing most literary fiction initially in hardback form. That means even stellar writers like Delillo, Naipaul, Banville and Cormack McCarthy will be going straight to paperback.

I read this with an initial twinge of irritation and sadness. I love hardback books, what reader or writer doesn’t? They’re beautiful, solid, lasting, and look good on a shelf. Sometimes they even have resale value.

And yet. About ten seconds later, I realized this could be some of the best news to hit the publishing industry in some time.  Here’s why, nicely wrapped up in one rival publisher’s comment:

Rival publishers described it as “a seismic change”. “Hardback then paperback has been the model for 60 years,” said Dan Franklin, the veteran publisher at Jonathan Cape.

What kind of business model doesn’t change for 60 years? I’m as book-y as they come; and yet I scour used bookstores for paperbacks, the same way everyone I know does. Hardback books aren’t serving the mass market, and they aren’t serving the writers who produce them.

When my co-author and I did our first (and as yet only, but wait…) book, it was hardback only. We were shocked at the discounts, shocked at the haphazard marketing dollars spent, shocked that our publishers had no interest in moving it to paperback, despite the fact that our core audience was mostly unlikely to shell out for hardback. We’re still trying to get the rights back so we can publish an updated version ourselves.

Publishers simply haven’t adapted to a market that has changed very, very radically in 60 years, and probably most in the last five. This is a step in the right direction, even if it’s a little sad. So be it. If my next book (fingers crossed) comes out only in paperback and digital form, I won’t shed any tears.

Berlin and New York are having a little love-in these days. It’s not just in the pages of the NYT, where gushing and usually (but not always) 66 percent fictional articles appear about the Wild Life In Berlin. The two cities are in the midst of a cultural interchange just now, swapping music and other performances at Important Cultural Venues, and I am unhappy to say I missed all of New York here.

But they like us over there on the other side. And it’s not just the romance. Well, it’s partly the romance; it’s impossible to read many articles without quickly finding references to the Weimar period, where Art and Sex and optimistic politics went hand in hand, even when all three were technically the same sex. (Of course that’s what sold me on this place too; how many expatriates here can’t claim some private love affair with the velvet-penned Herr Isherwood, or at least his cultural Caberet-ish offsprings.)

But no, it’s not just that. The NYT has much to say in the paper’s Berlin in Lights blog here, most of it very complimentary, about Berlin’s cultural ambassadors. Yet my favorite is the unrelated review of the Berlin Philharmonic by the very serious, very readable, very smart composer, writer and teacher Greg Sandow. A few excerpts:

The most astonishing thing about the Berlin players is that they move when they play. … Sometimes the entire section almost danced, each player in his own way… We hear that in Berlin, the Philharmonic attracts a younger audience, that there’s excitement at their concerts. And no wonder. It’s not because of marketing, or gimmicks. It’s because they’re exciting to hear, and also to see. You know they care. You know they’re excited by the music. You can see it. Carnegie Hall was electric with their presence, as it was with the young Venezuelans, but never is — just never — with most other orchestras.

That’s our local. We, or I, tend not to appreciate it enough, having an overwhelming surfeit of classical (and contemporary) music here. But they are not only good, they are world class, enough to make New York stand up and take notice. I need to spend more time at the Philharmonic.

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?

I have been meme-tagged by the beautiful and eloquent Ms. Balderama, of Intoxifictian, Nonsense Versian, Naxian, and NYT-ian fame. The idea is to expose eight things about yourself. I’m borrowing in part from her borrowed template, since this is a meme, after all. So here goes:

1. I took great pride when young in being born during the witching hour, which (according to me, and not Wikipedia), was the hours between 12am and 1am on Halloween Night. It doesn’t seem to have given me any magical or demonic powers, but I’m certainly still a night person. I can make pretty good scary faces, too.

2. The longest train trip I’ve ever taken was also one of the shortest, scheduled Seattle to San Francisco, but in fact Portland to somewhere in the Oregon Cascades. The train didn’t make it to Seattle, so Amtrak bused us south to Portland. The train met us there, then died in the middle of a snowstorm a few hours later. Night came, people started freaking out without any announcements (or lights, or heat) from the folks in charge, and eventually Red Cross came and gave us coffee, donuts and blankets. At dawn, a bus came and drove us to Sacramento.

3. Ice cream: it’s OK, but it’s really an excuse for the cone, which channels one of the few really celestial textures on the planet: crunchy. See the next entry.

4. I’m mildly obsessed by toast. Or maybe not mildly. Have you ever tried Acme Bread toasted just perfectly with a bit of jam? Or German billion-saat-brot with a slice of ham? See, poetry.

5. I’m scared of flying. You should be too. Big, heavy things oughtn’t to float though the air with the greatest of ease, no matter what physicists say. I know my own personal experience has nothing to do with ease at all, unless a few drinks have been procured beforehand.

6. I have tried to learn Mandarin Chinese several times. The first time, I got so anxious every time I approached the classroom, or even the general area, I dropped out after half a quarter. Better luck the second time on my own, but I remember none at all. I’m doing much better with German, danke.

7. At various times I have played baseball, soccer, run track (hurdles and sprints), run cross country, and been a diver with distinctly sub-Louganian grace. For all my deep and abiding commitment to the computer-driven lifestyle of writing and geekdom, I’m pretty sure humans were meant to get up and move around once in a while. I really ought to take that advice.

8. I have no idea when I’ll leave Berlin. This city has afforded me the time and mental space to write a silly and intermittently serious kung fu novel, for which I owe it a great deal. It is rewarding and infuriating, and I can’t think where I could next be as happily sub-economic as I am today.

Und so, on that note, I meme-tag onwards.

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…

Juan Cole and a few other bloggers are reporting chatter from D.C. that the administration will launch a pre-war sales effort after Labor Day, much as before Iraq, softening up the public for an attack on Iran.

Ugh. Could they be so ludicrously, criminally stupid? Please tell me Americans would see this as irresponsible, impeachment-worthy insanity.