Category: Places
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Wallowing in the misery of Bush’s mistakes
This evening to the splendid St. George’s bookstore here in Prenzlauer, which was hosting a discussion with New York Review of Books writer Thomas Powers, a longtime chronicler of intelligence agencies and their misdeeds. It turned out to be wholly retrospective, covering again the role of the CIA in setting the stage for the Iraq…
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Keeping order, with dangerous echoes
The G-8 Summit here in Germany early next month is already fulfilling its own prophecies. It almost doesn’t matter what happens at the meeting itself; it is the raw stuff of symbolism, for both sides. Europeans, and the UN, are hoping for an environmental breakthrough from the US that won’t happen. Russia will dig in…
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Bats and rooks, swallows and swifts
Seen outside my window, long after sunset: a dark shape that can’t be anything but a bat, based on its erratic flight. We’ve seen them fluttering down a specific street a few blocks away, and over the gardens at sunset, but I’ve never noticed them at night like this, not so close to the house.…
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Some a that fresh nudeln
Recipe: Zis German Life‘s pasta machine. A bag of flour. A bunch of eggs. Some water. A table. Dirty fingers. A clothes rack, for drying. Outcome: tasty pasta.
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Honoring the dead
The memorial to the Soviet war dead in Schönholzer Heide is monumental, in the true Soviet sense, unlike anything else I’ve seen in Berlin. It sprawls out an acre or two long, funereal marble everywhere. In the shadow of a soaring obelisk, a woman’s statue holds a dead soldier in her arms, almost Pieta-style. In…
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Victories that sound terrible, when you think about it
Germany’s economist types are celebrating today because unemployment reached a big milestone mark — dipping under 4 million for the first time since 2002. For those counting, that’s still a whopping 9.5 percent unemployment here. I can’t find current Berlin figures, but the most recent ones I’ve seen are still somewhere up north of 15…
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Why Berlin is the Grünstadt
Someone ought to do a documentary on the parks in Berlin. Maybe me, with the exquisitely primitive video capabilities of my camera. We’ve spent the last few weeks exploring parks on the outskirts, the sub- or mid-urban swatches of green that sometimes feel as big as a small country, at least Monaco or San Marinito.…
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First swift sighting
I fell in love with the swifts last year, birds that play in the air the same way dolphins do in the sea, with every evidence of unadulterated joy in the way they careen between buildings, skim the surface of rivers, chase each other through the heavens. When they left for the winter, it was…
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Terror watch, in the neighborhood
The US Embassy here in Berlin is boosting security. Apparently there’s an undisclosed threat to Americans here ongoing. Anybody have any clues? “U.S. diplomatic and consular facilities in Germany are increasing their security posture,” the Embassy said in a statement. “We are taking these steps in response to a heightened threat situation. The U.S. Embassy…
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A year on. The post office on tax day. Bubbly.
Tax day. A year ago (minus two days) we arrived in Berlin, travel-tired, wide-eyed, speaking almost zero German. Norbert, who managed the apartment we were to stay in for three weeks, was kind enough to pick us up at the airport, and became our first Berlin friend, the punk-with-a-pillow. A year later, we’re settled, and…
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Pain on exhibit, and two views of crucifixion
At the Hamburger Bahnhof contemporary art museum is an exhibit on pain (Schmerz). Art shares the walls and display cases with medical implements, a case of pickled, often diseased organs, photos of autoerotic deaths, and a curiously compelling film of a man dancing naked in an attic, a pink plush dinosaur on a chair next…
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Tongue, fleur de weiner, and Austrian Morocco
Eating in Vienna: tongue, sliced thin and drenched in a kind of horseradish porridge. A lovely goulash, which means bits of stewed meat along with a fried egg, wiener sliced into a perfect fleur de lys (oh look, I say naively, foolishly — I think it’s octopus!), an enormous knödel at least as dense as…
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English über alles. History doesn’t matter.
It takes a ballsy mix of arrogance and almost willful historical blindness to argue that any condition is permanent. This IHT article draws from both, drawing on arguments that the English language is so widespread and useful as a world language today that no other is likely to topple its dominance. Ever. Riding the crest…
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Maerzmusik pt. 2-3: Jetsons musik und primal screams
Two more concerts for the Maerzmusik festival: The first was a piece by local composer Moritz Gagern, written for a chamber ensemble specifically playing in the rotating cafe at the top of the Fernsehturm here, the huge Soviet-era TV tower in the center of Alexanderplatz. I had never been up in the tower itself, save…
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A moral here somewhere
A few days ago, like many days, I went to a cafe with my computer to write. Afterwards, I went to the bookstore, bought several books, including Pynchon’s latest six-ton opus. I carried this all around in my backpack for several hours, having a lovely drink on the rubble slopes of Friedrichshain Volkspark with Aimee.…