Lydia’s Blog

I first saw it in London about four days ago. In total…about thirty flakes of snow over about 8 minutes, resulting in the near collapse of all public transportation, traffic gridlock and monstrous delays at the airport.

Abe and I made it back to Berlin. Really late.

It has snowed in this city for the last three days straight. Now, Berlin is known for it’s wicked winter temperatures…and identifiable by the sensation of flash-frozen boogers lacerating your nostrils until blood is drawn…but not for snow, per se. That’s more of an Eastern Poland through to Siberia type of phenomenon. For this reason, Berliners seem more than a bit bewildered by this blizzard.

I saw a man staring at his feet (buried only up to his mid-shins as he was) for about 15 minutes at a tram stop last night. Open mouth. Gormless expression. Well, it is Berlin and he could have been high.

The city’s public works seem particularly befuddled. Sand? Salt? Shovels? You should see my knees after yesterday.

Still, ask any Brit, American, even Dutch person you see around, and they’re all over the moon with joy, appreciative of this white patina covering Berlin’s ugly post Xmasness.

Today, I saw a young PoMo mother explain yellow snow to her toddler son for the first time.

Retroactively, it must be said.

It’s come to my attention recently, that I’m suffering from a bit of the Holday Jiggly. You know the feeling, the circulation to your legs gets cut off by suddenly tiny waistbands, puffy pink flesh bows out from every unclothed gap, and general squooshiness replaces all of those beloved bones: cheekbones, collarbones, hipbones, etc.

My main H’mo du jour was also feeling the jiggly…made all the more anxious for the fact that, as Masetto in Don Giovanni, he’ll need to strip down to undies and a bra and get rammed from behind by Leporello. “Do my tits jiggle when he thrusts?” he asked. What could I say.

We considered our options, and then decided we needed fitness…in the form of a really upscale club. We decided to do a trial training at Holmes Place, an incredibly chi-chi club tucked away into the same shopping complex as Givenchy, Louis Vuitton, Dior, etc. Apparently they offer discounts to people from the opera.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from every gym I’ve ever joined (except for the NYSC on Court and Remsen in Brooklyn Heights), it’s that fitness, or at least what heterosexual women know as fitness is only the tip of the iceberg. Gay visual politicking overtakes any other function of any given training center, after a point.

We packed our bags and went to Holmes Place. It was slick, bright, and full of beautiful men strutting in pre-ordained patterns, sending each other cryptic glances. A very tall, very orange man named Stefan (whose tattoos climbed out from under his three-piece suit and up his neck) walked us through. The place seemed totally pleasant, even nice…if not totally overpriced.

I zoned out, staring at the womens’ only area, doors to the steam and heat rooms…thinking about the entire box of cookies I’d eaten earlier that afternoon, in celebration of my finally getting my shit together to work out a bit. We strolled. Stefan talked. My man listened.

After what seemed like an abnormally short while, their conversation seemed to be wrapping up, in a “thanks, we’ll think about it and let you know” kind of way. What? I had come to confront the Holiday Jiggly, not to wander around with a creature that looked more like living, breathing beef jerky than an ordinary human for twenty minutes.

“Could we do a trial training?” I saw my partner in crime go white. “Sometime?” I added.

We received “redeem for a trial workout” cards and headed toward the door. I was confused, annoyed at having carted my gym shit across Berlin, and curious as to why my man was shaking.

“Didn’t you hear”, he asked, obviously relieved to be out of there. “I have a muscle shirt”.

“Oh.” I said. We kept walking for a while.

“That orange guy said that muscle shirts are an absolute no go”.

We did the only thing we could think to do, considering the situation. We walked (briskly, give me some credit) to the nearest Xmas market and drank 3 mugs of mulled wine in rapid succession.

Then we went back to his place, ate Pringles and Lasagna, and watched Hustler White.

When the night sky becomes shot through with red and gold lights, and the air I breathe bears the scent of cinnamon and clove nearly as strongly as that of stale cigarettes, it can only mean one thing.

Xmastime. And that can only mean one thing…

Regretting the coat purchase I made six weeks ago as my broke ass shivers on a windy street corner.

Let me also add a quick story about a trip Abe and I made to the Outlet Mall near his parents’ house in Garrison NY last summer. It is relevant, I swear. Wait for it…

As per usual, Abe and I were bickering bitterly throughout the entire adventure, as is generally the case with us when either career or personal/textile/garment-related aesthetics come into discussion.

I believe we were shopping for pants. His, specifically.

At one point, we went into the Barney’s Outlet store.

He began thumbing listlessly through a rack of brown, khaki, fatigue, sand, and tan cargo corduroys, occaisionally throwing me one of those adorable, yet cerebellum-melting glances that, on one hand say “sweetie, I need a hand–please come over here and lend me your expert opinion”, while also saying, with equal emphasis “you controlling bitch, if you even try to come over here spraying your overblown, castrating judgements like usual, I will make the rest of this shopping expedition a living hell”.

While contemplating this age-old conundrum of going or staying, my eyes fell upon a rack supporting two perpendicularly hung rows of pure magic.

The Michael Kors coat. Winter 04/05. Wool, black or red, warm. Perfectly formed with a high neck, very long arms, over-knee fall length, and one sturdy, yet elegant zipper breaking the unmarred perfection of the outer shell (the pockets were inseam, coyly hidden). There it was…in my size.

$200.

$200.

$200.

I left it. My financial situation, as usual, looked about as good as the prospects for gay marraige in Texas. Anyway. The day was for Abie. Abie’s pants. Sure, he probably wouldn’t ever speak to me again, but at least his sweet cheeks would end up perfectly situated in reasonably-priced denim.

Since that day, I have regretted leaving the coat. A miserable, aching, and certainly cold regret.

Two months after I came back to Berlin, I bought a coat at H & M. Vaguely 1950’s in shape and Oscar the Grouch colored, it turns out to be the perfect coat for a dry, brisk, late autumn day.

Not the wet, dark, biting Taiga that is a Berlin winter.

I am grateful for the fact that, since buying the coat, I have lost a few pounds, allowing for extensive layering. Still, as I feel the unrelenting mini-turds of wet snow sink through coat, sweater, sweater, turtleneck, shirt, tank-top, finally hitting unappreciative skin, my mind returns to that which I was too dumb, cheap and proud to buy.

Now I know that Christmas ghosts aren’t necessarily menacing, faceless appartitions or sprightly fairies…they can be fabulously cut woolen shells filled with down and lines with nylon. They can haunt you while you shop for groceries and toiletries you could’ve done without…and appear on Berlin’s slender glamor girls, who probably payed EU 1000 for the honor.

On long dark nights, the Michael Kors coat is there. At least one generally wakes up from a nightmare come sunrise. Not me. By tomorrow morning (at which time hopefully the green H & M coat will have dried out sufficiently…reclaiming its charming “crusty asshole of a dog carcass lying on Arizona asphalt for a week” odor once again), there will be no release from its perfect, clean, classic red or black wool grip.

Only 5 more shopping days.

I’ve just gotten back from a place called the Hotel Bar (generic title, yes, but also concise, irreverent, sceney and thereby securely pomo). I went to hear my good friend Tommy’s brilliant sister, Alex, sing.

She sang. She was fantastic. As the final chord of her last song died, I turned around and immediately realized that Dorothy was no longer in Kansas.

It was one of those scenes. Hard to describe, but I’ll try. In a room full of people that are so obviously, unquestionably, practically exhibitionalistically “creative types”, I always find myself isolated.

Stranded.

Girls with artfully spiky (or spikily arty, whichever you’d prefer) hair, wearing painstakingly effortless scarves—a vast ocean of short men with wild, greasy hair and varying degrees of painstakingly effortless facial hair. All milling around ballad night at the Hotel Bar with vacantly pleasant expressions that tacitly say “don’t talk to me unless you run a gallery or a gig bar…or if you’ve got some green.”

The infuriating part of the evening, is that I knew a good few of the people there. I’d been introduced before by Tommy or others (at which time they’d all produced a heroically tolerant courtesy…which on this lot can look like anything from a “this speculum might be a bit cold” expression to…well, Terry Schiavo).

As I spoke to Alex (God bless the woman for her company at that moment) after her set, two prime examples approached [Alex] to congratulate her. As they were waved on toward the email list (without so much as a glance in my direction), I said (loudly, yet cheerfully) “It’s nice to see you again”.

No response.

I caught the female of the species by the arm as she passed again, and repeated my phrase, louder. She turned, with a pitying look that said “Sorry if you’d think I know you. I surely don’t know you. Look at you.” The look had an accent. It was weird.

Me (the gist): Yeah. Hi. We’ve met. At your place. We watched THX-1138 together. And all of the special features. We ate Xmas cookies, I played with your dog, wore your guest house slippers…

(Dear reader…I was one of only two guests on that occasion.)

She sputtered artily for a second without ever looking remorseful for her oversight. I grabbed my coat.

Sometimes Berlin can look like a freakishly inverted incarnation of high school. The tragically misunderstood THEREFORE (unassailably) artistically potent have transmogrified into a thin, pale, spiky, blank-eyed overclass…sort of like the jocks and sluts of yore, I guess. The rest of us…the ones who sell out to the man (read: have institutional jobs), smile when introduced to someone, and wear color…

Well, I don’t know what you’d call us—but I’ve definitely been here before.

On a positive (and definitely unpomo) note, I discovered online banking today. Yup. To celebrate, I bought myself a big bag of Xmas potpourri and put some in every room of my apartment.

I’m really looking forward to waking up to something other than the smell of my own halitosis tomorrow morning.

Night night.

Xmas is fabulous. I like how at Xmas, you can be hungry and full at the same time. Here are some other things I like:

I like Tangerines, and their bastard cousins, like Clementines, Mandarins and Satsumas.

I like the fact that I can get retarded in public in broad daylight with the assistance of Gluhwein.

I like Lebkuchen. I do.

I like the fact that Xmas cheer in Germany basically entails being ever-so-slightly less of an asshole.

I like that with so many Xmas revellers in the streets of Berlin, you don’t notice the stacks of drunk and disillusioned punks, with their hungry and badly-behaved pit bulls.

I like the fact that Santa Claus is known as the Xmas Man here.

I like that the German Xmas Man has an evil counterpart, Knecht Ruprecht, who gives kids coal.

I like that the brothel next door to by building has incorporated some Xmas deko into its display.

I like that, if you squint your eyes and clear your mind, Berlin actually looks like a fun, inviting city at Xmastime. Well, almost…

I like that buying ugly shit you’d never want is a Xmas market obligation.

I like mugs shaped like boots.

I like that Berlin’s student pomos are leaving the city to be with Mami and Papi on the Rhine for Xmas.

Did I mention that I like Lebkucken? I really do.

And I love the fact that I’ll actually be spending Xmas in London with my sweetie and some very good friends, and not in Berlin at all.

OOoh, I just shifted on the bench at the cafe…and recieved a choice Xmas glare from a man wearing a cloche, space-boots and three belts.

I like…

One time I got stopped by a camera crew in the street. It was right after the London transit bombing. They were interviewing people to ask if they thought it could happen in Berlin.

I went off on a rant about how, no, it would never happen here, and how dare Berlin feel so important that they deserved to become a big nasty symbol of Islamic terror. I went on to describe how terrorists hit either a.) big western centers of international commerce and culture (New York, London) b.) western cities with big disenfranchised northern African a/o middle Eastern populations (Madrid) c.) or Eastern centers of percieved Western privelege and decadence (Amman, Bali, etc.)…and that if the terrorists had half a brain in their heads, and were seriously interested in a German target, they’d hit Frankfurt (the money) or Munich (the big romanticized heart of German national culture).

They didn’t put me on the air.

Last night, people started coming to the opera really, REALLY late for their rehearsals. One breathless mezzo came in talking about how Unter den Linden…the huge commercial center of Berlin (and the street where the opera is located) had been cordoned off by police, and how everyone on the street had been evacuated (besides us, unfortunately).

The Christmas markets, the stores, Humboldt University…as well as the dress rehearsal at the Staatsoper—all closed down.

A bomb, they said. Fuuuuuck, I thought. Bleeding Murphy’s law. I should’ve kept my mouth shut. Oh, how my karma had doomed Christmas in Berlin!

It was, indeed, a bomb. But let me continue.

Some construction workers tinkering on a project (an underground parking lot on UdL) were boring through concrete when they stumbled across a live explosive from…

1945.

Apparently this happens a lot. They find an old bomb, or anti-personnel-explosive from WWII in the subway, or under a playground, or in the basement of a shopping mall, etc., etc., then call in the army to remove it, and then drive it deep into Brandenburg where they can explode it with robots in a field.

Pictures of the bomb were in the papers today. It’s about the size of a human torso, and quite badly rusted. Apparently the metal on the head had decayed down to only a couple of milimeters in thickness.

That means, just one tap with a hammer and pow, Berlin’s center becomes a crater.

If only W could invent a time machine, eh?

God I spend too much time in this buttfucking internet cafe.

Hey guys,

It was a huge goal of mine to avoid letting this blog go all issue-y. My almost total apathy toward current events is best represented by a series of completely self-centered posts, I feel.

Still, I’ve just been sent an article from the New York Times. Check it out at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/arts/07maki.html?incamp=article_popular

Also, sorry to endorse the Times, whose Times Select scheme offends me to my oily black core.

Anyway, it’s about American Universities and Conservatories cranking out way too many students…students who will, by and large, never be able to maintain solvency within the entertainment business.

I’ve gone to a conservatory (two actually…one for music and one for theater). Okay. The article is correct. There are too many students.

Let’s look at the unexamined roots, for a moment. The following paragraph is an excerpt, for your examination:

Actually, it wasn’t so long ago that if you were a teenager hungering to be an actor, the last place you’d prepare would be college. Maybe you’d go to New York and study in a private conservatory environment with a guru like Stella Adler or Lee Strasberg. Maybe you’d study accounting, try out for amateur productions of “The Music Man” and “The Taming of the Shrew” and then apply to a graduate program like Yale’s to hone your skills as an artist. Maybe you’d go to Los Angeles and hang out on the stool at Schwab’s Pharmacy and look pretty.

Yes. Then these Scwab’s alumni and Adler and Strasberg gradutes (the least commercially successful, mind you) hit the late 70s and early 80s with child support payments and enormous coke problems, and decided it would be way cooler (, man) to step away from “the biz” and make steady, even luxurious amounts of money while enjoying a neverending stream of young, worshipful, wannabe actresses from Iowa.

Thus, academic conservatory training was born. As “turning on and dropping out” gave way to “where’s the beef”, such ex-idealists talked to their buddies (ex-hippie poets they dropped acid with at the Chelsea after that Three Dog Night concert) who had already begun to invade the literature and philosophy departments of Universities. In the interest of expanding Literature departments into Theater Departments (under the auspices of the Liberal Arts umbrella) a genius scam was hatched.

Sympathies and Concurrence fell thusly into place…can that be everything?

No, jackass. There’s money.

Elisabeth Pugh Decatur’s beautiful, sweet (and “good”, if you get me) daughter, Bunny, has taken tap-dancing lessons practically since birth, singing lessons since puberty, and has had the lead in every school play and musical Mama Decatur can remember. Theater school seems a logical next step for her prodigously talented spawn. James Walter Farnsworth Decatur III is all too willing to pay for it.

All of it. This awkwardly cobbled example happens more often than you’d think. It is the rule, rather than the exception. Certainly at Carnegie Mellon, where I went to grad school, virtually NO ONE (in the undergraduate acting program) was on a scholarship. My fellow grad students, however, were all living on Ramen Noodles and unsubsidised loans. Anyway…that’s not relevant at the moment.

Think about it. Daddy (insurance agent) and Mama (3rd grade teacher) from Ashtabula, Ohio are going to send their son (though he dances and sings alarmingly well) to New York to become Michael Cerveris? One year at Tisch (with living expenses) would cost the equilvalent of one of their salaries: $40,000 at LEAST.

Financial aid is scarce, tell you what.

I have two items of advice as pertains to this situation.

Actors. Jump in. Move to NYC or LA, bartend or start fucking a rich married guy, join a dance conditioning studio, find a reputable dramatic coach. Read your ass off. Audition. Familiarlize yourself with the literature and infrastructure of the film or stage community of which you’d like to take part. Starve youself. (Sorry, but I’m not kidding). You’re worth more to the entertainment industry as an ambitious, hot, fresh-faced 18-year-old that a cynical 22-year old college graduate with alcohol-induced attitude problems.

To the industry. Stop being such dicks about papers and initials. It is irresponsible and nepotistic to disqualify auditionees who don’t have an B.A. from Tisch, Juilliard, CMU, Michigan, etc. If they do have those letters, it just means their folks have some serious cash. I know literally DOZENS of shitty directors, certainly, who have an M.F.A. I also know dozens more (also shitty) who will go into hock in order to get one. They will not improve as “artists”, they will simply receive a new badge to sew onto their little sashes, next to citizenship and knot-tying.

It’s a preposterous system. Greedy schools employing washed-out (or at least relatively professionally inactive) faculty to teach an enormous army of upper-upper-upper middle class kids, most of whom will never be cast anyway. However, this entire illogical system is somehow justified by a totally arbitrary expectation of institutional education in a business that, at its core, doesn’t require it.

It’s a hose job, pure and simple. Don’t blame it all on the kids.

The unspoken third bit of advice, of course, is for the government to start dumping significant amounts of cash into the arts, in order to create a system for publically funded performance and arts venues. Then, maybe, performers and creators (given more secure opportunities, therefore decreasing stagnation via fiscal desperation) would feel more inclined to really stretch the form in interesting ways (instead of importing it, a la BAM), rather than enter their trite piece of shit show into the New York Fringe with the specific hopes of getting it picked up for a teeny off-Broadway run.

The pretentious, hackneyed, unimaginative charm of which might, then, light the theater flame within the breast of yet another marginally-talented high school senior from Pelham Manor.

As I walked from the tram to the opera this morning in my traditional Wednesday morning/Admin. meeting coma, I literally walked into one of those sandwichboard advertisements on the street.

At first I didn’t know what hit me…and I sat on the ground shocked that one of these docile creatures would attack a half-conscious woman walking in broad daylight on Berlin’s busiest street. When I realized it had been a blameless sandwichboard, I felt sheepish.

When I read the sandwichboard, I felt a rush of that familiar sensation that only occurs in the immediate wake of some serious gaffe of Germtardation (see this blog’s first post for more details on Germtardation).

The sign said BLACK POWER in enormous letters. It was an advertisement for a brand of notebook computer that happened to come in shiny black (and silver, as it grudgingly noted in much smaller letters).

I’m sure our friendly neighborhood veteran Black Panthers and Weathermen would get a huge kick out of German cheek.

In every record store, there is a section marked, puzzlingly, Black Music. This is a catch-all category for Hip Hop, R & B, Blues, Soul, Gospel, and in some unfortunate cases, jazz. Eminem, as I have seen, is often filed under Rock or Popular. Tracy Chapman…yeah. Black Music.

There is also a cookie in German Bakeries called the “Amerikaner”. It is a large dough circle covered with half white and half black frosting. Thus, hard proof that ergregious political incorrectness and deliciousness need not be mutually exclusive.

Last week, I hung out with friends of friends, one of which was a Black guy who grew up in suburban San Diego.

Apparently he’s had to field numerous questions from Germans curious about how he faced a childhood in poverty, around so many guns and drugs.

Racial idiocy can go both ways, however. My good friend Tommy once met an American student at a party, who seemed very concerned about inequality and opression the world over.

I paraphrase from Tommy’s description (please keep in mind that most black people in Europe are of direct African descent).

Girl: So, like, what’s it like for, like, African-Americans in Germany? I mean, I was just, like, in Italy, and it was, like, really segregated between like, Italian culture and African-American culture. So, like, what’s it like here?

Tommy: For whom?

Girl: African-Americans. Like, do they have to face, like, repression, and opression and supression here in Germany?

Tommy: Who faces…?

Girl: African Americans, like, you know…

And so on. I just can’t wait for the shiny white laptop to come out.

Happy Nikolaus!

I just came out of a newspaper stand, where I’d intended to buy a copy of the Economist, which they ended up not having.

They did, however, carry a brand new, ultra-glossy, small-release magazine called Dummy Kinder. It appeared to be a parenting magazine for a young urban gente. There was a baby on the cover.

I asked the guy at the counter, “Did you know that this magazine, in English, is called Idiot Children?”

He stared at me for a long time.