Quality Footwear

Rezimy

2011-02-15T08:47:00.000-08:00

I've been quite busy lately and haven’t quite got it together to write a longer piece I’ve been planning for this yet. So in the mean time, like a cat that cheerfully drags in dead birds and mice to its owner’s kitchen as some kind of respectful offering, I'll continue to post the occasional link to items that I think may be of interest to any potential readers.

This time around it’s a Slovakian concept album. Maybe it’s just too many years’ proximity to punk music, but I must confess that I’ve always been rather distrustful of the idea of the concept album. To my ignorant youthful self they were something or other to do with 70s prog-rock and best avoided at all costs. The release of The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come for Free changed my mind somewhat. In particular it was the last track with its two alternative endings, which becomes much more moving and powerful thanks to the weight of the back story provided by the rest of the album. Rather than his first album full of the radio hits, The Streets' follow-up record was a slow-burner where the songs shared centre stage with the narrative context. Not always successful, perhaps, but always interesting.

And today I discovered another one, thanks to the Economist’s Eastern approaches blog. As well as reading the related article, you can listen to the whole album here. They say it better than I could, so I’ll quote:

A recently released rap album, Rezimy (“Regimes”), co-sponsored by the Open Society Foundation, takes listeners on a ten-song journey through the various regimes that Slovakia has seen in the last 30 years (...) In little over half an hour the album covers communism, socialism, the revolution, the short-lived Czechoslovak federation, meciarism and “freedom”. (...)

[It] paints realistic pictures of the everyday gloom under communism, the dangers latent in a young capitalism system and the tantalising tang of possibility that followed accession to the European Union in 2004.

I have no idea what they’re rapping about beyond the song titles themselves; perhaps you’ll have more luck. But the music and the delivery sound good, and the idea – to condense 30 years of national history into a 10-song album – is fantastic.

Ernst Jandl, or Dogs versus Angels

2011-01-28T04:34:00.000-08:00

The Austrian poet Ernst Jandl (1925-2000) is almost unknown in the English-speaking world. This is largely because Jandl's experimental poetry has a great deal to do with sound and is deeply rooted in the German language. Consider his war poem schtzngrmm (from the German word 'Schützengraben' - trench - with the vowels omitted, so literally trnch), a video of which you can find at the bottom of this post.

Some, however, are a little more straightforward. His plays on words often turn his poems into a sort of 'immigrant German', thus making a political as well as a linguistic point. And some deal with sadness, inanimate objects and - well, dogs. What the angel was for Rilke, said one critic, the dog is for Jandl.

This is also reminiscent of the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky, who saw himself as 'a stray Moscow mutt barking his love to fellow dogs'. And maybe this is why I could never get that excited about Rilke. Leave the poets of the angels for someone else - give me the poets of the dogs anyday.

In order that a few people who might otherwise never read Jandl can get a basic introduction to his work, I'm starting to translate some of the poems which also lend themselves to the English language, and will hopefully put a few up on this blog from time to time. Here are three to lead us off; any barks of constructive criticism from fellow mutts are extremely welcome.

record

i ask for a record.

can one eat this record like an English person?

i ask with a cannibalistic facial expression.

certainly not, says the amazed saleswoman.

can one mount this record as a wheel on a motorcycle?

i ask with a somewhat sporty accent.

that’s impossible, the saleswoman answers harshly.

can one perhaps use this record as

a target a millwheel ice rink monocle

cylinder sea urchin or wedding ring?

i ask, the individual words pouring out rapidly.

no, snaps the saleswoman and bites me on the finger.

then please wrap it up for me, I say

exhausted and relieved.

kiosk

1000 wild sow

in a tragedy

are considered more noble than

1000 wild sow

in a kiosk

a conversation with rilke

someone asks a question

rilke answers

rilke asks a question

someone answers

neither is particularly happy about it

neither is particularly sad about it

Musikautomat

2011-01-20T10:51:00.000-08:00

I wrote a poem this week called 'Danube Blues'. The title is a rather easy twist on Johann Strauss II's waltz The Blue Danube, but I was still quite pleased with it. Of course, checking how many people got there before me, I find 269,000 Google hits for my witticism. Either the news of my linguistic breakthrough spread bloody quickly, or it is a very obvious play on words. I fear the latter.

Nonetheless, one of the first Danube Blues articles to appear was this short music report from a January 23rd 1956 edition of Time Magazine. The author's lukewarm analysis notes that venerable old Vienna has "capitulated to the jukebox", and that the 400 new machines in the city are drowning out the traditional rustling of the newspapers with "mambos, boogie-woogie and other jazz".

"Teen-agers sit for hours, nursing their beers and feeding schillings to the mechanical monsters," laments the article, although the author does concede that some of the old cafe favourites (played live) were rather appalling in their own way. Nothing, not even the benevolent passage of time, can redeem lyrics such as: Like two raisins in a coffee cake/We sit side by side in life.

As something of a technophobe myself, it's sometimes quite instructive to look back at conservative reactions to technologies which we now appreciate or take for granted. The 50s and 60s as they exist in public memory would be inconceivable, and much poorer places, were it not for the jukebox and the revolutionary musical developments it witnessed and assisted.

And it's nice that, no matter how unspectacular the title of my poem is, it has helped me to stumble across this little relic from a bygone era; an era when the democratisation of access to music was greeted in some quarters with suspicion. Which seems especially absurd in a day and age where Strauss has long since waltzed his way onto the iTunes store.

Trial and Error

2011-01-11T02:32:00.000-08:00

I followed the recent farcical trial and conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, formerly the richest man in Russia, with some interest. Not because I have any strong personal sympathy for the man himself, who was memorably described by The Economist as 'unlovely', but because the trial was so obviously a politically-motivated miscarriage of justice. It also seems to have sparked a degree of international and Russian public protest against Vladimir Putin, who is able to use the phony conviction to keep a potential rival in prison. Khodorkovsky's acclaimed closing speech in the courtroom drew parallels between his own trial and the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s:

All the names - those of the prosecutors, and of the judges - will go down in history, as did the names of those who took part in the infamous Soviet trials.

Back in Stalin's times, Mikhail Bulgakov wrote his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, a wonderful, imaginative and viciously satirical attack on Moscow's self-interested, corrupt artistic elite. Thus far, the majority of Russian public intellectuals appear to have responded rather passively to the gradual chiselling away of democracy and freedom of speech in their country.

But a month after Banksy pledged nearly £80,000 to pay for the defence of two imprisoned members of the radical Voina art collective, an interesting piece in today's Moscow Times suggests that there is a belated backlash occurring within the country itself towards the recent turn of events.

It's easy to romanticise things, I know. The Master and Margarita wasn't published until 27 years after Bulgakov's death, and that death would have come sooner had the authorities ever learned of the book's existence. But the stakes aren't that high in Russia... yet. And although most artists would doubtless not subscribe to most of Voina's manifesto, perhaps some might at least be starting to agree with one part of the first paragraph:

Rebirth of heroical behavioral ideals of an artist-intellectual, in a manner of Russian libertarian decemberism. Creation of image of artist as romantic hero, who prevail over the evil.

Improvisations on a Theme

2011-01-03T10:21:00.000-08:00

Well, it was a little more than a week but here we are again. This rather lengthy entry is a review of the late Mike Zwerin's Swing Under the Nazis: Jazz as a Metaphor for Freedom, first published as La Tristesse de Saint Louis in 1985. It's an interesting book with an unorthodox approach, and since I had to write this for Uni anyway I thought I'd share my review (26 years after publication, but I never was the quickest off the mark) in case the subject matter is of interest to anyone.

I've deleted all of the footnotes and references from this version, not quite in tribute to Zwerin but because they're unaesthetic and rather pointless on a blog post. If anyone would like the full version, please e-mail me at qualityfootwearblog@googlemail.com and I'll send you a copy. Where possible I've added links to some of the people involved so that it's possible to get some extra information and background, or even buy some of Otto Jung's family wine.

The image above is the Frankfurt Hot Club's drummer Horst Lippmann listening to records at the Lippmann restaurant in 1940 (copyright of the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt).

_____________

Zwerin’s book begins with a warning:

There are no footnotes. No attempt has been made to be encyclopedic. Writing a good read came first. (...) Names, dates, and places are factual, although it became increasingly difficult to separate imagination from fact. (...) The most evocative versions were used.

From an academic standpoint, this places us already on less than solid ground. Indeed, the book is certainly a work of poetical journalism and has no historiographical aspirations. Is it, therefore, possible to view this work as a valid and legitimate addition to the existing scholarship on the subject, or does it have no value beyond the artistic?

Writing in the early 1980s, Zwerin had the advantage of access to some of the leading protagonists in wartime German jazz. Otto Jung, Hans Blüthner, Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, Carlo Bohländer, Emil and Albert Mangelsdorff, as well as international figures such as Charles Delaunay and Stéphane Grappelli, all gave of their time for this project. The transcriptions from the dinner table talk with members of the Frankfurt and Berlin Hot Clubs make for an interesting, informal multi-participant style of interview as the speakers thrive on each other’s company and memories (as well as a bottle of the Jung family’s own 1944 brandy), although Zwerin admits that:

Otto, Hans, Emil and Carlo often spoke at the same time. It was difficult to separate their voices when I was transcribing the tape (...)

The rather fractured, unfocussed nature of Zwerin’s approach is clearly deliberate but it has some major drawbacks. The book begins to lose focus somewhat around Chapter 11 as it plunges into an unnecessarily detailed biography of Django Reinhardt. While Django’s own wartime experiences certainly belong among Zwerin’s subject matter, it is doubtful whether yet another re-telling of the legendary guitarist’s origins adds anything to our understanding of swing under the Nazis, or indeed of Mike Zwerin himself.

The thematic digressions continue with a meditation on South African apartheid, and the ethical considerations Zwerin faced when agreeing to tour the country in spite of the international cultural boycott. The reasoning behind the inclusion of this section is clear; South Africa is ‘the closest system we have to Nazi Germany’, but it bears only an abstract moral relation to the book's topic. Certainly Zwerin's reflections on whether or not it was right for him to take a band to ‘a republic that does not give the vote to eighty-five percent of its population’ are reminiscent of the difficult choices facing musicians in Nazi-dominated Europe, and he quotes a friend asking him bitterly: ‘Would you have gone to play in Nazi Germany?’. Perhaps there was also a contemporaneous political motivation of opposing apartheid which now, happily, has been rendered obsolete; Zwerin opens the chapter by admitting that he hesitated before including it, and then quotes Connecticut's Senator Lowell Weicker as saying:

Apartheid exists because a whole world tolerates it by silence. The silence that envelops today's black South African is no different than that which wasted yesterday's European Jew.

But any analogy between two very different times and places, however abhorrent each may be, is dangerous territory and Zwerin traverses it rather clumsily. The central Germans in his book are not those jazz musicians who collaborated with the regime on propaganda projects and official ventures such as Charlie & His Orchestra. The likes of Jung, Blüthner and Bohländer avoided military service as best they could and did not co-operate with the Nazi state; indeed, Zwerin notes that the members of the Frankfurt Hot Club participated in (presumably rather risky) gang fights against the Hitler Youth. It is difficult to condemn somebody for simply existing in Nazi Germany, but in his more Germanophobic moments Zwerin manages to come awfully close to it. In the midst of an otherwise sympathetic portrait of Hans Blüthner, a member of the Berlin Hot Club during the Nazi years, he announces:

Like any anti-apartheid Afrikaner, he benefited from an exploitative system he disapproved of.

Zwerin's definition of ‘benefitting’ in this case is the fact that Blüthner himself escaped going to war on medical grounds and did not end up in a concentration camp. It seems a strange accusation that Blüthner was benefitting from an exploitative system just by surviving it; luck and profit are two very different things. Perhaps Zwerin has in mind the question posed in Brecht's 1939 poem To Those Who Follow in our Wake:

What kind of times are these when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors!

In Nazi Germany, a conversation about jazz (at least the type carried out in the Berlin Hot Club) was tantamount to a crime. A passion for jazz and swing music was, at least on some level, a rejection of the Nazi racial and cultural Weltanschauung, although Zwerin is right to question the repeated assertions that ‘anybody who liked jazz could not have been a Nazi’ (a BBC analysis of German tastes during World War Two suggests that even fanatical Nazis tuned in enthusiastically to their jazz broadcasts). But it is rather too easy for a writer living in a comfortable democracy to pass judgement on the actions (or inactions) of those living in more difficult times. The young jazz fans’ ‘passive good deeds, the absence of bad deeds’ certainly do not make them resistance heroes, but nor do they implicate them as benefactors of the regime’s crimes.

Even a complicated case such as Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, who was a first lieutentant in the Luftwaffe and by his own admission neither particularly pro- nor anti-Nazi, is described by Charles Delaunay (then Secretary-General of the Hot Club de France and an active member of the French Resistance) as having distributed ration cards and secret letters for the Resistance whenever he passed through the Hot Club's headquarters in occupied Paris. The boundaries between right and wrong, like Zwerin's boundaries between fact and imagination, are extremely difficult to define. We are examining, to quote Michael H. Kater, ‘gray people against a landscape of gray’.

One of the strengths of Zwerin's book is suggested by its subtitle: ‘Jazz as a Metaphor for Freedom’. His ideas on this theme are interesting and often perceptive, and it is here that his broad interpretation of the subject matter becomes an advantage. Drawing comparisons with the startling vibrancy of jazz music in Andropov-era communist Eastern Europe, he convincingly illustrates how jazz music flourishes in oppressive climates precisely because it becomes a tool of intellectual and spiritual resistance. As Joachim-Ernst Berendt, a jazz aficionado in the Third Reich who later became the driving force behind post-war German jazz scene, tells Zwerin:

It can be no accident that totalitarian regimes are all against jazz. It's basic to their character. You improvise, you make your own decisions. You have a special sound, you do not sound like anybody else. Spontaneity means freedom.

The comparative approach attempted in the section on South Africa is much more successfully handled here. Zwerin takes part in a late-night jam session with Otto Jung, his two sons and Emil Mangelsdorff, and then bemoans the utilitarian climate of the American and Western European jazz scenes in which:

There has to be a 'reason' to play these days. 'Play' is work. (...) Fun is, if not incidental, secondary. (...) The only place I know where professional musicians still jam just for laughs is Eastern Europe. Under authoritarian regimes. They are lucky. They have their devils.

According to Zwerin, European Jazz's Golden Age roughly coincides with the rise of the Nazis and ends around the time of Django Reinhardt's disastrous concert with Duke Ellington in New York in 1946. But the art form which thrives in oppressive political climates was doomed with the death of ‘a devil named Joeseph Goebbels (...) the most powerful angel jazz music ever had.’

What, then, of the book's contribution to the canon of scholarship on the subject? It follows from the introductory warning that this is a book that should be handled with care when it comes to the facts. But I would argue that, although it is pitched in layman's terms and has no pretensions of academic credibility, Zwerin's enviable access to many of the surviving protagonists (including the only published interview with Heinz 'Ganjo' Baldauf, the Gestapo officer who monitored the Frankfurt jazz scene) does offer new material at least, and a fresh perspective at best.

Thomas Hobbes wrote that 'imagination and memory are but one thing'. But this proto-relativist assertion will not quite do in examining books such as Zwerin's. If it is to be of any use to us, we must be able to distinguish between the two. Of course, imagination is vital in any historical writing to breathe life into the past, but it must serve the facts rather than replace them. As Timothy Garton Ash points out in his criticism of the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński's factually unreliable African reportages:

The frontier between the literature of fact and the literature of fiction is open, unmarked. (...) With Kapuściński, we keep crossing from the Kenya of fact to the Tanzania of fiction, and back again, but the transition is nowhere explicitly signalled.

In Zwerin's South Africa of poetic journalism, fortunately, there are signposts. The introduction states that ‘some characters are composites, and their names make that obvious’. The witnesses of the Nazi era, however, are all real. There is no blending of Otto Jung and Hans Blüthner, or Dietrich Schulz-Köhn and Joachim-Ernst Berendt, no composite Otto Blüthner or Dietrich Berendt appears to confuse us. The protagonists are allowed to speak their piece. The composites, rather, occur in the present; friends of Zwerin's such as 'Blow' Black and Claude Verses are merged personalities, their troubled lives and illegal activities are protected by false monickers. These excursions form a reflective part of Zwerin’s self-proclaimed personal chronology, but they add little to the book. The story of swing under the Nazis is fascinating enough in itself, and it would be preferable if he focussed on this rather than the drug-fuelled antics and xenophobic rants of his composite acquaintances.

Seven years after Zwerin's book first appeared under its original title La Tristesse de Saint Louis, Michael H. Kater published a scholarly work that finally gave the subject the time it deserved. Zwerin approaches the subject not as a historian, but as a musician and a writer. To ask for a book that sticks to the facts and cuts out the filler of Django biographies, personal anecdotes and lengthy philosophical digressions would essentially be to ask for a different book than the one he set out to write. What we are left with is a collection of abstract riffs and improvisations on a theme; a journey into the heart of jazz in the Third Reich that could have gone so much further.

Darn That Dream

2010-10-28T02:47:00.000-07:00

After my 5-week post-Dresden silence, here we go again. I've got a couple of pieces planned, but I thought I'd kick-start Quality Footwear's autumn range with a link to some amazing period footage of the Ahmad Jamal Trio.

As if the music and the footage itself wasn't great enough already, it's worth watching out for the legendary saxophonist Ben 'The Frog' Webster milling around behind the bassist Israel Crosby. He's the rather surprised-looking character in the pork pie hat, smoking a cigarette and clearly enjoying his day off. Hemingway said that the key to a great book is how much good stuff you can throw away; perhaps the key to a first-rate jazz band is how many incredible musicians you can leave loitering on the sidelines.

So, until next week, enjoy.

Dresden, a Contradiction

2010-09-21T01:14:00.001-07:00

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep, wrote William Wordsworth as he stood on Westminster Bridge in London at dawn over 200 years ago. Standing on a bridge over the river Elbe in Dresden at sunset on Saturday, the exact opposite seemed true. The statues of the Baroque old town, silhouetted against the glowing sky, appeared to be coming to life. The blackened forms of the startled seagulls or darting swallows became indistinguishable in colour and tone from the frozen human forms that tower above the riverbank. They became part of the city, their raised hands and open books seemed suddenly urgent and contemporary. The ghosts of Dresden were among us, talking to us, preaching and arguing.

At least that's the way it seemed to me. The world has always been pervaded by a sense of timeless historical dialogue. Just because Plato, or St. Thomas Aquinas, Nietzsche or Albert Camus are no longer living does not keep them out of the public domain. We are free to attack them, defend them, disagree with them or develop their ideas. And in Dresden as night settles onto the city, I have to wonder whether it was the sculptors' original intention that the birds and the sunset should somehow awaken their creations in the ambiguity of darkness. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk, Hegel told us. That is, knowledge (the owl) comes always after the event (the day). But in Dresden it seemed like an illustration of that truth. The representatives of history, knowledge and wisdom, like Hegel's owl, come alive only as the sun begins to set.

Dresden was once one of the most beautiful cities in Europe before it was destroyed by controversial Allied bombing raids towards the end of World War II. It has been impressively rebuilt and is once again a wonderful, if scarred, place. The lovely old town was bombed into near oblivion, but has been painstakingly reconstructed. So, too, has the Church of the Three Kings. The next afternoon we climbed to the very top of the rebuilt church to get a view of the city. Sprawling before us against the lush green backdrop of the Elbe valley and the Saxon Wine Road were resurrected Baroque masterpieces next to the East German high-rises, and the still-recognisable zig-zag layout of medieval street plans leading to the gleaming glass constructions of post-1989 capitalism. And yes, there they were, my statues. Frozen still and a stony grey in the early autumn sunlight, their voices had dimmed since the previous evening.

After 20 minutes or so staring out at 'the Florence of the Elbe', we climbed back down through the clock tower. Casting a last glance at the three giant bells in the steeple, motionless and silent, I descended the next flight of stairs. And then there was a sudden, frightening explosion of sound. An apocalyptic racket was raging and shaking the tower; the bells had started up. Instead of escaping the deafening noise, I hurried back up into the tower, where I found Olya, Spider and Debby standing by the bells, their fingers jammed tightly in their ears as they stood on the trembling wooden floor. It was beautiful; it annihilated all other thoughts and words, an extreme silence that shook us to our very bones.

Another Dresden contradiction was in full swing. This was no historical dialogue with the statues; this was the voice of unconquerable Time, drowning out mortal words and deeds as it rang its wrought-iron truths across this strange city. Sometimes, the bells told me as their violent, beautiful cacophony echoed through our bodies and vibrated in our toes, history isn't a dialogue at all. Sometimes history is just telling us to shut up for a minute and listen.

Moonshadow, Moonshadow

2010-09-07T01:30:00.000-07:00

This week, I realised for the first time that a moonshadow is not just a Cat Stevens song. Having spent most of my life in cities, I am used to viewing the moon as a rather tame object, rolling around above the neon and the high-rises in a pale soup of light pollution. But out here in the vast, lake-littered forests close to the Russian-Finnish border, the moon is a violent thing. I stepped out of our cabin one clear night at 2. 30 am and there they were; long, sinister shadows cast by the silvery light in the sky, the mud and the shacks of the little settlement shimmering in a ghostly pallour.

This moon is a strange creature; the shadows it casts in our imaginations vary wildly between different people and cultures. My favourite dictionary definition of all time, from the Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1708), is the superbly lazy description of the horse as a Beast well-known. A little unfair to horses, perhaps, but reasonably accurate. The moon, on the other hand, may be described as a Beast unknown.

Let's look at the evidence. The Polish anti-Stalinist poet Antoni Słonimski, with a healthy dose of Central European idealism, saw the moon as possessing great symbolic value. It was the last outpost of purity in a world that was both politically and morally corrupt. In his poem, 'In Defence of the Moon', he urges:

Let the moons turn unchanged in their courses

Let the sky, at least, remain pure

John Keats, on the other hand, saw the moon as the head of a sort of celestial royal family. His famous 'Ode to a Nightingale' states, with satisfaction:

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays

Beautiful words, and I think of them often as I gaze up at that Buckingham Palace in the sky. But trust the British to put everything into a hierarchy!

My favourite, however, will always be the wandering Tang Dynasty poet and scholar Li Po, one of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. As he spent his life roving around the enchanted forests of ancient China, he saw the moon as a friend and a drinking companion. He had only to lean up against a tree with a cup of white wine, look up at the heavens and he would be in good company.

I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For her, with my shadow, will make three people.

Plenty to mull over, then, as I sit here back in St. Petersburg typing up my notes on this Beast unknown; no, the Beast unknowable. Outside the window is the noise and the glow of the big city, the glare of the misleading electric lights. Here, too, we cannot quite trust what we see. What was it that Nikolai Gogol, St. Petersburg's own glorious weirdo, warned us all those years ago?

Beware the hours of darkness, when the devil himself lights the streetlamps in order to show everything in a false light.

But that's another story.

Imagined Communities

2010-08-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

The first thing that struck visitors to the old Intrepid Fox rock pub in Soho was the sign on the door: No ties, no football colours. A pretty modest dress code, as London dress codes go, and it wasn't one I was ever in danger of breaching. If they'd banned leather jackets the place would have been empty, but football scarves? No problem.

Times, however, are notorious for changing. Cycling to work today, proudly sporting the new 2010-2011 Brentford away shirt, I was basking in an irrational sense of pride. The sun was shining, I had the excellent new Invalids tunes on my iPod as I raced over the bridge, and I was wearing the colours of my local team. But why should a thirty-year-old man feel proud at the ability to pull a T-shirt over his head in the morning?

Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities defines a nation as a community that is dreamed by a group of people who, by and large, will never know each other personally. Membership, as it were, is "perceived". We have a common history. We remember the same things, forget the same things. We can feel proud that a writer or a band or an athlete happens to come from our particular political entity. Nationalism feeds on the irrational. As A. J. P Taylor once observed: If men were sane, there would be no history.

If men and women were sane, there would probably also be no football. In many ways football clubs, like nations, are also imagined communities. We have our "government", the people who run things on a day-to-day basis, but much of what we understand as a football club revolves around memories, rivalries and shared myths (FA Cup Quarter Final 1989, a 4-0 victory over Fulham in 1992, promotion at Peterborough the same season) that can set even the most rational of pulses racing.

Why is it that we can feel offended by the existence of rival teams, without whom the entire game would be meaningless? And why did I feel immense schadenfreude at Fulham's Europa League Final defeat in June because of my disdain for our local rivals, and yet I get on very well personally with every Fulham fan I've ever met?

This is where the tribal element comes into play. As England's nationhood was shaped by defining themselves 'against' French culture and values, football supporters, too, are fond of defining ourselves in the context of what we're not, rather more than as what we are. Even the Brentford matchday programme now bears the legend: Real Football, Real Fans. But where are the football and the fans not real? It is tempting to answer: The Premiership, that rich breeding ground for fairweather fans and glory hunters who mistake a Sky TV subscription for a season ticket. But then, I know plenty of fans at that level of the game who are much more dedicated than myself. The truth is back in that pesky grey area, and grey is a lousy colour for a football club.

"In football," said Jean-Paul Sartre, "everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team."

But as I arrived at work and got off my bike, I remembered that we're pretty damned complicated ourselves.

The Roaring Twenties

2010-08-16T06:56:00.000-07:00

One of the surprising things about turning 30 last week was how quickly it was to look back on my twenties as an easily definable period of my life. Opened in 2000, closed in 2010, a neat and tidy decade to file away with the follies of youth. The world doesn't always work this way. For example, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm identified a long 19th century (which ended with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914) and a short 20th century (which ended with the collapse of communism in 1991). It is therefore extremely likely that many lives also cannot be conveniently divided into decades like pieces of birthday cake, but seem instead to be one sticky pile of chronological dough that refuses to take any recognisable form. A messy clump of years.

So I'm reasonably happy with this tidy, well-ordered gift to hindsight that, should I ever inflict an autobiography on this world, will neatly fit into one chapter entitled something awful like 'The Wild Years'. My first, rather modest order of business as I stare forward at this gaping, blank slate of a decade, is to yet again try to maintain this blog on a regular basis. This will range from the usual (currently extremely sporadic) output of articles and poems, to simply pasting links to news items or videos that I feel like sharing. I'll say it now publicly so that there's no reneging on this promise to myself: Anyone who visits Quality Footwear regularly will find frequent updates and new material.

Timothy Garton Ash has been a regular source of quotations on this blog so far. Presumably unwittingly, he also played a part in the course that my twenties took. It was reading his book The File in my late teens that definitively tipped the balance in favour of my later choosing, aged 20, to study in Berlin as opposed to one of the more picturesque and venerable southern German university towns like Freiburg or Heidelberg. Likewise, his writings on the Solidarity movement inspired me to attempt to learn Polish in 2001. Although I later switched to Russian, it was those long-gone snowy afternoons drinking tea by candlelight with my Polish teacher in an unrenovated, crumbling Prenzlauer Berg tenement block that cemented my passion for the strange new (or renewed) geographical and cultural entity known as Central Europe.

It is fitting, therefore, to celebrate this new decade's resolution with a video of a recent talk given by Garton Ash on his latest book, Facts are Subversive. Highly recommended if you have 27 minutes to spare. Hearing him refer to a pedantic colleague as the 'Ayatollah of fact-checking' seems to make it be worth the virtual journey alone.

Night Train

2010-06-02T01:49:00.000-07:00

Russian jazz has come a long way since the days of Valentin Parnakh's First Eccentric Orchestra (pictured) and Stalinist repression. This second abandoned poem is about a night in late December when we attended a jam session at a basement jazz club in central St. Petersburg. It also includes a couple of scenes from the journey home, through the centre of the city and under the river with the last metro back to Vassily Island. Somehow these frozen nights out on the town and the dash (or should I say ice-skate?) through the streets to make the last metro have become so tangled in my memories that it's difficult to imagine one without the other.

In a sense, it could have been anywhere. The quality of the musicianship and the standard bop repertoire would have been equally at home in Amsterdam or Berlin. But there were tell-tale signs. The peculiarly Russian faces and careless dress sense, and the rich ethnic mix of Slavs and musicians from other parts of the former USSR. The couple of bored, pretty girls at the side, ignoring the music and just hoping to meet a rich foreign businessman. Right down, of course, to the drinks that never arrived.

Russki Dzhazz

Fleamarket nudes spoil beige walls
Above ill-lit front tables
Glowing faces flowering from
Woolen polo neck sweaters
Nicotine nails
Scratching greasy once-blonde hair

Girls
Inspecting the blue shadows for wealth
Deaf to our cacophony
Alert to the cut of the silk
The stuffed leather
Here hiding out
Amidst the dusk of Armenian eyes
And lightbulb foreheads
- A thankless task
They'll go home sighing

And
On bandstand
Portly pianist
Some rogue bank clerk, shirttails ousted
Grimaces into ivory
Punctuates
Nods, shows teeth at
Drummer – what to say – he drums
Swipes, slaps, smacks, alliteration
Of a kind

Waiting on drinks, still
American jazz, yes, but Russian service
Banker just quoted Gillespie
Salt-peanuts salt-peanuts
Where’s champagnska to wash them down with?

Baritone bell raised gleaming street level
Bassman hunched like yesterday’s washerwomen
Over his mournful charge
Wringing those old guts dry
Misses cue, nods at polished bar

-All change over
I’d sit in I don’t know how-

Midnight run for metro
Man at grim coatcheck’s
Polar moustache moved by laughter
Really it’s just getting started
But paka
Patchwork chords locked in cellar
Paka

Home over the Nevsky Prospekt
Snow piles swim
In the restless grand Christmas lights
Million dreamless colours evade
Nikolai Gogol's ragged ghost, hunched in the shadows
Madly

Under the Neva in the tunnel's death rattle
Out past frozen sodium-bright kiosks
And the Soviet grocery
Up darkened, complaining stairs

Into the flat where warmed icicles
Whisper unseen, electric
Joining courtyard drains
Echoing now, I hear them clearly.

All You Need Is Love

2010-05-05T01:52:00.000-07:00

The whole meeting had the air of an illegal gathering. There were about 25 of us sitting in a small attic room in St. Petersburg, Russia, watching black and white Beatles movies and surrounded by massive Beatles flags, posters and memorabilia. Occasionally a giant John Lennon or Paul McCartney board would drop from its hinges onto the head of some unsuspecting guest.

In fact, until around 20 years ago, this kind of thing was illegal here. The organiser, Kolya Vasin, is a Soviet underground legend who converted his St. Petersburg apartment into a Beatles museum in 1966 and has never looked back. He was the only Russian to exchange correspondence with John Lennon, and a founding member of the first Soviet Association of Rock Musicians in 1971 (which collapsed when one of its members was arrested and imprisoned). Now he’s spent the last couple of decades trying to get the world’s first Beatles Temple built on Vasilievsky Island at the mouth of the River Smolenka. In the meantime, his office/apartment is the temporary home of the temple.

With grey hair, wild eyes and a big Woodstock-style beard, Vasin takes the microphone and rambles on cheerfully about John Lennon for a bit. He uses Russian diminutives, affectionate nicknames for friends and family, when referring to the Beatles. Johnik, Paulchik, Georgeik and Ringochik. In Vasin’s worldview, John Lennon was sent by God and now lives in a monastery in northern Italy. (This theory, if it were ever proven, would have interesting legal repercussions for Mark David Chapman, his killer). Then he suddenly emits an ear-splitting yelp into the microphone; the audience’s collective heads practically explode. Everyone ducks and winces. Vasin grins. If you’re the type of person who dedicates their life to building a Beatles Temple, I guess you’re allowed to do things like scream annoyingly into microphones without people getting too upset.

Then the musical entertainment appears, an American named Jan Britten Owen who plays Beatles tunes on a 12-string guitar. He’s all decked out in a Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band suit, and would seem rather eccentric himself were he not sharing a stage with Kolya Vasin. After an hour or so of belting out the hits, the show is over and the guest star is besieged with requests for autographs and photos. I’m introduced to Mr Vasin, who tells us that they’re going to the temple in a minute and we’re welcome to drop by. “Sounds fun,” Olya tells me. “Expect indoctrination, though.”

I wasn’t quite sure what form Beatles indoctrination would take. Enforced ingestion of LSD? Sticking pins into Yoko Ono voodoo dolls? As we trudged down the 5 flights of stairs and back into the snow, we resolved to find out. At any rate, it wasn’t far to walk. The gig, like the makeshift temple, was on John Lennon Street. Vasin successfully convinced the local government to rename the city’s smallest street in his hero’s honour. The sign on the little door announced:

In the name of peace, love, music, and John Lennon

We knocked and it swung open from the inside. It was a bit like the scene from Being John Malkovich where he steps inside his own head. Every single spare inch of the small office was covered with Beatles pictures, life-size cut-outs of every member of the band, a papier-mâché model of the proposed temple on Vassilievsky Island, badges, stickers, tapes, books, coffee cups and homemade memorabilia. Jan Britten Owen, tonight’s guest of honour, sat in the VIP armchair at Vasin’s insistence. Another member of the church gathered up some mugs and filled them with dry red wine. It’s difficult to find good red wine in Russia- if they drink the stuff at all here they usually go for the sickly sweet variety- but then I suppose you’d expect good taste at a Beatles Temple. They handed drinks to everyone and we drank the health of the Italian monk John Lennon and his associates.

The American guest jammed some more classics on an old acoustic guitar and then our hosts turned the stereo on. Even Beatles fans need a bit of variety sometimes, so this time it was a John Lennon solo record. If you had told me when I was 17 years old that at some time in the future I would be dancing around in a temple with a bunch of hippies banging tambourines and singing Give Peace a Chance, I would have probably thrown myself under a bus. But back then I was younger, so much younger than today. Tonight I was drinking the blood of Christ, or Harrison, or one of the other Lads from Liverpool, and happily singing away.

I glanced around. There was a badge on the wall that said, “We have the temple, now we just need to build it.” Paul McCartney stood behind me, frozen in 1963, observing everything through his black fringe. He looked on with his cardboard gaze as the VIP guest stood up to say his goodbyes. Kolya Vasin hugged him vigorously.

The architect refilled our mugs and chatted a bit about the design of the future temple. Vasin announced that anyone who wanted to catch the last metro had to leave now. We hung around a bit longer. After all, there are last metros every night, but how often there are Beatles religious ceremonies?

And then, finally, it was time to quit. We thanked our hosts and put on our coats, scarves, hats, gloves, thermal shirts and all the rest of our arsenal for keeping the Russian winter at bay.

I shook Vasin’s hand and felt like I should say something profound. I am English, after all, a son of the Mother country that spawned the Fab Four. I decided to stick to the rules and repeat something I’d heard earlier.

“All you need is love,” I said, as soulfully as I could.

“Love is all you need!” Vasin exclaimed.

Not a bad mantra, I must admit. Then the door closed and we were left outside in the snow. Cold has a very sobering effect, both physically and emotionally. Had it all been a dream? We walked out towards the main road, past the giant, three-dimensional yellow submarine and the Revolver-era Beatles images engraved into the walls of John Lennon Street, past the proclamations of peace, love and music. It was definitely real, and it’s still there if you want to find it. I guess, to paraphrase the English World War 1 poet Rupert Brooke:

There’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever Beatles.

Weirdly, that’s quite a reassuring thought.

(First printed as a column in the Queensday Festival 2010 fanzine)

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich

2010-04-20T04:41:00.000-07:00

"A poem can be finished," wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti many years ago, "a translation can only be abandoned."

But can an original poem ever truly be finished either? Even great poets are notorious for returning to old poems throughout their careers and tinkering with them, re-working them constantly until it is difficult for anthologists to work out exactly what the definitive version is. All a poet really does is drag thoughts or scenes or ideas from the subconscious and translate them into words in one of our flawed, limited human languages, and perhaps this is the same thing all along.

My plan now is to publicly abandon several of the poems I wrote in Russia last winter on my blog over the course of the next few weeks. I'm used to surfacing in this medium only at the occasional poetry reading at a bar or café in Berlin, where the words fly by at a merciful rate and the audience only has a chance to reflect on the poem once the flurry of sentences has vanished into the ether. Nothing needs to be fixed, and you can ad lib or change bits that didn't work for next time. It's a different, rather more daunting prospect to hang the words out to dry, but here we go.

Poem number one was written on Christmas Eve in St. Petersburg and is addressed to the Siberian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. I'd been reading an old Penguin edition of his early poems, and knew absolutely nothing about him apart from that. I typed it out in Olya's mother's warm little kitchen as we hid ourselves away from the brutal Russian winter, using the few pages of verse ('Zima Junction', about his hometown, being the apparent masterpiece, but my favourite was 'In Georgia'), a translator's introduction written in 1962, and an old photograph of an angry young man smoking a cigarette as my research material.

Here it is, then. Unfinished, perhaps, but I hope that these poems collectively will serve to explain what I'm trying to say in the awkward silence that I fall into whenever people ask me, "Well, how was Russia?".

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich

The ash-cat tangles
with emptiness on the linoleum
Crumples the autumnal pages on
discarded Yevtushenko

The tight bay window
Holds a wheeling barrage of snow
Stifling the year-heavy cobblestones beneath
Sighs disrupt the dust
in the used light

Cream cupboards scrubbed cleaner
and the gas flame
chewing patiently, blue gold
at the charred rear of the squat silver saucepan

Yevtushenko!
You’re young!
and wearing a cigarette
and a tie clip
Pale and Irate, writing the blonde truth
Lacking Mayakovsky’s sinister
handsome shotgun darkness

And the
Introduction
tells me you were attacked 21st June 1957 in Komsomolskaya Pravda
A publication which I actually saw yesterday
behind the smeared glass of
the counter as I waited in line at the shabby
Vassilyostrov post office with its bored ponytails
Who don’t chew bubblegum but should
Writing raucous rhythms in saliva as they spit
Davai, davai
Give me your documents
A tragic old Siberian song
Heard once upon a time in bearded mouths
At Zima Junction

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich, your name is a tug of war of the consonants
I, too, would like to be “a fearless spokesman of his generation”
(Any generation would do)
And I’m jealous of your adjectives

- Yevtushenko 52 years and 6 months and 3 days after they slandered You
Are you still muttering new words
above the anemic linoleum
of some lucky girlful Moscow kitchen?

Or are you a literary footnote deep
Beneath the subdued, lamp-bitten courtyards
In this one evening’s surrendering light
And unbroken snow?

It would be easy enough to find out.

Death of a Patriot

2010-04-12T09:08:00.000-07:00

In the first verse of the song 'Radio Maryja', recorded in 2007, the Zatopeks criticised the homophobic, anti-Semitic Catholic radio station in Poland of the same name. More specifically, we were attacking the ruling Law & Justice party for its connections to Radio Maryja and the degree to which the station's values were shared by members of the Polish government. It won't have escaped many peoples' attention that the head of this government, Lech Kaczyński, was one of the 96 people who died in a plane crash at Smolensk on Saturday.

The reaction in Poland, even among Kaczyński's political enemies, was and still is one of shock and devastation. This is natural given that the crash took so many lives, regardless of who they happened to be. As it turned out, it was a presidential delegation comprised of many major figures from various walks of life, from politics to the military, finance and academia.

In the tributes to Kaczyński that trickled out after the tragedy, it is difficult not to detect the contradictory nature of his life and career amidst the cautious words of praise. "It was one of the great ironies of Polish history," notes the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, "that a nationalistic, ultra-conservative Catholic who may have counted some anti-Semites as his supporters was a pivotal figure in the post-Communist healing of grudges that have so long divided Poles and Jews."

Further food for thought is provided by Adam Michnik, a leading dissident during the 1980s and later editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, who wrote:

"We often differed in political views. However, I've always remembered what a great patriot Lech Kaczyński has been all his life. This was the first thought that came to my mind when I heard about this terrible accident."

It's worth examining this comment in a little more detail. The tainted word 'patriot' is, in itself, a rather dubious compliment. However, regardless of how it appears today, for the duration of the Soviet occupation this same Polish patriotism was a tool of resistance and unity against the authorities. The British historian Timothy Garton Ash recalled striking shipworkers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk watching a meeting of the communist party Central Committee on television. As the party leaders rose to sing the Internationale, the workers responded by singing the Polish national anthem.

Perhaps Michnik is trying to gently remind us of this as we remember the uglier sides of Kaczyński's patriotism. It is easy to forget that his earliest political involvement, from 1977 onwards, was with the unique cooperation between workers and intellectuals that began with the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and culminated in the massively influential Solidarity (Solidarność) trade union. Kaczyński was a member of KOR, lectured workers on labour law, wrote for dissident publications and served as an adviser to Solidarity's leaders in their negotiations with the authorities.

This patriotism served, then, as a kind of binding force for what the Czechoslovak dissident Václav Havel referred to as parallel culture in a 1984 essay:

"All those hundreds, perhaps thousands of people of all sorts and conditions - young, old, gifted, untalented, believers, unbelievers - gathered under the umbrella of 'parallel culture' were led to it by the incredible narrow-mindedness of a regime which tolerates practically nothing."

It is a shame that Kaczyński himself would come to represent that same narrow-mindedness and intolerance, this time in the name of ultra-conservatism and reactionary Catholicism. Several years ago I asked a girl in Kraków what she thought of the political situation in Poland; she just groaned and put her head in her hands. Not a particularly wordy critique, but somehow a rather eloquent summary of the situation (at that time Lech and his twin brother Jarosław were still a political 'double act', President and Prime Minister respectively).

The political career of this walking contradiction serves as a lesson in the complexity of Central Europe's recent history, and a warning to those of us outside of Poland who would pass judgement too quickly. The man I criticised (and will continue to criticise) in 'Radio Maryja' for his regressive socio-political attitudes was also fêted for his reconciliatory work with Poland's Jews and played a part in one of the great resistance movements of the 20th century. A resistance movement in a country where, once upon a time, 'patriot' was not yet a four letter word.

I Rememember Rock n' Roll Radio

2009-07-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

Do you remember lying in bed
With your covers pulled up over your head
Radio playin' so no one can see?

It must have been around 1988. A friend of my parents left the UK for 6 months and she let me borrow her small, white portable radio. It was the first time I'd ever had control of a wireless receiver, and being able to drag the little line over the dial and rest at random on the musical islands that populated the hissing, crackling sea of white noise was a new kind of freedom. I was thrilled.

Unlike the Ramones, I didn't need to pull the covers over my head. When everyone in the house had gone to sleep, I shut my bedroom door and turned on the radio at a low volume. At the flick of a switch, the adult world of political debate and euphemistic pop songs filled the room.

I would love to pretend that I suddenly realised something profound; that I yelled Eureka! and ran out to Tesco in search of hair dye and the complete works of Albert Camus. But I was eight years old, and the young are notoriously wasteful with their youth. I just sat there spellbound and drifted in and out of the stations, not really understanding or enjoying what I was hearing. Unintelligible broadcasts beamed in miraculously from another planet, for my ears only.

It would also be great to say something profound like I sat up 'til dawn with the radio glued to my ear, eyes wide open in wonder. That, too, would be a lie. It may only have been 5 minutes, probably just an hour or two before I got tired and went to sleep. The quality of the experience, not the quantity, has kept it lodged in my brain for the last 21 years.

This first magical encounter with radio has stayed with me since then, and I still occasionally recall that initial excitement as I search the Berlin radio waves in vain for something worth listening to. Alas, like a disenchanted lover, I'm bored. The promisingly-titled Jazz Radio plays health club music rather than real jazz, the rock stations favour the cheesy, eyeliner-wearing bombastic anthems that leave me cold, and the alleged cutting-edge stations all play that new wave of British bands I just feel too old to understand or care about.

This cynical approach to the medium was put to the test recently when I picked up Matthew Collin's book This is Serbia Calling, which tells the story of the underground Belgrade radio station B92. The station started out in the 1980s as a counter-cultural student radio project, and rose to become a national voice of resistance to the Milošević regime in the 1990s. Their critical news coverage, which included information from like-minded stations in Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia made them a natural target for the government.

B92's subversive musical selection, however, was just as important to its philosophy of liberation through culture. For many young people, they represented a lifeline to the outside world through in a country that was stewing in government-sponsored hatred and paranoia. While the rest of the nation was listening to patriotic turbo-folk and swallowing the official lies broadcast by Radio Television Serbia, B92 chose "the international call-signs of techno and rock'n'roll over the parochial, folksy paeans to nationalism".

"Art is more important than truth," said Nietzsche. Maybe so, but B92 was fighting for both of them at once against a government that respected neither. This led to an interesting hybrid of the two abstract concepts in March 1991 when, in the wake of mass protests for a liberalised media, the station was forbidden by the police to broadcast news. Strangely enough, they were still allowed to play music over the air. Station boss Veran Matić (pictured) explained:

"We were able to say through music what we would have said in the news if it had been allowed."

So The Clash, Thin Lizzy and Public Enemy were their spokespeople instead. B92's dissident DJs broadcast all sorts of calls to arms, sending out rallying cries in a foreign tongue to be decoded by the listeners as the police censors dozed in the corner of the office. The station had ceased to simply reflect information and events: it was now actively attempting to shape them with its soundtrack. And while radio has been a component of warfare since the 1930s, I doubt if it ever sounded this damn good.

Fast forward a few years to 2000 (hey, you can read the book or check out B92's own chronology of events here) to the collapse of the Milošević regime. B92, having spent the last few months broadcasting from secret premises as B2-92 after government cronies took over their station, returned to the air on their old wavelength and with a new television channel to boot. Today the station remains a major media voice in post-Milošević Serbia.

Curious, I searched Google for B92 and found the station's website. I can now listen to this once-guerrilla outfit's breakfast show, or tune in late at night to hear the obscure rock songs and the low, grainy voices of Serbian DJs chatting to their regulars across the airwaves hundreds of kilometres southeast across the vast, darkened continent.

There's something very romantic about it. I don't really know what's going on, I just enjoy the strange music and the incomprehensible monologues and feel excited and uplifted that I'm making some kind of contact with these cool people in a far-off place. And I can remember exactly what it felt like, sitting alone in West Ealing after midnight sometime long ago in 1988.

Eyebrow Literature

2009-06-22T04:11:00.000-07:00

On Friday, my older brother forwarded me a Twitter campaign asking people to visit the Daily Mail's website and take part in the following poll:

Should the NHS allow gipsies (sic!) to jump the queue?

The poll was successfully hijacked. 93% voted in favour of prioritised healthcare for gypsies and it was removed from the website. The Daily Mail, presumably very embarrassed, hastily replaced it with a poll asking whether Commons speaker Michael Martin should resign ("He resigned four weeks ago," notes the Christian think-tank Ekklesia). This impressive -and extremely funny- piece of media sabotage was an interesting example of how new social networking devices can be successfully used to political ends. And it's a nice retort to my last post about British apathy.

Now, criticising the Daily Mail for being offensive is a bit like criticising a dog for barking. It may be annoying as hell, but it would be exhausting to get angry every time it happened. And the author of the column that triggered the poll, Richard Littlejohn, seems to be a living parody of the worst bits of the Mail's output. A quick bit of research has revealed that he is notorious for his hatred of gypsies, muslims, Palistinians, asylum seekers, gay people and liberals. All of this hating clearly doesn't leave the poor guy much time for thinking.

That's not really what I want to talk about. Dismantling Littlejohn's poorly-written, tasteless column line-by-line would be rather like shooting the proverbial fish in the barrel. But something else attracted my attention about the rant, namely the cartoon (above) that accompanied it on the page. I showed it to a friend at the weekend and told her it was from the Daily Mail. She asked what year, and to her amazement I told her it was printed last week.

"I thought it was from the 1930s!" she exclaimed.

This is exactly the point. Because, in spite of Littlejohn's claims that the gypsies are not an ethnic group at all and are therefore not entitled to any governmental safeguards, this picture looks suspiciously like a Nazi-era racist caricature. Note, for example, the father figure pulling the horse into the hospital waiting room. He possesses a fine monobrow, as does the child to his right being dragged into the frame. As a monobrow wearer myself, this makes him an instantly handsome and admirable fellow in my book. We all know, after all, that monobrows are the Rolls Royce of the eyebrow world. To the cartoonist, however, this is simply negative ethnic shorthand.

Then there is the implied violence in the cartoon. The British tax-payer figure is being trampled into the ground by the grotesquely-drawn gypsy stampede. This may be figuratively intended, but it's extremely irresponsible and adds an element of physical threat to the fictional scenario (NHS research shows that gypsy communities' approaches to healthcare makes them very reluctant to seek medical treatment). It's the classic Joseph Goebbels logic: if you want to take people to war, tell them they're being attacked.

The Economist recently wrote with regard to Silvio Berlusconi's anti-immigration rhetoric in Italy: "The danger is that many a racist thug may now think he has tacit support from the prime minister."

How long until a racist thug in Britain feels he has tacit support from the British press in getting his own back on gypsies? Since its inception, the Daily Mail has been nurturing a climate of intolerance towards minorities. The disturbing thing when its cartoonists follow suit is that the historical precedents for the demonisation of ethnic groups become even more evident.

Now, however, we have new weapons to fight against the old methods. The reactionary media may still be taking people to war but, with the increasing shift towards interactive digital media, the battle lines are being redrawn. Social networking sites, as we saw with last week's successful Twitter campaign, provide us with the opportunity to mobilise large numbers of people in a short space of time and make a statement through direct action.

"Don't die in the waiting room of the future", says an old East German punk slogan. I couldn't agree more. Let's jump the queue instead...

Resistance is Fertile

2009-06-16T09:03:00.001-07:00

Berlin is a morbid kind of town. You never quite know whose grave you're walking on. Bronze plaques in the paving stones outside houses tell you the names of murdered Jews who once lived there. And cycling into West Berlin today I realised I was extremely close to the area where 16 dissidents, including the academic Albrecht Haushofer, were shot in the night of 23rd April, 1945. No signs or plaques, just a shudder down your spine as you pass on through.

Haushofer is one of the poets featured in Charles W. Hoffmann's Opposition Poetry in Nazi Germany, a study of writers who attacked the Third Reich from within. 23 pages alone are dedicated to his Moabit Sonnets, a collection of verse he scribbled as he waited for the inevitable in his prison cell. Like putting names to faces, when you've read somebody's innermost thoughts, dreams, fears and reflections, the 64 years just melt away and you find yourself meeting them on every street corner. The ghosts of Berlin have felt even more present than usual lately.

I feel more than just a little bit pathetic, then, in the wake of the neo-fascist British National Party's successes in the European parliamentary elections this month. The BNP received fewer votes than they did in 2004, and yet won 2 seats in Brussels because mainstream voters stayed at home. There's been a lot of talk about apathy towards Europe and disillusionment with the major parties. But whatever the cause, the result is a nightmare come true.

Friedrich Schiller's theory of mankind's inner conflict offers an interesting explanation for the original advent of Nazism, and the resistance poet Rudolf Hagelstange elaborated on the idea in his own work. On the one hand we have our material impulses, and on the other we have morality and reason. Basically, it is the immediate versus the eternal. Today versus forever. We really need to keep a grasp of both, since if we had no material impulses at all we would be unable to feed or dress ourselves in the first place.

The Third Reich, according to the Hagelstange, came into being because this delicate balance was screwed up and we lost a sense of the universal, lasting values. Germany ignored spiritual matters for too long and allowed absolute Evil into the world in the form of Hitler and Nazism, the ultimate expression of short-sighted, destructive human vanity. The result was hell on earth and the systematic murder of millions.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone who clearly spent so much time and energy reading and analysing the stuff, Charles W. Hoffmann argues that most opposition poetry is of little or no artistic value whatsoever. It will not last as poetry per se, and will be of purely documentary interest for future generations. What counted more for Germany at the time, however, was the moral fibre of the men and women who risked (and often lost) their lives by attacking the Nazis in words or deeds. To put it another way, in the midst of the bloodshed and the chaos, creating high art was not a top priority. What was important for Christians and Marxists alike was the content rather than the delivery.

The poets, especially those in prisons and concentration camps who were effectively writing for themselves as they awaited probable death, realised that the most important thing was to transcend the idea of self. Worrying about your own life is an animal instinct, and these brute instincts had driven Germany crazy. What really mattered now was to go on the record as having resisted, no matter what the consequences.

"Even if we die," wrote Harro Schulze-Boysen from Berlin-Plötzensee prison, where he was murdered in 1942, "we know: the seed will grow."

Günther Weisenborn, a member of the Soviet espionage ring known as the Red Orchestra, used the same motif in a poem written whilst in incarceration:

The wind travels through the wheatfield
I lie under a tent of stars
And soon I will lie under the wheat

I'm still looking up, smiling
The whole thing doesn't stop with anyone
The dead have plenty of seed
For your world to inherit

"This is not good poetry," announces Charles W. Hoffmann with characteristic bluntness. He accepts, however, that the basic idea is a fine one. The whole thing ("das alles") implies something more important than any one life. For the communist Weisenborn this may have been the collective - the future socialist utopia. For the Catholic and Protestant poets it was God. But, as our own Shakespeare once asked, what's in a name?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer summed up the poets' sacrifices perfectly when somebody asked him why, as a Protestant pastor, he supported the plots to assassinate Hitler. "When a madman is behind the wheel of a car, and driving down the street," he replied, "as a pastor who is present I can't just console or bury those who get run over. I have to jump in between and stop him."

And now Britain in 2009 is experiencing its own version of the Schillerian imbalance. Instead of doing everything within our power to prevent the Nazis from winning seats, we focussed on temporary personal afflictions such as apathy and disillusionment and let them sneak in the back door. Even if it means voting tactically for a mainstream party we don't necessarily support, it is our duty as human beings to ensure that a political group which openly endorses the crimes of the Third Reich remains a lunatic fringe element and nothing more. A pretty straightforward challenge sent to us by God, or Karl Marx, or whoever you want, and we failed it with flying colours.

The opposition poets in Germany also wrote about the idea of collective guilt, that Hitler was something 'we' (as opposed to 'they') had allowed to happen, and everybody had something to answer for in the tragedy. This approach is as valid today as it ever was. On Sunday 7th June 2009, Britain, we, blew it. I didn't even bother to see if I could vote from abroad. I just crossed my fingers, went to bed and checked the BBC website the morning after to find out that we are now represented in Europe by two holocaust deniers.

In this city of ghosts, we are reminded on a daily basis of what happens when you let a madman behind the wheel. We've got two of them driving to Brussels now, and it's our fault.

Save Berlin?

2009-05-05T07:46:00.000-07:00

I was interested to see that the Exberliner, Berlin's English-language magazine, is going to hold a Save Berlin exhibition in November to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. Their manifesto is simple:

Mega-malls, fake Prussian palaces and luxury lofts are threatening to turn the city into a sterile global capital. Don’t let grey bureaucrats and investors lacking imagination shape our future. DO SOMETHING!

But as frustrating as this is, it is also both logical and inevitable. The historian Timothy Garton Ash put it beautifully when talking about the commercialisation of post-dictatorship countries, in Europe and elsewhere. "Every cloud has a silver lining," he notes. "But every silver lining also has a cloud." Up until now, the relaxed lifestyle and unrivalled underground scene constituted Berlin's siver lining, and the lack of work and pathetic wages were the cloud. Soon the gradual increase of pay, jobs and living standards as the money flows in will be the silver lining. The Alexa shopping mall, the monstrous 02 World and the Kreuzberg McDonald's are merely parts of the accompanying cloud.

What is remarkable is that Exberliner itself thrives on the changes occurring in Berlin. The city has become incredibly hip and attractive to English speakers, who are drawn to it in increasing numbers by its bohemian nature. But the more people move here, the higher the demand for apartments and the bigger the rent increases. Without all of these Anglophone neo-Berliners, Exberliner would not exist in the first place.

Anyway. How does the magazine propose we deal with this looming cloud?

Get your bold ideas – new buildings, urban planning schemes, targeted demolitions, annual events and festivals, performances – all kinds of “urban interventions” together and help SAVE BERLIN! Take the first step: send us your ideas in writing, about 50 words per idea, telling us: • what you'd do • why it's important to you • how you want to present it - through drawings and models, or through film, dance, music - any medium you want.

While their hearts are clearly in the right place, I'm not entirely sure how an abstract dance routine is going to save our city. And who is going to finance these grand new buildings and urban planning schemes? Nothing on the website suggests that the massive amounts of capital required are going to come from the magazine itself.

As usual, the better course of action is rather more difficult and a lot less glamorous. I'd suggest that it would be more productive to simply get involved with the various local German-language grassroots groups working hard at limiting the damage that commercialisation is inflicting upon the city we all love. The Media Spree project, the plan to line the riverfront with huge corporations and entertainment venues rather than nightclubs and beach bars, was successfully challenged and defeated in a referendum. (Although it now looks as though democracy may be swept aside and it will all go ahead as planned after all). Currently the extensions to the A100 motorway through central districts of the city, amongst countless other things, are being fought tooth and nail by residents.

The other, more straightforward thing that can be done is to simply support the existing squats, independent businesses and non-profit events taking place every day around the city. Berlin already has plenty of platforms for the talents of the English-speaking community. Put whatever artistic ability you have to use by playing solidarity gigs and inviting friends to show up, pay entrance and buy drinks to help the threatened local venues live to fight another day.

It would be wildly unrealistic and naive to think that Berlin can be 'saved' from the onward march of history. But if people really want to get involved, maybe they should just dust off those German dictionaries, roll up their sleeves and get stuck in where it really matters.

No showers 'til Moscow.

2009-01-02T14:15:00.000-08:00

It's over half a year ago that I was in Russia, and I'm finally getting around to finishing this blog. The problem I had wasn't finding things to write about- every day threw up new experiences, stories and pictures which could each occupy their own blog- but learning how to edit the experience into several representative anecdotes and photographs that will give an idea of what happened over those 3 weeks.

Last night, talking in the kitchen to Olya's mother in my appalling, stuttering, grammatically anarchic attempt at pidgin Russian, the distance from St Petersburg struck me. In Berlin in January, daylight is something of a cameo appearance in the great nocturnal sitcom. St Petersburg in June enjoys the wonderful, disorientating phenomenon of the White Nights, when the sun (or at least the grey clouds) remain in the sky until way past midnight. By the time 21st June arrives, the city just simmers in a kind of post 2am twilight for a couple of hours before dawn swings back in.

We stayed at Olya's mother's flat on the island of Vassily Ostrov, connected to the rest of the city by a bridge which opens at night to let boats pass and leave the nocturnal drinkers and drivers stranded for an hour or two. Romantic, watching the lights on the other side of the river and the giant, gaping bridge raised towards the glowing sky, but I always somehow failed to appreciate this at 3am.

Russia itself struck me in a similar way; a beautiful, infuriating place. In St Peterburg you could overdose on beauty amidst the grand, crumbling apartment blocks and the interconnecting networks of dark, atmospheric courtyards which bred the sinister Dostoevskyan anti-heroes who seem to be the city's most famous ambassadors. The third night when we said goodbye to our friends and went walking the streets, pausing occasionally to descend into tiny 24 hour cellar grocery stores to buy strange 50 rouble microwave pizzas and bottles of the omnipresent Baltyka beer to sustain us on our journey, it felt like we were in some kind of dream. Whenever I felt like I had adjusted to my surroundings we would turn a corner and catch a glimpse of one of the Orthodox churches, all gold stucco and candy-coloured bulbous towers looming over you, a reminder that for all the Venetian canals and Italian/German-designed architecture, you're dealing with something else entirely.

Fleamarket in St. Petersburg.

Kirill in a St. Petersburg cafe.

Moscow punks in St. Petersburg.

Insane queues outside the Metro at Vassily Ostrov

. 'Archive'. Olya and her mother in a Vassily Ostrov courtyard.

The bridge to Vassily Ostrov. 3am, stranded again.

With Vanya and Kirill on St. Petersburg's beautiful metro system.

With Kirill at the Gulf of Finland. It's 10.30pm and sunny.

White Nights in St. Petersburg.

Hanging out in a park near St. Petersburg main station.

Pretending to understand a sailing boat at the famous Hermitage museum.

White Nights on the canals.

Olya and her niece Karina in a St. Petersburg bar.

This was confirmed after day 3 when we realised that the city's water supply was to be shut off for three weeks. Not three days, three weeks. We learned this after I'd just had a sweaty practice with the Cretin Boys from Moscow, who were in town for the weekend to play a show with their other band Give 'Em The Gun and with whom I was going to play two gigs, in St Petersburg and Moscow, the following weekend. I was standing in Olya's mother's flat in disbelief, but the Muscovites looked less than surprised. They'd already experienced this in May; it shifted from region to region like a carefully distributed drought.

'Why the hell would a civilised country leave its citizens without water for so long?' I asked.

The response was a grim smile, and a simple answer which might not be too far from the truth.

'Putin hates us.'

So, showers were taken by pouring pre-boiled buckets of water onto your partner's head as they squatted in the bath and then scrubbing furiously. Something soulful, I suppose, about getting back to basics like that. And something very fucking dubious about the government's attitude towards its citizens.

Months before we arrived I'd been put in touch with Kirill, who sorted me out a solo gig in St Petersburg in a laundrette/pub, and was responsible for putting me in touch with the Cretin Boys. He was to act as our unofficial host during the stay; a soft-spoken, dedicated pop-punk kid and all-round top chap. Through him we also met others, such as the wonderfully-named Aleksandr Nikolayevich. We asked why was the only person in Russia under the age of 90 who used his formal name. 'Oh, we tried to give him a punk nickname but couldn't think of anything.'

Before the laundrette gig I walked around the market with Olya, me clutching the guitar and nervously thinking through my setlist. 'Radio Maryja', a song which suggests that Putin's government was behind the assassination of dissident journalist Anna Politkovskaya, should probably stay off the list, as well as the cover of 'I Wanna be a Homosexual' in notoriously homophobic Russia.

'Why?' asked Olya. 'Play them, it'll be interesting.'

I did, and it was. Down in the basement laundrette and cocky on adrenaline I sang Radio Maryja, slowing down the Politkovskaya verse for good effect, whilst against every expectation the Screeching Weasel ode to homosexuality turned into a full-on sing-a-long with the pop-punk kids. Music sans frontieres, after all!

In so many ways Russian punks are risking a lot more than their European or American counterparts by being open-minded and choosing to stand out from the crowd. The number of murders (often pre-meditated) each year in the Russian Federation of punks and anti-fascists, not to mention people from various ethnic, political and sexual minority groups, is truly shocking.

'We've been pretty lucky,' I was told casually after the last gig in Moscow 'We didn't get beaten up after either gig!'

With Kirill, Alyosha, Artur and Anya on the canal before the launderette gig.

In the launderette.

We're a happy family.

With the Cretin Boys at Griboyedev's, St. Petersburg.
With the Cretin Boys at Tabula Rasa, Moscow.

This Machine Kills Fascists... bilingually.
The gigs

After a very fun show, happy, sweaty and no longer entirely sober, a group of us made our way to the train station to catch the overnight train to Moscow. When the train was finally ready to board at around 2am we took our seats, only to find that we were all seated in different carriages. Olya and I were on our own opposite a very strange couple, a trashy middle-aged man who blared disco music from his headphones and a much younger woman, badly but expensively dressed whose purpose in life seemed to be to deprive me of any leg room with which I could reasonably sleep.

Soon, however, a storm of Ramones and Queers t-shirts passed through the carriage, taking us with them and we all ended up drinking a duty-free bottle of Famous Grouse in the small connecting part between carriages, a fine impromptu party which was framed on both sides by the most fantastic, stunning sunset I've ever seen. Maybe it's just a better class of sunset at 2.30am, but as we rattled east across the barren countryside it was putting on one hell of a display for us. The vast sky was a mess of greens, pinks and oranges. Russian trains are still the old-fashioned kind which rattle and smack satisfyingly against the tracks, and juddering along in the midst of all this across a foreign, mysterious landscape with a group of new friends and a bottle of whiskey was something truly beautiful.

Around 5am we retired, a very fancy way of saying that we staggered back to our seats, curled up and passed out.

Waiting for the night train to Moscow outside St. Petersburg main station.
Party in between the carriages.

Artur catches the Grouse.

Sunset in the wilderness, 3.30am.

Moscow

For the two days after the Moscow gig we hung out with Bagi and Alyosha from the Cretin Boys around the city. I've heard many times before that 'St Petersburg is Europe, Moscow is Russia', at least in an architectural sense, and the difference hit us as soon as we emerged bleary-eyed from the central station on Monday morning .

Bagi humoured me by taking us to see the museum dedicated to the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, his old apartment and several spots where the action in his masterpiece, 'The Master and Margarita', takes place. Having witnessed the peculiar rituals acted out in the little Orthodox ceremonies near Red Square, I was surprised to see I had my own little ticks at the altar of literature. I removed my hat, scribbled schoolgirl notes to the long-dead writer and threw them in a box specially reserved for fan mail as though he would show up in 5 minutes to check them.

The morning after the show we were sitting eating toast in an insanely wealthy apartment in a drab Moscow suburb which was the scene of the after-party and our subsequent crash pad. A young chap who has just arrived is cheerfully discussing how he was beaten up by fascists the night before, and possibly only survived because he was too drunk to feel anything.

'Anyway,' he said. 'I hear some fucking bourgeois played here last night?'

'Bourgeois?'

'Yeah, Westerner.'

'Oh, yeah. He's opposite you drinking tea.'

(Courtesy of subsequent translation)

We sell puppets. Medvedev and Putin are everywhere.

A kiosk in Moscow.

With Mikhail Bulgakov outside his flat in Moscow, where The Master and Margarita is set.

Bagi and Olya at Patriarch's Ponds, where the devil appears in the first chapter.

Night train from Moscow - St Petersburg

A diary entry, written on the night itself:

Carriage half-asleep.
Crackled announcement in Russian, followed by some laughter and several cheers. Football: Russia have scored against Sweden and are 1-0 up. It is the only announcement of the 9-hour trip.
Antiquated gas water boiler for making tea. It looks like an amateur science experiment from World War 2. Vase with cold water and bronze pipes. I creep up to take a photo. Caught red-handed by the ticket lady who asks me good-naturedly if I'm a spy. Niet, I reply, hoping she's joking. Ya turist. Not entirely sure which answer will get me in less trouble.
Remarkable sky. Vast, shimmering lakes litter the wilderness.

My James Bond act. Tea, anyone?

Early morning connecting train from St Petersburg - Zielona Gorska - Basa

A lady with a mullet listening to Kylie Minogue's 'Do the Locomotion' over her mobile phone while her young child bops.
Middle-aged lady passes through the carriage selling pens, plastic gloves and plasters. Very successfully.
Sour-faced blonde listens to techno too loud while her kid stares bored and twitching at the passing forests.
Pass village houses. Largely wooden.
Socks for sale.
Magazines for sale. Scientific American.

On the train to Zielona Gorska, in between sales pitches.

Basa

During the summer months Olya's mother works at a place in the middle of the forests between north-west Russia and the Finnish border. During Soviet times it was closed off and the only visitors were select groups of young pioneers for summer camps. It remained in pristine condition until the 1990's, when the restrictions fell and people from the surrounding towns and St Petersburg now travel here to enjoy the scenery. The only problem is that when they leave, their rubbish stays. Walking through these beautiful forests, pock-marked with hidden ice age lakes, it absolutely kills you to see the giant bomb craters from the Soviet-Finnish war, now filled in with mounds of rubbish formed by thoughtless, ignorant holiday makers. Unfortunately, the government appears to care even less than the visitors, and the pits keep on growing.

But still it was fucking wonderful. We took a long walk and, upon our return, realised we were out of water so stomped down to the well, lowering the wooden bucket 15 metres down and immersing it in the icy spring water before dragging it back up on the rope. We then gathered up vast clumps of stinging nettles using thick gloves, and Olya's mother made a delicious soup from the nettles, water and potatoes. While the two of them chatted in Russian I drifted away into my book. One of the glorious things about being permanently surrounded by a foreign language is that you can enjoy company without necessarily needing to be socially active. We shared a couple of beers in three 'stakhan' glasses and I very much regretted that we would be leaving at dawn. I felt like Dylan and The Band getting back to nature up at Woodstock. Next time, I told Olya, we should come back for a week.

Around midnight we took a boat out onto the lake closest to the 'Basa' camp. The only sounds were the oars hitting the water and the sky was filled with a wild pink sunset. There's no electricity in Basa so when the semi-darkness finally closed in the oil lamps came on in the cabin.

Former Finnish territory, in the forests near Basa.

Bringin' It All Back Home.

Half past midnight, sunset on the lakes.

I could get used to this.

Olya and her mother by kerosene lamplight in one of the few hours of darkness.

Three days later we finally said goodbye to Russia, and we were just about ready to leave. Through the punk scene we'd met so many amazing, intelligent people who were willing to put their neck on the line for the music they love in a hostile environment. But that environment itself, and the harshness you deal with from strangers on a day-to-day basis gradually wears you down. Coming from a cushy western European background, and with the awful exaggerated English notions of politeness and manners ('I'm sorry, my face appears to have hit your fist') which had already caused me problems at the Russian embassy, experiencing such a great deal of negativity and aggression in everything from buying a drink in a shop to getting off a bus is something beyond culture shock. Olya seemed to get even more frustrated by it, perhaps because it's closer to home and the connection to this mindset can't be escaped simply by leaving town.

Away from it all, though, batteries recharged, sifting through the hundreds of photos in an attempt to find just a few for this blog which will somehow sum everything up and represent different aspects of places and events (how the hell, though, can you pick just 5 pictures and call them 'Moscow'?), I've got one eye on the calendar for August 2009 and the other on my Russian phrasebook.

Do widzenia, Russiya.

Time Out Of Mind

2008-08-15T04:02:00.001-07:00

Perception of time, and how it passes, is strictly a cultural thing. Ryszard Kapuściński wrote that the Africans, traditionally, don't really believe in time. Buses leave when they're full, village meetings start when everybody's there. A little further north, Lawrence Durrell noted that peasants in the Greek Islands judged distances in terms of how many cigarettes they would need to smoke before they got there, while for Orwell's Spaniards everything is going to be done mañana.

My recent acquisition of a functioning bicycle and an i-Pod, however, has led me to a newer and rather more satisfying way of measuring time. I noticed when I cycled from home to the Due Forni pizzeria in Prenzlauer Berg that it took exactly three Bob Dylan songs, two from his Time Out of Mind record and one from Blonde On Blonde. Likewise, the distance from my front door to the dentist's surgery in Weissensee is precisely three of De La Soul's greatest hits, plus half of track from the Oscar Peterson Trio's Night Train.

Part of the attractiion of this manner of time-keeping is that it is fluid, ever-changing. It depends which tune you play off the record, as they are all of differing lengths (at least according to the old system, which we've just done away with).

But perhaps the best argument for this method can be found in the fear of death. When you look closer at most of the fundamental things in life, they ultimately boil down to the desire for some form of immortality. And by replacing linear time with music, we may just be on to something. After all, everybody knows that our days are numbered, but record collections are strictly alphabetised.

And it's taken me three of Bob Dylan's lifetimes to write my Russia blog, but it's on its way.

At the Russian Embassy.

2008-05-21T06:08:00.000-07:00

I was warned about this place before I arrived. Expect chaos, expect difficulties. Be assertive, walk straight through the crowds and don't take any crap. This sort of behaviour is so out of character for me, a human bundle of indecisiveness and awkward politeness, that I almost had to create an alter-ego in order to get into the correct state of mind.

Pushing my way to the front of a small group of Russians, I waited for the little door to open. After about five minutes a sleepy, Mediterranean-looking guard emerged and surveyed us all with an extreme lack of interest. People began calling and waving Russian passports. Trying to point out that I only needed a tourist visa and should be in a different queue, I held my British passport aloft and felt a twinge of colonial embarrassment as I did so. 'Let me through, old boy. It's alright, I'm British!'

The door was closing again so I forced myself through it and the guard looked at me with surprise. I told him in German that I need a visa and he nodded patronisingly to humour me. I may as well have told him that my name was Betsy and I'd come to marry his shoes. 'Kein Problem, kein Problem', he muttered in a thick Russian accent as he pushed the poor deluded would-be tourist back outside. I took my place again in the midst of the impatient mob, and again we waved each time he came out as though he were a celebrity.

Finally I managed to shove my passport into his hand. He glanced at it apathetically and slipped it into his pocket, before disappearing back into the cool, dark recesses of the Embassy. Around twenty minutes later he opened the door and ushered me in. I walked through the metal detector and every ounce of my clothing triggered the alarm. Metal badges, steel boots, copper coins, keys, phone. He seemed unfased by the potential terrorist threat I represented and pointed vaguely over his shoulder in the direction of the corridor.

When I got to the top of the staircase I was greeted by a sort of apocalyptic version of the Post Office. A tall guard in a green uniform was sitting behind a table and gave me two tickets to take to counter no. 2. I walked past chaotic scenes, shouting Russians, confused Germans and fighting children. Upon reaching counter no. 2 I milled around near the window, unsure of exactly what I was to do next. Somebody in the queue noticed me loitering and explained I needed to give the man at the counter one of my tickets and wait to be called.

From watching the people whose numbers had come up I worked out that I needed to take a visa form and then get some photos taken at the extortionate 6 Euro photo booth. Since the booth only had instructions in Russian, the guard came over and actually helped me to work it. I was stunned by this peculiar outbreak of assistance in a place which seemed deliberately and skilfully constructed to confound all attempts to get anywhere even near to Russia. The first photograph was bad. It lingered flickering on the display screen.

'You happy with that one?' he asked, uncertainly.

'Uhm, I think so.' I said, politely.

'Take another one.'

A computerised Russian voice counted down and there was another flash. I tried to smile for the camera but it came out as more of a leer. The guard gazed in horror at the screen. Greasy hair, unwashed in two days and sticking all over the place, as well as a bizarre smile which made me look like a rather apologetic serial killer. Certainly not the sort of person you would want to let into your country.

'No,' he snapped. 'Another.'

The third photograph was shabby but passable. At least it allowed me a fighting chance of getting a visa. I walked back to the queue and started filling in the application form. One question was difficult to understand so I called Olya to ask her opinion. The guard, who had been perfectly friendly until a moment ago, marched up to me.

'Sprechen Verboten!' he barked in a perfect imitation of World War II German film clichés.

Eventually my number 230 was called and a small bearded man processed my forms with something between complete indifference and active hostility. He gave me a bill to pay at the counter, 50 euros more than I was expecting, and told me to bring the receipt back to him.

After waiting in another queue to pay, I forced my way back through the crowd. Two ladies who had managed to get in after a one hour wait at the entrance door lottery had just been told that they were too late and would have to come back again. I shoved the slip of paper through the little gap under the window, where you had to hold it with your thumb to prevent the air conditioning behind the screen blowing it straight back at you.

The man grudgingly accepted it and I skipped through the madness and the shouting out into the silent staircase. An old German guy who had also come for a visa and seemed friendly enough was sitting on a chair in the corridor, apparently waiting for something to happen.

'Is there anything else that needs to be done once we've paid?' I asked, since quizzing the people who were ahead of you in the queue seemed to be the only way of finding out what was going on in there.

'How should I know?' he spat, startling me with a hostile grimace, like a hobbit turned evil by the ring in his pocket.

I shrugged and jogged down the remaining stairs. The sleepy security guard was leaning by the metal detector and I was surprised to find him smiling at me.

'Well, all sorted?' he asked, cheerfully.

I nodded and wished him a nice day. It was all over, I'd gotten out alive and emerged triumphant from the Embassy's anarchy and moodswings.

'See you next Tuesday' I said as I left.

Do not adjust your city.

2008-04-14T03:21:00.000-07:00

The older I get, the more I fall into the pattern of comfortable little rituals. Every time I arrive back in England, pulling up at Liverpool Street on the train from Stansted, I invariably stop at the station off-license to buy an overpriced, chemical-ridden can of Carling. Once I'm firmly planted on the Piccadilly line train to South Ealing I open it and bathe in the dirty looks from fellow passengers. A quiet welcome back into the city which spawned me, and a tribute to my late teenage years shuttling in and out of Central London on the same train in search of something bigger than the suburbs.

Returning to Berlin this time, landing in my city on a Tuesday night after Davey Hunchback's wedding over in the UK, I found that a new habit has crept into my life. Three seconds after coming through the gate I automatically picked up a football paper to check the scores I'd missed from the weekend. Armed with the latest edition of Cometbus courtesy of a visit to Punker Bunker in Brighton, however, I stuck the paper in my jacket for later and climbed onto the waiting train to continue reading Aaron's reviews of New York's bookshops.

The S9 from Schönefeld starts in the south-eastern wilderness, the allotment gardens and sad neighbourhoods left half-empty by the post-communist cultural and economic vacuum. Slowly, as you pass from Schöneweide into Baumschulenweg, Berlin begins to reveal itself as the amounts of people, light and noise gradually increase. A metropolitan strip show, drawn-out and clumsy as we rattle our way into the heart of the city.

But I was only partially watching. The longer you live somewhere the less you dwell on every detail. "Dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty," William Wordsworth wrote about Westminster Bridge in 1802, and those words have been ringing in my ears for years as a warning never to take anything for granted. But my attention was fixed on the copy of Cometbus and my brain was in another city, across the Atlantic. And suddenly it all went black.

The book disappeared and so did my fellow passengers as the train surged forward in the void. All I could see were the lights of the city from which we'd just been erased, hanging outside the window from invisible strings. Then some awkward flickering and we were back, like a momentary glitch in a TV broadcast. Disappointing to return to ourselves so soon, but my heart was still pounding. And then we dropped out again, back into anonymity. All conversation in the carriage died with the light as we fell into a stunned silence. The sound of the wheels smacking against the tracks was the only reminder of who, or where, we were.

Amazing how a simple lapse of electricity can change everything, flick a single switch and the city becomes bigger. Every familiar perspective was distorted beyond recognition as the night spilled over into the carriages and drowned us in darkness.

Then the lights came back on for good, but not before the city had managed to strip away another layer of our complacency. Another ritual shaken, and a swift kick up the arse for the dull of soul.

Odd Numbers

2008-02-06T00:23:00.000-08:00

'I know what love can do', sing The Techniques as I walk down the dark forest path. The sound of raindrops falling on the brim of my hat is mixing with the ska music on my headphones and I ask myself for the tenth time whether I'm doing the right thing.

I am on my way to an extremely meaningless football match. Tennis Borussia (fourth division) vs. Hilalspor (sixth division) in the last-sixteen of the Berlin Pilsener Cup. The result is something of a foregone conclusion but, even if the impossible did happen and Hilalspor won the game, nobody would care much anyway.

Several computer-printed signs attached to wet fences point me in the direction of Julius-Hirsch Sport Complex, where the reserve team usually plays. Due to low demand, however, it's not worth the trouble of opening up the stadium for the 100 or so bedraggled, half-interested punters who make the journey out to this far-flung corner of West Berlin on a Tuesday night.

An old man is standing beside a table with a small money tin. Next to him a fat guy in a Lonsdale sweater is providing the 'muscle' in case anyone tries to sneak in without paying the 4 Euro charge. The man cannot count, and every single transaction is drawn out as he stares at the money with exaggerated concentration, getting it wrong every time.

Finally I'm in, and not a moment too soon. The game has just kicked off so I buy a beer in a plastic cup and take up a prime position on the touchline amidst a small group of purple-clad student types. Within 6 minutes it is 1-0 to Tennis Borussia, an appalling backpass which is punished by a crisp, concise finish from 30 yards out. The crowd doesn't even cheer. Rather, they emit a kind of collective sigh. Yes, their team is going to win. Yes, it's that easy. No, it wasn't worth coming.

The rain keeps falling and so do the goals. 2-0. I buy another drink and the man at the beer stand tries to give me 18 Euros change for a 10 Euro note. Returning to my place, I find the crowd discussing the fact that the new Tennis Borussia striker, Danny Kukulies, has a tattoo of their rival team, BFC Dynamo.

"We should collect some money from everyone," the loudest chap announces to nobody in particular. "Pay to get it covered up."

The third goal slides in and the Hilalspor goalkeeper can't even be bothered to dive. It's followed promptly by a fourth, absurdly off-side goal. A few moments later the newcomer Kukulies yells at the referee, angered by a decison. "Get rid of your Dynamo tattoo first," shouts my neighbour. His words echo around the field and Kukulies looks slightly annoyed.

As the referee blows the whistle for half-time the players trudge back down the forest path to the dressing room. Some of them greet members of the tiny crowd and politely decline offers of sausages and coffee. A middle-aged man hovers by the bratwurst stand barking statistics into a mobile phone. People mill around amiably enough and I lean on the fence, watching the proceedings with interest. A strange mix of pensioners, twenty-somethings and middle-aged couples seem to have braved the weather for all this. But why?

The second half starts and it is getting colder by the minute. I pull out my red Brentford gloves, emblazoned with 'BFC' in huge white lettering across the back. Up until now I'd kept them in my pockets to avoid running the risk of being mistaken for a BFC Dynamo fan. The fifth goal goes in and the sky opens, freezing raindrops pouring onto us from up in the void above the forest. I pull my hood up.

By the time it becomes 6-0 it is pretty fair to say that the game has been decided. The aggressive, competetive element of the game is fading and the tackles are becoming less violent. A more relaxed atmosphere now reigns on the pitch as the opposing players slap one another on the back and share jokes with the referee, who for his part has taken on more of a role of resident comedian by this point.

7-0. Final whistle and an half-hearted chant of 'Come with us to the final' breaks out amongst the younger section of the crowd. The teams leave the pitch a little too quickly and a younger Tennis Borussia player yells out to his colleagues, "Hey! Help me pack up!".

We all shuffle back into the darkness, players and managers and supporters and beer sellers. It's not quite the glamour of the Bundesliga but there's something to it. Whatever it was that drew me out here on a rainy tuesday night to watch a couple of teams battle it out on artificial grass in the name of the most beautiful game on earth.

I know what love can do...

Thanksgiving.

2008-01-25T00:35:00.000-08:00

Going anywhere Jewish in Berlin these days is like travelling to a foreign country. First you have to walk past the policeman at the door, then you're greeted by the airport metal detector. Even the kids who came to the Channukah market at the Jewish museum in December were forced to undergo rigorous security checks before they were allowed to get near to the sweets and toys.

This familiar sight greeted us as we arrived at the Jewish Community Centre. From the outside the place is bizarre; the ornate gateway of an old, ruined synagogue attached to an ugly 1960's building. The old and the new, married uncomfortably together like so many other places in this city.

I got through security after a slightly drawn-out check and made my way up to the restaurant where I was going to wait for a couple of hours while Olya took her Yiddish class. Two women, mother and daughter, were hunched over cake. A few chaps wearing skullcaps and beards were drinking Becks Gold and speaking Russian in low tones. I took a seat next to the whitewashed wall and ordered my drink, took out my book and got comfortable. It occurred to me then that The Fall by Albert Camus was maybe not the best book to read in such religious surroundings, but nobody seemed to notice or care.

No one really sat still in this place. They milled around, visited each other's tables, inspected the buffet, without ever allowing themselves the time to settle. The oldest man there, a splendidly-bearded gentleman aged around 65, would wander between the rooms at regular intervals. Each time he passed through a doorway he would kiss his hand and press his fingers lightly against the wall. Whenever he stood up I would watch him repeat the practice out of the corner of my eye. It seemed to be an extremely spiritual gesture, although I had no idea at all what could be so moving about a doorframe.

In between reading Camus' stories of gambling, prosititutes and atheism I began to feel extremely tired. The glare of the lights hitting the yellowed pages of the old Penguin paperback and the soft murmurings of the voices around me lulled me into a strange trance. Every minute or so I would notice that I was falling asleep and have to sit up, straighten my back and focus on the words again.

The only answer was caffeine, but it was not so straightforward. Whenever the waiter got within two tables' distance of me his gaze would automatically drift elsewhere and he would increase his speed. Often he would take a seat to chat with the mother and daughter eating cake in the corner, or converse with the beer drinkers. I could have called him over or approached him, but it seemed as though that would have been inappropriate behaviour. It was a cafe, but it wasn't a cafe. He was a waiter and he wasn't a waiter. I was there, but I wasn't there.

Having resigned myself to no more coffee, I waited it out until Olya arrived at quarter to ten. I left my little table and managed, with a great sense of achievement, not only to procure my bill from the waiter but also to pay it.

We descended the staircase, back towards the security checkpoint and out onto the cold street. I told her about the old guy's peculiar method of entering and leaving rooms and she didn't seem surprised. "I think you're supposed to thank God for everything, no matter how small," she said.

There's something great about this idea. Showing gratitude for forgettable things, even the simple act of passing from one room to another, seems to me like a wonderful habit. God or no God, a little humility would do us all a bit of good in the end.

We headed toward to Zoologischer Garten station and I looked back at the ugly concrete building one last time in the glow of the West Berlin lights. Of course, I forgot to say thank you.

Kreuzberg Hotel Debacle

2008-01-20T11:14:00.000-08:00

Nobody told me exactly what I needed to do, just that I should be outside the abandoned hotel at 3pm. Let some people in with this key. Don't lose the key. They'll know the rest, they're professionals.

So I took the train over the river and suddenly there I was, standing outside a beautiful 19th Century building in Kreuzberg, nonchalantly jangling the keys to a property that's worth 1.5 million Euros. It was no ordinary Friday.

They arrived one by one, a mix of New Yorkers and Germans, and they were disturbingly young. Around my age, probably. It felt as though I was peering through the looking glass. On the surface they were the same as me, but there was one big difference: these reflections which stared back at me were organised, driven human beings. Goal-oriented. Shrewd. Money people.

And suddenly they were asking me questions.

"Is the facade protected?"

"How many rooms are occupied?"

Earnest faces peered in at me from the other side, the commercial Wonderland. I had two options. Do I lie, pretending to be professional and risk being exposed as a fake when my answers prove to be complete bullshit? Or do I admit to being completely clueless, an unfortunate individual trapped through complicated circumstances in this rather awkward situation?

"I just have the keys," I shrugged, apologetically.

They realised that they were dealing with a complete amateur and left me alone after that. All I had to do was fulfil my duty; that is, I turned the key in the padlock and opened the place up for them.

"What makes a house grand," sang Tom Waits, "it ain't the roof or the door. If there's love in a house, it's a palace for sure." Beautiful words, and very true. Unfortunately, however, love is no longer considered a solid investment. In order to decide whether or not this was a palace these guys had brought a team of surveyors, architects and structural engineers with them and walked around tapping everything.

I realised that I was no longer of use and wandered off to explore. The place was five storeys high and had been left in a complete mess. Mushrooms bloomed from empty wine bottles littering the floor. Mattresses had been torn out, windows smashed and one of the toilets now had what appeared to be a tree growing out of it. Amidst the ruins I found a West German newspaper from 1984, giant metal candlestick holders and framed paintings. I was fighting an extremely strong urge to steal everything that wasn't nailed down.

My new friends seemed less impressed. They walked around knocking the walls and muttering to each other. It was a little strange that none of them seemed enthusiastic about this giant, sleeping beast of a building. A ghost hotel with an old-fashioned mirrored bar, rusting balconies and rotting treasures. A real-life haunted house.

A torn copy of the Bible lay on the floor of a trashed bedroom. The cover had been ripped off, revealing one of those inadvertently funny contents pages telling you where to turn for guidance in every situation under the sun, from the loss of a family member to an unpleasant winter cold.

But unfortunately for me there was no page which advises you on what to do if you are in a 15,000 square metre wasteland, hiding from investors and feeling a strange mix of sadness, excitement, emptiness and adventure.

So I just climbed up to the top of the haunted house and looked down on Kreuzberg, sat up there with the rain clouds, broken furniture and shattered dreams. For the investors it may have been a bit of a waste of time, but I can think of worse ways to spend a Friday afternoon.

London.

2008-01-04T10:02:00.000-08:00

Sitting here in Berlin this evening, wired on coffee in a strange local café surrounded by the lights and concrete of my adopted city, it's easy to feel a million miles away from London. The pubs aren't going to close anytime soon, the transport runs like clockwork and the beer is reasonably cheap. All of the components for a normal European Saturday night are in place.

But having recently returned for a 2-week visit to the UK with Olya, I am forced to concede that I probably have a lot more connection to the place than I would usually care to admit. Maybe it's when standing on the terraces at Brentford, very vocally accusing the referee, a man I have never met, of being a 'wanker' just because he makes a few bad decisions. Could be how much I like the way that complete strangers will call you 'mate' (or, indeed, 'wanker'). Or just the faint shiver that goes down my spine as we stand outside the skeleton of the old Intrepid Fox pub where I (mis-)spent many evenings growing up and which is now being converted into luxury flats. Either way, the older I get the more I realise that you can't escape your hometown just by leaving it.

Olya and I kept a bit of a record of this trip (300 or so photos constituting 'a bit') like true tourists. Hopefully the strange mish-mash of experiences collected here will form some kind of comprehensible whole.

Probably not, but then that's cities for you.

Tate Modern.

By the Thames.

Sammie and Ema seeing in 2008 at the Crown.

Londoners

My dear departed Intrepid Fox (Soho) becoming luxury flats.

Hey Suburbia. South Ealing, all wired up.

Spade-umbrella.

Cafe.

Me, Judy and Sammie on the terraces at Brentford.

Onfield. Brentford 3 Chester City 0.

Me and Sebby.

2008 looks this good.

Piggy in the Middle

2007-12-27T15:42:00.000-08:00

On my last day in Berlin I went to the DIY superstore out in the industrial desolation of Storkower Strasse to buy a toilet seat. It's not the kind of area you want to stay any longer than is absolutely necessary, but it was early and I was very hungry. Not wanting to make any important bathroom decisions on an empty stomach, I stood there torn between the charms of an overpriced Chinese takeaway and a tiny bakery. Economy finally won out over my MSG addiction and I chose bread instead of noodles.

The first thing I saw as I walked through the glass door was Santa Claus hunched over a plate of 'boulette'. He had an impressive, very real white beard, a red fur-lined coat and hat. A hospital drip attached to his nostrils led all the way down over his huge beer gut into a sports bag on the floor. His unorthodox costume was completed by blue nylon tracksuit trousers and a pair of brown sandals.

Santa was grimacing good-naturedly at his food and exchanging muttered words in a thick Berlin dialect with the owner, a genial fellow who seemed far too old to be running a bakery. A normal-looking guy sitting in the corner waiting for somebody was chatting away with them too. At some point the old man's wife emerged from the back of the shop and joined in the fun. It was the most sociable bakery I've ever seen.

This festive scene was completed by two middle-aged ladies eating sausages. Only 5 days have passed since the event but they were so unremarkable that when I recreate the bakery in my mind they are only ghostly outlines. I don't remember a word they said, although they must have been talking. Not very fair to them really, and probably more an indictment of my limited powers of observation than their own unremarkable existence. But for now they will have to remain silhouettes in the centre of the room.

Being a bit of a nervous vegetarian and knowing how Germans love to throw diced bacon into everything, I checked with the owner that the scrambled eggs were meat-free. He assured me that they were so I ordered that and a coffee and took my seat. I had a good book and seven hours until I had to go to the airport so was looking forward to dragging this breakfast out a bit.

The plate landed in front of me and, as I thanked the old man, I noticed there was a chunk of bacon sticking out of my breakfast. I could have complained, but was it really my place to upset everything, to bring disruption and dissent into this cheerful little world? No thank you, I'm British. So I carefully removed it and started cutting into the bread, at which point I discovered more and more little specks of bacon.

It was time for Plan B. Carefully wading through the scrambled eggs, macheteing away layers of egg with my knife and then surgically removing the offending bacon with my fingers, I began to make a small mountain on the side of my plate. The whole business took around 15 minutes, and I realised I was beginning to draw rather a lot of attention to myself. The waiting man in the corner was watching me with a mixture of curiosity and disgust. Santa snorted into his drip and the owners pretended not to see. Even they, however, could not help sneaking the occasional glance at the strange fingertip bacon harvest unfolding in their establishment.

Suddenly it was me. I was the nutter. Santa Claus had lost his crown and now it was Bacon Boy who ruled the roost. The weird collision between vegetarianism, British politeness and social awkwardness would take hours, if not days to explain to my hosts. But none of us had time for that. I had a toilet seat to buy and a plane to catch. They had a bakery to run, wives to meet and presents to deliver to all of the world's children.

It would have to remain just one more of life's misunderstandings, then. The owner tidied away my plate, which I had covered with a serviette in an attempt to conceal the evidence of my crime, and left me to brood over my coffee.

Santa finally took his leave, slinging the drip-bag over his shoulder and shuffling out of the door into the freezing Berlin air. He unlocked a nice-looking Range Rover and sat in the drivers' seat for some time without moving. Snow began to fall as I watched him, then he drove off and the snow stopped again.

The waiting man's wife arrived. She knew the owners and they all exchanged noisy Christmas greetings and friendly words before they, too, went on their way.

Several minutes later the strange foreign guy who made the bacon-mountain paid up and left too. He never once got around to opening his book.

In praise of...

2007-12-19T00:27:00.000-08:00

About a year ago I visited an excellent museum exhibition chronicling the footballing relationship between East and West Germany during the years 1945-1990. As I was milling about and staring at replica ticket stubs from UEFA Cup games, I was approached by the man who had put the whole thing together. He was delighted to hear that I was English.

"In England they really understand that sports history is an important part of history itself," he told me. "Nobody cares about it in Germany."

But last week, as I sat reading reports in the weekly football newspaper Fußball-Woche about Berlin's biggest club Hertha BSC commissioning historians to examine their own club's role in the Nazi dictatorship, or stories of East German clubs being forced to merge in order to deal with the new economic and political situation after the fall of the Berlin wall, I began to wonder if he was right.

Like a snowball in reverse, Fußball-Woche's focus starts big and then descends rapidly into nothingness. After discussing the latest top-flight Hertha game in West Berlin, they move down to the Third Division North to cover 1.FC Union, the workers' team from the former East who still enjoy cult status as the anti-regime club from communist times.

Next up (or, rather, down) comes the NOFV Upper League, where the games are mostly local to Berlin and attended by average crowds of less than 500. This is the home of BFC Dynamo, the former East German secret police team who are now notorious for their large neo-Nazi fan base. The left-wing West Berlin club Tennis Borussia, or 'TeBe', also play here, attracting a small but politically right-on following. And pushing for promotion alongside Dynamo and TeBe is the largest immigrants' club Türkiyemspor, straight out of the legendary Kreuzberg district with its mix of punk rock and Turkish culture.

Moving down one division into the Association League we find TuS Makkabi, the official team of Berlin's Jewish community. Formed over 100 years ago, the club was disbanded by the Nazis in 1937 and then re-formed in 1970. Self-styled advocates for peaceful co-existence, Makkabi is recognised by the German government as having a status that 'transcends sport'.

That's a nice way of putting it, and I think we can steal the term. Because Berlin's football scene itself is about so much more than sport. It is, for better and for worse, about community, politics and history, and what happens when they collide each weekend on football fields around the city.

Every Monday there are people in Berlin meticulously documenting this continuous flow of social history, in its cunning disguise as just another pointless game. Maybe someday these old yellowing copies of Fußball-Woche will be used by historians as valuable primary sources, helping them to understand just what the hell we were all doing back then.

Not bad for 2 Euro.

Coffee and cigarettes?

2007-11-19T07:31:00.000-08:00

I forgot about the smoking ban when I came back to England.

Since 1st July 2007, it's been illegal to smoke in Englands pubs and nightclubs. It hit me particularly hard during the first few gigs of our small English tour, not because I had to go and huddle outside in the cold with all the newly-stigmatised smokers, but because of the smell. Walking down the back stairs into the Camden Underworld we were stunned by how much the place smells like a toilet. I spent many evenings there during my formative years without realising that the smokers were, technically speaking, doing me a favour by making it smell halfway sanitary.

It's also pretty strange today, now that the tour is over, throwing all of my clothes in the washing machine without being greeted by that familiar, sour post-gig smell of sweat and beer mixed with stale cigarette smoke. The law was changed, says Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt, in order to "protect everyone from the harm of second hand smoke". However, a forced change in the lifestyle of a nation will inevitably produce knock-on effects. Hewitt points to Ireland and the increase in business facilitated by the ban there. But there are also stories from Ireland of old people who, not willing or able to loiter in the cold whilst smoking outside their local pub, simply stay home and withdraw from that aspect of community life. With the good comes the bad.

As well as the areas of health, business and community, it occurred to me today as I was sorting through my smoke-free clothes that there is another part of our lives which is going to be irreparably altered by the change in the law: Art. If, assuming the planned ban comes into place in Germany soon as well, anyone in Berlin wants to make a reference to cigarettes in a song, book, film or painting, it will have to be done in the next few months or else be set in the pre-ban past. Artists, writers and even musicians in England, Ireland, Scotland and New York must already be coming to terms with this change. It may sound pretty irrelevant, but consider the extent of art which contains, as its focus or on the periphery, the act of smoking. Any cafe scene painted will now have to be ashtray free. Any description of a pub, which traditionally contains smoke so thick you can cut it with a knife, will be radically different. Characters in novels can no longer nervously light a cigarette in the middle of awkward conversations. Mafia bosses in movies will have to stand outside the New York restaurant if they want to threaten people in style. Couples in romantic films may even have to think twice about lighting up for the traditional post-sex smoke.

East Berlin was said to have had its own unique smell, a combination of cheap Russian cigarettes, environmentally disastrous Trabant exhaust fumes and coal ovens. Today they have been replaced by American cigarettes, Western cars and central heating. Those of us who never breathed the air in that lost world can never really understand what it was like over there at that time. What we are experiencing now is not just a change in health regulations, but a significant shift which will dramatically alter the way our environment smells and feels.

People, said Isherwood, adapt to changes in our environment because we have to. Like animals changing their coats for the winter, we alter our behaviour and get on with things. And any artist wanting to capture the fading memory of smoky bars or even write the banal but staple line, "I lit a cigarette", had better get on with it fast.

In Defence of the Moment

2007-05-13T14:21:00.000-07:00

I've had a quote rolling around in my head lately. It's not something I find particularly offensive but I somehow feel the need to respond, in spite of the fact that the person who wrote the words has been dead for 25 years. In his essay, 'Let's Ban Applause', written in 1962, the legendary Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982) wrote:

"The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."

This makes perfect sense when taken in the context of Gould's own life and work. Having played his last concert in 1964, he then restricted himself to recorded output (and later composing/conducting). He retired to the studio and the editing suite and left the applause to the Beatles.

So what about the rest of us? Specifically in this case, what about those of us who eke out our evenings writhing and sweating on some corner stage in a near-empty pub in Nowheretown or Nichtsdorf and yelling out our punk songs to anyone who will listen? I suppose I have an unfortunate tendency to be too uncritical of people I admire. But something jars with me on this one.

Firstly, to begin this debate, we need to argue that punk music can be categorised as art. This is not necessarily an easy task, or a very pleasant one. The whole point is that it isn't art. But, at the same time, it is. There's no getting away from that. Once you open up the gates of what constitutes art, of course, you can find yourself in the situation where even drunken football chants are accepted as some distant vocal cousin of free jazz. But any form of musical expression is art, a human creation designed to translate our experiences into content which will be presented to (and interpreted by) others.

Collins Dictionary doesn't help me much on this one. Under 'art', the four leading definitions are:

1. skill
2. human skill as opposed to nature
3.creative skill in painting, poetry, music etc.
4. any of the works produced thus

The word 'skill' is definitely an obstacle here. Joey Ramone could sing, in a sense, but he was no Maria Callas. Paul Simonon is a fine bass player until you compare him to Charles Mingus. But I think we've reached the point where both the Ramones and The Clash can be accepted by mainstream western culture as constituting the A-word. If all that this says is that our standards are dropping rapidly as we nosedive through the 21st century then, well, let's slip through the gates before they close again. But it does suggest that art is now a more inclusive term than Collins allows and, for want of anything better to do on this rain-swept Berlin night, I think we have just enough legitimacy to argue the matter out with the late Mr Gould.

So, Glenn. (I'm going to take the liberty of carrying this out on first-name terms). You talk about art having a definite purpose. Already, I suspect, we're on rough ground. The idea that art has a fixed role to play has been largely discredited by the tyrannies of the 20th century who deployed it almost solely to express and reinforce political world views, from phoney Nazi realism and equally phoney Socialist-Realism, right through to D-Ream cavorting onstage to "Things Can Only Get Better" in support of Tony Blair's New Labour in 1997. Art is basically stories, the communication of experiences or feelings, even if we use metaphors and images and abstract devices to open them up to varied interpretations and wider meaning.

Of course it could (and should) be pointed that individual stories do make us feel something and can be taken as smaller parts of some greater vision, your state of "wonder and serenity". However, if we take as an example the paintings of Edward Hopper, these are individual scenes, captured moments which are designed to express a greater truth, to make apparently mundane landscapes seem desolate and threatening, worrying or unsettling. The urban landscapes show us how detached and isolated we are. But they also belong to the moment. I'm not interested in the painting 'Nighthawks' because it forms a part of some larger body of work, or even because it makes me understand something of the nature of how lonely and impersonal life can be in a city. I am interested in it because I enjoy peering in the window at the four misfits in the bar, to wonder what they are talking about and to feel something of the melancholy of that precise moment. It's strangely romantic, and to wire this in to broader notions of a life's work loses what I think is soul of the picture. It has a spirit which comes from the spontaneous, natural feel of its composition and the four characters frozen forever behind the glass screen. Any functional purpose it has is, at best, a side-issue.

In one of the best-known works of English poetry, John Keats begins 'Ode to a Nightingale' with the lines:

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,"

He goes on, from the perspective of a man stood alone in a darkened forest listening to nightingale's song, to announce:

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;"

Our words and our deeds, however, are trodden down by these hungry generations of humans. We don't possess the immortality of birdsong, just a few scattered ideas which we try to record in any way possible before the next crop comes through. Like Hopper's painting, I think the poem's power lies in how well it evokes a particular scene and the melancholy of one particular lost night some 200 years ago. The broader, abstract point it makes about existence is only still with us because we, another hungry generation, can still relate to the mortal narrator.

Now to get to the fun part, Glenn. The "momentary ejection of adrenaline" which you ascribe to live performance and the desire for praise and applause. For those of us aforementioned thrill-seekers who find our fun in sweating on tiny stages, rolling around on pub carpets and singing songs about bridges or women or neither or both, this ejection of adrenaline is the whole point. The purpose, if you will. Does this de-legitimise the entire process? Are we cast down into the artless pit because these moments of possibly connecting through lyric or melody with two or three (at an optimistic count) kindred spirits are precisely that: moments?

Salvador Dali, writing to Federico Garcia Lorca to criticise his Gypsy Ballads, suggests that:

"(The minute hands of a watch) only begin to acquire real value when they stop pointing to the hour and, losing their circular rhythm and the function assigned to them arbitrarily by our intelligence... escape from the watch and become a new bodily joint."

That is to say, our minds assign each piece of art with an unnecessary 'purpose', without allowing them to stand and exist in and of themselves.

I suppose at this point I should admit to something: what our bands are doing all over the world can perhaps today, charitably, be called art. But it is also a kind of therapy. Yelling things over a knackered PA or cutting your knuckles over a fifth-hand Fender Squire is a means of channelling the aggression and frustration which human beings accumulate every day just by coming into contact with the world. But it is not entirely without direction. The songs may range between 20 seconds and 3 minutes in length, not so much ejections as ejaculations, indeed, pouring out unclean thoughts or stories set to a rhythm and a melody through which we hope to communicate that precise feeling to someone else. But even the most basic punk tune sets out to move a listener in a particular way, regardless of the lyric. (That, Glenn, is why I managed to spend all day today on my cleaning shift listening to incomprehensible Spanish bands without tiring of the experience). And like all other art, it's entirely open to interpretation. We as listeners don't necessarily need the lyrics to be able to form some kind of attachment to the music.

But what we are doing is certainly not a "gradual, lifelong construction" of anything, and even if it were I very much doubt that the end result would resemble wonder and serenity. Individual songs can form part of a broader whole, which is why we record albums and why we think carefully about the order and inclusion of tracks so that it forms a coherent catalogue of individual moments. And if a band or a musician stays around long enough to build up a significant back catalogue, what we usually end up seeing is a series of progressions, musically and lyrically, as the artist grows older and shifts focus at different stages in his or her life. Variations, I guess, to use your classical terminology.

Maybe, Glenn, this all says something too. It is possible for art to function as a mirror for the human condition by the steady, consistent weaving of a state of wonder and serenity. But for some of us, the wonder is in the moments, and the fleeting experiences which furnish our lives and which we express through these small ejections of adrenaline. When we turn the tape player off for the last time, what we leave is not some carefully constructed silk web of sound, but the dirty footprints of our passions and fears and loves and losses, borne out over the course of one life.

I know what you're going to say. You're going to point out that all this article consists of is a series of scattered quotations and lazy personal interpretations of great works, selected in a half-arsed and haphazard manner with the intention of disproving a theory articulated by one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century. You'll tell me that I'm just bored, that it's raining too much tonight for me to take a walk beneath the tracks just so I can write another song about it. And you'll point out that these words belong solely to the moment, to 4.30 a.m. in the miserable early Friday Berlin half-light, that nobody else should read them, and that this is a million miles away from being art.

But maybe someone out there will acknowledge that momentary ejections of adrenaline can have a place in the world, and that it would be a mistake to write them off without understanding that the sum total of these brief songs can have some kind of anarchic, ill-plotted value which is different to but no less valid than your careful constructions.

And if they happen to sound good too, well, that's a fucking bonus.

Bloody Typical

2007-05-11T06:47:00.000-07:00

Okay, so the Coupland post below is from 19th January but I forgot all the details of how to access my old weblog. So here we go again.

Artificial Dissemination

2007-05-11T06:45:00.000-07:00

I had planned to write a big spiel about the artificial process of communicating via 'blog' as opposed to the traditional fanzine format, but quite frankly you don't have the time for all that and neither do I. Paper is nicer, but the internet is cheaper. So here we are.

I just finished reading Douglas Coupland's latest novel, "Eleanor Rigby". The man was one of my favourite writers up until the age of 20, then the whole thing trailed off. I brought "All Families Are Psychotic" with me on my first trip to Rotterdam in 2001, and accidentally left it lying around there in a half-read state. Basically, it was more of a monetary loss than a literary loss. So after that, I followed his reviews with interest but never bothered delving into the new fiction he was putting out.

But due to fortuitous circumstances (read: Christmas), a Coupland novel once again fell into my hands. His new one. And it was fucking good. To read the description on the back, a lonely woman whose life is opened up by the re-discovery of a son she gave up for adoption at birth, it is not a promising read. However, the man has a clear fascination with, and knowledge of, the subject matter and is able to translate it into an engaging, funny story which goes as far as deserving the rather cumbersome adjective "weighty", whilst also courting her more acceptable cousin, "enjoyable". In non-wank terms, it's just a great book that encourages thought and laughter. There is no adequate translation for the German word nachdenklich (literally: after-thoughtly) in the English language, but it summarises the whole affair pretty well. You get the intial hit and then let it filter through you.

Alas, no sooner had I turned the final page, satisfied that Coupland had not fallen too far into his self-imposed trap of offering a bizzare and overly-sentimental ending to his story, then I came across the letters PS. The PS series is an innovation of the Random House publishing group and involves an interview with the author, along with a brief biography and a series of recommended reads. It is, frankly, the equivalent of a sexual partner climaxing and then yelling, "Aren't I great?".

That is not to blame Coupland for the whole business. It seems to be some kind of standard which the publishers are trying to impose, offering something more than just a novel which ends and then expels you back into the real world, where you will confront the uncomfortable silence in which you must contemplate what you've just read and critically assess it according to your own value system. The interview with Coupland, whilst interesting enough, loses its edge because you know it has been commissioned by the very same people whose own financial interests are inextricably tied in with the novel's fate. It's not honest, and it's not truly critical. And yet they select a quote from each section and present it seperately from the rest of the text, promoting it to the level of a soundbyte in the way that the broadsheet newspapers will do when interviewing an artist, athlete or a politician.

Worse still, the recommended reads are introduced with the unbearably presumptious preamble: "If you're missing Liz Dunn (Eleanor Rigby's lonely protagonist) already, you'll love these...". It is not for Random House, or Douglas Coupland, or anyone else for that matter, to tell the reader who has turned the last page what they should be feeling. Should we like, dislike, be attracted to, or be repelled by, Liz Dunn? That's our own decision. These asinine post-scripts have no place in serious literature.

Of course, a well-written and insightful foreword to a book which has already achieved 'classic' status is welcome and useful. Assuming, that is, that there has been adequate space between publication and response for the necessity of such a piece to arise. But since Coupland's novel was first published in 2004, aren't Random House jumping the gun a little?

I believe that 'Eleanor Rigby' will stand the test of time admirably, so let's not rush the process.