7/23/10 – h

On the train from Berlin to Prague. East German countryside passing by, long flat wheat fields, patches of thin, new-growth woods with creeks and small lakes, rivers. The sky is thick gray, a summer storm brought heavy rain, big warm drops of it, last night in the hot humid air, and there were lightning flashes and rolling thunder over Berlin. I’m surprised at how tropical the weather in Central Europe feels in the summer. The balmy day with intervals of warm rain is like Mexico City in the springtime.

The countryside we’re passing feels deeply agricultural. We’re passing through Roderau. Old houses with short fences, two and three story with roofs pitched from all 4 sides then up to a flat part and then the final pitch with protruding attic alcoves. Walls with flaking paint uncovering old stucco over older brick, or weathered stone. Little brick stations with names on them painted in black on white in German script, not blackletter but definitely calligraphy.

It is classic European countryside as I have seen in films and imagined. Wet, green, lush, agricultural. It’s more like the California foothills, with smaller plots and interspersed houses, than the real farming land of California with its giant agricultural fields and machine-planted rows. It’s idyllic, iconic. To my American eyes, it’s also familiar, with a similar sensibility to settlements in the American countryside.

Yet there are distinct differences – as I pass by on the train, the houses do look on average taller, less horizontal, and certainly older. There’s a marked absence of cookie-cutter developments on a mass scale; when I see identical houses they’re in a small row. Bold graffiti slides across railside buildings in their decline. Green space exists right up against compact development.

*

Passing into Czech Republic. Smokestacks, swaybacked warehouses, broad brown river, long deep green hills. Towns with concrete slab-style buildings next to ornate 5-story houses with moldings on the windows and embellishments. Sleek modern bridges, then old steel hulks of rusting train crossings. Sharp church spires, needlelike, steam rising.

Prague.

High-flying ancient buildings blackened by time and diesel. New scrubbed tourists thronging the medieval square, the sheer mass of them creating a theme-park effect in the absurdly ornate, beautiful and intact historic square. The buildings crowd in on narrow cobbled streets, where tourists in sports clothing squeeze into trinket shops filled with cheap plastic stuff, the odd marionette shop, “Bohemian Crystal” and restaurants selling “authentic Czech cuisines.”

The place is choking on its authenticity.

Outside the tourist zone, there is a vaguely depressed air, something of the Soviet era hanging still. In Hybernia Restaurant we sit in a cobblestone courtyard at a table under one of the ubiquitous Pilsner Urquell umbrellas. The building above us is off-white with white trim, jutting out where the floors are marked, jigsawing around the windows.

At a table in the corner there is a little scene of Slav mafioso types, either real or trying to look that way. A couple older guys in suits with flashy watches smoke and hold forth. The fat one with the tan keeps flagging the waitresses down. Next to him is a young fool in a white polo with the collar turned up, a shaved head and wraparound sunglasses. The bunch sit and pose like royalty, and when they leave, the restaurant manager graciously shakes the fat gangster’s hand while the waitress rolls her eyes.

7/24/10 – h

In Klub Ujezd in a neighborhood across the river Voltava, with a much different feel. I’m having an absinthe… the Czech Republic is one of the few places in the world where the green, wormwood-infused liquor is legal. You don’t get the whole slotted spoon treatment of Paris legend. The bartender served it to me in a shot glass. I asked how people consume it, and the bartender turned to the guy he was playing dice with, talked in Czech for a moment, then said people pour sugar into a spoon, hold a flame over it to carmelize the sugar, and then mix it with the absinthe.

I finished my shot, and I can’t tell yet if it feels any different from a regular shot of strong alcohol. I do seem to feel an unusual sense of calm and clarity. There’s music going, and it does seem to be right in my ears sort of in the way it can be on a really clean pot buzz. One thing just occurred to me – this cigarette I’ve been smoking seems to have lasted a very long time. I can’t tell if it’s just the force of my imagination, but the longer I feel it, the more it seems there is something different about absinthe.

7/25/10 – h

In the tower of St. Vitus Cathedral in the Prague Castle. The view is astounding. The castle – which is a whole complex of buildings and palaces – is laid out at your feet and all of Prague surrounds it, unfolding in green, white, and red: gardens and parks, buildings and red roofs.

*

Headed back to the apartment on the 22 tram. Exhausted by the crush of tourists in which we pressed half the day at the castle and around, in the old Jewish Quarter. My phrasebook is useless – not only is the Czech language difficult, hypersyllabic and unpronounceable, but the velvet curtain between Czechs and tourists here is hard as iron, soft but impenetrable. Unlike in Latin America, where people will help you as you fake it with a smile and a nod to indicate if you’ve got it right, even offering a hint or an impromptu language lesson, here they are cold and unresponsive. Not only that, but observing other people’s interactions is less helpful, since the whole manner is different. More subdued, less formally polite. It is less obvious what Czechs are saying to each other and thus to learn by observation.

7/26/10 – h

Navigating the transit system in Prague is tricky. There are 2 tram systems: streetcars and an underground subway. The navigation system is text rather than icon driven, and this design presents obvious problems if you don’t speak the language. That said, the connections are fast and the trains run late and often. The stations, while not the works of art that the Berlin stations are, are interesting: the subway tunnels plated with colored metal with a dull gleam, large plates with round protrusions like inverted bowls, which gives the tunnel the look of the inside of a long beaded bracelet.

*

In Prague I’ve seen more begging and hustling than in Berlin. A man asked me for money on the tram. I gave him 20 crowns – a dollar – and he seemed pretty happy, smiling wide to reveal his few remaining teeth. There are canvassers and salespeople on the sidewalk and in the tram stations. A woman selling magazines.

7/28/10 – h

On the River Voltava. The river is bridged many times to connect the city to itself. The river is divided by dams or water-walls over which the water spills, in a long diagonal line across the whole river until a small walled-in canal – a lock – permits boats to pass up and down the river.

We are in the lock now. It takes a while, but it’s worth it to go through the lock and south, to an area below the Charles Bridge, where one gets a view of a castle in Prague called Vyshrad. While not as massive as Prague’s main castle, it looks more like the castle of European myth, perched on a cliff over water, ancient stone turrets and cathedral spires.

The cathedrals have sharply angular spires here. It seems to be a signature of Slavic architecture. It reminds me of the Mormon’s grand temple in Salt Lake City. I wonder what caused the Mormons to adopt this particular architectural motif, of all the ones available in Europe’s and America’s sacred architecture.

The trams ride up and down the stone wall of the riverbank. Modern midsize cruise boats line the banks, angular lines and low windows, sharp prows, white hulls, green or red trim bright in the patchy sun, curtains in the windows, dark interiors, orange lifesavers, vinyl awnings on the decks, flapping in the wind, ads on the awnings for Pepsi, aquasys.cz, etc. and on the boats flags flying: Czech flags blue white and red and EU flags, blue with a thin crown of yellow stars.

This morning we had some great food. The trick is going to a real Czech restaurant with no English menu and puzzling through with your phrasebook. Yukio and I had goulash, Czech dumplings, and beer, Anya the fried cheese and french fries, Aurora a chicken salad. The goulash was dark and rich, peppery.

7/29/10 – h

Our last night in Prague was great. We went to a bar in Zizkov called Bukowski, named after the American writer. A dark candlelit dive with a fantastic cocktail menu. Came across a little outpost Vice Magazine has in Prague, a small shop selling magazines, beer and cigarettes, and picked up a free booklet, “The Vice Guide to Prague.” The usual mix of good info and smut, would have been great if I had found it on the first day, there are some interesting spots particularly art galleries listed in it. We didn’t see any galleries, though we were looking for them just walking around, trying to find an arts district Yukio read about in the New York Times.

Prague is amazing, but the touristed zones are hard to enjoy due to being heavily overrun. I feel like the real Prague is sort of hidden, would take some further digging to get to.

Glad to be back in Germany. We’re now in Dresden, on the train heading into the city.

More notes coming on last days in Germany before coming back to California.

7/20/10 – h

In Berlin. Delirious with jet-lag and thrilled to be here.

*

The scale of Berlin is infinitely appealing. Five story high standard buildings everywhere with a multitude of variations, from moldings and ornaments to striking colors and fresh takes on common elements like the balcony rail, the doorway, the rain gutter.

The subway is stunning: old and dirty and graceful, a graffiti-spattered underground cathedral, smelling like something dark, like trains and coal and steel and tunnels. People, not cars, come first on the streets.

In Kreutzberg, Turkish food beckons, bars, towering apartment blocks. Berlin is in a state of beautiful decay and vigorous reinvention, the decay not decay but age and weather and the way other things have been built around the old. Young and old fill the streets, sidewalk tables everywhere, people talking, smoking. Even on a weeknight, everyone’s out, sitting, walking, biking. On a scaffold in Kreutzberg, someone has set up a sun-chair and hammock outside their 4th-floor window.

7/22/10 – h

Rosenthaler Platz subway station has orange tile. Some random graffiti says “Lina Rulez.” Names and initials sprayed on the stairs. A girl with wild teased platinum hair has scizzors tattooed on her arm. At Brunnestrasse and Torstrasse we eat doner wraps – delicious meat cut from a spit, with cabbage and tangy sauce, and cappucinos from a neighboring cafe. Doner refers to the meat – sheared from a spit – and there are two types of wrapping, a flatbread or a thin, tortilla-like roll “durum.” The three sauces are herb, garlic, and spicy, and it usually comes with lettuce, onion, tomato, and cabbage.

We’re sitting at a main intersection. Torstrasse is a main artery, it runs along the path of an old city wall. Berlin has, according to Yukio, just one car for every 3 residents. It’s the lowest rate in Germany.

*

All along Kastanienallee in Prentzlauerberg there are trendy shops and boutiques. A record shop selling vintage LPs of mostly American music, some classic R&B blasting from speakers outside and inside the shop, and sections for Krautrock and German pop. At a thrift store, I look for some artifact of Berlin life in the t-shirt section, something from a local soccer team or firemen’s fundraiser, the kind of stuff you find in U.S. thrifts. Here I only find t-shirts in English, promoting California surfing or Beverly Hills tennis.

There are hostels, cafes, Italian restaurants, ice cream, “Sumo Sushi.” A banner reads “Kein Truhling Tur Nazis! Hier Nicht und Nirgens” – No spring for Nazis, not here, not anywhere. Next door in an occupied building in a state of gorgeous decay, an installation of letters on the facade reads:

From Kastanienallee we walk to meet up with Chris, Yukio’s colleague at Ableton. Chris is from the UK. We go to Mauer Park with beers, and sit and drink and talk. The sky is huge above the open space, strong clouds gathered in the warm light of late evening in the late light of summer.

An ultramodern sports complex at its edge, next to a graffitti wall and paint-mottled amphitheater, the park is an expanse of scrubby yellow grass and sand, peppered with loungers, drinkers, couples and families. Beyond the park, the line of pastel-shaded “Grunderzeit” (founder’s era) buildings frames the park in Berlin.

After Mauer Park, we got to W, back on Kastanienallee. W is a strange place, serving “naan pizza” with Tiki-themed decor, and toppings that defy any regional characterization. It’s owned by an expat American. I got the “Jewish Naan” with capers, salmon and cheese. It was delicious.

After our first few days in Berlin, Aurora and I went on to Prague. More notes coming on that.

The designs are mostly from architectural features but include many abstract patterns, from tile or other embellishments, that could be applied to print and web design.

Clean, modern design usually sits best with me, especially since on the web you often see an explosion of design ornamentation in poor taste. I was taught in Design 101, like most Americans who have studied design in an academic setting, that modern design means cutting away extraneous elements. We go back to the Bauhaus, to the design of things that look like what they are, that are informed by their materials.

I love the spirit of the original Bauhaus, to strip away the barriers between craftsman and artist, to be in touch with the materials of use, to serve function before tradition. Designers should be aware of the constraints of the materials they use, and inspired by them. Yet there is a lot of bad design on the web, often because in an effort to show off the capabilities of fancy new techniques, the purpose of clearly and effectively communicating an idea gets lost. Materials shouldn’t supercede function.

So I have been thinking: what is a kind of ornamentation that is compatible with clean, modern design? Ornamentation is not purely decorative: it has some very important functions. It guides the eye, it highlights certain elements while downplaying others. It communicates certain aesthetic ideas, feelings, and sensibilities.

What I’m on the lookout for now, in examples and in brainstorming, is: what are the kinds of ornamentation (borders, page dividers, menu embellishments) that can work to the benefit of a design without throwing it back into a previous era of design, i.e. Victorian curlicues, Grecian borders, Celtic knots?

Where’s the “Grammar” of 20th and 21st-century ornament?

Or is it simply “no ornament”?

In Werner Herzog’s new film, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, we are plunged into a savage world of moral ambiguity. The central character, played by Nicholas Cage in an amazing performance (to my mind his best outside of Leaving Las Vegas) is a grotesque anti-hero whose life is so out of control, it seems as if he is in a race to destroy himself before the forces he has unleashed do it for him. He lurches through the movie like a crazed balding hunchback, guzzling drugs and abusing people.

Herzog punctuates the film with bizarre interludes where the lens fixates on iguanas or breakdancing crack hallucinations, or in the case of the deeply evocative opening sequence, a snake as it swims through brown floodwaters unleashed by Hurricane Katrina. Though the performances of the actors unfortunately fail to conjure the Southern setting, visually the film is a rich exploration of a devastated, depressed New Orleans. No picturesque shots of Bourbon Street here, but a trip to the lower 9th ward and back to the halls of power. Decaying houses, crumbling tenements, slick casinos, cocaine nosebleed hotel rooms, claustrophobic office interiors.

Despite the film’s moments of visual experimentation, Port of Call New Orleans is conventional in some successful ways: it is a very gripping linear narrative, and follows the ancient pattern of the hero’s journey through darkness and trial to a hard-won truth. The hero acquires a wound in the beginning, and the conclusion revisits and cures this wound.

The screenplay was penned by William Finkelstein, a veteran TV crime writer on shows such as NYPD Blue, Brooklyn South, LA Law, and many others. It deftly skirts the border of sleazy pulp, crime realism, and high psychodrama, with a series of shady characters and hard plot turns that call to mind classic film noir.

What unites Herzog, Finkelstein, and Cage’s Bad Lieutenant with the first Bad Lieutenant by Abel Ferrara? There is no common storyline or common character in the two films. Both are about a man in a position of power, trusted to represent the public good, coming to terms with absolute corruption, both in himself and others. Both films end up collapsing any easy ideas about good and evil, and demonstrating the disturbing possibility that evil may serve good, or good evil. Ferrara’s is still the more shocking film: it is also deeply Christian. Port of Call New Orleans doesn’t match its concern with theology and uncompromising conclusion, but it is more engrossing as a narrative.

I know I’m a sucker for contrast: show me the bleakest depths of the dark night of the soul, and then a glimmer of renewal seems twice as profound. If this is a trick, Port of Call New Orleans does it so well I don’t mind. There’s a scene when McDonough, the bad lieutenant, stumbles into a childhood hangout to show Frankie, his prostitute girlfriend and fellow narcotics addict, something he lost there. The acting, direction, and music all flow together in this scene to make it unforgettable. This film has its share of disgusting moments, but unlike many movies that zoom in on the grotesque side of human nature, Port of Call New Orleans does so for a reason.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is still playing in select theaters, and will be out on DVD this year.

That is why I’m moving (back) to the East Bay, to the Oakland neighborhood called Temescal. It is not an easy decision to make. Even in a quiet neighborhood of SF like the one I live in, there is a special atmosphere. The homes that are palaces of wood; the carefully tended, gardenlike feeling of the neighborhood after dark. But Aurora and I found a listing for a storefront apartment in Oakland that turned out to be an incredible live/work space. In SF, the rent would be double or even triple.

As a kid in Berkeley once said to me of the Bay Area, “it’s all one big city.” Practically, it is; and early on in Bay Area history, there were plans for a “greater San Francisco” akin to NYC and its borough system. Like L.A., the Bay Area is economically de-centered, despite SF’s towering business district. With Silicon Valley miles away, there is talk of SF itself becoming a high-rise bedroom community for an office-park army who commute to and labor in the suburbs.

Whatever city you live in, your experience depends entirely on the neighborhood. So to say I’m moving from SF to Oakland isn’t saying much. I’m moving from Bernal Heights/Excelsior to Temescal. It might be a bigger change to move from one SF neighborhood to another; say, from the Outer Sunset to the Tenderloin, or from the Bayview to Pacific Heights. My commute to work in SF on BART will be almost exactly the same after moving.

Oddly enough, in Oakland I will be closer, walking, to a cafe, a bookstore, a farmer’s market, and a public library. There are other perks, like Ethiopian and Korean food within a couple blocks, and a shop selling recycled and remaindered art materials. Oakland is very diverse and, if it is like it was years ago when I last spent time there (it’s probably even more so), there is a thriving arts scene, though it is under the radar, with many artists living in Oakland and with most galleries in San Francisco.

Despite Temescal’s desirable attributes, I still would have a hard time leaving my neighborhood in San Francisco, with its proximity to the Mission and its ready supply of pupusas, if it wasn’t for the space. Space to have a workshop, to entertain guests. So I quiet my doubts with the knowledge that the Mission District, which I love so dearly, with its thriving nightlife and teeming daylife, is still only a few BART stops away.

After the move, I’ll follow up with a report on Temescal.

The maligned urban vertebrate known for its smoke-gray feathers and runny white spoor. The habitue of telephone wires. The bird who no one loves enough to cage. The terror of the bald man coming out of the BART underground as he ascends the escalator. The eternal foe of public monuments. The resourceful beast who makes nests of newspaper. Who raises its squabs on San Francisco’s eighth story windowsills, and its proud Victorian mouldings.

I walked behind my apartment, through the narrow hall there that empties into a small courtyard, and when I passed under an overhead walkway, an explosion of feathers flashed in front of me. I never saw the pigeon: I saw an electric gray blur. It startled, unsettled me. But the thought that this interstitial space between apartments was of some use to a living bird made me glad.

Are they merely pests, these hardy specimens of street ornithology? I know they are more than that for at least some of us. I saw a lonely man, probably indigent, by the Library. By the big sky-square of the Civic Center, sitting apart from the junkies and crack fiends, though he might have been one of them. He was feeding pigeons crumbled bread out of a plastic bag. They cooed like doves, little warbling sounds of pleasure coming from their throats, or like doves do in my imagination.

Pigeons, of course, are cousins to doves. Doves are supposed to be white, and to represent peace and union. Pigeons have less lofty associations. Yet the distinction between pigeons and doves, morphologically speaking, is blurry. When we speak of “hawks and doves,” what do we mean? Might we just as well say “hawks and pigeons”?

Pigeons and doves have considerable variation, but the one most widely known in Palestine, at least from my superficial research, is the common Rock Dove, or Rock Pigeon. In appearance, it is identical to the pigeon widespread in urban North America today: gray, with black bands on its wings and a tinge of green on its neck. Would it be sacreligious to suggest that paintings depicting Our Savior’s baptism might have been compromised by the artists’ ignorance of the Holy Land, or preconceived notions regarding color symbolism?

One new translation (called “Good as New” — admittedly a trendy one, as Bible translations go) has it that the most faithful rendering of John’s Gospel goes “A pigeon flew down and perched on him. Jesus took this as a sign that God’s Spirit was with him.” Allow me to suggest that if the image of a rugged, steel-colored bird with steady red eyes resting on Jesus’ naked shoulder seems blasphemous to you, the fault is entirely with you, and not the pigeon.

Pigeons have, by most accounts, been wrongly condemned. Though they do feed on our surplus grain if they can, they don’t transmit disease like rats do. They are well suited to our most vertical of cities, since their ancestral habitats were high, sheer cliffs. In their personal lives, pigeons are mild and private. They favor long relationships, have only one or two eggs at a time, and males and females share the duties feeding their young on a thick ambrosia (“crop milk”) regurgitated from their throats.

When I see these birds in my daily life in The City, I try not to take them for granted. I have seen them treated with scorn, shooed away, even spit on. I have seen kicks aimed in their direction, and it is solely to the credit of the pigeon that these kicks were not successful. I admit, when they descend in a flock on some discarded food wrapper, with greasy looking feathers around their necks, I have started to feel the contempt that has caused some to refer to the pigeon as “a rat with wings.”

But consider this. The passenger pigeon, similar to our own of today but larger in size and with splashes of blue and orange in its coloration, was once taken for granted, and now it is no longer with us. Billions of them once flew across America in flocks of hundreds of thousands. After the arrival of Europeans, they were harvested in massive numbers for cheap food, and fed to slaves and the poor. By 1914, what once might well have been the most numerous bird in history was extinct. Their small nests were ill-equipped for survival.

Let their cousins remind us, then, if not of the Holy Spirit stuffed into common feathers, than at least as a reminder of the pigeons that once were and now are no more (the sky once black with them, “a living wind“). Is there anything so terrifying to contemplate as an extinction? The irretrievable cessation of a unique form of life, lost for all seasons to come, and the startling reminder that we too, could go that way?

The common pigeon of today doesn’t, at present, need us to defend its survival.

But it could, I argue, use a little more respect.

“Would you leave me alone now, please,” he said.

Two days later, he brushed his teeth in a motel room. Outside, a maple tree stood leafless in the cold. Elmer’s chest was concave and hollow, and the towel wrapped high around his torso made him look elderly.

“It gives me a glimpse into lives I once lived, or might have lived,” he said, and rinsed his mouth. “That, aside from the fact that I’m a sexual deviant, is why I spy on people.”

He crossed the state line into Montana with the pedal against the floor.

“There’s really no limits here,” he said over the motor.

“Which I don’t like much. Takes most of the fun out of going fast.”

Snow capped mountains in the purple distance.

“I think I’ve probably spied on say… oh, about three hundred people in my life. That’s through their house windows, I mean. With equipment, or without. I wonder, all the time, if people leave them open on purpose. I wonder about it all the time. I think they do. I think they do it on purpose, personally.”

Late into the night, he played solitaire. He took the jokers out of the deck and stuck them in the lampshade. In the morning he combed thick neon gel into his hair and watched his sallow face in the mirror as his hair turned into black cement. Then he went out to sell perfume.

Elmer entered the hotel bar after work. He ordered a club soda at the bar: Elmer never drank alcohol. His face was covered with sweat, and his hands trembled.

“A woman answered the door in her bathrobe today,” he said. “I started to show her the brands, went into my routine. Then. She let it fall open.”

He shook his head slowly.

“I feel violated,” he said. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

When he reached the West Coast, Elmer found a secluded beach and sat for hours in his parked car. He’d never seen the Pacific before.

“Something’s different,” Elmer said. “I don’t know what it is but something is different. Every time I start… doing the things I used to do, I think about that woman, and I think about how embarrassed I was, standing at her door, trying to sell her some perfume.”

Elmer laughed and rolled down the window.

“She didn’t know who she was dealing with. But she sure messed with my head.”

Elmer fingered his hard leather case, popped it open and pulled out his binoculars. He squinted into them, looking out at the seagulls. His upper lip curled, the moustache on it arching over his wet teeth.

“I’ve been thinking of taking up birdwatching,” he said, and closed his mouth.

The sound of the gulls filled the sharp air.

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