Routes Award 2009

Thanks to the European Cultural Foundation, I interviewed two very inspiring folks: Borka Pavićević (pictured) and Stefan Kaegi. They were the winners of the Routes Award for Cultural Diversity 2009 for their work in theater championing the voices of the “other”.

Borka, in particular, has long been a hero of mine ever since I first visited ex-Yugoslavia. As the founder of Belgrade’s Centre for Cultural Decontamination, she has fought the good fight against a steady stream of nationalists, gangsters and populist pricks. The Centre was one of the first places I went when I felt dirty from sitting behind Mira Markovic, wife of Milosevic, on a flight between Amsterdam and Belgrade in 2001.

I went to the awards ceremony in Brussels a couple of weeks ago and certainly had a couple of culturally diverse moments. It was at the Royal Flemish Theater and when we arrived early, my friend and I went to the next door cafe to kill some time. The waitress refused to talk Dutch with us — which we thought ironic since we were at a Dutch-language theater for an award’s ceremony dedicated to cultural diversity. 

After the ceremony I went over to introduce myself to Borka and she greeted me very warmly thanks to some common friends (ah, I do miss the Balkans sometimes…). She asked me if I had ever met Princess Margriet of the Netherlands. I hadn’t so I shook the princess’s hand. Then Borka wanted to introduce me to  some Belgrade journalist — “you actually probably know him, he’s the one that they tried to blow up with not one but two bombs.” But just as I was about to shake his hand, a plate of oysters came by and the crowd — royalty, journalists, etc — swooped in. It was a moment of true diversity. The oysters were dang tasty as well.

But really, read the interviews:
Borka Pavićević
Stefan Kaegi

War criminals of yesteryear, part 1

Ten years ago Serbian warlord Željko ‘Arkan’ Ražnatović was shot dead in the lobby of a Belgrade hotel. He was a gangster. He was a nationalist. He was the Mr Clean of ethnic cleansing. I wrote about him in ‘Arkantecture: A Field Guide to Serbian Gangster Kitsch‘.  The picture on the left is of his former home in Belgrade where I believe his widow, the turbofolk queen Ceca, still lives. Apparently a movie about Arkan starring Vinnie Jones will be released later this year.  Ouch.

On Wall and Currywurst

 

 

 

 

 

My feature on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (and the 60th anniversary of the rise of Currywurst) is published today in the Globe&Mail. It was a hard one to write mostly because it is such a dense and telling tale. I  visited Berlin a few months after it happened and the images that still stick was of children playing in the watchtowers and the big bales of collected barbwire – forming 5-10 meter high tumbleweeds of rusting iron. So anyway I had to leave a lot of wacky facts out of the article in the name of readability. Luckily I have no such constraints here. Oh, and if you want more on ostalgia just check out my previous Globe&Mail feature on the 15th anniversary….

 

 

 

 

 

 

Funniest story I heard was from my esteemed hosts Mr and Mrs Cameron (who have been living the revolution in Mitte quite a few years now…) who told me of a group of West Berlin friends who found a hole in the wall and went for a look in East Berlin. When they returned they found the hole had been closed up — they were stuck! But luckily, for them the Wall properly fell the next day.

There are a few tricks for the visitor to differentiate between former East and West halves. East Berlin has much more animated and jaunty figures in their crosswalk lights. Linguists now also know that it just takes 29 years, the time the wall existed, for distinct dialects to develop.

By 1980 an estimated 100,000 West Berliners were living life in a subculture — via cafes, communes, squats and generally radical lefty politics. (Today the most affluent of this generation support some of the largest organic supermarkets in Europe.)

You know you are buying an authentic GDR postcard by its flimsiness — and by the fact that you are overcharged for it.

 

And in the world of currywurst:

 

 

 

 

I had some earlier thoughts on sausage. The mighty currywurst is apparently called the “white trash plate” in Cologne and Dusseldorf but “chancellor’s plate” in Hannover. Also interesting: Gerhard Schröder was known as the “currywurst chancellor”. And Volkswagon developed their own recipe that can only be bought in factory canteens. In 1982, the singer Herbert Grönemeyer sang passionately of his nightly desires for the mighty wurst (this YouTube clip is not for the queasy of stomach but boy does Herbert sing from the heart).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now for something completely different:
After all that heavy street food (especially since you’ll also have to pay tribute to the Turk, Mahmut Aygun, who invented the now universal Döner Kebab here in 1972), there’s nothing like Japanese noodles. Cocolo (Gipsstrasse 3, 0172 3047584, ) serves some of the best Japanese noodle soup on the planet. Owner Ollie not only cooks but also built everything — from the furnishings to the service to the kitchen — from scratch. Inspiring! Also, Restaurant Schoenbrunn is a lovely and fancy place to dine in Volkspark Friedrichshain. Aid digestion by climbing the nearby hills which were built from the debris of WWII.

For dessert, one can pop into a baker for a Berliner (more commonly known as a Pfannkuchen in Berlin itself), the pastry JFK accidentally referred to in his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech to half a million bewildered Berliners in 1963.

But to conclude: 
Mir ist alles Wurst!
Es geht um die Wurst!
Sei keine beleidigte Leber wurst!

Ai ai ai Amsterdam

The local anti-vertrutting (”anti-frumpication”) action group AI! Amsterdam, who this summer successfully lobbied for the easing of terrace laws, has changed their logo after being threatened with legal action from the city since their original logo was a parody of the I Amsterdam city marketing campaign. Hmm so not having a sense of humour is good for the city brand?

These are complicated times we live in. It was all much simpler back in the 1970s. To entice more people to visit Amsterdam all you had to do was put out some posters cajoling long-haired American targets to “Fly KLM, sleep in the Vondelpark”. Word of mouth did the rest.

And then there was the tourist board’s Get In Touch With The Dutch campaign during the 1960s. This one just gets me all misty-eyed; those must have truly been the most innocent of times.

And for the last few years, it’s been I amsterdam. I can imagine it can work to help attract tourists and business. I only start seeing red when it peddles the delusional idea that it also works to unify regular Amsterdammers. It’s as if the local government actually believes that culture is not a grassroots phenomena but rather something that can be shoved down our throats from the top down.

OK, it’s easy to criticise. Marketing a city can’t be easy. I certainly can’t come up with anything better. “Ich bin ein Amsterdammertje” would probably generate the same confusion and controversy as JFK’s grammatical gaffe, “Ich bin ein Berliner”. And “Handy Airport. Lotsa Coffeeshops”, while appealing to both the business- and leisure-minded, lacks a certain elegance.

I think I’d just opt for golden oldies like ‘Amsterdamned’ or ‘Amsterdamaged’. I regard these lines as way more effective ambassadors. After all, the visiting dope smokers of today may just hold our city’s future in their hands. I figure it was mostly sentimental ex-hippies who invested in this city during the booming 1990s. They figured it would be a good excuse to come and visit a few times a year, and maybe recreate certain perfect relaxed coffeeshop moments from decades past. (And these investments got the city thinking that they could get even more by coming up with that era’s ho-hum city marketing ploys — “Gateway to Europe”  and “Capital of Inspiration” — that resulted in the building of lots of new office space that today stands largely empty…).

Anyway… it was short-sighted to force Ai! Amsterdam to change their logo. The city is losing a perfect co-branding opportunity with a group that is both grassroots and community-driven.

A Cesspool of Corruption

The Truth About Amsterdam, RE: Bill O\’Reilly loves Amsterdam

It’s nice when quality propaganda goes viral.