The fine artiste Aquil Copier, friend and cherished ex-Weekly collegue, has just started a pamphlet about painting: PRESENTeert.
Track down a copy (he’ll even send you one…) and check it out.
I interviewed the artist Pieter Paul Pothoven who has just returned from the caves of Afghanistan where he visited the mines supplying the Lapis Lazuli that formed the basis for Vermeer’s blue. What a story! And a story I will probably post here once the hard copies run out…
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 Schroeder 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 Groenemeyer 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 Doner 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!
My piece about the new museums in Belgium dedicated to surrealist Rene Magritte and Tintin-creator Herge has been published in today’s Globe&Mail. Read it here before rushing out to buy a bowler hat of your own.
