The Thin White Duke was Here

I was the first person in line for the Beck show at Columbiahalle. Other German hipsters may boast, may have the lie tattooed across their biceps. But it was I, standing on the kerb, ticket in hand, who was uncool enough to show up two hours before the bouncers did. It had been years since I'd attended a concert where you actually had to buy tickets beforehand, so I'd grown accustomed to waltzing through the doors in an altered state midway through the third opener, sidling up with whomever I knew at the bar and slugging my way to the front after the lights had dimmed. But this was Beck and this was Berlin: I erred on the anal side and showed up three hours before the doors opened. I had to ask a wino whether I was at the right place. Then it started to rain, so I ducked into a nearby pub whose clientele reminded me of American war vets, though they were probably just retired Krautrock scenesters. I sat and ate a pickle and langenscheidted my way through Die Andere Seite and waited for the rain to stop.

When I returned to Columbiahalle, I was no longer the first person in line. There was a German girl with Beck pins covering both lapels of her frockcoat and a Spaniard wearing the Beck t-shirt that I had left at home.

"So, ehh, you guys like Beck much?" I asked.
As they talked about Him, their eyes glazed over in a way that mine did not. But like all music buffs, I nurtured the belief that they didn't appreciate Beck the way I did, and like the rest, I was probably right about that.

The bouncer let us in and we pressed as far forward as the guardrails allowed. We sent the Spaniard out for drinks and we sat injun-style on the floor and waited.

There may have been an opening act, but I have no memory of it. I remember Beck walking out on stage - already some Germans were chanting "Loser" - and I was surprised to see him sporting his Loser-era locks, his Mellow Gold shades, and the sneer to match.

It was an underwhelming show, or perhaps it was just me who was underwhelmed. I hadn't slept in a fortnight and after a month in Berlin, my body was turning to Nutella and currywurst. I remember little about the concert, just that Beck was surly and anhedonic, that I was dissecting the performance too much to enjoy it, and that the German girl in the frockcoat had fallen in love with me, but I dissected her to bits and so lost her to an autistic Swede. The whole night would have been a wash if a German graphic designer hadn't adopted me after the show and paid for me to dance at the rockabilly club until the sun came up over Kreuzberg.

A week later, Radiohead came to town. This was, for me, the mother of all shows; was, in fact, the reason I had allowed myself to linger in Berlin for so long. The night before the concert, I tried to get a good night's sleep, and so I stayed up 'til five. I tried to get geared up in the hours before kickoff, and so I found myself listless and lifeless as I slipped through the turnstile.

There was an opener, the much-hyped Modeselektor. I was able to cut through the crowd with unexpected ease, so I was close enough to the stage that Jonny Greenwood's hair was whipping me in the face. And yet I can't say I enjoyed the show. They played songs - i.e. all of them - that always put me in a visionary trance when I listen to them at home on my oversized headphones, but there, live and in the moment, I couldn't build an enthusiasm that wasn't false. In truth, I wanted to go home and see what Ben was up to.

Through incredibly dumb luck, I scored a free ticket to see R.E.M. the following week. I figured that expectations were at the root of my rock show impotence, that perhaps a band whose lyrics weren't already tattooed across my cortex might stir me out of my slumber. And R.E.M. did, but not as much as I'd led myself to expect. I'd never heard "Electrolite" before, which remains a staple on any mixes I make for girls. And Michael Stipe was lively and carefree on stage, as Michael Stipes are wont to be. But as the drunken hordes pushed through the black forest towards the nearest U-Bahn station, I was haunted by the suspicion that I had missed something.

I was crashing in Schöneberg at the time, which is where David Bowie lived while he was recording the Berlin Trilogy. Twice I set out to find his old digs, where one imagines the Thin White Duke lavishing himself with a spongebath in a porcelain tub overflowing with Nutella and cocaine. On my first expedition, I walked in the complete opposite direction and found myself merging onto the autobahn. The second time, I grew confused by the apartment numbers and gave up, settling instead for a döner kebab and a Franziskaner for the road.

And then my cash ran out and I was ejected from Germany like a bad organ. I wasn't disappointed, not exactly. I had expected Berlin - and at least two of those performances - to transform me. And in some way they had. Everything always transforms you. But the moment has a way of eluding me. The attempt to measure the moment renders the moment, like the electron, nonexistent: a smear in time and space. The moment only becomes a moment after the moment has passed, often years and years later.

If I am to be honest with myself, and to my readership (who will judge me), the only rock show I ever enjoyed the way a rock show should be enjoyed was the Counting Crows concert I saw when I was sixteen. It was my first show. For me, the electric guitar was a recent discovery. I remember standing in a garage with one of my cronies as he plugged his amp into the wall. There was a screech of feedback, then the unexpected power of the non-chord he strummed, the disproportionate relationship between the sheer volume generated and the 106-pound nerd who had so amateurishly generated it. The electric guitar, for me, was the first great equalizer between brawn and intellect, though I would discover others as I went along in life.

At that young age, live music thrilled me. It wasn't something to be dissected or inspected for quality. The sound of a savage beat on a thrift store trap set was enough to set my legs joggling against their caucasian will. And so the Counting Crows show was a spiritual experience for me, though I would cringe and probably vomit to see something like it now. Adam Duritz - I believe he was wearing pleather pants - tightroped along a stack of amplifiers with his arms outstretched and his head thrown back in an unabashed Christ imitation. The band broke into seemingly impromptu interludes in which Duritz sang what was glossolalia to me then, though I know now that they were just Byrds lyrics. And on the drive home, there was no debate as to whether what we had just seen was three hours of contrived bullshit: we knew the mind of God and were content to say "Wow" over and over again. We were also buzzing to be in a car - a 1992 Plymouth Acclaim - driving back on the interstate from a rock show in Iowa with no adult supervision. It is hard to tell whether the enthusiasm of youth is misguided, or whether it is more pure than anything we will ever experience again.

There were other good shows, of course. I saw The Fiery Furnaces four years ago and I appreciated the performance several months later, though I struggled to understand it in the moment. Devendra Banhart came to Omaha a while back with his band of sleepy-eyed beards, and he suspended us between sleep and waking for two wonderful hours. I saw Low once and the Sokol Underground was unusually sepulchral for the occasion: nobody spoke, and people shooshed you when you did. We were hyped up on something, laughing way too much, and Will was acting goofy, so we removed ourselves from the show before it got too sublime. I have seen Bright Eyes on three occasions. The first time, Conor was so hopped up on quaaludes that he smashed his guitar midway through the second song. The other two shows were in Council Bluffs, and though they were four years apart, I found myself in the same predicament: drinking with Will, about to leave my main squeeze for the weird, wild East. Strangely, perhaps cruelly, life functions like a broken elevator and, despite an infinity of other possibilities, will deliver you to the same floor several times in a row: step in, please - sixth floor - women's hats and coats, lingerie and perfume - step in, please ...

The Stink

Before I plunge too deeply into the Mexican chapter of my life, it is necessary for me to digress a bit and describe to my faithful viewers my living conditions in the great city of Berlin. I will draw heavily from the journal I kept during that time and embellish where necessary. My intent is not to slander my former roommate, Ben Pham, who persists living in those conditions somehow. But it is important for me to reconstruct those days of squalor so I can figure out how it is I wound up here – working close to sixty hours a week for five hundred bucks a month – and how the hell I survived for so long in Germany, working six hours a week and blowing five hundred Euros a minute.

So, we will pick things up on the 4th of July, in the present tense:

July 4th, 2008
We live in squalor. Ben's room is big enough for two grown men to live in, provided they took the time to erect some kind of partition, but we have not. The room is segmented into sovereign zones of garbage. My territory includes the deflated air mattress that I no longer sleep on and the heap of musty blankets on the floor that I curl up into these days, as well as a sinister black bag that contains six months of unwashed laundry. Ben has an actual mattress, an empty bookshelf, and several islands of dirty clothes and Assorted Shit that dot the floor like a Micronesia of filth. Thankfully, he has disposed of the lime green nylon mesh tube where he used to stash his dirty laundry. It dangled from the Chinese lantern in the ceiling and the fusion of light and stink attracted the fruit flies in droves.

There is a frameless mirror leaning up against one wall, like a portal to another equally disgusting dimension where all the crap on the floor is reversed. There is a constant droning, as though someone is drilling into cement, that seems to come from one of the neighboring apartments but assails us from all sides. There is a long hardwood desk where Ben and I do our paperwork. The desk is cluttered with triple-folded visa applications, US passports, the phone numbers of people who might be able to bail us out of jams, half-eaten foil-wrapped bricks of chocolate, a webcam that Ben hasn't used once since I got here, and scattered bits of plastic. Curled up on the empty chair next to me is the bike lock that I bought Ben for eight Euros at the flea market. He hasn't used that, either.

The place is so sloppy that I can't tell if it's getting better or worse, whether I am having a positive or negative impact on the apartment's overall level of entropy. The kitchen floor seems to be getting progressively stickier. It is impossible to ignore the fruit flies. Perhaps they stowed away in my luggage and followed me over from Poland. Or perhaps they have been here all along and I just didn't notice them when I arrived. Fruit flies become more noticeable as you go along. The Stink works the opposite way. You notice The Stink the first time you enter a room and notice it less and less every day thereafter, until the only people who smell it are those unfortunate souls who come into your room, or the people who are buying your drinks, because by then, The Stink is on you.

I'm thinking about leaving the country again. I'm approaching the possibility of life in Berlin like a starved wolf circling a visibly diseased carcass. Surviving here seems financially doable, but it only appears that way because I am not yet trying to make a living in Berlin. I am just a loafer and hobo-speculator at the moment, so I must be leaving a lot of things out of the equation. I can sit here and say, "$200 for rent. $200 for food. $200 for language school. I need $600 a month and fuck the rest." But there are always intangibles, and not just the ones people usually cite – unplanned medical disasters, travel expenses, taxes, apartment repairs – but also the True Intangibles, like Where the Hell Did it All Go? Those intangibles are multiplied twofold-and-rising by the flaccid dollar. So although the Berlin Bohemeslebens seems possible on the most abstract bohemian paper, in reality working a lot and coming home sweaty and depressed to our crumb-strewn apartment might not be so great for my psyche. It would be much easier to volunteer at an Italian winery. I would have my daily work. My host farmers would feed me three times a day and take me to the hospital if I started squirting chyme from my pores. I could stay there through the winter without having to buy any new clothes. And by the time the Peace Corps summoned me back to Blade Runner USA for my cough-and-turn, I would fly home with 500 bucks in the bank, all suntanned and lithe from months of Mediterranean cuisine and romantic farm labor.

I need to shut down this computer. Staying inside is driving me mad. I'm going to kidnap Ben and take him out for a ridiculous night in the Valley of the Turkish Whores.

That was July 4th. At that point in time, Ben and I were still going out on the town. Our credit hadn't yet crunched. Today I had planned on writing a pretentious rant about teaching the present continuous tense, but for our purposes, I think it would be better for me to continue regurgitating Berlin stories until I am fresh out of them. Then the pretentious rants will continue.

Hasta más tarde,
- Karate Keith

Carnies.

Teaching in Korea is a carnival game. The object of the game is to teach children, seven or eight classes a day, five or six days a week, armed with Not The Best Resources In The World, with no time to sculpt those resources into a distracting never mind educational form, you must improvise; your students have already been in school for ten hours and they have cell phones and their cell phones have games and the kids are fairly ADD as it is; when you're not in school you're outside where the air smells like pitsweat and the water causes hallucinations and the beer turns your brain to petrified wood, and the Korean suburbanites hound you like a C-list celebrity, and your toilet clogs, and the music sucks, and the restaurant next door has gone and dumped clams in your front lawn and clams are not a mollusk that smells better with age, and your toilet clogs, and the music sucks, and every morning the grape vendor comes megaphoning down the block at 8 o'clock sharp, and amidst all this Seinfeldian angst, the cruelest of all cruel Teaching In Korea ironies comes Hammer-dancing into your mind: everywhere you go you will attract attention (stares, leers, gawks; giggles, titters, guffaws) but not at school, i.e. the one place you want people to pay attention to you is precisely the one place where you vanish, fade, become invisible, cease to exist - and it. is. maddening.

So, good luck. A whole year, 365 days. If you survive, you win. If not, _______. The carny eggs you on. You'll never make it, he says, pansy. But he underestimates the shit you can put up with. He doesn't know that you've survived core-level theology classes at a Jesuit University, that you've worked at a non-figurative zoo, that you've spent a week living out of a Dunkin' Donuts in Berlin, that for four months you proofread catalogues in the Oriental Trading Company's Really Dark Basement Where the Dreams of Liberal Arts Majors Go To Die, i.e. you've been through some shit, or just enough petty shit to know that life is just that: going through shit. So the clouds begin to part around month ten when it starts looking like you're going to make it. The carny is rattled and starts throwing out jabs that go beyond mere gamesmanship, talking shit about your haircut, throwing bottlecaps at your head, flirting with your lady friend and that. You keep going, the days keep falling. You're on pace not only to win but to win big, one of those top-shelf stuffed frogs that weighs more than a human corpse. But in the face of triumph you begin to wonder whether this slithery carny is really a man of his word, whether someone who conducts such a corrupt racket with such compunctionless ease can be trusted to deliver the goods even if you win the carnival game fair and square, whether you oughtn't to have avoided the game in the first place and just held onto your money and stayed home and just I don't know and -

and that's where I stand. Whether the metaphor has a happy ending depends on the next 55 days, whether I am handed certain envelopes, whether I am still sane enough to understand what those envelopes are for.

Global Hobos: A Cross-Cultural Examination of Effective Salesman(or woman)ship.

Krakow, Poland:
The Krakowian hobo scene thrives on the predominantly Catholic population's sympathy for the meek, ragged, leprous, etc. In Stare Miasto during peak hobo hours, you will find no fewer than eleven middle-aged hoboes spasming behind their aluminum walkers. Taped on the front of each of their walkers is the same laminated bilingual sign that reads (in 72-point Times New Roman font), "Please give me to the money" and "Szrzczrzczsz rzcz rzczrzczłić." These Polish hoboes are afflicted by a rare form of Parkinson's Disease, whose body-convulsing symptoms vanish the instant the hobo's palm nerves make contact with a fistful of loose złoty.

Chicago, Illinois:
Is it any wonder that this festering bastion of diversity is home to the most paradoxical hoboes in the world? Chicago plays host to the sort of hobo who makes you shine his shoes, who is a Boeing executive making 2.3 million a year, who will toss you a quarter for doing nothing.

Daegu, South Korea:
Like much of the local non-hobo population, the Daeguian hobo is an entrepreneur first, an alcoholic second, and a Level 32 Dwarf Priest in World of Warcraft. He coasts about downtown, lying chest-down on a four-wheeled wooden scooter, the kind you used for roller dodgeball in 3rd grade P.E. class. His lower half is swathed in a tarp of black rubber, mermaid-style. Whether or not there are legs underneath the tarp is a topic of some interest to Korean young adults aged 13 to 16 who are on their first dates. On his cart, each hobo carries a small boombox capable of blasting, at 120 decibels, the most sorrowful Korean waltzes you ever did hear. There are eight of these men downtown at any given time and one imagines they are equipped with GPS equipment so as to not infringe on another hobo's rolling grounds.

Minneapolis, Minnesota:
Notoriously picky hoboes. Whimsical. Eccentric. Capricious. They ask you for 37 cents and if you don't have exact change, they walk away.

Berlin, Germany:
The Berlin Hobo (German: der Berlinerhobo) is among the most enterprising and talented in the former Holy Russian Empire. An accordion virtuoso, a prolific caricaturist, a juggler of flaming crucifixes, and a public urinator extraordinaire, der Berlinerhobo often gets so wrapped up in his performance that he forgets to ask you for change. But he will find you some days later, even if you have since left the country or continent.

Omaha, Nebraska:
The Omahobo is Walt Whitman, Kofi Annan, and a wet paper bag full of cigarette butts and bottlecaps all rolled into one. He will tell you a woeful tale of marital estrangement and high seas hijinks on the River Mississippi; he will talk politics, at once impressing you as right-wing and left-wing without touching anywhere in between; he will perform a magic trick in which he spontaneously materializes some treasured artifact from your early childhood. And then, he will ask you if you've got a buck, "cause [he] wanna get laid out tonight and it already [nine] o'clock." As you walk away, the thing that impresses you most is his honesty, and his smell.

So glad to be a slab.

It's my third month in Korea.

The BBC hordes have been nipping at my heels this year. I was in Krakow for The Pope, I was in Berlin for the World Cup, and now I'm in Korea for the apocalypse. Call me Forrest Gump. And yet I've scarcely written a word about any of it. I'm not sure why, exactly. When I'm not at work getting ddong chimmed by Korean 4th graders, I'm brooding on how I will recount my travels to my cybernetic great-grandchildren of the future, whether I will narrate each episode in past or present tense, which digressions I will make, the length of said digressions, whether to omit sordid details for posterity ... but my misadventures, like this afternoon's kimchi, need time (probably several years) to be digested.

I will say - in highly general and mostly vague terms - that my travels have been rendered surreal by the sheer ubiquity of western shit. I feel very much like ... what's his name? ... Tartuffe? Voltaire? ... ah! - Candide! ... what with all the zany coincidences, the recurring themes, the lopping-off-of-ass-cheeks and all. Certain corporate logos have a way of running to your aid when you are at your most defeated, when a Berliner has jacked your luggage and an unprecedented late-May blizzard descends upon you; when your posh British roommates have locked you out of the flat and spending the night on a Krakowian park bench becomes a real (although not splendidly enticing) possibility; when you've just missed your connecting flight home and pause briefly to consider whether you (as a man) could sell yourself for a profit. But when all seems utterly and unrefundably lost, cutting through the frenzied squall of binge-shopping Asians, you spy those doughy electric letters - "DUNKIN DONUTS" - and rising above the consonant cacophony of a Polish Catholic anti-gay march, those glistening, golden buns - "BURGER KING" - and at the train station at the end of the earth, where there is nothing but a slab of rusty concrete and the tombstone-colored sky, where the wolves stand to come before the train ever does, just over your shoulder is a Starbucks, selling grande frappucino latés for half the gross domestic product of wherever it is you've ended up.

I climbed my first non-metaphorical mountain not too long ago. Here is a picture.



Nothing is impossible, just prohibitively time-consuming.

-Keith

Der Zahnstocher

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Robbed

I am back in Krakow, 120 pounds lighter. Some Scheisskopf in Berlin stole all my clothes and personal thoughts. So it goes.

My bag contained:

everything I wasn't wearing at the time
a tube of toothpaste
a toothbrush
some dental floss
a bottle of shampoo
a bar of soap
a bottle of one-a-day vitamins
four notebooks full of writing
Being and Time by Heidegger

I'm not sure what he's going to do with all of that junk. Sit around in my underwear reading Being and Time, probably. At least Scheisskopf won't be making any money. The only person in the world who would pay him for all that shit is me.

But I'm zen about it. It's a fresh start. I've bought some thrift store button-fly jeans that are too tight and an argyle sweater that is too big and a snowboarding t-shirt that I hate wearing. All and all, I look like a circa 1984 Krakowian snowboarding bureaucrat. I am undergoing Polefication. I brush my teeth with myrrh-flavored toothpaste and wash my hair in goat tallow. Maybe I'll even start going to church. When in Poland, do as the Roman Catholics do.

They even want my chitterlings!

Provided I don't snap in my next lesson and start bellowing "Deutschland Über Alles" as I goosestep up and down the aisles, I will pass my CELTA course tomorrow and leave Krakow the day after. I'm anxious to get out of here. Krakow has been kind to me, but I am ready to step onto a train and go someplace else, to drink coffee and brood on my own for a few days without the company of a stumbling gaggle of British lechers.

Thursday morning, I am taking the train to Berlin. I might stay the night there. Over the weekend, I have a job interview in Darmstadt. It is possible that I will be living there. Then again, a lot of things are possible now that were just a daydream yesterday.