The Compost Heap

On our way to Berlin from Prague, we stopped for lunch of wurst and beer in Dresden. As in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” “so it goes.” Much of the reconstruction of the city, once called the most beautiful in Germany, has been completed. The original architectural plans, some dating from the twelfth-century, had been moved for safekeeping in 1943 and were used in the reconstruction that’s been going on now for almost sixty years. Some of what’s been accomplished  is mind-numbing in its beauty. But wait, let me describe that divine sausage and beer lunch we had from an outdoor vendor.

It was dark when we reached Berlin. It must be hard to get bad food in much of Europe. Going out blindly on a Sunday night, we stumbled upon a café-restaurant, that proved more than adequate. My wife however, ordered a pork knuckle, something that turned out to be as unappetizing to her as it was challenging to manipulate. The red pickled cabbage that accompanied my excellent schnitzel will remain forever in my memory.

Despite having served in Germany as a draftee in the mid fifties, I remained trapped in the wartime mentality of my childhood. I never met a German that I didn’t begin doing the arithmetic, calculating the person’s age and zeroing in on the unasked question; where had this person been and what had they done, 1933 -1945?  This trip, going into the Germany of 2007, has largely banished those fading ghosts. The WW II generation, our “Greatest,” however their’s is remembered, is quickly disappearing. On any German street, I was among the more senior passers-by. The people I encountered had no more to do with what happened then than I did or young people anywhere. It is vital to maintain an honest historical consciousness, and not forget what happened, but also to let the rest of it go. An aside, Hitler, it was reported, disliked Berlin, believing the city and its people insufficiently zealous in their embrace of him and the regime. Continue reading ‘Fourth of Four Cities: Berlin’

A current Top Ten of my late night listening:

Is That You                                 Buddy Miller

Sam Stone                                   John Prine

Emaline                                       Benny Goodman

Hot Blood                                    Lucinda Williams

Sun Touches Down                     The Twin Atlas

Start A War                                  The National

Days Have Gone By…                  Andrew Stanglen

Mam’selle                                    The Four Freshman

Bye Bye Bad Man                         The Stone Roses

Missing                                        Everything But The Girl

If you are anything like me, and can’t quite remember the last time you had your car washed, you may have found yourself stopped at a traffic light next to a vehicle not only larger than yours, but one that is sparklingly clean, shining and flashing as H. L. Mencken might have put it, “like the gates of hell itself.” 

You look at it and realize that it’s not an SUV; it’s a pickup truck. But it’s a pickup truck that looks nothing like a working truck. In truth, it looks much more like one of those Tonka toy trucks you might have bought for one of your kids years ago. And maybe like me, you begin to think, hey what’s going on here? 

Then you start noticing them everywhere - Pickup trucks, new, shiny, pimped out in lots of expensive chrome after-market goodies. Many of them sporting assertive stickers on their back-windows and bumpers; NFL and NHL teams logos, Harley-Davidson logos, almost always, high-testosterone markers. And worse, those aggressively patriotic messages, the ones that imply that if you don’t entirely share their support for whatever war is in progress you are probably some limp-wristed, commie Jane Fonda lover.

But the most common indicator of a toy truck, of a vehicle the existence of which seems to serve solely to enhance the macho, if delusional self-image of its owner, is its cleanliness. These pampered iron horses look to have never seen a hard day’s work, or for that matter any form of real work that might, heaven forbid, dirty the bed, mar the finish or even get the tires muddy. If it’s a truck, but never does the work of a truck, what then other than ego gratification could be the purpose of its existence?

I look at the guys in the cabs and I wonder; wannbe tough guys, real tough guys but insecure, or is it maybe like the Pete Townsend observation about guys preening; it’s usually for other guys, because women are rarely impressed by this kind of posturing.

Remember to keep your eyes on the road. Check it out for yourself. Count the big, high-end pickup trucks, waxed and shining, cleaner than clean. Then just imagine yourself at the wheel of one of these babies, in the command position, high above those effete guys in sedans, coupes or even SUVs. Imagine how you might be able to drop your voice a couple of octaves, how you could add a swagger to your gait when dismounting. Maybe you’d even be a bit taller. Maybe somebody might mistake you for a real cowboy.  

Our hotel in Prague, The Diplomat, though very good, was located far from the center of town, but just steps from a subway station. Nothing like riding public transportation to give you a sense of place. Coming to Prague from Vienna, there had been a lunch stop at a highway service area just inside the Czech border, and a fine lunch it was, complete with a large draft of Pilsner Urquelle, the national beer of the Republic. As in Hungary, we were no longer on the Euro, but both Hungary and the Czech Republic are scheduled to join the Euro zone.

We had signed up for a group dinner and a night at the opera; there are neither Marx Brothers nor Marxists left in Prague. Back on the bus through heavy traffic for dinner at the Opera Restaurant, and then a few steps to the Prague State Opera House for a performance of Bizet’s Carmen. The sets were dramatic and ingenious, and the orchestra and company seemed, to my untrained ear, more than up to the task. There were three of us seated in a box for six, all quite upscale in an old worldly way. Unfortunately during the Habanera, I suffered a violent leg cramp and began knocking over empty chairs in my efforts to escape the pain in my calf.

The first morning in Prague, like the first mornings in each of the cities on our trip, was given over to a guided tour, which we did the first day in each city, a good way for first-time visitors to get bearings in a strange town. Prague Castle, another contribution to my sense of architectural overload, is the center of government and is protected by unsmiling, but unserious-looking Czech soldiers in baby blue, comic opera uniforms. Continue reading ‘Third of Four Cities: Prague’

To eat in a restaurant was an extraordinary and memorable event when I was growing up in the nineteen-forties. With my parents trying to get on their feet financially after my father’s illness, every penny of every spending decision was thoroughly weighed and gravely pondered. Eating out didn’t enter the equation. However, every July during my father’s vacation when the mill shut down for two weeks, the rules might be relaxed, just a little. On our way home from one of our day trips, a cruise down the Delaware River on the Wilson Line to Riverview Beach Park, we stopped on the sidewalk between Second and Third on Market Street.

In the orange light of a summer sunset, my younger brother and I watched as our parents became engaged in earnest discussion, sorting out the serious issues regarding the expenditure of the price of a restaurant meal for the four of us. My father’s argument for the celebratory moment finally prevailed over my mother’s worried doubts about any spending that wasn’t absolutely necessary. My brother and I were directed through a set of big metal and glass revolving doors into the chilly air-conditioned splendor of a Horn and Hardart Automat/Cafeteria restaurant.

Even now, after years of sophisticated and not-so-sophisticated eating out, I always get some a rush of excitement upon entering a restaurant. The idea of sitting down and ordering anything you want from a menu remains one my life’s joyous little luxuries, one I associate with those and happy occasions like our post Riverview Beach dinner at Horn and Hardart’s.

 “You can have whatever you want,” my mother told my brother and me. I stood with my brown bakelite tray resting on the chrome rails of the serving line, paralyzed by the range of choices. I froze and stammered “uh, uh, uh…”  My brother had begun ordering right at the start of the offerings. The server had already put two knockwursts, an order of fried bacon, baked beans, and cole slaw on my brother’s tray before my mother could intervene. “Mother of God! That’s it. You’ll never eat all that.” My brother looked stunned. He hadn’t understood the rules of fine dining. You could have anything you wanted. You couldn’t have everything. Continue reading ‘A Horn and Hardart Moment’

Several years ago, I attended a local college workshop titled “drawing and story-telling.” I was drawn, no pun, to the event because the visiting instructor was Ben Katchor, the creator of what Michael Chabon has called the last great American comic strip, “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer.”

A decade or so before, I had stumbled upon Katchor’s strip featuring a real estate photographer, who despite always appearing with a camera case hanging around his neck, never seems to take a photograph. The weekly strip was appearing in a throw-away paper that I would pick up on my lunch hour. Rendered idiosyncratically in ink and ink washes, and set in a nameless city in an unstated year that could only be a long-lost New York City in an imagined nineteen forties, the flow of each cryptic episode is carried by a combination of omniscient narrative text boxes positioned above the dialogue balloons of the characters. And the characters, whose ethnicity, like their time and place also goes unnoted, could never be anything but Jewish. Katchor’s own context, as he put it, was a childhood spent in a Yiddish speaking household with communist parents.

The Wikipedia entry for the strip describes the title character as a “downtrodden schlep who wanders the streets taking pictures (I don’t know about that) and being sidetracked into surreal escapades. Strips often depict Knipl’s chance encounters with obscure, marginal businesses (e.g. a company that distributes newspaper weights to newsstands), eccentric hobbyists, and enigmatic details of the urban landscape. There is rarely continuity between the strips, and Knipl is the only recurring character.”

In an affectionate introduction the 1996 collection of the Julius Knipl Stories, Michael Chabon catches the gentle sadness of the Knipl project. Chabon writes that “Katchor carefully devises a seemingly endless series of regrets in the heart of Knipl, for things not only gone and rapidly disappearing, such as paper straws and television aerials, but also wholly imaginary: the Vitaloper, the Directory of the Alimentary Canal, and tapeworm sanctuaries.” My own favorites include: “public mustard fountains and the Stasis Day Parades.” And there’s Mr. Knipl’s daily paper, the “Eternal Edition of The Evening Combinator,” with headlines like “Nudist Colony Discovered in Synagogue” and ads for “Mortal Coil Mattresses.” Continue reading ‘Homage to Julius Knipl’

The photo to the left is the grade I call “the big one.” Two years ago, skating a longboard skateboard back up that deceptively mild slope, I miscalculated and found myself seriously manhandled by the surface of that otherwise benign looking street.

If you are careful, judicious and use some common sense, riding a longboard skateboard is not all that difficult. But those qualities could be considered absent in the very act of a person my age, a certified social-security recipient, even thinking of mounting a board. But so far, I’ve yet to fall while actually riding. All five of my inadvertent contacts with the paving have come while trying to skate the board, that is, pushing or kicking it forward along on flat ground, or on returning back up a hill.

In the process of skating or propelling the board, the slightest loss of concentration or loss of balance, and you are off the board and into a free fall. You fly and then you land. Unlike surfing or even snowboarding, when you land, it’s onto an unforgiving surface, blacktop or worse, concrete. To minimize the potentially catastrophic consequences inherent in such an occurrence, I take on the appearance of the Michelin Man; a foam-lined plastic helmet, hard-shell elbow and knee-pads and wrist guards. After my first two falls, both of which were backwards falls, I purchased a roller hockey girdle, that’s a pair of heavily padded long-legged, hi-rise pants complete with a tailbone-protecting strip of foam padding.

My last spill, the one that pretty much kept me from riding for almost two years, was a first, a fall forward, a pitch out over the front of the board as I was executing the third stride of a push back uphill. This was after a particularly graceful high-speed descent of what I define as a moderately steep and curving, deserted residential street. I sensed something not quite right with my second stride, a subtle awareness of an infinitesimal shift in balance, the realization of which came as I was well into my third thrust or stride. What was essentially a minutely minor flaw in technique escalated in a fraction of a millisecond into a major malfunction. My mind flashed a frantic “Mayday! Mayday.” Too late, too late for adjustments, too late to compensate, I was airborne. In a cliché of slow motion replay reels, I could see and understood precisely what was happening, but I was powerless to do anything but ride out the fall. Continue reading ‘A Literal Fall From Grace’

From the window of the tour bus between Budapest and Vienna, the Hungarian countryside had a vague strangeness to it. Open farmland broken by the occasional tree line, by distant red-roofed villages, the larger towns marked by dreary Soviet era concrete apartment blocks. The landscape itself seemed oddly different, the greens, just a bit grayed and muted.

Once across the border into Austria, the windmills appeared, hundreds and hundreds of gigantic hi-tech windmills, all facing east into the prevailing winds that blow from the not-so-distant steppes. It was once written of Vienna that Asia began on the Landstrasse, a street on the city’s eastern suburbs. Our guide told us that Austria is one of the world’s leaders in the production of wind driven electricity.

The hotel wasn’t ready for us, and we stopped for lunch, decent, at a large railroad station on the outskirts of the city. We were now on the Euro and the prices were at least comparable to those in the states. The first thing I picked up on was that the people generally were much better dressed than those in Hungary. Once in the city itself, the contrasts with Budapest were even sharper. No graffiti, no trash, and again a prosperous looking crowd. The cars were now large, almost as large as those in the states, many of them high-end Mercedes and BMWs, and most were relatively new.

With still a bit of time to kill, we walked the grounds of The Belvedere, the 18^th century palace built by Prince Eugene of Savoy, a general from Italy who saved the Hapsburg empire from the Turks. Interestingly enough, one of Nazi Germany’s WW II heavy cruisers was named the Printz Eugen, in honor of the Italian who is Austria’s national hero. The magnificent Belvedere, built to rival Versailles, appears to be another case of  Hapsburgs trying to keep up with Bourbons. Continue reading ‘The Second Of Four Cities: Vienna’

When you’ve found yourself standing in the light of revealed truth, every detail of that instant, every sight, sound, smell, what your were wearing, the weather, all of it, is yours forever. In the unlikeliest of settings, the cloud of life’s confusions can lift, if ever so slightly, but enough. And no matter the years, it will remain with you as if it had occurred this very morning.

Over a half-century ago, I stood as ordered, in the at-ease position, with two hundred of my fellow field artillery trainees, my hands atop each other at the base of my spine. I felt anything but at ease. Again, something had gone wrong or gone badly, and in the usual military way, we were, all of us, somehow guilty. The winter afternoon was raw and overcast. I was at an isolated army post in northwestern Arkansas. I was eighteen years old. 

On a low wall in front of us, flanked by his senior NCOs, stood our battery commander, an officer, unapproachable, to us almost a god. A tough guy, not as young as me, but young, a no-nonsense second lieutenant, roaring at us, telling us what “a sorry bunch of assholes” he believed us to be. It was damp and cold, and we had been outside all day doing the repetitive, mind-numbing gun drills known to us as the “cannoneer boogie.” During noon chow, which we ate from metal mess kits while standing beside the guns, it began raining and it rained just long enough to add an asterisk to our misery. I had begun to forget what it was like to be outdoors without the big mud-caked, metal-buckled rubber overshoes that covered my combat boots.

Lieutenant Olson had a slight speech impediment, but most of us knew instinctively that it was something to stay away from. Lieutenant Olson cultivated an image that he was nobody to fuck with. The few barracks room Elmer Fudd imitations drew more anxieties than laughs. I had decided to take Lieutenant Olson at his word. The rumors and stories about our fearsome, but less than esteemed, leader had begun churning from our first days on post as artillery gun-crew trainees. Continue reading ‘Military History, Chapter Two, 1956′

When we found out that we’d be flying to Europe on Czech Airlines, my wife remarked that she wasn’t aware the Czech’s had an airplane. In reality, it’s a good-sized and crisply run operation.

We flew into Prague and transferred to Budapest. Forty plus years of East-Bloc incompetence have left a mark on what we saw of Hungary. Almost two decades after the fall of the Communism, the Hungarians still have some catching up to do. 

If you listen closely enough to tour guides, you can catch some inadvertent revelations. In Spain last year, on a tour of Madrid, the guide continuously referred to the Civil War era Nationalists as the “fascists.” In Budapest, our moonlighting school-teacher guide made several references to the distasteful extravagances and flashy Mercedes’of the new rich, free-market capitalists, wistfully recalling a more egalitarian Hungary. 

Our introduction to the city was a well-conducted, guided boat tour on the Danube, which on that day and in that city was anything but blue. Budapest, despite the slovenly maintenance of public spaces, graffiti and uncollected trash, has a lively flair in a beautiful setting. The really old buildings, mostly 18^th century, combine with the turn of the century (19^th to 20^th) streets to create the effect of a mildly sinister 1940s Carol Reed movie set. There’s a bouyant café culture, pre-war trams and an ornate subway system as old almost as those of New York and London. 

A friend of a friend, a Hungarian émigré historian, recommended a Budapest restaurant named Gundel, and on our last night in town, we did it. The place has been in business since 1896 and works hard to replicate the dining experience of those times. I felt like Ralph Kramden imitating a Hapsburg Count. Our evening at Gundel was one of the most elegant outings I’ve ever experienced; garden dining, exquisite service, over-the top food and a Hungarian string ensemble complete with a cimbalom (the Hungarian version of a  hammered dulcimer). It was also among the more expensive restaurants in Hungary. The tab matched anything a trendy Manhattan joint could have laid down. It was our extravagant gesture of the trip, and worth the price. And as we left the restaurant, a major fireworks show began in the park just across the street. We watched from under the trees and across moonlit water.

Continue reading ‘The First of Four Cities: Budapest’