Today is Walrus Day. (Oh Happy Day!) Walrus Day is a holiday invented by a friend of a friend. And it’s purpose? On Walrus Day you do exactly what it is you’ve been wanting to do the whole year but haven’t gotten around to. Call in sick and lay in bed reading all day! Learn how to screen print! Eat pancakes until you explode! Have a spontaneous dance party! Excessively use exclamation points!
Of course, you could do all of these things any old day of the year, but the point is, most of us don’t. So there’s Walrus Day to give us the kick in the ass we need to get started right this very second. Today, the world is your walrus. I’m going to go get all the non-genetically modified seeds I can find, because I hear that shit is going to hit the fan next week, and I’d rather not have to loot the plant store after the end of the world.
If you’re not sure what to do with your walrus day, I’d recommend starting by watching this beautiful music video of one of my favorite people in the universe. Tata.
This just in: This year, there’s a new candidate up for the position of Satan! That’s right folks! Buy Round Up, and place your vote for the new dark lord today!
Expat German-stereotype legend has it that Germans like laws and bureaucracy almost as much as they like beer. And they like beer a lot.
So what do you get when you add a love for rules and stark efficiency with a love for a substance known for breaking down inhibitions, order, and law? You get the Reinheitsgebot, or the German Beer Purity Laws.
Lo weary readers! I apologize for my extended absence. Lately I’ve been trading in the click clacks for travels and music and improbable coincidences. I spent five weeks in America, another week in Holland, and somehow just survived organizing a weekend-long festival to celebrate Haus Mainusch’s 20th birthday. But the winter is a’coming and so are more writings. I’ve decided to make my America travel stories into a paper and ink zine, which will (hopefully fingers and eyes crossed) be finished in the next month. The following is an excerpt. I realize it’s bleak. I realize there are probably some nice things in New York City. I like a lot a of people who live there. But this is how I felt when I was there. Let me know if you’d like a copy of the zine when it’s finished.
-Click-
New York City is a monster. A filthy, soulless monster, stretching its tentacles further and further each year, out through Queens, Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx.
Once a Dutch settlement, once the country’s capital, home to tenements and concrete palaces, industrial and financial meccas, those two pesky towers…a set for beggars, losers, artists, dreamers, and scammers to act out their own search for The American Dream, for Opportunity, Fortune, Fame, Inspiration, Excitement, Good Drugs and A Good Lay.
New York City is a corpse drawing people into its rotting folds like so many maggots and flies, parasites hoping to extract the last drops of blood from it’s cracking concrete flesh, people, unaware that the hype, the lights, the heaving pulsing draw are noxious, unaware that in the end, it will be the city that draws their blood and leaves them empty and wilting, tired and tense, and grinding their teeth through waking nightmares.
But artificial as its prosthetic pulse, New York City is alive. Alive the way that zombies are alive. Its skin splayed with concrete, pocked with glass boils and soaring steel sores. Its hot, piss-sprayed bowels rattle with ancient, moody trains. The trains themselves filled with empty-eyed creatures, already zombies themselves, plugged into iPods and iPhones and iFriends and iLives, all anxious to avoid the unpleasant present and arrive in a hypothetical future, always just out of view.
The people still come—rubber neckers—fascinated by the obscenity: something to do every single night, a different bar or club or restaurant or shop for every day of the millennium. The spectacle of overindulgence, the illusion of endless potential, fascinating and poisonous like a spider you admire through glass but would rather not have to touch.
This is what I see when I step off the train. This is what I see, more and more acutely, each day I spend here. It‘s getting to me already; I‘m grinding my teeth. I have to get the fuck out of here, I think every morning, I have to get the fuck out as soon as fucking possible.
I swear to myself I’ll never come here again.
The monsters we create will come for us. I don’t want to be around when New York comes for you.
Up until 3 the night before at the Ablärm/Icos/Discarga show at Mainusch, nervous as fuck, chain smoking, babbling about the places I’d be seeing in the next five weeks, trying to explain how far away from Baltimore Chicago and Colorado really are, taking requests for presents.
We got up at 7:30, and I hastily repacked my bag, hoping the wagon-chaos wouldn’t reclaim any of my things before I got them back into my little gray backpack. Then a coffee, a train ride, goodbyes, and off into the labyrinth of airport waiting rooms.
Airports are a strange perversion of purgatory, the people in them herded like cattle from one holding pen to the next, and finally into an enormous metal tube, floating thousands of feet above the earth (44, 387 feet right this very second, the screen on the far wall tells me). Time spent in planes remains outside of time and between it. The place you’ve left fades slowly into the stratosphere, while the place you are going doesn’t yet exist outside of your imagination. We are nowhere, and it is now.
On the first leg of my trip—from Frankfurt to Rome—there is a camera crew who appear to be filming some sort of wedding reality television show. The cast switch between Italian and German, and I, startled at the sight of the bright lights and cameras a few rows in front of me, think for the thousandth time about how little reality television has to do with reality. Then I think about how little this trip seems to have to do with reality, and I go back to sewing up the hole in my skirt. Handcrafts are calming, I hear.
The second leg of the trip—from Rome to New York City—is quiet: a tasteless vegan meal, several failed attempts to kill time with one of ten equally bland and mindless movies, a few hours sleep, a few chapters of Rant by Chuck Pala-Nobody-Knows-How-to-Pronounce-Your Damn-Name-Anyway-hniuk, the time between spent fruitlessly spent trying to imagine how it will feel to step off the plane in New York.
At customs I rush past the baggage claim—I’ve only brought a carry-on—and on through customs.
“What is the purpose of your trip?” The bored-looking man behind the desk asks me.
“Visiting my family,” I tell him. I can feel my skin beginning to glow with excitement. I am really here. Holy shit, I’m really here. This is surreal. Am I dreaming? Am I really here? Holy holy shit.
“Visiting family in Rome?” he asks skeptically.
“No, no,” I say quickly, pointing to the line on the entry form that lists country of residence, “I live in Germany. I’m in the States to visit my family.” He looks at my passport, then at me, and nods.
“Alright, then, have a nice trip.”
I rush out the last set of doors, and into New York.
“Americans are always afraid of coming home,” said Karabekian, “with good reason, may I say.” “They used to have good reason,” said Beatrice, “but not anymore. The past has been rendered harmless. I would tell any wandering American now, ‘Of course you can go home again, and as often as you please. It’s just a motel.’” Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
“Coming home.” Home. Home? It’s a word I no longer associate with America. America stopped being capital “H” home after I’d been away for over a year. After my friends and family scattered themselves across the country making trip planning complicated and visiting everyone I’d like to see impossible. Once I started thinking of it as that far away place across the sea where the letters and emails come from and where there’s no good bread.
Coming home. Home is where the heart is? Home is where I hang my hat? No, no. For nomadic gorillas, home is in the eyes and arms of the people called friends, even when those friends are living in cities we’ve never visited in apartments we’ve never seen with flat mates and friends we’ve never met. It means no matter where I am, home is always nearby. It also means that no matter where I am, there’s always someone that I miss.
Afraid of coming home? Yes. Excited? Yes yes yes. Cartwheel-excited, trembling-nervous, drunk-giddy, by night having nightmares about missing my flight because I never am quite sure what day it is, by day obsessively trying to imagine what it will feel like to get out of a plane in New York City after two years sans visit. Will there be rolling tobacco anywhere? Will there be good bread? Will I accidentally open a beer on the street out of habit? Will I be allowed to smoke anywhere? Will my friends recognize me? Will I recognize them? Has the past really been rendered harmless?
“I’m leaving for America soon!” I’ve been chirping at friends all week.
They smile and ask me about where I’ll be going and what I’ll do while I’m there. Not many people I know have been to the states themselves, so I draw maps of my travel plans in the dirt. “Ok, so if that stone is New York, then this one is Baltimore. And see that stick over there? That’s Chicago, and that tree over there is Colorado. Saratoga is over there above the stone that’s New York.”
Nods, then sometimes, a nervous smile: “But you’re coming back, right?”
“Yeah, I’ll be back. I already have my return ticket, I get back into Frankfurt at the end of July.”
At first I hadn’t realized he’d spoken to me in English. He had a thick Indian accent, a pink polo shirt, and awkward looking khakis that topped white Reebok’s.
“Yeah, it is,” I replied, briefly rubbing the letters on my wrist with my left forefinger.
“Is it old?”
I shrugged. “Maybe five, six years. Something like that.” The math between now and my junior year in college has become too complicated for bank-line conversation.
“Oh, well, that’s probably good because you know many diseases can be transmitted in this way.”
On a top-five list of strange things that people have said to me in my lifetime, I’d have to say that a stranger telling me (ever so politely!) that I probably have an infectious disease rates just under “Can I photograph your feet?” and “The bags under your eyes looks so beautiful when you smile.” And I thought I was socially awkward.
I frowned. “Why are you telling me this?” What possesses a person to choose infectious diseases as a topic for bank-line small talk with strangers? Was he screening me for a date? Did he have a bottle of spray disinfectant in his bag ready to disarm me? Are there other people who ask strangers this question? Are there people who like it?
I waited for an explanation, but my tone had disarmed him; apparently he didn’t know why he had asked that either. When the teller called him up to the counter he scuttled away from me, relieved.
The Dresdner Bank is a strange place. The kind of place that always leaves me with the uncomfortable feeling that I’ve just had an encounter with a strange and highly illogical alien race.
When I first opened my account I had just come from teaching, and I suppose in my black turtleneck dress I must have looked respectable. The teller was friendly and polite; I suppose as far as she knew I was a rich American heiress here to flit through Frankfurt’s cosmopolitan nightlife drinking cosmos and flirting with wealthy businessmen.
But one night at the atm in ripped fishnets, boots, and a patched and fraying hoodie, three business people—two men and a women in long black dress coats and shiny black shoes—came in behind me and started to laugh. I turned to see what they were laughing at. Oh. They’re laughing at me. Laughing and pointing. I looked at them in disbelief. They continued to laugh. Perhaps on their planet anyone dressed in ripped clothing couldn’t possibly have a job, let alone an account at the same snotty institution that safe-guarded their money and managed their investments. I shoved my money into my wallet and headed out into the night feeling like I’d just had a close encounter of the third kind.
Later, in my teacher disguise again, and with a lost atm card, tellers at several branches gave me cash without asking for any ID at all, once when I didn’t even have my account number with me. Several weeks later, this time in a dirty t-shirt and cut off shorts, a teller in Mainz refused to give me cash because, according to her, American driver’s licenses are not a valid form of identification. Picture or not. Wallet full of other picture IDs, credit cards, library cards, frequent buyer cards or not. No, I’m very sorry, but unless the person who is in charge of your account knows you personally and approves the withdraw, I can’t help you.
Can someone please explain to me why I need to have anything to do with a company that treats me differently depending on how I am dressed? Bank account what? Fuck it, from here on out it’s hidden compartments and pirate chests for me.
I suppose in high-security, anti-chaos, pro-status-quo circles it’s common sense, but it came to me as a surprise. In Germany (and presumably everywhere where there are corporations cutting down trees and activists who prefer clean air and environmental stability to corporate profit), there is a special police force that is trained to deal with the removal of activists from trees.
Imagine that. “So what do you do?” “Oh, well, I specialize in removing dirty hippies from treehouses.” “Ummm, right. And how’s that working out for you?” Dirty work, any way you look at it.
While I was living in Dresden, activists squatted a several-hundred-year-old tree in one last attempt to stop the construction of a very ugly multi-lane bridge over a very beautiful, untouched stretch of river. Under the name of Robin Wood—an environmental activist collective—a group of people squatted the tree itself, housing several activists on a makeshift platform and populating the grounds below. The activist-tree-removal-special-police’s first attempt at removing the tree dwellers was unsuccessful due to the hundreds of protesters gathered below, but by and by public interest dwindled, and eventually the police were able to move their equipment close enough to remove the pesky tree huggers by force. The tree is long since cut, and bridge construction has begun.
Capitalism: 9,876,458,700, Activists: 0. Once again. (Insert loud collective, cynical sigh of disillusioned discontent here.)
Last night the flyers came in: the Kelsterbach Forest has been squatted. Kelsterbach—a small town on the Main west of Frankfurt— was, until recently, the finding place of Europe’s earliest anatomically modern humans through the discovery of a Cro-Magnum skull dubbed “the Lady from Kelsterbach.” What you can’t find out on wikipedia, eh?!
Now, due to the VERY highly intelligent decisions of the Lady from Kelsterbach’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great (and so on) grandchildren, the forest is due to be clearcut to make way for an additional runway and terminal for the Frankfurt Airport. Good job Fraport. Old Mama Kelsterbach would be glad to know that you’re doing such a swimming job blindly prioritizing your over-blown monopoly game over the well-being of the environment which makes your lives possible. Not to mention the quality of life for the people already living in the area. Here here. Crack the champagne. We’re going to need more than a few bottles before we start feeling good about this one.
This isn’t the first time Fraport has had to deal with protests against proposed expansion. In the 80s thousands, yes, thousands(!), of people occupied the Flörsheim Forest in an attempt to hinder the Startbahn West expansion project. A small city sprung up in the forest and lasted for approximately two years before it was finally, permenantly cleared. The protests—the largest of which is said to have included upwards of 10,000 protestors—culminated in the usual black blocks, police-activist clashes, rubber bullets, water canons and all the other demonstration banalities we’ve all come to know and love. The squatted city was forcibly evicted, and construction of Startbahn West was completed in 1984.
When I first heard about the latest expansion project, I used it as a debate topic in my advanced English classes. “It’s good for the economy,” one Postbank employee told our class. Most of the other students nodded in agreement. “And what about the pollution?” I prodded. It’s easy to play devil’s advocate when you already disagree. “And all of the people whose homes are going to shake with the roar of landing planes every ten minutes?” They made intelligent arguments against expansion, but, except for one student who had been involved with the protests, each argument ended with a shrug of defeat and apathy.
Fraport says that the new runway is good for the entire region. (Oh business people. They never seem to tire of that line.) Not only is the expansion good, they claim, it’s completely unavoidable. Written in the stars even. Bitteschön.
In their own words, “…demand for takeoff and landing slots at Frankfurt is strong. For this reason alone, rapid expansion of our airport is essential. In addition, air traffic will continue to grow. If FRA is to maintain its present significance in world air transportation, there is no alternative to the planned capacity expansion.” There’s demand! If we don’t expand Munich will, and we’ll lose our reputation as Germany’s biggest, bestest, fastest airport! We will create 100,000 new minimum wage jobs! Well yipee-ki-yi-yeah, doesn’t that sound like just what we need.
As for the environmental harm expansion will inevitably cause, well, Fraport has a quippy little answer for that one too:
“The operation of a major airport is inevitably associated with environmental burdens. Our company’s goal is strongly to reduce such burdens. Our environmental management system has been validated against the world’s most stringent standard, EMAS (Eco-Management and Audit Scheme)and, beyond meeting the legal and official requirements, achieves far more in terms of environmental conservation. This commitment has meanwhile also been publicly recognized: The “Institute for Market – Environment – Society” in Hanover and the “Ethical Investment Research Service” in London both rate Fraport AG’s environmental management as exceptionally good. Such ratings are important, above all, to portfolio managers who decide on the acquisition of Fraport shares.
Protecting the environment while expanding means for us to minimize all burdens such as noise, loss of natural land and air pollution.”
They say it clearly enough themselves: “such ratings are important, above all, to portfolio managers who decide on the acquisition of Fraport shares.” Implied: such ratings are not important to those whose backyards will be cut or poisoned by plane exhaust. To those whose houses will rattle as planes approach overhead. Mine already does. I imagine it sounds something like it sounded just before your house got bombed in World War II. I hate to break it to you Fraport, but when you are sitting in a shaking house, when you have to stop conversations to wait for the noise form a passing plane to die down, those environmental certificates you have don’t mean shit. I’m pretty sure they don’t mean shit to the melting ice caps either, but I suppose you’d like to be able to sleep nights, huh?
The Kelsterbach tree squatters hope to be able to hold out against Fraport, the police, and the government long enough to force Fraport to back down. A proxy for Mayor Ockel visited the site on the first day of occupation and announced that the occupation would be tolerated until June 1. June 1 being a Sunday, eviction will probably begin in earnest tomorrow (June 2).
If you’d like to help, the Kelsterbachers are seeking donations of wood, polypropylene rope (10mm and 14mm), (vegan) groceries, tools, paper, and office materials. If you read this in time, you can stop by today (June 1st) for coffee and cake and find out more yourself. Donations can be transfered to the “Spendung and Aktion” account number 92881806 at the Volksbank Mittelhessen (BLZ 513 900 00), Subject: Waldbesetzung.
Forest telephone: 0175 833 59 58. Email: waldbesetzung (AT) riseup (DOT) net. Directions: The squatted trees are near the huts in the Kelsterbach forest. Drive to Kelsterbach, follow the b43 (Rüsselsheimer Straße) and turn onto the K152 (Okrifteler Straße). At the first parking lot (Mönchwaldsee) go through the forest.
Word on the street is that Click Clack Gorilla is writing a travel guide. It’s about Germany. Having recently escaped near financial ruin at the hands of a sinister, yet (conveniently) easily flustered ticket controller, I am posting a piece of the section on (free)riding the German rails in celebration. Here here. Break out the champagne already.
die Bahn
Schwarzfahren—in literal English, “riding black,” or, in English English, the practice of riding public transportation without a ticket—carries two risks: getting thrown out of the train in a potentially inconvenient place and/or a 40€ fine. Urban legend has it that schwarzfahren is statistically proven to be the smartest financial option. I don’t make this shit up. The people on the news do. Having done a little math I reckon it’s true. But it all depends on the train.
RE (regional), IC (Intercity), and ICE (Intercity Express) trains are checked uncomfortably thoroughly and often. It is not impossible to ride these trains without a ticket, but requires a high level of concentration, creativity, or the patience to lock yourself in a small hot bathroom for hours at a time. One variation: Purchase the sort of ticket that allows you five trips across Germany dress like a businessperson, and see if you can’t sleep through the entire ride without being shaken awake by a ticket-checking conductor. As long as no date is recorded on the ticket, it can be used again. Buying tickets to cheaper destinations that lie along your route is also rumored to be effective.
Public transportation companies within German cities employ plainclothes men and women to conduct random ticket checks. (The conductors on REs and ICEs wear blue uniforms and snappy little hats.) Possible signs that you are trapped in a car with one of them: He remains standing as the train starts in preparation for beginning the check, she is carrying what looks like a portable credit card machine, or she is with a uniformed railway security duder, recognizable by his own snappy little red tam. They tend to come in twos and there tends to be something about them that just doesn’t look quite right. But maybe that’s just urban schwarzfahrer’s legend. If you see a snappy little tam though, don’t panic. Most of these in are false alarms—duders waiting for a ticket checker in another car or doing security duty. Each city has its “hot” routes and times. Learn them, heed them, and get the fuck off the train if you smell a rat. Multiple offenses can lead to much higher fines and harsher penalties. If you pay with cash, they won’t record your name, and no one will be counting, so if you can afford it, consider keeping a 40 tucked into your wallet. Or there’s always that fake ID you used in high school to buy 40s, but don’t come crying to me when you get arrested for falsifying documents.
Signs within the train cars will attempt to guilt you into seeing your failure to purchase a ticket as a grave social offense and before the train system was privatized, I might have agreed. You, being an American taught to like the taste of corporate cum and to despise all social programs as communist propaganda, will be immune to their social guilt. Consider buying a ticket once in a while to appease the direct action cods, and your own guilt at having refused to pay your share of an already underpaid driver’s salary. Also consider the thoughts of your travel companions. There is a certain breed of Germans—fuck it there is a certain breed of people—who have a general tendency to take corpor-ehem-I mean social responsibility and abiding by the rules rather seriously.
If asked for a ticket there are several approaches you can take to attempt to avoid the fine. There is the Oh Shit I’m a Slow Witted Tourist from Am-eer-e-ca approach. There is the I’m an Exchange Student Just Starting (note: the new semester usually begins in October and March) and I Don’t Have My Student ID Yet (students ride local transport for free) maneuver. There is the Ticket From Earlier in the Day tactic (tickets are usually only valid for two hours, but some employees are not detail-oriented and look only at the date and not the time). There is the Quickly Flashed Ticket From Yesterday scam. And if you’re dressed right, there is the slightly more involved Oh My God I’m SO Scatter-Brained Can You Believe It I Lost My Ticket Oh Dear Look at These Tears of Sorrow Shining in My Eyes (I’d Like to Thank the Academy) double whammy get out of jail free card. Or you could just run. Most Bahn employees have big Bahn bellies, and most will take you off of the train, right out into freedom, in order to collect your information.
