My Missed
Chance at a Pulitzer Prize
04/06/08
I’m trying to figure this out: National Public Radio had a report last week on the Pulizer Prizes for this year. The Washington Post got six, one for its piece by Gene Weingarten about an experiment by the violinist Joshua Bell, the star musician playing in a Washington, D.C. metro station in January 2007. I read the article; it gets very pseudo-philosophical, twisting the ‘if a tree falls in the middle of a forest and nobody is there to witeness it, does it make a noise anyways’ question into ‘if Joshua Bell plays the violin beautifully at L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station during rush hour for an hour, but masquerading as a Joe Shmoe street musician, will anyone notice him anyways?’
The same question, with Josh Bell’s name replaced by ‘a great violinist’ was posed to Leonard Slatkin, the director of the National Symphony. He rambled on and on about how, even if no-one would notice the musician as ‘a personality’, his greatness as an ‘excellent musician’ would be seen and that alone would draw a crowd of listeners. When asked how much the violinist would make for an hour’s worth of busking, Slatkin said ‘About $150.’
Well, guess what? Josh Bell only earned $32.17 for his efforts, giving up after 43 minutes. Only one person noticed him, a government official who had been at a concert that Bell had given at the Library of Congress three weeks earlier. This woman, who handed him a $20 afterwards (not part of the $32.17, as the twenty was ‘tainted by recognition’) was supposedly appaled that people were only ‘flipping quarters’ into his violin case. ‘Omigosh!’ she supposedly said, ‘What kind of city do I live in that this could happen!’
Josh Bell himself reported that it was one of the few times he ever experienced stage fright. He was supposedly grateful when someone threw a dollar or two into his case, and was taken aback by the eerie emptiness of his surroundings after he had finished a piece of music. In other words, there was no thunderous applause for Mr. Bell here, just the sound of hundreds of government officials rushing off to their jobs.
But what I don’t get is this: Mr. Weingarten of the Washington Post went on and on about this ‘grand experiment’ as if Joshua Bell had done something really daring, like signing up for a expedition to the Artic Circle and play for polar bears as an attempt to save them from global warming.
Sorry, Gene, but this is not Pulitzer Prize material.
After all, your violinist took a taxi three blocks from his hotel to the station to protect his Stradivarius. If you really want it to earn the Pulitzer, then make Josh spend an entire month or two earning his living from being a street musician. Let him report his experiences, and make the book into a report like Barbara Eherenreich’s ‘Nickel and Dimed- Undercover in Low-wage USA.’ That would interest me, because that’s what I went through for the entire summer of ‘95 before I started playing with the Akademie- earning my keep as a street musician.
I was still living in Basel back then, and it was a point in my life where everything just seemed to be going wrong. The baroque orchestra in Zurich I had been playing with and was concertmaster of had pretty much kicked me out, my audition for the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra had failed miserably, and my audition to study at the Conservatory in the Hague had also failed, being told that I was ‘too good of a violinist to have to study anymore.’ Furthermore, my only firm anchor back then, teaching English at a language school was suddenly questionable since my student visa for Switzerland was soon to expire. All of this left me to wake up one sunny June day in a panic, realizing that my life was like peering into a huge black hole with neither work nor a future.
After about a week of agonizing over what I was going to do, I took a hard look at my Marchetti, and said to it ‘You and I are going to go to work in the streets of Basel- I’m going to be a street musician this summer, and you’re coming along for the ride.’ One thing was clear to me, despite whatever was going to happen, I had to earn some money now, somehow.
So the next day I found myself walking with my $50,000 violin down to the pedestrian zone of Basel, hoping that nobody would notice me. I even had a quick alibi ready if someone I knew did: ‘Oh, I just have a concert I’m getting ready for, and I thought this would be a good way to do it.’ Now its weird, because when back stage before a concert, waiting to go on, everything is so routine now that I’ve come to trust that pre-concert tension over the years. But when I was walking down that street to the point I had mentally chosen, a fountain where the three pedestrain streets intersected (now probably the perfect the location for a Starbucks)- part of me was screaming inside to turn around immediately and stop this nonsense. And, as I stood in front of the fountain and opened my violin case I felt as if I was one of those Japanese businessmen, who, in training to become a manager are commanded by their superiors to walk into a crowded street in their underwear and start singing Japanese nursery songs very loudly.
Well, maybe not so extreme as that. Oddly enough, I started out with the same music as Joshua Bell did, Bach’s Chaconne from the D minor Partita for solo violin, and as I drew the first chords out from my Marchetti, I felt how strange it was for me to slip out of my anonymity to immediately become someone who passers by couldn’t help but notice. The first few minutes were extremely turbulent, as if I had to first force my way through some kind of invisible wall to make myself noticed. As I felt my violin as too loud and too rough in my ear and yet too small to cut through the noise, a delivery van stopped three meters away from me, its warning signal beeping away in another tempo as it backed up. All the while people were rushing by, somtimes glaring at me, somtimes deliberately looking away.
But just as things seemed to be unbearable, and I was ready to give up, a sense of inner calm suddenly took over, everything went into autopilot, and I became focused again. I could feel my fingers and bow dancing across the strings, and the loudness of the sound under my ear had stopped, as too the perception of the commotion all around me. Within a few minutes the first coin was thrown into my case, a Dutch Guilder presented by a tourist who first held out the coin into my nose, grinning at me all the time while asking if I wanted it. Somehow, I managed to nod a ‘Yes’ back without derailing the arpeggio passage of the Chaconne, and he dropped the coin into my case, giving me the thumbs up before walking away. I was elated.
I played for about an hour and a half that day, collecting about 40 Swiss Francs, or about thirty Dollars, which, not bad for an hour’s worth of work in the 1990’s. Now at this point of the story Joshua Bell was able to pack up and walk away from the scene of the crime. After a taxi ride back, Bell could consider in the comfort of his hotel room all of his thoughts going though his head during those moments, including his biggest fear of ‘What if they don’t like me? What if they resent my presence…’ Here, the Washington Post grandly comments about Bell’s L’Enfant Plaza performance as ‘art without a frame,’ peering into Kant’s ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgement’ to support the argument, and then over to the 19th Century French sociologist Alexis de Toqueville’s comment about how we Americans are just too busy Americans are to appreciate life. Add a quick reference to ‘Koyaanisquatsi’, the 1982 film about the frenetic speed of modern life, and you’ve got the makings of a Pulitzer Prize .
It’s all so very poetic, almost like T.S. Eliot. By the way, is that Chardonnay cool enough to drink yet, Josh?
After my first hour, I had no time for poetry. I had to go on. Unable to afford a tram ticket, I walked back to my one room, sixteen square meter apartment, and counted the change I had collected.
I made it my goal to earn about forty francs each day. It sounds like like a fairly easy job, and Joshua thinks so at least. ‘I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn’t have to pay an agent,’ he reported. However, in truth it wasn’t so easy. As the weeks progressed, the interest had quickly dissipated and the daily prospect of going over to the fountain to play hung over me like a dark cloud. There were of course the passers-by who seemd to like my playing, but by the end of the second week I had seemed to have witnessed everything: Japanese tourists having their pictures taken next to me, dogs snarling at me while being forcibly pulled back by their owners, shopkeepers rudely telling me to play somewhere else, an unexpected rain shower that sent me running for cover, and a jealous boyfriend who told me to get lost with my ‘Scheiss-violin.’ He said his girlfriend had been listening to me all week- didn’t I notice that? Well, of course I had seen her- she was very pretty, slim, with short dark hair, and she had smiled to me several times when we made eye contact. However she always seemed to always disappear into the crowd whenever I finished playing, so I was at a loss about what to do or say. Now I knew why. She never appeared again after He-Man put a stop to things.
What I liked the best was playing for children, if only because I could feel just how much they had their parents in control. They also seemed to really like the music, especially Bach. You could see this light of amazed wonder in their eyes as they stood there looking up at me, unflinching and oblivious to their parent’s pleas to move on. ‘Martin! Come!’ their parents would call out in dulled desperation. ‘We have to go on! There’s an ice cream waiting for you, but only if we go now! Martin! Did you hear? Ice Cream!’ But often the bribe didn’t work. Martin knew he was going to get ice cream anyways, and first he was just going to stand here for the next five minutes and listen to me. That of course was embarrassing for the parents, who ultimately ended up diging into their pockets to let little Martin drop a coin or two into my case. Thanks, kid.
But perhaps my most bizarre experience was when one time an older Swiss woman wearing a heavy fur coat (it was summertime) shuffled by me with her lap dog. I was standing in front of a window of a jewelery store, playing, and suddenly became obvious that I must have been blocking this woman’s view of something she really wanted to see. Because, all of the sudden she looked at me with an expression of absolute hate, mumbled something to herself, and then started to push my violin case away with her cane so that she could ‘move in’ and get a better view of just whatever it was in that display window behind me. She then just stood there, inches away from me, somehow oblivious of my presence and oblivious of her dog’s frantic yapping while sniffing my feet. Then, after a few minutes she went into the store, coming out once again with a sales woman. Soon they both were standing next to me as if I was invisible, looking into the display window. ‘That one, the one with the gold and silver twist for 4000 Francs?’ yelled the sales woman over my playing. ‘Ja ja! That’s it!’ cried the older woman back. My bow was dangerously close to her eyes, and one accidental swoop from either me or her could have blinded her. It really didn’t matter either, because I saw that I ‘didn’t exist’ in her eyes, and that fact depressed me terribly, especially since I knew that probably the woman was going just to open her purse in the store and just pull out four 1000 Franc notes to pay for whatever she wanted- and unlike for me, money was no matter for her. At that point I started to realize that enough was enough, and that I simply wanted to return back to the normal world without this struggle anymore.
Fortunately, I got a call from the Akademie a few weeks later, asking me to play in August. It was almost out of the blue, that call, but it was like a release from the time I had served on the streets. Still, what I had learned from those weeks, even if I didn’t like it sometimes, was incredibly valuable for me as a musician. Because there, unlike on stage, I realized that people only listen if you have something to really say, something to express. Otherwise you are just an annoyance.
As for Joshua Bell, it was his talent that did save him in the end. Little did he know that Edna Souza, a Brazilian shoe shine lady who was working on the other side of the L’Enfant Plaza station, had the number of the Metro Security programmed into her mobile phone for such cases. ‘He was too loud,’ she said, but: ‘He he was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn’t call the police.’
Thank You for the Music
04/06/08
Again and again I am amazed at just how far the ring tone of a mobile telephone can carry in a concert hall.
For example, about a year after the Sasha Waltz/Akamus premiere of Dido and Aeneas we were doing a production of the opera in the Staatsoper in Berlin. We had just gotten to the end of the tearful finale ‘With Drooping Wings’, all waiting for Belinda to light the eternal flames of remember Dido's tragedy when suddenly the silence of the dramatic finale was rudely cut off by cell version of Beethoven’s ‘für Elise’. If the person is truly ashamed by the interruption, as most are, they will go do everything possible to quickly switch the telephone off and minimize the distraction. However, once or twice I've been astonished at how some people seem to be so proud of their incoming call that they just stand up in the middle of the performance and answer their phone. 'Si?’ a well dressed businessman in Lisbon loudly barked into his telephone as he pushed his way through the audience to go outside- I guess it wasn’t enough for him that his phone had let all two thousand sitting there know that he had something better to do than listen to a boring ol’ Akamus concert. I mean, if only he had a mute or pause button for the orchestra on his telephone, he could have just simply turned us off and taken the call at his leisure. And when he was ready to continue, he could have just pressed the play button to let the concert go on. Someday it will probably be like that anyways.
But I have my own ‘handy’ story (don't ask me why, but the Germans call their cell phones ‘Handys’.) Way back, when cell phones doubled as clubs to whack people in the head, my work as a freelance violinist was starting to pick up and I bought a ‘Handy’ to keep in touch with the world while on the road. It was a really ugly clunker, but I was pretty proud of it and carried it around with me everywhere, waiting for ‘the big call’ to come in. Most of the time it was only my girlfriend, who took my voicemail greeting when the phone was off as a personal insult to her right to reach me at all times. ‘What about ME?’ she would sob, ‘I thought you bought this telephone so that I could call you! Why is it off now? Just who are you with?’ It was my price for ‘mobility’, and because of her incessant calling I probably would have ultimately thrown the phone away had it not been for the fact that I did get other calls too.
However, being new to mobile phones, I always forgot to turn it off, probably the main reason why my phone is almost always off now- I still forget. Soon after getting the phone, I was a guest with the Freiburger Barockorchester for a concert of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and forgetting that I even had it with me, my telephone barged its way through with its own version of ‘Spring’ just as the rehearsal was about to start. I rushed over, red faced, and Golle, the soloist and ever the clown, took it lightly and grinned, miming his bow over his violin as if to say ‘Look at me, ma, no hands!’ The other Freiburgers were not as amused, and I was swiftly reminded that it would be perhaps better if my 'handy' just stayed off for the rest of the rehearsal.
I was more careful afterwards, and after the embarrassment of the ‘Spring’ tone, I had returned my melody to the refrain of ABBA’s ‘Thank You for the Music.’ Remember when being able to program in your own ‘personal ring melody’ was the height of mobile telephone technology? Well, I had made this ‘my’ tune; I hated the song, but I had programmed it in as a joke because of my next door neighbor in The Hague. A forty something bachelor, my neighbor was probably one of ABBA's last groupie, and every evening at six I would be serenaded with for an hour, starting with 'Waterloo' and ending with 'Thank You for the Music'. And if my neighbor was in an especially good mood he would play the CD twice. It was simply unbearable.
But back to the Freiburgers. On the evening of the concert I was trying to get in touch with my girlfriend beforehand, just to let her know that I would try to call her afterwards. Unfortunately the line was continuously busy, and after trying twice ten minutes later I gave up, thinking that she was probably talking to ‘Mama’ in Rome. Just as I was about to leave the telephone in my violin case one of the Freiburgers swept breathlessly through the backstage area. ‘The place has a history of theft,’ she explained, rushing to grab her purse from her violin case. ‘But we have to get on stage now- just take everything.’ Everyone else scrambled about to get their wallets and handbags and I ran back to my case, grabbed my telephone, and stuffed it into the inside pocket of my concert tails. We walked on stage, bowed and without any further ado, began to play Vivaldi's Four Seasons- it was then that I realized I had forgotten to switch my telephone off.
Worse, the chances of my girlfriend calling back were pretty good, because our fax machine at home always displayed the telephone number of unsuccessful incoming calls. Seeing my cell phone number posted three times on the display was all she needed to see in order for her to press the 'return call' option. 'Oh God, help me.' I thought to myself as I felt my body break out in a cold sweat. Over and over again I cringed at the worst case scenario- the Freiburgers, all swaying together in perfect musical harmony, would come to a gorgeous moment in the Vivaldi, and just as Gottfried von der Goltz would dig down into one of his solos, ABBA's ’ Thank you for the music would blare through the hall seating two thousand people to announce that my girlfriend had called back. The concert would be denounced by critics as a failure, I would be thrown out of the orchestra, and my career would end up back at the Buffalo Greyhound Bus Terminal as a homeless street musician, playing Bach for a cheap bottle of Blatz Beer. 'Wanna hear my Chaconne?' I would say to waiting passengers with a wide toothless grin.
Unfortunately the phone was lodged so deep down in the pocket of my tails that it was impossible to dig down and turn it off. So struggling and hoping to high heaven that nothing would happen, I stumbled through the first half, ready to jump out of my concert tails when it did. I also saw how the others were smiling at me, oblivious to my panic and weakly I tried to smile back, but was I far too concentrated on the coming disaster to 'be there' during the concert. Somehow however I had luck, and when the finale of the Winter Concerto was broken by applause, I felt my body scream 'Get me out of here!' as I rushed off the stage as quickly as possible. 'What's the matter with you, are you not feeling well?' one of the orchestra memebers called out to me from behind. 'No, no!' I shouted back. 'I... er... just have to go to the bathroom!'
It was just then when my telephone rang. As I expected, it was my girlfriend, and she was terribly upset. 'Erik!' she wailed. 'You tried calling me, and I wanted to call you back but- oh! Its so terrible!' She sobbed and sobbed into the telephone. ‘What is it?’ 'Bujo, my little Bujo! He's dead! What will I ever do! ' Bujo was her German shepherd back at home. When we had attended her sister’s wedding in Rome the dog had tried to bite me several times, and needless to say I didn't find the dog's death so tragic, especially as I still had the second half of the concert ahead of me. ‘Um, listen, I'm sorry, but I'm in the middle of a concert. Can I get back to you later?' She was livid. 'Stronzo!' she screamed back, 'You know what your problem is? You never want to talk to me when its really important!’ Suddenly she was shouting so loudly through the telephone that the other Freiburgers suddenly turned around and looked at me. 'Why can't you be there for me when I really need you! You and your stupid telephone! Go ahead and play your stupid concert! See if I care!' She went on and on, and I pulled the telephone away from my hear, realizing that I was doomed. The others around me just stared at it with the sound of the screaming voice. 'Is that your girlfriend?' one asked me. 'Uh... yeah,' I answered. 'Wow- she sounds pretty angry at you.'
Somehow I got her off. I rushed to my violin case, turned off the telephone and put it back in the violin case and snapped the case shut. If someone wanted my telephone, they could take it- and the angry voice barking into it too.
POSTSCRIPT: Several years later, Akademie did a recording of Gluck Arias with mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli. At that time she was in a 'difficult' personal relationship with her manager/boyfriend so that during the recording session we always witnessed moments 'barbed wire' verbal exchanges between the two. Supposedly they broke up during the tour that followed the recording, and when the orchestra came back everyone was buzzing about what had happened. Supposedly, after the concert in Moscow, Cecila was supposedly so incensed at how much time her boyfriend was spending on his mobile telephone that she grabbed his telephone out of his hand while he was in a middle of an 'important' call and 'deep sixed it' (translate as 'immersed') it into his full beer glass. With one swell foop, both the telephone and the relationship were effectively killed. Lesson learned: never get on the wrong side of Roman. You'll pay dearly for your mistake.
7.2 MP Berlin Diary
03/06/08
Some of you have asked where the I have been these months- if maybe your name might have fallen off my list. Well have no fear, I'll still alive, quite kicking, and with 2008 just around the corner, one of my resolutions is to turn this madness into regular series (so that we coult get at least three more diaries out of me.) Even bought two expensive ties for this occasion. I'll explain more soon in upcoming issues. In the meantime, enjoy, have a good holiday season, and I hope to be coming to you again in full swing next year.
THE 7.2 MP BERLIN DIARY
‘Where are you from?'
‘Washington D.C., but I have been living in Europe since 1990, first in Switzerland, then in Holland, and now in Berlin.’
‘Ah so, so you’re really ‘Europeanized’, aren’t you?’
‘Well, actually I just consider myself to be in exile…’
IT’S NOT the first time that I have been told that I am ‘Europeanized’; I get it from both sides of the Atlantic, like once in Bergen, after giving an American couple directions, ‘You Norwegians speak such good English- really, in fact better than some Americans!’ In Holland my attempts to speak Dutch often receive an answer in German, and in Germany I’m told that my accent is ‘charming,’ together with the question ‘Are you English?’ When they hear that I’m actually a Yank, those with chutzpah come up with this ‘Europeanized’ stuff, which I don’t know if I really like. Okay, I’m not Sig and Dottie Potembski from Buffalo who ‘saw that really neat Schweinstein castle and got the real Black Forest coocoo clock before the tour bus took them to Paris for a night before heading off to London. That’s long behind me (well, that was never in me actually…) And despite some of my colleagues amazement that I can walk by a McDonald’s without becoming sentimental, I’m still not to the point where I will succumb to my mother in law’s attempts find me ‘a good healthy pair of Birkenstocks.’ Maybe I’ll get them when I am able to fulfill my secret desire to test drive a Hummer H2 at 200 km/h on the Autobahn with California plates.
Of course I would drive it with Bio Diesel.
But I have to say that, if anything, globalization has made Europeans become pretty ‘Americanized’ since my arrival nearly eighteen years ago. It’s not just McDonald’s (they’re also ‘Europeanized’ by the way, with their modern ‘McCafé,’ complete with leather lounge chairs and wood tables.) And its not Dunkin Donuts, Wal-Mart, Burger King, Schlotzky’s Deli, Levi’s, Pizza, Subway, Eddie Bauer, Docker’s, Salomon’s Bagels, NPR, or Land’s End either, all here in Berlin. And it’s also not Starbucks- and please, you Europeans, leave my Strabucks alone! I can’t help it if we Americans have a coffee culture too and if you like it. No, its something else- something that I noticed this week while trying to accomplish a nearly impossible task, namely, trying to find a decent compact digital camera for my wife’s birthday.
Its called the attack of the aggressively friendly salesperson.
You Americans know them- the ones who stalk your every move, and make a comment about every object you pick up. The ones who, through their ‘kindness of heart’, try to force you to walk out of the store with something in your hand.
The Berliners don’t seem to have the tatics down fully, but they’re trying pretty damn hard. I was amazed, because normally when you go into a store here the salespeople just glare at you, making you feel guilty for just having left grimy fingerprints on ‘their’ items. No, what they now do is that classic ‘come up to you from behind’ tactic, and like a warm southern breeze, tell you nonchalantly:
‘That’s a great little camera you are holding in your hand. My brother just bought one last month. It’s amazing- he was on vacation in Bermuda with the thing and came back, and made posters of some of the shots. You can see every little detail.’
This week, this comment, or a variation thereof, seemed sooner or later to emerge from behind my back by a friendly salesperson. The first such comment, at Store One, was made to me by a kid who seemed to have just as many pimples on his face as the camera had pixles. Fine- he wanted me to get a Panasonic Lumix because ‘they’re such great cameras, and I bet your wife would look great with one too.’ What? Did you really say that? Can you tell me since when spec sheets include ‘looks awsome with wife’ as an option? Needles to say, I put it back, mumblng somethig about having to consider that possibility some more before purchasing such a camera.
I went to Store Two, on Alexanderplatz, to have another look. This time I got the one-two knockout to the jaw treatment by two thugs- the first one, a tall man stlyled as a Turkish John Travolta with a goatee, saw me holding the same little Lumix in my hand and said, ‘Great camera, which color do you want it in?’
‘What?’ I replied.
‘Which color do yo want it in- you know, black, blue, silver, beige?’
‘Um, I don’t know, I guess I’d take it in black but I…’
‘He wants it in black!’ he called out to his colleage, ’Do we got it in black?’ ‘Yeah- here!’ Salesperson number two, who looks almost exactly the same, except shorter, broader, and tougher, shoots a hand out with a Lumix box through the crowd over to number one, who then stuffs it into my arms. ‘There you go- you gotta buy a memory card for it now. Have a great day!’ He walks off, high fiving it with number two, and I stare at the box in my arms, dumbfounded. First I walk around a bit, deliberating about whether I should take it or not when I find myself secretly putting the box down next to the espresso machines before out. Perhaps store Number Three will provide more answers, but I have to first find a way to get past the people standing in front of the store who are offering free personality tests, compliments of the Church of Scientology. I wave their offer off and walk on.
Now store Number Three is part of a newly opened oversized shoping mall on Alexanderplatz. With the store’s motto loosely translated as ‘Ich bin doch nicht blöd’ (loosely translated as: ‘I’m not as stupid as you think’) this store is the non plus ultra of electronic outlets- four floors of digital and electronic dreams. So again I’m standing there, trying to compare the diffent models to test results I had written down in my pocket diary. Its when I am finally starting to finally make some headway that ‘the velvet voice’ comes… and oh man, does it come this time.
‘Confused, are you? Here, let me show you something’ He pulls out a little spray bottle, holds it up to a metallic orange plated Olympus and squirts a stream water onto the camera. Then he turns it on. It beeps and whirrs noisily. ‘See? You can’t do that with just any camera. This little baby takes the hard knocks of a trip and even lets you go three meters under water. Add its ‘smile detection’ its three inch display and 12 megapixels and you’ve got a real winner here. I think you’d really like it.’ Like the Cheshire Cat, he smiles into my face. This salesperson looks like that bearded guy from ABBA, except that he’s my size and I find his grin annoyingly impossible to shake off. Can’t you leave me alone, I think to myself, I just read that Olympus handhelds are crap in comparison to other brands. And I don’t need your damned ‘smile detection’ either buddy- in fact, I need a ‘smile off’ button now. Meanwhile he’s still talking, showing me a picture he’s just taken of me, and now he’s holding up a box, which is obviously his signal to me that I should take it and buy the camera. So, out of desperation, I throw a Hail Mary: instead of hunching up I try smiling back.
‘Does it go down to 28 mm? I really need that.’
The tatic works. He stops, suddenly. ‘Um, a what?’
You know, a wide angle lens. I then pick up another camera, and try flicking it on. ‘Like this one- Hey, but it doesn’t power up. Can I see it working?’
Yeah yeah yeah- wait right there, I’ll get batteries! As ABBA runs off I put the camera down and rush to make my exit. Over my shoulder I hear another salesperson say to a customer, ‘But you know, most cameras only a have a three year life expectancy anyways…although this one has five.’ I’m frankly disgusted.
And yet, still no camera, and I am about to go out of the store empty handed and dejected when I suddenly see a bin filled with those Lumix cameras I saw at Store Two, but for twenty Euros less. I pull out a box and quickly walk off with it, going upstairs to the Apple iMac counter where the salespeople won’t bother me. The camera looks pretty good, and there are recommendations from the German magazines so I decide to take it. I get a memory card and walk happily through the crowd to the checkout, relieved that the ordeal is soon to be over. Waiting, a couple in front of me looks out into nowhere as the checkout person struggles to find the barcode for a giant plasma television they are purchasing. When they are finally through and I triumphantly set the camera down. The checkout person scans it.
‘Two hundred and eighty nine Euros please.’’
I open my wallet, ready to pull out my direct debit bank card from its position. But wait, its not there. I search desperatley, but then I realize that its on the ktichen table, where I had deliberately taken it out earlier in the day to write my account number down for another bank transfer. So in desperation I whip out the MasterCard- the famous little card with that saved the Akademie once from having to sleep on the streets of London. Three years ago, the Mercure hotel didn’t recognize the orchestra’s own credit card, and when I swiped my card through, the machine liked my ten thousand dollar limit and the person in charge politely smiled at me and said, ‘Thank you Mr. Dorset for helping us out.’ I wanted that kind of service here.
Except that the woman wasn’t smiling at me now.
‘You can’t pay with that, she tells me. ‘We don’t take creit cards- we don’t have an agreement with Master Card or Visa. You can only pay with EC card, or cash.’
‘But I don’t have the EC card on me, and I only have twenty Euros in cash.’
‘Then you can’t pay for these things.’ She then swept my hard-found camera away from the counter. ‘Next please.’
I’m flabbergasted. ‘Wait,’ I cry. ‘What kind of place is this anyways- a store that doesn’t take credit cards? A simple Master Card? That’s absurd!’
‘Listen if you want to make it a problem, then we can call Security. Just leave.’
So I leave, glumly looking the camera box behind me, and at the others with their happy red bags, all bearing the same message, ‘Im not as stupid as you think.’ In that moment, I realized that I had hit one of those corners of European life I just didn’t get… And yet I looked into the worn faces of these people, exhausted from their Christmas shopping. I see that the turbo charged mass spending for which we Americans are criticized is exactly the same here. If anything, its only getting stronger, and the people here are no less vulnerable to it. The East, bound for so long under the rule of Communism, is now creating a generation that is so consumer oriented that it’s not funny. And yet, they don’t seem any happier for it. Worse, you see this generation of children who have grown up on cell phones, MTV, and Happy Meals, and what do they look like? Like fat American kids. Where’s the beef? Its now here, growing on the hips of the Europeans while their brains slowly become numbed from video games.
So I really don’t want to hear this word ‘Europeanized’. I am what I am s a person, and that takes more than being just a ‘European’ or an ‘American’.
I then trudged downstairs to Starbucks, drowning my sorrows away with a tall vanilla cappuccino while Louie Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald happily sang ‘Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!’ If only it could. One time I’d love to see Berlin in the grip of a real Buffalo winter, with soft snow that goes up to your waist, and see how the people would go about with it. For all of the benefits I get from living over here, I still find myself longing for such simple things as a real snowfall- and the silence that comes with it at this time of the year. Call me a sentimental minimalist.
As I finished this piece up it was Sunday morning of my wife’s birthday. She was coming into Berlin that afternoon with the train, and when I had told her this story over the telephone, she calmly answered, 'Don't worry, the stores are open on Sunday. Why don't you look for something before you pick me up?'
At two in the afternoon it was back into the crowds and back into the temple of modern European Culture on Alexanderplatz. 'I am not as stupid as you think' was my credo and with ten minutes to spare before my wife's train pulled into the train station I had the 7.2 megapixel wonder in my hand. My head was spinning from the pushing and shoving, the bad air, and the neon lights, but dammit I had the camera. How it took pictures was another thing, but for the moment I was happy; a successful homo sapien back from the jungle of Christmas shopping with the bounty of his hunt under his arm.
04/06/08
I’m trying to figure this out: National Public Radio had a report last week on the Pulizer Prizes for this year. The Washington Post got six, one for its piece by Gene Weingarten about an experiment by the violinist Joshua Bell, the star musician playing in a Washington, D.C. metro station in January 2007. I read the article; it gets very pseudo-philosophical, twisting the ‘if a tree falls in the middle of a forest and nobody is there to witeness it, does it make a noise anyways’ question into ‘if Joshua Bell plays the violin beautifully at L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station during rush hour for an hour, but masquerading as a Joe Shmoe street musician, will anyone notice him anyways?’
The same question, with Josh Bell’s name replaced by ‘a great violinist’ was posed to Leonard Slatkin, the director of the National Symphony. He rambled on and on about how, even if no-one would notice the musician as ‘a personality’, his greatness as an ‘excellent musician’ would be seen and that alone would draw a crowd of listeners. When asked how much the violinist would make for an hour’s worth of busking, Slatkin said ‘About $150.’
Well, guess what? Josh Bell only earned $32.17 for his efforts, giving up after 43 minutes. Only one person noticed him, a government official who had been at a concert that Bell had given at the Library of Congress three weeks earlier. This woman, who handed him a $20 afterwards (not part of the $32.17, as the twenty was ‘tainted by recognition’) was supposedly appaled that people were only ‘flipping quarters’ into his violin case. ‘Omigosh!’ she supposedly said, ‘What kind of city do I live in that this could happen!’
Josh Bell himself reported that it was one of the few times he ever experienced stage fright. He was supposedly grateful when someone threw a dollar or two into his case, and was taken aback by the eerie emptiness of his surroundings after he had finished a piece of music. In other words, there was no thunderous applause for Mr. Bell here, just the sound of hundreds of government officials rushing off to their jobs.
But what I don’t get is this: Mr. Weingarten of the Washington Post went on and on about this ‘grand experiment’ as if Joshua Bell had done something really daring, like signing up for a expedition to the Artic Circle and play for polar bears as an attempt to save them from global warming.
Sorry, Gene, but this is not Pulitzer Prize material.
After all, your violinist took a taxi three blocks from his hotel to the station to protect his Stradivarius. If you really want it to earn the Pulitzer, then make Josh spend an entire month or two earning his living from being a street musician. Let him report his experiences, and make the book into a report like Barbara Eherenreich’s ‘Nickel and Dimed- Undercover in Low-wage USA.’ That would interest me, because that’s what I went through for the entire summer of ‘95 before I started playing with the Akademie- earning my keep as a street musician.
I was still living in Basel back then, and it was a point in my life where everything just seemed to be going wrong. The baroque orchestra in Zurich I had been playing with and was concertmaster of had pretty much kicked me out, my audition for the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra had failed miserably, and my audition to study at the Conservatory in the Hague had also failed, being told that I was ‘too good of a violinist to have to study anymore.’ Furthermore, my only firm anchor back then, teaching English at a language school was suddenly questionable since my student visa for Switzerland was soon to expire. All of this left me to wake up one sunny June day in a panic, realizing that my life was like peering into a huge black hole with neither work nor a future.
After about a week of agonizing over what I was going to do, I took a hard look at my Marchetti, and said to it ‘You and I are going to go to work in the streets of Basel- I’m going to be a street musician this summer, and you’re coming along for the ride.’ One thing was clear to me, despite whatever was going to happen, I had to earn some money now, somehow.
So the next day I found myself walking with my $50,000 violin down to the pedestrian zone of Basel, hoping that nobody would notice me. I even had a quick alibi ready if someone I knew did: ‘Oh, I just have a concert I’m getting ready for, and I thought this would be a good way to do it.’ Now its weird, because when back stage before a concert, waiting to go on, everything is so routine now that I’ve come to trust that pre-concert tension over the years. But when I was walking down that street to the point I had mentally chosen, a fountain where the three pedestrain streets intersected (now probably the perfect the location for a Starbucks)- part of me was screaming inside to turn around immediately and stop this nonsense. And, as I stood in front of the fountain and opened my violin case I felt as if I was one of those Japanese businessmen, who, in training to become a manager are commanded by their superiors to walk into a crowded street in their underwear and start singing Japanese nursery songs very loudly.
Well, maybe not so extreme as that. Oddly enough, I started out with the same music as Joshua Bell did, Bach’s Chaconne from the D minor Partita for solo violin, and as I drew the first chords out from my Marchetti, I felt how strange it was for me to slip out of my anonymity to immediately become someone who passers by couldn’t help but notice. The first few minutes were extremely turbulent, as if I had to first force my way through some kind of invisible wall to make myself noticed. As I felt my violin as too loud and too rough in my ear and yet too small to cut through the noise, a delivery van stopped three meters away from me, its warning signal beeping away in another tempo as it backed up. All the while people were rushing by, somtimes glaring at me, somtimes deliberately looking away.
But just as things seemed to be unbearable, and I was ready to give up, a sense of inner calm suddenly took over, everything went into autopilot, and I became focused again. I could feel my fingers and bow dancing across the strings, and the loudness of the sound under my ear had stopped, as too the perception of the commotion all around me. Within a few minutes the first coin was thrown into my case, a Dutch Guilder presented by a tourist who first held out the coin into my nose, grinning at me all the time while asking if I wanted it. Somehow, I managed to nod a ‘Yes’ back without derailing the arpeggio passage of the Chaconne, and he dropped the coin into my case, giving me the thumbs up before walking away. I was elated.
I played for about an hour and a half that day, collecting about 40 Swiss Francs, or about thirty Dollars, which, not bad for an hour’s worth of work in the 1990’s. Now at this point of the story Joshua Bell was able to pack up and walk away from the scene of the crime. After a taxi ride back, Bell could consider in the comfort of his hotel room all of his thoughts going though his head during those moments, including his biggest fear of ‘What if they don’t like me? What if they resent my presence…’ Here, the Washington Post grandly comments about Bell’s L’Enfant Plaza performance as ‘art without a frame,’ peering into Kant’s ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgement’ to support the argument, and then over to the 19th Century French sociologist Alexis de Toqueville’s comment about how we Americans are just too busy Americans are to appreciate life. Add a quick reference to ‘Koyaanisquatsi’, the 1982 film about the frenetic speed of modern life, and you’ve got the makings of a Pulitzer Prize .
It’s all so very poetic, almost like T.S. Eliot. By the way, is that Chardonnay cool enough to drink yet, Josh?
After my first hour, I had no time for poetry. I had to go on. Unable to afford a tram ticket, I walked back to my one room, sixteen square meter apartment, and counted the change I had collected.
I made it my goal to earn about forty francs each day. It sounds like like a fairly easy job, and Joshua thinks so at least. ‘I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn’t have to pay an agent,’ he reported. However, in truth it wasn’t so easy. As the weeks progressed, the interest had quickly dissipated and the daily prospect of going over to the fountain to play hung over me like a dark cloud. There were of course the passers-by who seemd to like my playing, but by the end of the second week I had seemed to have witnessed everything: Japanese tourists having their pictures taken next to me, dogs snarling at me while being forcibly pulled back by their owners, shopkeepers rudely telling me to play somewhere else, an unexpected rain shower that sent me running for cover, and a jealous boyfriend who told me to get lost with my ‘Scheiss-violin.’ He said his girlfriend had been listening to me all week- didn’t I notice that? Well, of course I had seen her- she was very pretty, slim, with short dark hair, and she had smiled to me several times when we made eye contact. However she always seemed to always disappear into the crowd whenever I finished playing, so I was at a loss about what to do or say. Now I knew why. She never appeared again after He-Man put a stop to things.
What I liked the best was playing for children, if only because I could feel just how much they had their parents in control. They also seemed to really like the music, especially Bach. You could see this light of amazed wonder in their eyes as they stood there looking up at me, unflinching and oblivious to their parent’s pleas to move on. ‘Martin! Come!’ their parents would call out in dulled desperation. ‘We have to go on! There’s an ice cream waiting for you, but only if we go now! Martin! Did you hear? Ice Cream!’ But often the bribe didn’t work. Martin knew he was going to get ice cream anyways, and first he was just going to stand here for the next five minutes and listen to me. That of course was embarrassing for the parents, who ultimately ended up diging into their pockets to let little Martin drop a coin or two into my case. Thanks, kid.
But perhaps my most bizarre experience was when one time an older Swiss woman wearing a heavy fur coat (it was summertime) shuffled by me with her lap dog. I was standing in front of a window of a jewelery store, playing, and suddenly became obvious that I must have been blocking this woman’s view of something she really wanted to see. Because, all of the sudden she looked at me with an expression of absolute hate, mumbled something to herself, and then started to push my violin case away with her cane so that she could ‘move in’ and get a better view of just whatever it was in that display window behind me. She then just stood there, inches away from me, somehow oblivious of my presence and oblivious of her dog’s frantic yapping while sniffing my feet. Then, after a few minutes she went into the store, coming out once again with a sales woman. Soon they both were standing next to me as if I was invisible, looking into the display window. ‘That one, the one with the gold and silver twist for 4000 Francs?’ yelled the sales woman over my playing. ‘Ja ja! That’s it!’ cried the older woman back. My bow was dangerously close to her eyes, and one accidental swoop from either me or her could have blinded her. It really didn’t matter either, because I saw that I ‘didn’t exist’ in her eyes, and that fact depressed me terribly, especially since I knew that probably the woman was going just to open her purse in the store and just pull out four 1000 Franc notes to pay for whatever she wanted- and unlike for me, money was no matter for her. At that point I started to realize that enough was enough, and that I simply wanted to return back to the normal world without this struggle anymore.
Fortunately, I got a call from the Akademie a few weeks later, asking me to play in August. It was almost out of the blue, that call, but it was like a release from the time I had served on the streets. Still, what I had learned from those weeks, even if I didn’t like it sometimes, was incredibly valuable for me as a musician. Because there, unlike on stage, I realized that people only listen if you have something to really say, something to express. Otherwise you are just an annoyance.
As for Joshua Bell, it was his talent that did save him in the end. Little did he know that Edna Souza, a Brazilian shoe shine lady who was working on the other side of the L’Enfant Plaza station, had the number of the Metro Security programmed into her mobile phone for such cases. ‘He was too loud,’ she said, but: ‘He he was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn’t call the police.’
Thank You for the Music
04/06/08
Again and again I am amazed at just how far the ring tone of a mobile telephone can carry in a concert hall.
For example, about a year after the Sasha Waltz/Akamus premiere of Dido and Aeneas we were doing a production of the opera in the Staatsoper in Berlin. We had just gotten to the end of the tearful finale ‘With Drooping Wings’, all waiting for Belinda to light the eternal flames of remember Dido's tragedy when suddenly the silence of the dramatic finale was rudely cut off by cell version of Beethoven’s ‘für Elise’. If the person is truly ashamed by the interruption, as most are, they will go do everything possible to quickly switch the telephone off and minimize the distraction. However, once or twice I've been astonished at how some people seem to be so proud of their incoming call that they just stand up in the middle of the performance and answer their phone. 'Si?’ a well dressed businessman in Lisbon loudly barked into his telephone as he pushed his way through the audience to go outside- I guess it wasn’t enough for him that his phone had let all two thousand sitting there know that he had something better to do than listen to a boring ol’ Akamus concert. I mean, if only he had a mute or pause button for the orchestra on his telephone, he could have just simply turned us off and taken the call at his leisure. And when he was ready to continue, he could have just pressed the play button to let the concert go on. Someday it will probably be like that anyways.
But I have my own ‘handy’ story (don't ask me why, but the Germans call their cell phones ‘Handys’.) Way back, when cell phones doubled as clubs to whack people in the head, my work as a freelance violinist was starting to pick up and I bought a ‘Handy’ to keep in touch with the world while on the road. It was a really ugly clunker, but I was pretty proud of it and carried it around with me everywhere, waiting for ‘the big call’ to come in. Most of the time it was only my girlfriend, who took my voicemail greeting when the phone was off as a personal insult to her right to reach me at all times. ‘What about ME?’ she would sob, ‘I thought you bought this telephone so that I could call you! Why is it off now? Just who are you with?’ It was my price for ‘mobility’, and because of her incessant calling I probably would have ultimately thrown the phone away had it not been for the fact that I did get other calls too.
However, being new to mobile phones, I always forgot to turn it off, probably the main reason why my phone is almost always off now- I still forget. Soon after getting the phone, I was a guest with the Freiburger Barockorchester for a concert of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and forgetting that I even had it with me, my telephone barged its way through with its own version of ‘Spring’ just as the rehearsal was about to start. I rushed over, red faced, and Golle, the soloist and ever the clown, took it lightly and grinned, miming his bow over his violin as if to say ‘Look at me, ma, no hands!’ The other Freiburgers were not as amused, and I was swiftly reminded that it would be perhaps better if my 'handy' just stayed off for the rest of the rehearsal.
I was more careful afterwards, and after the embarrassment of the ‘Spring’ tone, I had returned my melody to the refrain of ABBA’s ‘Thank You for the Music.’ Remember when being able to program in your own ‘personal ring melody’ was the height of mobile telephone technology? Well, I had made this ‘my’ tune; I hated the song, but I had programmed it in as a joke because of my next door neighbor in The Hague. A forty something bachelor, my neighbor was probably one of ABBA's last groupie, and every evening at six I would be serenaded with for an hour, starting with 'Waterloo' and ending with 'Thank You for the Music'. And if my neighbor was in an especially good mood he would play the CD twice. It was simply unbearable.
But back to the Freiburgers. On the evening of the concert I was trying to get in touch with my girlfriend beforehand, just to let her know that I would try to call her afterwards. Unfortunately the line was continuously busy, and after trying twice ten minutes later I gave up, thinking that she was probably talking to ‘Mama’ in Rome. Just as I was about to leave the telephone in my violin case one of the Freiburgers swept breathlessly through the backstage area. ‘The place has a history of theft,’ she explained, rushing to grab her purse from her violin case. ‘But we have to get on stage now- just take everything.’ Everyone else scrambled about to get their wallets and handbags and I ran back to my case, grabbed my telephone, and stuffed it into the inside pocket of my concert tails. We walked on stage, bowed and without any further ado, began to play Vivaldi's Four Seasons- it was then that I realized I had forgotten to switch my telephone off.
Worse, the chances of my girlfriend calling back were pretty good, because our fax machine at home always displayed the telephone number of unsuccessful incoming calls. Seeing my cell phone number posted three times on the display was all she needed to see in order for her to press the 'return call' option. 'Oh God, help me.' I thought to myself as I felt my body break out in a cold sweat. Over and over again I cringed at the worst case scenario- the Freiburgers, all swaying together in perfect musical harmony, would come to a gorgeous moment in the Vivaldi, and just as Gottfried von der Goltz would dig down into one of his solos, ABBA's ’ Thank you for the music would blare through the hall seating two thousand people to announce that my girlfriend had called back. The concert would be denounced by critics as a failure, I would be thrown out of the orchestra, and my career would end up back at the Buffalo Greyhound Bus Terminal as a homeless street musician, playing Bach for a cheap bottle of Blatz Beer. 'Wanna hear my Chaconne?' I would say to waiting passengers with a wide toothless grin.
Unfortunately the phone was lodged so deep down in the pocket of my tails that it was impossible to dig down and turn it off. So struggling and hoping to high heaven that nothing would happen, I stumbled through the first half, ready to jump out of my concert tails when it did. I also saw how the others were smiling at me, oblivious to my panic and weakly I tried to smile back, but was I far too concentrated on the coming disaster to 'be there' during the concert. Somehow however I had luck, and when the finale of the Winter Concerto was broken by applause, I felt my body scream 'Get me out of here!' as I rushed off the stage as quickly as possible. 'What's the matter with you, are you not feeling well?' one of the orchestra memebers called out to me from behind. 'No, no!' I shouted back. 'I... er... just have to go to the bathroom!'
It was just then when my telephone rang. As I expected, it was my girlfriend, and she was terribly upset. 'Erik!' she wailed. 'You tried calling me, and I wanted to call you back but- oh! Its so terrible!' She sobbed and sobbed into the telephone. ‘What is it?’ 'Bujo, my little Bujo! He's dead! What will I ever do! ' Bujo was her German shepherd back at home. When we had attended her sister’s wedding in Rome the dog had tried to bite me several times, and needless to say I didn't find the dog's death so tragic, especially as I still had the second half of the concert ahead of me. ‘Um, listen, I'm sorry, but I'm in the middle of a concert. Can I get back to you later?' She was livid. 'Stronzo!' she screamed back, 'You know what your problem is? You never want to talk to me when its really important!’ Suddenly she was shouting so loudly through the telephone that the other Freiburgers suddenly turned around and looked at me. 'Why can't you be there for me when I really need you! You and your stupid telephone! Go ahead and play your stupid concert! See if I care!' She went on and on, and I pulled the telephone away from my hear, realizing that I was doomed. The others around me just stared at it with the sound of the screaming voice. 'Is that your girlfriend?' one asked me. 'Uh... yeah,' I answered. 'Wow- she sounds pretty angry at you.'
Somehow I got her off. I rushed to my violin case, turned off the telephone and put it back in the violin case and snapped the case shut. If someone wanted my telephone, they could take it- and the angry voice barking into it too.
POSTSCRIPT: Several years later, Akademie did a recording of Gluck Arias with mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli. At that time she was in a 'difficult' personal relationship with her manager/boyfriend so that during the recording session we always witnessed moments 'barbed wire' verbal exchanges between the two. Supposedly they broke up during the tour that followed the recording, and when the orchestra came back everyone was buzzing about what had happened. Supposedly, after the concert in Moscow, Cecila was supposedly so incensed at how much time her boyfriend was spending on his mobile telephone that she grabbed his telephone out of his hand while he was in a middle of an 'important' call and 'deep sixed it' (translate as 'immersed') it into his full beer glass. With one swell foop, both the telephone and the relationship were effectively killed. Lesson learned: never get on the wrong side of Roman. You'll pay dearly for your mistake.
7.2 MP Berlin Diary
03/06/08
Some of you have asked where the I have been these months- if maybe your name might have fallen off my list. Well have no fear, I'll still alive, quite kicking, and with 2008 just around the corner, one of my resolutions is to turn this madness into regular series (so that we coult get at least three more diaries out of me.) Even bought two expensive ties for this occasion. I'll explain more soon in upcoming issues. In the meantime, enjoy, have a good holiday season, and I hope to be coming to you again in full swing next year.
THE 7.2 MP BERLIN DIARY
‘Where are you from?'
‘Washington D.C., but I have been living in Europe since 1990, first in Switzerland, then in Holland, and now in Berlin.’
‘Ah so, so you’re really ‘Europeanized’, aren’t you?’
‘Well, actually I just consider myself to be in exile…’
IT’S NOT the first time that I have been told that I am ‘Europeanized’; I get it from both sides of the Atlantic, like once in Bergen, after giving an American couple directions, ‘You Norwegians speak such good English- really, in fact better than some Americans!’ In Holland my attempts to speak Dutch often receive an answer in German, and in Germany I’m told that my accent is ‘charming,’ together with the question ‘Are you English?’ When they hear that I’m actually a Yank, those with chutzpah come up with this ‘Europeanized’ stuff, which I don’t know if I really like. Okay, I’m not Sig and Dottie Potembski from Buffalo who ‘saw that really neat Schweinstein castle and got the real Black Forest coocoo clock before the tour bus took them to Paris for a night before heading off to London. That’s long behind me (well, that was never in me actually…) And despite some of my colleagues amazement that I can walk by a McDonald’s without becoming sentimental, I’m still not to the point where I will succumb to my mother in law’s attempts find me ‘a good healthy pair of Birkenstocks.’ Maybe I’ll get them when I am able to fulfill my secret desire to test drive a Hummer H2 at 200 km/h on the Autobahn with California plates.
Of course I would drive it with Bio Diesel.
But I have to say that, if anything, globalization has made Europeans become pretty ‘Americanized’ since my arrival nearly eighteen years ago. It’s not just McDonald’s (they’re also ‘Europeanized’ by the way, with their modern ‘McCafé,’ complete with leather lounge chairs and wood tables.) And its not Dunkin Donuts, Wal-Mart, Burger King, Schlotzky’s Deli, Levi’s, Pizza, Subway, Eddie Bauer, Docker’s, Salomon’s Bagels, NPR, or Land’s End either, all here in Berlin. And it’s also not Starbucks- and please, you Europeans, leave my Strabucks alone! I can’t help it if we Americans have a coffee culture too and if you like it. No, its something else- something that I noticed this week while trying to accomplish a nearly impossible task, namely, trying to find a decent compact digital camera for my wife’s birthday.
Its called the attack of the aggressively friendly salesperson.
You Americans know them- the ones who stalk your every move, and make a comment about every object you pick up. The ones who, through their ‘kindness of heart’, try to force you to walk out of the store with something in your hand.
The Berliners don’t seem to have the tatics down fully, but they’re trying pretty damn hard. I was amazed, because normally when you go into a store here the salespeople just glare at you, making you feel guilty for just having left grimy fingerprints on ‘their’ items. No, what they now do is that classic ‘come up to you from behind’ tactic, and like a warm southern breeze, tell you nonchalantly:
‘That’s a great little camera you are holding in your hand. My brother just bought one last month. It’s amazing- he was on vacation in Bermuda with the thing and came back, and made posters of some of the shots. You can see every little detail.’
This week, this comment, or a variation thereof, seemed sooner or later to emerge from behind my back by a friendly salesperson. The first such comment, at Store One, was made to me by a kid who seemed to have just as many pimples on his face as the camera had pixles. Fine- he wanted me to get a Panasonic Lumix because ‘they’re such great cameras, and I bet your wife would look great with one too.’ What? Did you really say that? Can you tell me since when spec sheets include ‘looks awsome with wife’ as an option? Needles to say, I put it back, mumblng somethig about having to consider that possibility some more before purchasing such a camera.
I went to Store Two, on Alexanderplatz, to have another look. This time I got the one-two knockout to the jaw treatment by two thugs- the first one, a tall man stlyled as a Turkish John Travolta with a goatee, saw me holding the same little Lumix in my hand and said, ‘Great camera, which color do you want it in?’
‘What?’ I replied.
‘Which color do yo want it in- you know, black, blue, silver, beige?’
‘Um, I don’t know, I guess I’d take it in black but I…’
‘He wants it in black!’ he called out to his colleage, ’Do we got it in black?’ ‘Yeah- here!’ Salesperson number two, who looks almost exactly the same, except shorter, broader, and tougher, shoots a hand out with a Lumix box through the crowd over to number one, who then stuffs it into my arms. ‘There you go- you gotta buy a memory card for it now. Have a great day!’ He walks off, high fiving it with number two, and I stare at the box in my arms, dumbfounded. First I walk around a bit, deliberating about whether I should take it or not when I find myself secretly putting the box down next to the espresso machines before out. Perhaps store Number Three will provide more answers, but I have to first find a way to get past the people standing in front of the store who are offering free personality tests, compliments of the Church of Scientology. I wave their offer off and walk on.
Now store Number Three is part of a newly opened oversized shoping mall on Alexanderplatz. With the store’s motto loosely translated as ‘Ich bin doch nicht blöd’ (loosely translated as: ‘I’m not as stupid as you think’) this store is the non plus ultra of electronic outlets- four floors of digital and electronic dreams. So again I’m standing there, trying to compare the diffent models to test results I had written down in my pocket diary. Its when I am finally starting to finally make some headway that ‘the velvet voice’ comes… and oh man, does it come this time.
‘Confused, are you? Here, let me show you something’ He pulls out a little spray bottle, holds it up to a metallic orange plated Olympus and squirts a stream water onto the camera. Then he turns it on. It beeps and whirrs noisily. ‘See? You can’t do that with just any camera. This little baby takes the hard knocks of a trip and even lets you go three meters under water. Add its ‘smile detection’ its three inch display and 12 megapixels and you’ve got a real winner here. I think you’d really like it.’ Like the Cheshire Cat, he smiles into my face. This salesperson looks like that bearded guy from ABBA, except that he’s my size and I find his grin annoyingly impossible to shake off. Can’t you leave me alone, I think to myself, I just read that Olympus handhelds are crap in comparison to other brands. And I don’t need your damned ‘smile detection’ either buddy- in fact, I need a ‘smile off’ button now. Meanwhile he’s still talking, showing me a picture he’s just taken of me, and now he’s holding up a box, which is obviously his signal to me that I should take it and buy the camera. So, out of desperation, I throw a Hail Mary: instead of hunching up I try smiling back.
‘Does it go down to 28 mm? I really need that.’
The tatic works. He stops, suddenly. ‘Um, a what?’
You know, a wide angle lens. I then pick up another camera, and try flicking it on. ‘Like this one- Hey, but it doesn’t power up. Can I see it working?’
Yeah yeah yeah- wait right there, I’ll get batteries! As ABBA runs off I put the camera down and rush to make my exit. Over my shoulder I hear another salesperson say to a customer, ‘But you know, most cameras only a have a three year life expectancy anyways…although this one has five.’ I’m frankly disgusted.
And yet, still no camera, and I am about to go out of the store empty handed and dejected when I suddenly see a bin filled with those Lumix cameras I saw at Store Two, but for twenty Euros less. I pull out a box and quickly walk off with it, going upstairs to the Apple iMac counter where the salespeople won’t bother me. The camera looks pretty good, and there are recommendations from the German magazines so I decide to take it. I get a memory card and walk happily through the crowd to the checkout, relieved that the ordeal is soon to be over. Waiting, a couple in front of me looks out into nowhere as the checkout person struggles to find the barcode for a giant plasma television they are purchasing. When they are finally through and I triumphantly set the camera down. The checkout person scans it.
‘Two hundred and eighty nine Euros please.’’
I open my wallet, ready to pull out my direct debit bank card from its position. But wait, its not there. I search desperatley, but then I realize that its on the ktichen table, where I had deliberately taken it out earlier in the day to write my account number down for another bank transfer. So in desperation I whip out the MasterCard- the famous little card with that saved the Akademie once from having to sleep on the streets of London. Three years ago, the Mercure hotel didn’t recognize the orchestra’s own credit card, and when I swiped my card through, the machine liked my ten thousand dollar limit and the person in charge politely smiled at me and said, ‘Thank you Mr. Dorset for helping us out.’ I wanted that kind of service here.
Except that the woman wasn’t smiling at me now.
‘You can’t pay with that, she tells me. ‘We don’t take creit cards- we don’t have an agreement with Master Card or Visa. You can only pay with EC card, or cash.’
‘But I don’t have the EC card on me, and I only have twenty Euros in cash.’
‘Then you can’t pay for these things.’ She then swept my hard-found camera away from the counter. ‘Next please.’
I’m flabbergasted. ‘Wait,’ I cry. ‘What kind of place is this anyways- a store that doesn’t take credit cards? A simple Master Card? That’s absurd!’
‘Listen if you want to make it a problem, then we can call Security. Just leave.’
So I leave, glumly looking the camera box behind me, and at the others with their happy red bags, all bearing the same message, ‘Im not as stupid as you think.’ In that moment, I realized that I had hit one of those corners of European life I just didn’t get… And yet I looked into the worn faces of these people, exhausted from their Christmas shopping. I see that the turbo charged mass spending for which we Americans are criticized is exactly the same here. If anything, its only getting stronger, and the people here are no less vulnerable to it. The East, bound for so long under the rule of Communism, is now creating a generation that is so consumer oriented that it’s not funny. And yet, they don’t seem any happier for it. Worse, you see this generation of children who have grown up on cell phones, MTV, and Happy Meals, and what do they look like? Like fat American kids. Where’s the beef? Its now here, growing on the hips of the Europeans while their brains slowly become numbed from video games.
So I really don’t want to hear this word ‘Europeanized’. I am what I am s a person, and that takes more than being just a ‘European’ or an ‘American’.
I then trudged downstairs to Starbucks, drowning my sorrows away with a tall vanilla cappuccino while Louie Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald happily sang ‘Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!’ If only it could. One time I’d love to see Berlin in the grip of a real Buffalo winter, with soft snow that goes up to your waist, and see how the people would go about with it. For all of the benefits I get from living over here, I still find myself longing for such simple things as a real snowfall- and the silence that comes with it at this time of the year. Call me a sentimental minimalist.
As I finished this piece up it was Sunday morning of my wife’s birthday. She was coming into Berlin that afternoon with the train, and when I had told her this story over the telephone, she calmly answered, 'Don't worry, the stores are open on Sunday. Why don't you look for something before you pick me up?'
At two in the afternoon it was back into the crowds and back into the temple of modern European Culture on Alexanderplatz. 'I am not as stupid as you think' was my credo and with ten minutes to spare before my wife's train pulled into the train station I had the 7.2 megapixel wonder in my hand. My head was spinning from the pushing and shoving, the bad air, and the neon lights, but dammit I had the camera. How it took pictures was another thing, but for the moment I was happy; a successful homo sapien back from the jungle of Christmas shopping with the bounty of his hunt under his arm.