Die Vaterland Is Calling Me Back

Any American abroad has probably had this experience. You’re sitting at a bar on some foreign shore, and eventually you disclose where you’re from, if they haven’t figured it out already (and no faking you’re Canadian, that’s pussy shit and you know it). And eventually, they can’t help themselves, but say something along the lines of…

“Ha ha you Americans think cheese comes in cans, ha! Cheez Whiz ha! What you want to shoot your gun at me, Wild Bill Hickok?”

I mean, I enjoy dunking on my own country, and if they’re clever enough and interesting enough to talk to, I’ll join in on the jabs on the States, and make a few regarding their country too. After all, I’ve probably had Cheez Whiz less than five times in my life, so I’m perfectly happy incorporating other nations’ unfair stereotypes into the banter. Friendly ballbusting is one of the best forms of diplomacy.

And while I’ve had this conversation with people of many nations, Germans are by far the worst offenders. When I see the guy in the Birkenstocks with wool socks, I know he’s going to give me a talking to, and he probably won’t be nearly as funny as his Irish or Mexican equivalent.

But then I look around, as I sip my Riesling in a chilly autumn public square in the Bundesrepublik, at the apple cheeked and neckbearded young men in shapeless hoodies, at the icy slender blonde women with ponytails wearing jogging gear, at the jowly and thick-necked and beer-gutted old men in polyester, at the ladies pouring me the excellent wine – one with scraggly hair and eyeliner too thick in a pink fleece jacket, one with hair chopped short and square-framed glasses – all the faces I know from the golf courses and prayer breakfasts and dental offices of Des Moines.

But it’s not just the rubicund phenotype, which of course crossed the Atlantic from greater Germania to my native Middle West.

You have your image of German food, giant sausages and hunks of meat and heaps of potato salad and mash, washed down with great flagons of beer. It’s not at all bad, and can even be very good – but really how much difference is there between that and what you’d get at the average Wisconsin supper club? But just like in Middle America, that’s far less abundant than the takeout places where you can get a pizza or some fast food with origins from migrating brown people (tacos for us, kebabs for them). And whoever talks about the superiority of European groceries has never been to a Rewe supermarket in provincial Germany. At a cozy little tavern, they keep promoting something called “pizza salad.” I am not tempted. In a little town at the foot of the Harz Mountains, I see the fluorescent-lit Chinese place in the Aldi parking lot. There’s a special on orange chicken today.

Or consider the shops I pop into. Granted, the local wine they’re selling is a damn sight better than what you’d get in Ohio, but other than that? Shitty elevator music, kooky little tchotchkes with cutout wooden hearts, doilies with little jars of jam, disgusting fruity home scents. I might as well be at a welcome center on I-90.

Some ladies doth protest too much indeed.

Of course, I came for something more transcendent, and I found traces – I found it in the mist-wreathed schlossen high above the vineyards of the Mosel, where blue slate gravels give us wines of incomparable elegance, or in the spooky old East German transmitter tower emerging through the icy fog high up on the Brocken, from where the witches fly from on Walpurgisnacht, and from where a certain Austrian broadcast his commencement speech for the 1936 Olympic Games, but fuck his teetotaling and vegetarian ways, I had hot coffee enlivened with herbal bitters and a bowl of solyanka to beat back the chill. In the smoke-filled café lined with yellowed movie posters, covered in decades of graffiti, angular men behind the bar, Ian Curtis’ voice warbling through the speakers. In the skeletal industrial wastelands of the Saarland I know from the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, in the agonized faces of Albrecht Dürer and Matthias Grünewald, in the scarred heads of Christ and the Four Evangelists in the old basilica built by Emperor Constantine, its adornments ripped out in the Protestant Reformation, its heavy cedar roof destroyed by British bombs, and so all that was left of the old splendor were the chipped and cracked faces of a few old visionary Jews.

So I didn’t feel entirely like I was in Davenport. Entirely.

And Berlin, of course, is nothing like Davenport, but this isn’t to say it’s nothing like America, because it’s exactly like Brooklyn.

The hipstery parts of Berlin have remained relatively inexpensive compared to their NYC, SF, and London equivalents. Now, the lingua franca is just as likely to be English as it is to be German, the twitchy Anglos trying to stretch their money fill the streets. Yet there are still enough people who seem to be out doing the thing, some version of that old dream – move to the city, dive into your endeavors with like-minded freaks, hopefully attract the attention of the capital class. Even if many of the forms that now takes look cringe to my aging mind, some possibility still exists, and in that way it’s a bit of a time warp. I asked the bartenders for where to get late night eats, and they had an encyclopedic inventory of open-late immigrant takeout joints, got some kofte, strolled home through the autumn air, and in my morning shower, the perfume of the bar, cigarettes and Nag Champa incense, wafted off my skin and hair… I was 23 all over again.

OK, so it’s not some Berlin of the mind. Sure, I know it’s foolish for me to expect Sally Bowles and the city of stones, David Bowie and Nick Cave lost in the synthesizers and narcotics, commissars in leather coats and skulking dominatrices in leather thigh-highs, but of course I wanted to. But relatively little of those old Berlins remains. Not only because of the carpet air raids of a proud mustachioed Rhodesian who went by the moniker Bomber Harris (“no tears for jerries!”), but also the upheavals of the postwar years, with modernists on both sides of the Wall showing little regard for the past, especially since anything associated with that saber-rattling Prussian kultur was now automatically suspect. This in turn was followed by the giddy boom years after the reunification, so even that modernist optimism towards the future is now passe – the major structures built during the GDR era are torn down without a second thought, and nostalgists have been erecting neoclassical reconstructions of buildings destroyed during the war as if nothing had happened between now and then.

What is there now? Like I said, Brooklyn. There are still a few relics, proud old industrial canals and riverfronts, even if they’re no longer producing motorcycle parts but vegan brownies made with fair-trade chocolate, and there are still the dirty counters on old brick streets where I can get the specialty of the neighborhood (pastrami on rye and a Dr. Brown’s soda for Brooklyn, currywurst and light Berliner weisse beer topped with woodruff syrup for Berlin), there were the cool little galleries, the cocktail bars with skinny intense dudes pouring me a complimentary flight of different evergreen-infused spirits, all of them excellent.

But… along with all the other parts – the 5-over-1 condo buildings with cheeky blinking neon craft beer signs on the ground floor, the urban grit as branding, the largest chunk of the former Berlin Wall, along the River Spree, being dedicated to a bunch of largely really fucking fugly street art for people’s vacay snaps. The café-bar full of tech bros with fashion mullets doing their most horrifying unintentional Lex Fridman impressions. The café-bar full of vacuous talking points on the politics of the Anglosphere, with the coked-out girl castigating me for my moral failings as a yt, ironic given that she was extremely white-passing and far more stylish than me. The café-bar full of wealthy, thin-lipped, and poised xennial Germans in understated luxury apparel who expressed a visceral repulsion at me and looked like they were about to go do rites of Moloch. You tell me I’m in Europe, but I’m seeing fucking tip screens?

My suspicion is that part of what makes Berlin feel like Brooklyn is it has managed to achieve that ultimate dream of Enlightened Brooklyn, to be entirely outside the United States, in an imagined cross-national interzone, at both its best and its worst.

And if I’m going to make this strawman even bigger, the ultimate dream of liberal-minded Germans, it seemed, was to liberate themselves from any notion of complicity with the long shadow of the German past. The response I heard from the very charming, very kind Germans of a liberal cast that I met was that theirs was the land that empowered the WORST GUY EVER, making them by corollary the WORST PEOPLE EVER, as if by self-flagellating sufficiently, the guilt of the past will finally be expiated. Like all forms of self-proclaimed guilt, this is masochism, which is another German specialty, but that’s a tale for a different day. Strike dear mistress and cure his heart.

(see Hans-Georg Moeller on the topic for more and smarter)

And it’s unfortunately an attitude that often translates into self-righteousness. We feel the worst, and therefore we are the best. I have never been told not to do something by strangers more in my life. And we can freely sneer at the less enlightened.

I went to a Diane Arbus exhibition at the Gropius Bau, and Arbus is someone whose work I’ve always adored, but I always felt somewhat uneasy towards. When writers talk about her, they tend to fawn over the dignity and accord she gave to her outsider photographic subjects, but I always felt there to be something lurid about her work. At the exhibition, I looked at the catalog for the photos that really did seem to make their subjects look glamorous, and they were Mia Farrow, Norman Mailer, and various Warhol Superstars. Nudists, drag queens, carnival freaks, and snake handlers and just ordinary, not very attractive, not very poised people seemed almost like fish on display at the market, with the same dead-eyed stares of whole fresh trout on ice, 10 bucks a pound.

And seeing all the impeccably dressed Berliners gawking at the gawking just felt awkward, especially when I gawked back at them.

Arbus, I think, genuinely did want to find the common humanity in her subjects, and the more I learn about her life, she saw her outsiders as kindred spirits, troubled soul that she was. And her empathy is that of someone bearing the same wound, one which maybe we cannot admit we all have. She exposes us to an atavistic form of ourselves, stripped away, rendered vulnerable in all our odd thoughts, flabby, marked, disabled, re-gendered, somehow violated.

But were the gaunt faces of the masterworks of the German Renaissance that I had seen that much different?

And maybe through Arbus’ view of America, they were looking through their chic square glasses at something very familiar.

At the children’s park, the phrase “Sigma Boy,” which I believe is in reference to a TikTok slop content earworm by Russian children, is spraypainted across the slapdash plywood. Lord of the Flies by way of Andrew Tate.

For a long time after the war, the so-called “Rhenish model” did a lot to soften the contradictions of capitalism in West Germany, a social market economy with strong representation of labor in corporate decision-making, and strong bumpers in place to prevent more extreme beliefs on either the right or left, turbocharged by Marshall Plan money. Meanwhile, East Germany, for all its problems, did provide a basic standard of living for its citizens. But since then? The rise of austerity politics in the West, and shock therapy programs in the East – you’re on your own, bucko.

Karl Marx’s childhood home in Trier is now a dollar store.

Which conversely, makes the rise of the AfD, particularly throughout the Eastern regions, a horrifyingly logical likelihood, a black mark that’s increasingly impossible to ignore. Not that their economic position was equitable – they, like all right-populist parties at present, realize they just have to employ proletarian rhetoric without needing any substantive policy behind it. I had thought of them as just another gang of lummoxes, but when their platform includes banning the sale of kosher meat… But whoever their targets may be in 2025, let’s just say I can feel the nights getting a bit more crystalline.

“Ha ha you Americans, you voted for Trump.”

Yeah, well go to Thuringia motherfucker.

And born of rich Amerikaner loam, I only see a series of distorted mirror images. The world is burning. Die vaterland is calling me back. I have a plan…. Mein führer! I can walk!

We’ll meet again…

Introducing Cuck au Vin, the Food and Drink Division of Subject/Object

 I have slowly been migrating over to Substack (and that really is the best place to follow me, but for those of you who do still use Blogspot, I'd like to introduce my food and drink platform:

https://cuckauvin.substack.com/

Enjoy! 

We Good?

I can’t say I ever truly understood podcasts. Firstly, I don’t take in information well through auditory means, which is the main reason why lectures leave me impatient and I loathe phone calls. I get that you want something to listen to while you handle the mundane shit of day-to-day life, and that’s fair, and some few podcasts manage to scratch that itch, but now that the market is saturated, and now that random men tell me to listen to someone’s podcast on the regular, I can’t muster the enthusiasm. It just seems like more detritus.

However, that wasn’t always the case. Before all three turned into the worst kind of culture-war slop, and before I stopped listening entirely, This American Life and Radiolab and 99% Invisible were regular favorites. The first balanced beautiful human nuance with hilariously bitchy snark – Sedaris for the win – and the latter two were the best kind of popularization, taking complex and thorny ideas in science and design and presenting them in an informative but still rigorous way. But the early podcast bros never did it for me. Adam Carolla was far funnier when he was bottomfeeding on Comedy Central’s Man Show and lowering the discourse on MTV’s Loveline than he ever was on his own podcast (Dr. Drew telling listeners how important communication was, followed by Carolla asking if they’d done anal yet). And long before his right-wing turn, I found Joe Rogan to just be kinda annoying, even when he was interviewing people I found interesting and admirable. 

Yet I’m not sure quite why I stuck with Marc Maron, whose WTF podcast ends this week.

Before every comedian had an interview podcast, Maron had one. 

I remember so distinctly when I first listened to him, sometime in 2011 or 2012, while working on a technical writing gig in late summer in suburban Seattle. And while I don’t exactly remember how I found him, I do remember the angry, weird, self-loathing comic style that drew me in. This in particular stands out.

And the podcast had the same spirit. You got to see how he dealt with all the people he’d wronged in the past, making amends with all the people he had been an absolute shit to in the cocaine-and-bourbon haze of the ‘90s NYC alt-comedy world. My team at the time consisted of a cadre of overeducated, boozy quasi-fuckups with humanities degrees, heavily stamped passports, and strong opinions on David Foster Wallace. Listening to Marc Maron as I took screenshots and instructed users on how to get the most out of their Tapout-branded Android devices seemed a natural response to the circumstances in which I’d found myself. We’re all in this shit together. Let’s hash it out. 

And while his personality carried the tone of the interviews – the deeply wounded man trying to get good with the world – the guest list largely consisted of other loveable disasters, figuring their shit out with someone else figuring his shit out, as they all admitted they hadn’t behaved like upstanding citizens after snorting absolute alligator tails of primo Colombian. And they still weren’t completely alright. Sure, they had writing credits on well-regarded shows, they had husbands and wives who managed to deal with their foibles, but they were at the end of the day the sort of broken people who have no choice but to put themselves on stage and try to connect. These were their war stories. In a world of slick packaged bullshit, WTF seemed a beacon of honesty.

For years, I listened religiously. 

That being said, I did fall off some time ago. As Maron’s fame grew, his guest list consisted of fewer and fewer second-tier comics who never quite made it, and more and more genuine A-listers on the award-season campaign interview circuit. Maybe the famed Obama interview, an ugly sort of softball utterly lacking in substance, was the moment where he jumped the shark, but it seemed to me more of a slow decline. Rather than actually connecting to something deep and human, too many Maron interviews seemed to have the form of sincerity but not the substance, and consequently were little more than kitsch. His penultimate episode, a 40-minute monologue, ended with a compilation of some of his most legendary moments, set to the Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??” And it just felt manipulative.

He himself also got progressively more annoying. There was less and less cynical smirking counterpointed with genuine tears, and more whinging about the minor humiliations of Hollywood life and getting fat from craft services, as well as a fair bit of ignorant culture-war slop. And while I expected a certain misanthropy from him, it used to be barded with empathy. By now, his opening monologues have devolved into the groanings of a stereotypical wealthy California liberal who seems to genuinely despise and fear ordinary people, someone who seemingly hates them for their stupidity and just desires to wishcast them out of existence, while at the same time mewling about the importance of amplifying marginalized voices and listening to people’s trauma, assuming of course that they serve to assuage his sense of personal virtue. I came awfully close to smashing my phone when he harped about how people elected a fascist because they cared about the price of eggs. God forbid people, even if quite misguidedly, take their material conditions into consideration rather than their moral uprightness. Not all of us get infinite swag bags of vegan snacks, Marc. 

Furthermore, as other comics imitated the style of WTF, it seemed less like a unique representative of a certain world and more part of the background chorus. How unique is it when Bill Burr has a comedy podcast, and Conan O’Brien, and Shane Gillis, and Hannibal Buress, and Iliza Shlesinger, and Anthony Jeselnik… and… and I didn’t even know most of those people had comedy podcasts, but all I had to do was go to the Wikipedia pages of some comics I liked, and lo and behold. It’s almost a requirement now.

But even with all of that said, he never fully devolved into shit. He never got the neon podcast sign, he never sliced his interviews up into TikToks with starburst subtitles. For every utterly pointless interview with a focus-grouped favorite, there were interviews with the sorts of weirdos I like hearing from, and at its best it was still a clarion call to those of us, who try, quixotically, to still pursue creative endeavors in this benighted era. Consider this beauty, with filmmaker Kelly Reichardt (and go watch Old Joy and Meek’s Cutoff while you’re at it).

Yet just as I’m writing this, final episode dropped. It’s Obama, he’s back. Will I even listen? It’s frankly doubtful – I don’t need to spend another second of my life with that empty suit. Just fuck you. But maybe that’s a representative choice of our first-as-tragedy-second-as-farce era, trying to drink the Amanita muscaria urine until the heat death of the universe. 

Which is a sign that it really is time for the curtain to fall. I’m not sad to go because of Marc Maron himself, as he is now, who is someone I feel less identification with, or because of his podcast, as it is now, as something that I feel has lost much of its original value, but because of what he and it were to me at one time in my life. Our lives disappear piece by piece, and for every graceful dismount, there are a half-dozen stumbles.

The World You Were Born In...

You know the phrases. “Hold my beer.” “The perfect ___ does not exi…” You get the idea. The tired cliches plunged from the depths of the discourse, irredeemable mass-market quips. Some of them, to be fair, were once clever, before multiplying like anaerobic bacteria in the hogshit lagoons of 4chan, Reddit, etc., repeated by 14 year olds and bots until their mere invocation becomes repulsive. You can call them memes, but you could argue that all idioms, sayings, and turns of phrase were really just memes before we called them memes. However, these phrases are used more like memes – impervious to creativity and lacking defined by their repetition, they are a pure statement of one’s own social and discursive standing. Sometimes deployed sincerely, sometimes ironically, almost always repulsively.

But sometimes one actually makes an impact -- not much of one, perhaps, but enough to spark inquiry rather than a dismissive snarl. 

1970s grain, VHS font, doomed buildings. If it was in a gallery, it would get far higher praise.

A memory of years ago, right before I first stepped off American soil for a long period, for my first travel adventure in Asia. I sent out a Facebook message on blast to maybe 20 or so people one day, saying I’d be camped out at the Redwood on Howell and Belmont (RIP) that evening. And I drank dirt-cheap pints of PBR and read library books in the interim – I finished Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things and started Andrei Codrescu’s Wakefield if I remember correctly – and friends came by in ones and twos and threes, most of them not saying when or if they were swinging by, just coming and going, on their way to or from other loose hangout sessions, gigs, theatrical rehearsals, shifts at the bar or the café, while All the President’s Men played silently on the projector and someone put Guided by Voices on the jukebox.

It's hard to even imagine a world like that now.

But look a little bit further, and a certain hollowness emerges. The memelords, while they get the feels right, seem to lack that sort of long, telescopic view of their own past. They’re pretty young, and despite the aesthetic cribbing from other eras, they’re not talking about the longue durée of history, but like 2017. When you have fewer rings on your trunk, you think about time in more compressed terms. Remember those “Only ‘90s kids will remember this!” posts from back in the day, posted shockingly quickly after the ‘90s had themselves ended? That being said, the past decade or so in particular has been a motherfucker. COVID, of course, being the big thing, but many, many more things have happened in the interim – and it’s only natural for younger and youngish people to contrast the chaotic present with the more sedate if bovine world they associate with the ’90s and even ‘00s. 

Therefore, it’s unfortunate but unsurprising that the term in question has its origins and has had its greatest currency in the world of online “traditionalists,” a cadre that seems to mostly consist of alienated boys and men, mostly young, but with quite a few divorce dads and the like in there, who in their worse moments fancy themselves as Saxon warriors or Goldwater Republican picket-fence patriarchs deprived of their destiny. Men who believe that in a better world they would be slaying Saracens right now, or puffing their pipe in the study while wifey massages their shoulders and pours them another dry martini (although something tells me many of their taste buds are nowhere near mature enough to enjoy an actual dry martini). Plenty of ink has been dedicated to this kind of modern creature, but it’s hard to see how this could be anything other than the logical end result of a mirror maze of signifiers without signified, and every single moment of one’s life becoming a consumer choice, with minimal regard to what it is to be human. Their solutions are idiotic and often psychotic, but their instincts are not too far off. 

I would like to dance through the chaos, to take this Spinozist joy in the present, even amid the ugly world, but it’s tough to find the energy. Beer and peanuts and Paul Auster at a long-gone Seattle tavern. Did any of us know what was coming?