Two lessons they neglected to teach me in German class.

Item (1): As a boy I thought Jim Henson’s Muppets were the tops. Naturally, I liked most of the major players, but even more than Kermit, Fozzie and the preposterous Miss Piggy, I dug the Swedish Chef. I liked the way the mustachioed singing Scandinavian could turn the art of cooking into a comedy of errors. Well, prepare yourself for feelings of despair after I tell you what I learned when I recently mentioned the Swede in conversation with a German theater director.

“Frank Wedekind blah, blah, blah … Lulu, blah, blah, blah … Pandora’s box …” said the director as he swirled a splash of Syrah around the inside of the glass he was holding.

“Yeah,” says I, stifling a yawn. “But what about the Swedish Chef?”

That’s when the director tugged at the collar of his black turtleneck, coughed a cloud of greenish cigarette smoke from the holes in his pointy nose and walked away. One of his acquaintances smiled gently at me and explained that, in Germany, the Swedish Chef is known as the “Danish cook.”

“Didn’t you know that?” she asked.

Think about it. The Swedish Chef=der dänische Koch. It’s akin to dubbing Martha Stewart’s voice over old Julia Child’s episodes and calling the show the Naked Chef! (Isn’t it?) Instead of chanting “Bork, Bork, Bork” the puppet sings a song, apparently in Danish, that goes, “Smørrebrød, Smørrebrod røm, pøm, pøm, pøm…” Aside from an appalling display of rapping and break dancing witnessed at a Christoph Winkler show at Sophensaele, this is perhaps the worst case of cultural misappropriation I’ve experienced in my three years in Berlin.

Why the makeover? I wish I knew. I have a feeling it has something to do with political correctness gone awry. You know, some German TV exec likely decided that taking the piss out of the Swedish people—who are so easily ridiculed what with their rugged good looks and smoothly run social system—is just not kosher. So, instead, TV viewers in Deutschland get a non-threatening Danish cook who speaks perfect German. It is a cruel world.

By the way, real Swedes don’t seem offended by Henson’s original chef, and whenever the Muppet show airs in Stockholm or Göteborg (where my mother’s family is from, fwiw), viewers apparently get the same goofy Swedish guy that I used to howl at from my living room floor in Oklahoma. At any rate, now I know that the next time I find myself at a party in Berlin talking about Frank Wedekind (it will happen), it’s best to avoid Muppet talk altogether. You should probably do the same.

Item (2) is somewhat blue, so if subjects like masturbation make you go green, you should click away now.

As I’ve mentioned before in this forum, my father was a lingerie salesman. By default this means he fancies that his sense of humor is prodigious. At his best, he makes me laugh, but at his worst, well, it’s not an exaggeration to say that in the early 1980s I heard him say the punch line, “But you can’t marry Walter Cronkite, darling. He’s a common tater!” more than 50 times. Mercifully, other jokes displaced his story about the conveniently named French Fry and her boyfriend Hash Brown, but there’s one line he’s used pretty much my entire life. He breaks it out every winter just after my mother comes down with her yearly cold. It never fails to send a shiver up my spine.

“Your mom’s a little stuffed up,” he told me recently over iChat.

“Better get her to the doctor.”

“Not before I rub Vicks all over her bare chest!” he said as he wagged his eyebrows and chuckled suggestively, apparently so caught up in his mentholated sexual fantasy that for a brief moment he had forgotten that he was speaking to his son.

For what are probably obvious reasons, I’ve never once laughed at this attempted bon mot. What’s worse is, my dad’s yearly crack recently took on a new, more horrifying dimension when I learned why Vicks products in Germany are called Wick without the ’s.’ It seems that the imperative form of the verb wichsen (“to masturbate”) is wichse. Vicks sounds pretty close wichse when spoken aloud (go on, try it) which means that when the pharmacist asks me “Which brand of rub would you like, sir?” and I answer, “Vicks, bitte,”  it could easily sound to his or her ears as though I’m suggesting that he or she engage in an act that would be grossly inappropriate in the confines of an Apotheke (at least during business hours).  Similarly, it was necessary to change the “v” in Vicks because, of course, the letter “v” is pronounced like an “f” in German, and most of you probably know why asking for a tub of fick ain’t no good. (If you don’t, friend, it’s cos the verb ficken means, delicately put, “to make love (without abandon)”).

As a result of this new information I’ve decided that while I live in Berlin I’ll stick with brands that have easy-to-say names like Bayer when shopping for medicine. Just in case. I’ve also decided that no matter how open minded I might think I am, I’ll never be comfortable knowing that my parents have any kind of sexual relationship. Especially when my mother has a cold and my father’s talking about Vicks.

(Trying to) Accentuate the Positive

I approached the stranger. He was carrying a pile of meat, and teasing a small boy in American-accented English.

“That’s not very nice,” I said dutifully.

He looked at me incredulously. Then we both smiled.

“Whereya from?” he said chuckling.

“States.”

“No way,” he replied. “I was sure you were from England … what with the accent and all.”

My grin turned to grimace. I felt a cool breeze waft over my body, and I don’t think it was the open poultry freezer I was leaning on. It’s bollocks, I tell you. While my voice may not be as folksy as cowboy-actor Sam Elliott’s, as plaintive as Jimmy Stewart’s, or as gangsta as Rudy Giuliani’s, I don’t talk Brit.

How do I know? Because I listen to my monotonous accent hover in the air like stale cigarette smoke on a daily basis. And the lack of character in my intonation is normal if H.L. Mencken’s old-timey The American Language is to be believed. “We are, in brief, a somewhat snuffling people,” he writes, “much more given to catarrhs and coryzas than the inhabitants of damp Britain. Perhaps this general impediment to free and easy utterance … is responsible both for the levelness of tone of American speech … and for the American tendency to pronounce the separate syllables of a word with much more care than an Englishman bestows upon them.” In other words, my voice’s benign cadence is part of my identity as an American, dammit!

I will admit, after arriving in Berlin I often feared that I sounded like a Radio ad for my country’s most recent Imperialist dabblings, no matter what words I said. So, I overcompensated, not by aping Peter O’Toole or Terence Stamp, but by agreeing with everything my new Europals said. There we’d be, sitting around sipping pastis and munching caper berries, and they’d be grinding out a new asshole for America. I’d just nod my head in the affirmative. “Why in sam hill do you think I moved to Berlin?” I’d say, and we’d all clink our glasses together as the strains of some alt-country band from Arizona or Illinois played in the background. Then I’d listen to them bash Hollywood movies or tell me all about the time they visited the U.S.

“Where’d you go?” I’d ask.

“New York,” they’d say. Then they’d light an American Spirit which always seemed to be the prelude to a long list of things learned about America and Americans after visiting Manhattan for 10 days.

I’ve decided that nothing helps a person discover latent patriotism (I use that loaded word in the most simplistic way possible) more naturally than living in a foreign country. In fact, I’m pretty sure that even the most jaded and cynical expats among us discover, from time to time, moments of pride in our birth country. Some Americans might’ve felt it at Berlin’s Obama rally, while others might feel it when they’re remember the town they grew up in or a trip to Yosemite or some other pretty place like that. Mind you, I’m not talking about jingoism or nationalism. I’m talking about the kind of pride one feels when their team scores a goal in the World Cup or they see California say something like, “Well, lordy, we don’t care if you’re both packing a vagina, come on down and get hitched if you wanna.”

The sad and embarrassing thing is that at some point in my life I began to confusingly think that it is impossible to separate the ability to feel esteem for my roots from my loathing for government (current and past). The two ideas got all twisted up with each other when all along they should have remained irrevocably divorced in my peanut brain. Thankfully, I believe I’ve finally learned that while America’s political philosophy is surely no less corrupt than Cosa Nostra, to say that I’ve met some Texans who seem like decent folk is not to give George Bush my seal of approval. Only now, as an expat, am I beginning to acknowledge that it’s not embarrassing to say that the US is OK, especially in comparison to any European country. America, after all, was created from European laws, customs and people. I’m not sure if it’s living in Berlin that’s got me thinking this way or if I’ve just grown wiser with age or if I’m still pissed off that I had to spend almost a full week without telephone and internet access at home because of the boneheads who run Kabel Deutschland. Whatever it is, I’m going to take a break from breaking my country’s balls for awhile.

What’s probably worse than the above confession is to admit that I’ve spent years stripping my voice of its Oklahoman roots. As a kid I was embarrassed by the way my family in New England teased me about my twang, and I bought into the convention that some accents are smarter than others. During my first year at a Connecticut boarding school (on scholarship, thank you) I began to rapidly alter the way I spoke in order to fit in. It was an insecure and immature thing to do. Same as it would be if I all of sudden started speaking in a British accent. In retrospect, I sure would have loved it if when I approached that stranger in the supermarket the exchange had gone a little more like this:

“Where ya from?” he would ask chuckling.

“Oklahoma.”

“Yeah,” he’d reply. “That’s what I thought.”

Instead he figured me for English.

Don’t get me wrong. Despite its recent reputation as a country filled with lager-swilling yobs who run around slicing-and-dicing each other with knives (Over 22,000 slashings in 2007, according to the Telegraph); despite the fact that a couple of weeks ago the British Foreign Office released a report that provoked headlines like “Drunk and abusive Britons wreak havoc in Spain as 2,000 are jailed”; despite the fact that that when I lived in London someone actually said the words ” ‘appy birfday mate” to me, I revere many things British. To wit:

• My wife, champion of my world, is a citizen of the United Kingdom.
• Three of my five all-time favorite writers are British (I’ve only just discovered Wilkie Collins, so that might change).
• Reeves and Mortimer, Peter Kay, French and Saunders — all British.
• And, if my half-Welsh wife lined up Angelina Jolie next to Helen Mirren and said, “You’ve got 20 seconds to chew face with one of them,” I’d toss a Polo mint into my mouth and unapologetically give Mirren’s 62 year-old lips a ride based solely on the way she delivered the line “Try the cock, Albert. It’s a delicacy, and you know where it’s been,” in the Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Their Lover.

Indeed, at the end of the day, there are aspects of the British Isles that are absolutely fabulous, what? But me talking like Jools Holland ain’t on, and I swear on Gary Cooper’s grave, I’ve never done it except in fun. Sure, the American government can be offensive and embarrassing, and so can I and a lot of my countrymen. But, jimminy christmas, I’m Made in USA.

It says so on my passport.

When in Berlin, do as the Viennese do.

“Is it too predictable to order Wiener schnitzel in a German restaurant?”

That’s the lede from this weekend’s New York Times “Bites” column about the Berlin restaurant Lutter & Wegner.

Means by no Means

Most mornings I listen to the radio and marvel at the bad, bad American economy. Dollar’s down. Cup of Starbucks is in the five dollar range. Gallon of cow’s milk costs almost as much as a gallon of gas, and soy milk, well, let’s just say that every time a farmer tugs at the soybean’s teat, a vegan ends up paying out the wazoo.

The even bigger news, of course, is the way that houses are foreclosing. It’s becoming epidemic, and after listening to NPR, it’s easy to imagine vast swaths of homeless people wearing their best Abercrombie and Fitch outfits, and leaning on their SUVs as they watch a crackle of fire shoot out of the oil barrel they’re all gathered around:

“I used to have five bedrooms, three baths and a GE fridge that was connected to the internet so I never had to miss my Perez Hilton,” the most popular of those displaced people are surely saying as I type this.

And, no doubt, their friends will respond with distant gleams in their eyes. “Yeah,” they’ll say, “I had two bay windows! Hell, there was a skylight in the master bathroom!” Then in solidarity they’ll all earnestly compare the aftermath of hurricane Katrina to the aftermath of forfeiting on a $500,000 loan.

That got me to thinking. What kind of house could half-a-mil purchase three or four years ago? I began to Google.

As normally happens when I Google, I got distracted from the task at hand. First, I read some expat blogs. Then I read about Obama’s visit to Berlin and wondered why no one took a few lighthearted jabs about how he horribly mangled every German name he mentioned. After that, I wondered why no one reported that there might have actually been 500,000 people at the rally if only half of them didn’t leave midway through warm-up band Reamonn’s set.

“Why? Oh, god of mercy, why?,” the dejected Obamaniacs could be heard to say. “That was really, really deplorable. I mean, that guy actually sang the line “Yeah you’re losing control…it’s just a chemical flow” with his eyes closed.”

Finally, I wondered if Obama would be able to cure the ailing economy. While I pondered that question, I realized that I’ll vote for him no matter what he does or promises.

Then my tangents came full circle. I remembered my original task.

Within a few clicks, I stumbled onto this real gem of a blog called “It’s Lovely! I’ll Take It!” If you’re an American expat, and you’re ever missing the shores of liberty or the pursuit of happiness, visit Sara’s collection of “poorly chosen photos of real estate listings.” I admit, it didn’t answer any of my questions about the floundering real estate market, but by the time I read through the site I had completely forgotten what my questions were. And, besides, what do I care about the American housing market? I live in Berlin, for chrissakes.

Spare change; My two cents

After John Kerry was defeated in the 2004 American election, I blamed Bruce Springsteen. Well, to be fair, I only partly blamed him.

See, I am pretty sure that when the Democratic party parades their celebrity endorsers, as they have done in the last two elections and are doing again in the current one, it drives a wedge between the candidate and his or her potential constituency. Naturally, Republicans try to do the same, but for them, it backfires to their advantage because only lame “stars” like Chuck Norris pony up. I believe the result is that the GOP ends up looking more like autograph seekers than the famous elite who sign their names on books and posters and the glorious bosoms of adoring fans. And let’s face it, most Americans are autograph seekers who just want to vote for a guy who understands their needs.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t vote for Bush, and I won’t pull the lever for McCain, either. But will I support Obama? Gosh, I don’t know. Sometimes I think he’s great. In my lifetime, I’ve never been so moved by a public speaker as I have been by him, and all of my friends think he’s simply the bees’ knees. But he’s a crafty politician, too, and I occasionally find his policy choices maddening. Here are four quick examples: (1) He proved two weeks ago that privacy isn’t as important to him as it is to me when he sided with Republicans and voted for a bill that allows warrantless surveillance of international telephone calls and emails. (2) Despite his lifelong fight for civil rights, he still believes that marriage is an institution meant only for a man and a woman. (3) He thinks it’s OK to fuse religion with government-sponsored programs, as he proved earlier this month when he came out in support of George W. Bush-type faith-based initiatives. And worst of all (4) Jennifer Aniston has endorsed him.

Barack Obama has spent a lot of time and money campaigning for change, but I can’t always figure out how he’s so different from the rest of the bunch. All that seems to be changing in his campaign these days is his heart, and that makes me wonder if I’ll even bother voting at all…

By the way, as he did for John Kerry, Bruce Springsteen has also come out in support of Obama. Only this time around, the Boss might blow my whole theory and actually do a candidate some good. You see, it was just revealed in an article by Reuters that “[Springsteen's] comments at 1988 concert helped fed [sic] East Germans’ discontent,” and, it seems, he was probably one of the key catalysts for bringing down the Berlin wall. Heck, who wouldn’t want a guy like that on his team? That’s an endorsement that’s almost good enough to guarantee my vote. But, then again, it kind of makes me wonder: What the hell has Jennifer Aniston ever done?

Detektivbyrån find the clues to tickle my fancy

What a nice venue, the amphitheater at Monbijoufestspiele!

Last night a little more than 100 of us sat sprawled out there on risers made of fresh-smelling pine as we watched and listened to Detektivbyrån out of Gothenburg, Sweden. The scene was a real wonder, what with the shiny dome of the newly renovated Bode Museum in the background; dozens of potted plants set up behind the band; and the natural flora that towered over the theater, including a Japanese maple that seemed to “get” the trio as it clicked its leaves together in time while the group did their thing.

Their thing is a peculiar combination of, in their words,  “glockenspiel ‘n’ accordion on top of fuzzy beats, swinging hugs and sweet respect.” Yes, I know, not the kind of hard driving power rock that makes a nice soundtrack for war. Nor is it the shoe-gazing emo that so many of the German kids seem to be listening to when they’re not blasting tedious Aggro hip-hop out of their cell phones. Instead, Detektivbyrån use their instruments to emit an ethereal feeling that’s at once contemporary and playful and magical, and with their bodies they portray the weirdest melange of hip geekiness. The accordion player, the poetically named Anders Flanders, seems to wobble on chopstick legs as he pushes out bass notes on his squeezebox with one hand and tinkles on an electric keyboard with the other. His Joey Ramone haircut and impossibly tight black jeans are perhaps the only indications that the band’s roots are primed in punk. Well, that and the fact that at one point he announced something like:  “When we were a punk band, our friends could never understand what we were singing.”

His pal, messy-haired Martin Molin, struck the bars on his vibraphone and glockenspiel with a panache that would’ve made the likes of Bobby Hutcherson smile, but the sounds that came out were decidedly anti-jazz inasmuch as they didn’t swing, but instead hung onto the wafts of cool Berlin air. These are the kinds of notes that would no doubt please Wes Anderson’s go-to composer Mark Mothersbaugh (née Mr. Devo) or maybe fans of the Icelandic group Múm. They are the kind of notes that were perfect for this particular outdoor venue. But wait, jeez, don’t think that I’ve forgotten about the drummer who is so singular that his parents gave him four names (Jons Nils Emmanuel Ekström). In fact, his combination of acoustic and electric drums gave the impression of a full rhythm section that was at times so bumpin’ he had me wishing that there was an appropriate place to shake my ass. Sadly, there wasn’t. JNE Ekström even managed, by the way, to play an amplified set of scissors with such precision that they must have been made by Fiskars.

I have no doubt that some famous Scandinavian pixie singer like Bjork will be calling these boys for a project someday soon, and you can bet that after their first full-length LP, Wermland, comes out in September, some DJ with slick fingers will remix Detektivbyrån right onto the desk of a not-quite-good looking New York City publicist (trust me, they’re all like this) who will make sure that the band only plays packed clubs and festivals for the rest of their career. If you have the chance to see them before that happens, please do.

By the way, the greatest thing of all for me was that I finally attended a show at a small Berlin venue without feeling like I’d been jammed into a Tokyo subway car. For once, I found it unnecessary to fight off the aggressive concert atmosphere using the fake dance-fighting Capoeira moves I’ve absorbed from the past few Karneval der Kulturen. Add to that the fact that, aside from the occasional burst of unintentional fuzz and feedback from what I guess was a wonky cable, the sound was remarkable for an outdoor arena. It might be too late to see Detektivbyrån play there again, but I suggest that you try to stop by sometime. Even if the music’s not to your liking, I’m sure the theater will be.

Indian super prank?

Just a quick note about the item that I mentioned at the bottom of yesterday’s post. I noticed this morning that news outlets around India and beyond are running wild with the story about a Nazi war criminal, Johann Bach, who was supposedly captured in Indian jungles.  But I’m evermore convinced that it’s all a big hoax.  The guy was supposedly 88-years-old, and he dragged an 18th Century piano with him across the globe these past 50 years. Add to that the fact that many of the news items say that he was captured by the German intelligence group “Perus Narkp,” which doesn’t exist as near as I can tell, and it’s all too rich to believe. If I had the time, I’d try to confirm this for sure, but alas, I’m off to earn my bread. If it is all a big joke, though, I’m looking forward to laughing at it.

UPDATE

Et voilá! A Hoax, indeed. (click here).

UPDATE II

If you’re still interested in this story, you can inform yourself about the group that is claiming responsibility for the Perus Narkp hoax by clicking here.

Eine Mischung for the Weekend

A day or two after bawling on the Fishwife about my desire to earn some colorful Euros, I reluctantly strapped on a tie, matted down my hair, pressed my thumbs and convinced some nice people that they could do a lot worse than give me money. I should’ve wished for something else, I guess, because they gave me the work, and it’s been keeping me so busy that I haven’t had the appetite or energy to keep this little project of mine from turning into a dusty hellhole.

Yes, yes it’s nice to earn some dough that’s not all green and devalued, and the work isn’t all bad, but I was getting used to writing for myself instead of for Papa Paycheck. If you’ve never done it before, writing about subjects chosen by other people can become fatiguing over time. It does for me, at least, and it reminds me of why I originally became an editor. Of course, puzzling out how to piece together so many voluptuous English words into new, never before written paragraphs is a pip, but when it’s really juicy stuff that’s not, shall we say, accompanied by my byline, I can get a little resentful. “Sorry, bub,” the chief decision maker where I’m working seems to say as he pats his damp forehead with a folded handkerchief. “T’ain’t yours no more.”

On Friday, I wrote a sentence — one sentence, mind you — that I was so tickled with, I almost emailed it to myself and then deleted any trace of it from the workstation I was using. But I didn’t let my greed win out, and the boss was pleased enough to invite me back next week. So, it looks like my little journal here is gonna get the prickly end of the stick for another short while. But, since we’re here with all of these middle-of-the-road sentences, I think I’ll go ahead and blow chunks about three subjects that pique my interest this very instant. Don’t worry, this should go quick.

***

Two Berlin related notes, and one about a Nazi.

• First thing’s first.  I saw a nice little show a couple weeks ago at a venue that was new to me. The Stadtbad Steglitz is a beautiful old Art Deco swimming hall that’s been rejigged to handle theater and music performances. On the evening that I attended, about 50 of us sat in comfortable-ish chairs in the shallow end of the (bone dry) pool. While a Russian tinkled an old upright piano, a pretty Israeli diva-in-training and a handsome young Chinese tenor stood on the pool’s deck and adroitly bellowed out opera’s greatest hits for us. The singers were endearing, the acoustics were great, and I only wondered once if I’d leave the old swimming pool with a new case of athelete’s foot. In sum, despite the fact that the audience at this concert took part in less drug smoking and binge drinking than I’m used seeing at concert events, I still had good time. And, I’m here to tell you that the Stadtbad Steglitz is celebrating its 100th birthday in July with some kind of gala.  If it’s not too pretentious, it might actually be fun.

• Sticking to the music theme, I am hoping to attend a show this Wednesday evening at the Monbijoufestspiele. A peach of a band from Sweden called Detektivbyrån (video pasted below) will be playing, and the entrance is only €10. Thing is, my experience is that a lot of the venues for music in Berlin suck massive pig testes. I’ve never been to this outdoor ampitheater, and this show starts at the early hour of 19.30 on a Wednesday night. It’s not a formula that guarantees big fun, but I might be wrong. If anyone knows about the venue, please do tell. I hate spending any amount of money on bad experiences, and if the sound ends up getting swallowed by the audience and surrounding Mitte, my underpants will most certainly end up in a twist.

• And, speaking of bad experiences, how about the Holocaust? Didya catch the story in this morning’s news about the Nazi war criminal who was nabbed in India?  The goddamn guy, a former SS colonel named Johann Bach, was on a well-tempered 50-year run from authorities before he slipped up in Goa. Apparently authorities finally found him because he placed a classified ad in an English language paper in an attempt to sell a rare 18th century piano that he nicked from a German museum in 1942. The whole story sounds a bit fraudulent to me, what with the fact that the guy has suposedly been bouncing around the world all these years dragging this piano along with him. That, and the fact that he’s 88 years old and he was captured in the wild Indian jungles. It all smells a bit funny, and my gut says it’s a hoax. Still, if it is true, what the hell? There must have been a substantial circuit of nefarious bastards keeping this guy hidden, and since his advanced age means that Bach is just a few meters from death’s doorstep, it is my great hope that some of his underground helpers are snatched up and tarred and feathered and made to eat only Toasty meat snacks for the rest of their lives.

A Quick Bellow

I’m afraid I’ve been too busy lately to puzzle out any sort of decent post. So, until I can get it together, I thought I’d share a nice quote that I read last night in Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift. For a moment after I read it, I was sure he was describing the blogosphere, but then I remembered that he published the book 33 years ago.

“America is a didactic country whose people always offer their personal experiences as a helpful lesson to the rest, hoping to hearten them and to do them good—an intensive sort of public-relations project. There are times when I see this as idealism. There are other times when it looks to me like pure delirium. With everyone sold on the good how does all the evil get done?”

Young and Innocent Days

This morning, as I was doing my ablutions, I listened to the Kinks’ Low Budget at a really high volume. I expect that most people don’t know this album very well, if they know it at all, and I guess that’s OK. It pains me to think that more of the world is interested in listening to Mick Jagger than to Ray Davies, but I’ve grown used to living with this kind of injustice.

Unfortunately, when Low Budget was released in 1979, my soft little boy brain was more interested in watching the Dukes of Hazzard and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century on our new 19-inch color Sony TV than listening to Ray Davies and the Kinks. Back then, if I listened to anything at all, my tastes leaned more towards the Bee Gees and Donna Summer because when that kind of music played on the Hi-Fi, pretty women who smelled of perfume and makeup, white wine and cigarettes, would sometimes lift me off the ground and dance with me. In my memory, those times were warm and safe and sometimes thrilling, and I remember constantly having the feeling that someday I’d grow up and people would be proud of me.

Now, we all know that the late 1970s were anything but warm and safe. The economy in America hadn’t been so bad for 40 years; the commies were threatening to sell us drugs, rape us or cut our throats; there was an Islamic revolution going down in Iran; and there was that blasted energy crisis that was really going to teach us all a lesson. Listening to Low Budget this morning reminded me of all that badness, but more so, it reminded me of the obvious parallels between then and now. Take these lines from “Gallon of Gas”:

Who needs a car and a 747
When you can’t buy a gallon of gas
Who needs a highway, an airport or a jet
When you can’t get a gallon of gas…

Around the time that Low Budget was released, the price of oil set a record “real price” that wouldn’t be broken until May of this year. Before the war in Iraq began in 2003, the price of oil was $30.13 a barrel. Yesterday it traded at over $136 a barrel, and the average price of gas in the United States was over $4.00 a gallon. Were Ray to sing “Gallon of Gas” today, I’m certain he would change the lyric to “When you can’t afford a gallon of gas…”

Then, there’s this verse from the title song. I blush when I write it, because it closely parallels my own recent wardrobe malfunctions:

Excuse my shoes they don’t quite fit
They’re a special offer and they hurt me a bit
Even my trousers are giving me pain
They were reduced in a sale so I shouldn’t complain
They squeeze me so tight so I can’t take no more
They’re size 28 but I take 34

While most of the American economy struggles, Wal-Mart and Costco, a slash-prices wholesaler, have recently turned in strong stock performances because they’re the only places where middle-class America can afford to shop. Me? On the American dollars that I earn, I look forward to the Tuesday Happy Hours at Colours Kleidermarkt on Bergmannstrasse when I can buy a whole kilo of clothes for €9.99 instead of the usual €13.99.

Finally, there’s my favorite song on Low Budget, “Little Bit of Emotion,” which offers some particularly poignant lines. See if you can guess who they most apply to in 2008:

Look at that looney
With a smile on his face
He knows no shame
And feels no disgrace
He’s got a look in his eyes
That makes it seem that he’s from outer space
Maybe that looney knows what it’s all about
He’s got something to say
But he can’t spit it out….

I write all of this to remind myself, and perhaps you, of three things: (1.) George W. Bush will be in Berlin today. Unless you’re carrying a sign that says something derisive, try to stay far away from the Regierungsviertel. (2.) Thankfully, history has proven time and again that the really bad times can get better. And (3.) bands used to make entire albums that tackled demanding real-world themes.

In the grand scheme of things, that last item probably isn’t all that important, but I had to include it order to justify all of my blathering about the Kinks. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go listen to Lil’ Mama’s slammin’ joint “Lip Gloss.” I love the part where she raps, “My lip gloss is cool/My lip gloss be poppin’/I’m standin’ at my locker/And all the boys keep stoppin’.” Sadly, ladies don’t pick me up and dance with me anymore, but if I’m lucky, my wife will take time out of her busy day to have a break dance battle with me in the living room.