William Carleton, Counselor @ Law

Finding Jacques Tati's Europe

A couple times this vacation, I've felt like we've stumbled into a scene from the Jacques Tati masterpiece, "Playtime."

The first time was in Kassel, when H and I went up a short alley to check out a cafe we spied at the end. Midway, a crew of young people seemed to be working at cross purposes to prepare a cavernous space for some sort of popup caberet or disco to be held later that day. As we retraced our steps to the mouth of the alley, a young man determined that a fifteen foot ladder should be removed, and he swung the ladder like a gate, serendipitously admitting a middle aged couple bearing a pizza box, and letting us out the other side. As we met the sidewalk on the perpendicular street, bicyclists and a pram whizzed by in opposite directions. The movements could hardly have been better choreographed.

The second was midday today in Berlin, when we transitioned from the charming, Greenwich-village like Savignyplatz to the post-war, master-planned scale of Ernst-Reuter-Platz. Here it was not the pedestrian ballet that recalled Tati, but instead a comedy of autos, trucks and buses parading in a roundabout, set within an arrangement of post-war rectangular office towers. The three pictures in this post are of Ernst-Reuter-Platz.

Hotel Social Network

Here's a concept I haven't before seen reduced to practice: a "social network" in which random occupants pull down shades both to identify with an assigned room and signify they have turned in.

I suppose they are not following the Facebook or Google policy of announcing a "true" identity, but there is a kind of systemic authenticity here. How do observers from the street comment? They don't. They are like those who follow tweets by SMS but don't post to Twitter themselves.

The hotel is in the Mitte area of Berlin.

Reconstruction

Helen tells me that when she first started regularly visiting Berlin, a few years after the wall came down, all of the buildings formerly east of the wall looked like this one: muddy colored, stucco missing, pick-marked.

This one, at the corner of Zehdenicker and Choriner Strasßen, has obviously been deliberately "preserved" in a dilapidated state, at least as to its façade.

People here move so fluidly along the avenues and alleys, through plazas and around gardens. Coming from Seattle, it is hard not to be jealous of the surfeit, the abundance, the redundancy of public transit. There is a subway system; an elevated rail system; a street trolley system; a bus system. The society seems determined to enable mobility (literally).

Writing this from another corner in the Mitte area, also pictured. More from Germany später.

zwei Smartphones

On a train this morning, to Kassel via Giessen.

The two-count (zwei mal) smartphone strategy is working out. The strategy is mostly an acknowledgment that a single charged battery won't support a full day's hard use, though it is the case that each phone has specific advantages; I often run both at the same time.

Begrudgingly, I have to admit the iPhone is proving more continuously reliable than the Motorola handset. The latter is connecting to the universal subconsciousness (reporting to the Borg) only when I have wifi, which is just as well, as it is the better picture taker and faces heavier lifting (particularly now that I've discovered the panorama feature, which stitches the image files for you in camera, so to speak).

Prior trips, I've experimented with taking an iPad along, but that's a bust. You can't do a damn thing with it.

A laptop remains the general answer, unless you are taking a proper vacation and are trying to detach. For - and let's be candid - a laptop enlists your full attention. That is one of its productive virtues and one of its recreative dangers. Laptops are for business travel, spontaneous vacations with your brothers, and holidays to jumpstart the writing of your novel (neuen Roman schreiben Expeditionen).

Begrudging, with reference to the Apple product, because I've been reading the official Steve Jobs bio on planes and trains, resenting that someone so mean should be so lauded. But I'm getting to the point in the narrative where two decades of assholishness is about to pay off, in terms of seeding the world with devices like this phone, that set new standards for utility and connectedness. Somebody had to sacrifice for that, apparently.

"Thank you very much"

Been on the road a week. The trip has taken us to London, Basel, Freiburg, Stegen and Strasbourg. Notes denominated in US dollars, British pounds, Swiss francs and European euros are folded happily in my pocket.

Today we're in Bad Nauheim, where Elvis is alive and looking well.

Before I left the States, I queued up several posts, and a smattering of those are yet to appear. But when we get to Kassel and then to Berlin, I may post more currently. We'll see!

Gibt mir dein Wurst

In Basel and Freiburg and Stegen in the Schwarzwald, I've had three varieties of wurst so far this vacation, all of them excellent, worlds beyond anything like the hot dogs, sausages, kielbasa and bratwurst I've eaten in the States.

I wonder if it's the lack of nitrates or other preservatives, but H says the meat is just probably a higher quality - not so much the leavings of an industrial food system.

The beer is excellent here, too, but you can get beer this good on the east coast of the United States. Just not on the west coast, which is plagued by hyper-carbonated "micro-brews."

We do have salmon in the Pacific Northwest. That alone justifies a decision to headquarter there.