On tour with John White in the Dominion of New Zealand

No hurry here.

When I took a tumble in Calais that time, as well as smashing my face up a bit I also dropped my ipod and my violin.  The violin is something like a hundred years old and protected by powerful gypsy force fields, so it was fine.  The ipod is about four years old, which in ipod terms means that its been obsolete for about three and a half years, and presents a case similar to your neigbour's blind and deaf eighteen-year-old terrier.  No surprise then that that brush with the pavement was enough to send it scurrying to the Great Consumer Electronics Graveyard On A Beach In China Somewhere.  This week, with the ipod gone to its rest, we had to rely during the trip to Wellington on a bunch of mixtape CDs I made.  This was not a problem, because Ms Millicent Crow came along for the ride also, and making mixtape CDs is still really the only trick I know for impressing girls.  As we passed through Cambridge, a particuarly fine track came on, towards the end of my 'quiet but still awsome driving music' compilation.

'Hey!' Interrrupted I. 'What do you think of this track?'

'It's alright I guess.'

'Would you say you 'like' it, do you reckon?'

'OK, yeah.  Like.'

'Really? Sweet!  Do you know what that means?'

'Sigh. No.  What does that mean?'

'It means you like Led Zeppelin now!  Yess!  My work here is basically done.'

'What? So no.  Is this Led Zeppelin?  I thought they were all denernernerner boom sort of stuff.'

'Yep, this is 'Going to California' off Led Zep four, and you just told me you officially 'like' it.'

'Did you just put this song on the CD so you could put on your blog that I like Led Zeppelin?'

'Wow.  Um... Kind of, yeah.  But also because it's a good song.'

'I think you should stop thinking about things to put on your blog before they actually happen.  It's weird.'

'Maybe it is, but you like Led Zeppelin.  That's actually not weird because they are one of the best if not the best band of all time.  So on average, we're not weird.'

'I'm not going to respond to that except to say it makes no sense.  And I'll be pissed off if you say that I like Led Zeppelin on your blog.'

This got us as far as Putaruru. Money is worth a lot more there than it is further up the line, so I was able to purchase a suit from the Baptists for a very reasonable price.  That night, I left this entire suit behind after the gig at the Frederick Street Sound And Light Exploration Society, which is not a thing I habitually do.  In fact, it occurs to me that over three months of touring around Europe, forty shows and forty-one thousand-odd kilometres by planes, trains, ships and busses; back-rooms, bar-rooms, mattresses in living rooms, heatwaves, thunderstorms, psychedelic rock'n'roll and acid rain; countless metros, tube-stops, u-bahns, s-bahns, stables in the forest, solarpunk vineyards and walks in the park, all I lost was this: a single red patch lead, the sort you can get five for ten bucks down at Surplustronics.  I actually even know who has it, the swine.  BUT: Driving my own car from Wellington to Auckland and back via Whanganui over roads too familiar to even write songs about, two shows only over the course of a single weekend, I mislaid or left behind the following items:

• One three-piece suit, including the waistcoat
• A deliciously warm jacket (twice)
• My actual glasses that I need in order to see properly
• My hat
• A tin of tobacco (wasn't mine, don't smoke, long story).
• Three dollars and change.

My sister asked me how come I never lost anything in Europe, given how uselss I clearly am.  'I had a system,' I replied.  'It's important to have a system.  Also, I didn't change my clothes.'

'That's gross.  I hope you're lying.'

 I know what you're probably thinking:  'Jesus, this is boring.  I wonder if anything cool happened on the weekend, like maybe Sam fell over and hurt himself again?' The answer is well, yes, actually, cool things did happen.  I got to go on tour with John White and Ms Millicent Crow, which was pretty much a Tour Dream Team.  We had picnics and talked about how the fourth dimension works until our brains started to hurt.

Millicent Crow, stealing own soul.

John White with Squizwot.

John White thinking about hypercubes.

Mangaweka: Quiet.  Too Quiet.

We visited the haunts of those denizens of Wellington and Whanganui who have most to do with spiky interdimensional freakout music and fuzzy psychedelic werewolf music, respectively, and when we had finished doing that we drank some wine and sang some songs.

The Frederick Street Sound And Light Exploration Society, Wellignton: 

Interdimensional General Store

Stink Magnetic HQ, Whanganui: Home of NZ's finest purveyors of psychowerewolffreakout surf jams.

In Wellington, we went head-to-head with the Sisters of St. Rupertsberg and Stefanimal, who were playing down at the Mighty Mighty on the same night we were at Fred's.  The Mother Superior of St. Rupertsburg used to be in the Bond Street Bridge Band, and Stef used to be in John's band Mestar, so the stage was set for some sort of teen movie show-down battle of the ex-bandmates.  As things turned out, that proved to be unnecessary: John phoned Stef from the stage during his set, and they did an across-town phone-in duet together.  If there was a dry eye in either house, I'm sure I didn't see it.

John at Fred's: photo by syncretismassociates

We should have a jam sometime, are you busy? photo by syncretismassociates

Yeah, now is good: Photo by Syncretismassociates

Look, a winner:

And the winner is:  Maja.  Even though she pretended to be her dad, and tried to start rumors about me which are mostly unfounded.  That's how fair the process was; I asked the cat and she chose without fear or favour. 

Tomorrow I will drive to Wellington for these shows I mentioned.  People who aren't from New Zealand may not be aware that that's actually a fair way away, even though our country is just a pair of islands in the middle of a large ocean full of sharks.  The island thing can be confusing for people, I think.  Once upon a time I had a job selling liquor and cigarillos to Americans off the cruise ships, and middle-aged rich people would ask me things like 'is there a Hard Rock Cafe on the island, sweetheart?'  It took me a while before I figured out that the island they were talking about was the North Island, which is not usually thought of as an island in the sunny South Pacific atoll sense.  I didn't know the answer, so I would alternate between yes and no depending on how much I felt like making up directions that day.  For all I know, there are to this day Americans in places like Dargaville or Fielding looking for this elusive cafe.  I wish them luck.

The Broken Heartbreakers and a sweet giveaway

For the past few years, I've been playing space mandolin and dark, tremulous guitar (See what I did there?) with The Broken Heartbreakers.  It's been a blast.  Then I turned my back for five minutes, and half the band ran away to parts unknown, so we're having a little break at the moment.  It turned out, though, that in a classic case of how you never really know what drummers are up to back there, our drummer Myles had been quietly shooting really grainy footage and taking low-resolution photos of us (mostly of our backs)  for the duration.  Earlier in the year, in the moments when his new baby daughter was asleep, he edited it together into a sweet little video to go with the title track of our new album 'Wintersun.'  For reasons best known to himself, he decided to use a version of the track that is actually quite different to the one that ended up on the record, in that half the vocals are missing and the guitars in the bridge kind of sound like Supergrass.  Such nitpickerry notwithstanding, the results of his efforts warmed my heart when they emerged from the internet into the Berlin apartment where I was sitting listening to the rain and missing my band a couple of months ago.

I don't think this is the kind of video that will ever get played on the television, partly because it's just too awesome, and also because it actually doesn't get any bigger than the little window here.  Also, the section between 2:43 and 2:46 features rare footage of the only time Rachel has been know to lose a game of pool, so it's kind of embargoed.  So for now, this is an exclusive, which is sure to boost my traffic and help me to monetize my blog.

I'm kind of interested to hear whether other people enjoy this video quite as much as I do.  I mean, for me it's memories of touring with a good people for the past couple of years playing awesome music; to you it may look like a bunch of grown-ups failing to act their age.  Perhaps it's the same thing.  Anyway, since the Broken Heartbreakers usually appeal to a more sensible and mature demographic (as well as our hordes of teenage fans who were devastated when it was revealed that John was actually married to Rachel and hence unavailable), here's a video of us being accepted by the cultural establishment:



Yep, that's Finlay MacDonald there, who edited the NZ Listener last time it was a good magazine.  If that's not cultural establishment, I quit.

Why am I telling you this?  I thought you might want to get a copy of the newish Broken Heartbreakers album, is why.  Ms Millicent Crow has been telling me that I should do a giveaway on my blog for quite a while, because that's what people with blogs do, apparently.  So here goes: What you have to do is leave a comment below telling me your favorite thing about the 'Wintersun' video, and sometime before Thursday I'll choose a winner.  I will probably do some sort of names in hats or random number generator type procedure in order to ensure fairness, or perhaps I will get the cat to choose.  The winner will receive this princely prize pack:

One 'Wintersun' CD, to be posted anywhere in the world or to the Mars colony, and
Two free passes to any of the the shows I'm doing with John White over the next couple of weeks.  If you're not in Wellington, Whanganui, Raglan, or Auckland, these are transferable, so you can nominate two people in one of these towns to get in for free.  I probably can't give away free passes to the South Island shows because I'm not playing at those ones, but I'll check with John and get back to you.  Similarly, if you already have a copy of 'Wintersun,' because chances are if you read this blog you're either a friend or a relation and you got it at one of the release shows, take the free one and give the one you already have to your aunty for Christmas.  If you are a relation, though, please don't give it to one of the aunties we have in common because then she'll get two.

Pretty sweet deal, huh?  Comment away.

UPDATE:  It was drawn to my attention that I had set my settings such that you needed to do stuff like sign in to leave comments, which a lot of people find quite difficult apparently.  This blogging thing is clearly more complicated than I had anticipated.  Anyway, I've changed it now, so everybody can comment, even spambots.

Spambots: Even if you win the competition, you can't come to the show.  Sorry.

The Brokem Heartbreakers will see you now.

Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie

One thing I realised when I got back to New Zealand is that we need a new pet. We already have a cat and a fish, and we used to have several more fish until the remaining fish ate them, but there is room here for a newcomer I think. Fish are good because you can ignore them. They don't need to be exercised, and if you forget to feed them for a while they pretty much sort themselves out, at least until they run out of smaller fish. The fish is called Leviathan and he's fine, we quite like him, he can stay. The only real problem with fish is that they aren't particularly fulfilling as pets because it's hard to tell what they're thinking and they don't really listen if you've got something you want to talk to them about. The cat is a different story, but I did not fly all the way around the world to write a blog about the cat. All I will say on that subject is if anybody wants a violently deranged and overly furry housecat who likes to drool on keyboards and destroy people's stuff, send me a stamped, self-addressed envelope and you can have her by return post.

I want an animal less homicidal than a cat, but more interesting and interested than a fish. It's a difficult balance to strike, because the pet must also not need exercising or training at all. A pig is a possibility; I have always been fond of pigs. My friend in Berlin has a pig called Kenny Powers, who is obviously a very fulfilling and faithful companion, but the impression I get is that he requires a lot of attention and training. That's fine if you've got the commitment and stickablility to maintain a good training regime, including walks in the park and jumping practice etc, but I fear that I lack that stickability. It would be a shame if my pig lost condition and became lazy due to my want of focus. A dog wouldn't work either, because you can't ignore dogs. If you ignore your dog for too long, pretty soon it will be running around the neighbourhood eating children, and that attracts journalists. I need a pet I can ignore sometimes, but one that will be there when I want a bit of a gossip.

So what I decided was this: It's turtle time! What this house needs is a tank with a serious turtle in it, the kind that you can feed meat to when you're bored, the kind with red dots on its ears and a leathery head that it retracts into its little shell when it's eaten too much meat and it has indigestion. Turtles make great pets because they are virtually self-sufficient: They don't need to be walked or burped, they don't crave attention, and you don't have to try to teach them things because you just can't: turtles don't do tricks. They just hang out, swim around, and look awesome. But: if you want to, you can talk to them, and they will be a lot more interested than a fish would be. That's because while fish have no knowledge of the world beyond the aquatic, turtles are amphibious, and therefore have a broader perspective on life. They hunger for knowledge, and in their little turtle brains lurk the rudiments of empathy. Once you have won its trust (with meat) your turtle can be a very sympathetic listener.


Another strong advantage a turtle has as a pet is that when we go away, lots of people will be happy to look after it. Nobody who's met her wants to look after our cat any more, because everybody knows that she's trouble. It's pretty hard to find a dog-sitter as well because of the regular exercise thing, and the problem with leaving your pig with someone is that pigs can easily be turned into a range of delicious meats and it can be hard to explain that your particular pig wasn't for eating. Turtles are no-fuss and pretty much all look the same, though, so nobody will have any qualms about turtle-sitting because a) it's easy, and b) if you still manage to make a horrible mistake and kill my turtle, you can replace it with a similar-looking one and I will never know.

I am strongly looking forward to this turtle, and I know that pretty soon people will start asking me what I'm going to call it. Well, I can reveal that I've thought quite a lot about this, and my first and well-considered choice was 'Led Zeppelin.' That would be a rad name for a turtle. Here's the thing though: you can have that name for your turtle if you want, because I'm not going to use it. I realised that I'm really looking forward to people meeting my turtle and going 'pretty cool turtle man, what's its name?' and me just saying 'The Turtle.' Because really, that's all the name it will need. It's not like it needs to get a driver's license or vote or anything, it's just a turtle. Using its powers,* The Turtle will know when it's being addressed or spoken of, so no fancier moniker is necessary in my view. When we talk of 'The Turtle' in this house, everybody will know who we mean.

So obviously nothing much exciting has happened this week, but sometimes it's good to be able to take a breather and sort out your life, particularly vis-a-vis turtles. Next time something interesting happens you will be the first to hear about it, and you can also expect more pictures of turtles here in the future. I'm thinking of subtitling this whole thing 'the blog that keeps on giving,' so feel free to let me know what you think about that.


Next week: In which I go to Whanganui, for rock'n'roll purposes. We'll see how that turns out.


----------------------------
*Yeah, The Turtle has powers. What of it?

I'm a lot like you were

Did you think maybe that just because I'm back in Neuseeland I might stop it with the blogging? No such luck. Auckland is a lot like Berlin, I have found, except that everything is further away and it costs more. The main difference is that when people are rude to me on public transport here I usually know what they're saying, and I have a chance to respond with a witty remark. The situation doesn't arise much, of course, because Auckland doesn't have any public transport to speak of. If it did, though, I would be prepared with some of the pithy comebacks I've been saving up for when I got back to an English-speaking country where they would appreciate my ready wit. This may not sound apropos, but I've been working on my witty comebacks in my head for the past couple of weeks, ever since I got heckled by a toothless busker in Freetown Christiania.

It was just another day at the An Emerald City office - we were rolling through the lawless streets of Copenhagen's autonomous anarchist zone in Jim the Eagle, the German ex-police van with crow-black bulletproof windows. I was perched on the windowsill of the shotgun-side door, ostensibly the better to navigate through the windy hodgepodge of stalls and hawkers with their t-shirts and overpriced cannabis, but actually because I was pretty sure that I looked kind of rad sitting up there all rock'n'roll with my leather jacket and my top button undone. We were in good spirits, heading for a venue called Loppen, where we had been told we could confidently expect to have a very pleasant evening. As we slowed to negotiate a bottleneck, a wizened fellow banging on a five-stringed guitar looked up and called out to me something I didn't quite catch about my hat. Because objectively it's a very good hat, I figured it must have been an unsolicited compliment, so I smiled benignly and gave him a regal wave. I share this story now because I suspect that this was my mistake - behaving like royalty from the comfort of a police-looking Volkswagen may not endear one to the kinds of anarchists who get by playing five sixths of a guitar to broke wasters in open-air drug markets, and if you dear reader are able to profit from this insight one day then more power to you, I say.

Jim the Eagle, roosting outside Loppen.

After we'd found the venue and packed the gear in using their Steampunk Family Robinson freight elevator, we decided to go an have a look around the neighbourhood. Christiania is a good place to play a show, because it has something for every member of the modern psychedelic instrumental rock ensemble. If you're a political theory nerd (and every band has one) it is an interesting case study in spontaneous organisation and the effects of a power vacuum on the marketplace. If you're into weird little houses that look like they were built for hobbits by wizards, it has those in spades. If you need a new hat for the stage, or a cape for everyday wear, the selection is wide and relatively inexpensive. If you like to get into conversations about the relative merits of Moroccan versus Tibetan hashish, you will find plenty of people to talk to about your hobby; there are also swings and slides for the rhythm section to play on.

Anarchist goods elevator. Don't bother looking for the
inspection history or any of that bourgeois nonsense.

To get to all of these diversions, however, it was necessary to pass by the toothless busking man again. We were strolling, you know, six deep, looking kind of like a band with a couple of hours to kill and probably also like we knew it, when the busking dude calls out 'Hey! nice hat man!'

'Thanks dude.'

'Yeah man, nice hat! Shame you're yuppie scum!'

'Beg your pardon?'

'Nice hat! Shame you're yuppie scum!'

'Oh. Yeah. I um, I guess it is.'

This was really confusing. I mean, I'm used to getting yelled at by people, don't get me wrong. Usually though, it's for doing things like Looking Like a Fag in Public, or Not Paying Attention During a Discussion, or Playing a Noisy Solo While The Guy Who Wrote the Song is Singing About His Feelings, all of which I have been guilty of and actually quite enjoy doing. Getting a yell in these situations may not be always welcome, but at least it is not unexpected. Strolling through Hippietown with my musical co-conspirators though, wearing not even a suit, but my busking hat with the lucky crow's feather in, I would have thought I was safe from accusations of yuppiedom. Particularly when these accusations are leveled at me by a busker with few teeth, the kind of guy who usually winds up on my team, these things can smart.

Pretty good hat, for a yuppie. Note that the coffee is a long black,
not like a cappuccino or something that maybe a yuppie would have.

In the absence of a witty comeback from the proud owner of said hat, Dan, bless him, was all for going back and starting something with the guy. He was in the army down in Israel for a while, and sometimes the esprit de corps comes out I guess. Rob, however, was quickly at pains to appraise us of the sociopolitical realities of the situation in which we found ourselves: when you're in an autonomous zone controlled by an anarchist tribe who have thrown out the cops, it's a good idea not to start altercations with people with no teeth. I didn't have much to contribute; I was sulking a little bit, which is what I usually do when people call me a yuppie and I can't think of a funny thing to say back.

I don't know about you, but when people call me things I tend to go through a brief period of introspection to determine whether or not the new label is accurate. I mean, there is every chance that the broken-down minstrel hanging out on the fringes of the cannabis bazaar shouting at strangers has some sort of insight into my life that has hitherto been hidden from me. It would be a shame to forgo this chance for self-improvement just because I find the messenger's behaviour boorish. I also probably needed to walk past the guy again in order to get back to the venue for soundcheck, so I wanted to have a think about how things stood and where our relationship was at so I would know how to interact with him should the opportunity arise a third time.

As the others tried on hats and chatted with the pushers, I considered the situation from a few angles. The first thing I thought was that I hadn't heard anyone say 'yuppie' for quite a long time, really since the nineties if I think about it. Maybe it's common in Denmark, though, and the guy didn't have to be down with the latest slang if he really had a point, so I let that slide. Was I dressed like a yuppie? I didn't even have to check, I had been wearing the same clothes for several days and none of them would have earned me rapid preferment in an office context. So not that then. Could it be my overall appearance apart from my clothes? Yuppies, I'm pretty sure, shave a lot, and generally engage in grooming. Like cats, they wash themselves frequently. They are well turned out, and their nail polish is usually not chipped as far as I am aware. I, on the other hand, had left my razor in a gas station restroom in Calais over a month ago, I was beginning to smell faintly ursine, and I lost points in the nail-grooming category as well. In short, I was well prepared for playing space violin in a psychedelic rock band, but I would not have even made Casual Friday in most downtown workplaces.

Guys, to smell 'ursine' is to be like these chaps. Not whatever you were thinking.

Perhaps it was something more intangible then, like attitude? It's true that I am arrogant and I tend to walk around with a vast sense of entitlement, but I would have though that 'asshole' was a more appropriate label for someone with those traits, and in any case I'm working on it. Perhaps he meant that I have an eye for the main chance, a keen instinct for the vagaries of the market, and a razor-sharp focus on my career? How to tell the poor man, then, that I am used to playing for little or no money beyond costs, and my idea of career development is a day spent listening to every single Led Zeppelin album, back to back and in order? It made no sense. This aggression, I decided, would not stand.

I will not trouble you with the range of options I went through in my head regarding the inevitable future encounter with this heckling busker. The problem I had was that any verbal riposte on my part would inevitably come across as prepared and stilted, since he would know that I had spent the past couple of hours thinking about it. That essentially meant that the better it was, the more it would seem like I'd thought about it, which would mean he'd got to me; whereas if it was lame I would look extra-dumb because after all, I'd had a couple of hours to think about it, hadn't I? Any non-verbal response, though, would be very far out of character for me because of how well brought-up I am,* so I really was in a bit of a bind. I guess I could have mooned the guy, but that seemed, and still seems, tacky. My least bad option, as far as I could see it, was to embrace the yuppie/busker dichotomy and offer the guy twenty Kroners to shut the hell up. As it happened, I was spared the decision by my old allies: social confusion and my congenital inability to recognise humans.

What happened was, the group of us became separated for various reasons and me and Rob were the last to wander back to Loppen together for soundcheck. As we approached the spot where the busker had been, I could hear a cracked voice singing 'Old Man' by Neil Young, and all I could think was you've got to be fucking kidding me. We stopped by the guy playing the guitar and he's all like, do you like the song? And I'm like, yeah, I mean, I like the song I guess but to be honest it isn't his best work and you really need more strings for that shit don't you? Rob kind of gives me a look like don't be a dick, man, and the guy asks what we're up to in Christiania. Rob says we're here to play music and the guy says cool, he plays music too. Rob says uh-huh, cos the guy is holding a guitar and has just been observed to sing.

'Whereabouts you boys playing?' He sounds Canadian. Whereaboots. Come to think of it, he looks kind of like Neil Young, if Neil Young smoked crack.

'Over there. In um, in Loppen?'

'No way. Tonight? With that Canuck band?'

'Yeah, I guess.'

'Wanted to get to that. Couldn't get a ticket.' Yeah, because you spent all your money on crack, Neil, thinks I. But doesn't say it.

'Oh, well we've got some door list I think. Have we still got door list, dude?'

'What? Um I guess so. Maybe we shouldn't -'

'Yeah OK, cool man, we'll get you on the door. What's your name?'

So the guy gave us his name, and I was very confused because that wasn't how I expected it to go at all. At the same time I was quite impressed with Rob because I figured that this had to be the last thing the guy was expecting, and it was a pretty masterful comeback, if that's what it was. We didn't discuss it though, and the two of us walked back to the venue, speaking of more lofty matters. Later on, however, over dinner, Reuben suddenly remembered the guy.

'So did you see Toothless Busking Man again today?'

'Yeah man, saw him again on the way back.'

'Did you give him a karate chop?'

'Um. Yeah nah that didn't seem appropriate really, after Rob had like invited him to the show and whatever.'

'No way! Did what?'

'Wait, what? No I -'

'Yeah he did! Dude, you totally did invite him. Do you have a hole in your brain?'

'Yeah, well, yes. I mean I do, but what? Holy shit, was that the same guy?'

'Yeah, the busker, man! The one who saw through my disguise? That was the guy we were talking to on the way back. Who you said to come to the show. Wasn't it?'

'Really? Are you sure that was the same dude?'

'Fuck I don't know man, people are people, right? These broke-down old junkies all look the same to me with their guitars and their Neil Young and shit. But yeah, I think so.'

'Nah look I'm pretty sure that was a different guy from before. No way was I going to invite that guy. Jesus.'

'For real? You're sure?'

'Yeah, like, ninety per cent?'

'OK, that's pretty high. Far out, this town bugs me out man. I totally thought it was the same guy.'

'Oh man, and you didn't say anything?'

'Yeah well what was I gonna say? You were just about pashing the dude.'

Social confusion, retarded development in the part of my brain that recognises faces, these are powerful forces that conspire to strip meaning from my life. It's possible that the guy came to the gig that night, but to be honest, the Danes really like their Black Mountain so the room was pretty full and I didn't see anyone with that many gaps in their teeth. Basically, this kind of incident is by no means isolated for me and it often takes me about four goes before I recognise people's faces at all. This often has hilarious consequences for everyone except me, which is fine, because it's good to make people laugh, but it can be inconvenient when it comes to things like revenge. Dad reckons that it means I should never try to be a politician, and he's probably got a point. I reckon the main thing it means though is that I need to work on my comebacks, because when you're me and all the faces look the same, you only get one chance with the haters.


-----------------------------
*and also a bit of a sissy.

Done all I can do in this town

After three months on this side of the world, the seasons have taken a turn. The weeping birches by the Treptower memorial are colouring, and honking great skeins of geese cross the sky from the North. As the evenings begin drawing in, the drug dealers in Gorlitzer Park have started to fight each other with baseball bats, and finally I can wear all of the layers of wool I laughed at myself for hauling over here in July. I like to wear wool, and I like the geese. Riding around a park in a big old railway yard while the leaves turn gold and the various crews of pushers pursue diplomacy by other means is a fine way to spend an afternoon if you're not busy, but despite these attractions it still feels like it's a good time to head home.

I try to remain vigilant in life when I can, but I do find that things tend to sneak up on me. Opening for the Black Angels with An Emerald City was a good way to celebrate my last week in Europe, but it was only a couple of days before my train to Frankfurt international airport that I really started thinking in terms of leaving town and making sure I did what I'd come to do before I had to go. You will be aware that the main thing I came to Europe to do was ride purposlessly around Berlin on my bike Philip, so I made sure I did that first. Me and him have had some good times together over the past few months, and I think he realised that our time was coming to an end, because he was a little subdued on our last few outings. Usually he is a very spirited bike and he likes to throw his chain at inoppourtune moments, or lock up his wheels in the middle of bustling intersections to show me who's in charge, but as we've cruised around our favourite parts of Neukolln and Kreutzberg this past week his behaviour has been very proper.

Another of my key mission objectives for the Berlin Operation was to spend a good part of most days cluttering up a particular cafe in Oppelnerstrasse where you can get the best long black north of Midnight Espresso. I don't usually care that much about how my food and drink taste, but these long blacks are very fine and the company there is often worth getting out of bed for. If you ever feel like maybe your pants don't match your jacket and you're not ready to face up to the beautiful kids in Berlin just yet, a leisurely bout of coffee consumption here should put you in the right frame of mind to stroll down the strasse with your freunden, ready see and be seen. I think the rule is that it doesn't matter if band practice starts a little late if at least half of us need to stop at Passenger for a coffee before we feel like we can make a useful contribution to the session, and band practice has been starting late a lot recently. This is a good thing, and it meant I was able to put in a bit of quality time with the motley Passenger crew before I left town.

One of the few things that I really needed to do in real life, though, I predictably ended up postphoning until my last day. Those of you who have kept clicking back here hoping for something worth reading* since a couple of months ago may recall that at one time I was bragging about how busking has made me rich as a troll. I'm not apologising for bragging here; people who dislike bragging typically have nothing to brag about. However, I feel I should clarify my financial situation somewhat, in order that readers don't develop the impression that the people of Berlin have handed life to me on a plate, or in a hat, if youlike. The thing with busking is that people usually give you coins. Sometimes notes, but usually coins, and that's fine - I like coins. They make me feel like a character in a game of Dungeons and Dragons. (I.e. awesome). The problem I had in July, though, was that I liked my coins too much. Like some latter-day Midas, I hoarded them and gazed lovingly upon them, enjoying them both as objects and as tokens of the esteem I felt I could purchase with them from my peers. It is true that I should have been more out in the fresh air, but my behaviour did have a rational basis, which was this: I figured I might as well take them all to a bank at once and get them changed into notes in one go rather than in time-wasting dribs and drabs. As you will be aware, my time is precious and my days are crowded with purposeful incident.

It was reasonably important for me to get these coins changed into notes, because bureaux de change typically don't handle coins; presumably because they are not run by trolls or aficionados of fantasy fiction. My plan was to not be completely broke when I got back to New Zealand, so I needed to convert my hoard into a form that I could reconvert into NZ dollars later. So it was that on the last day of July, before I left Berlin to hoon around Europe in an A-class Mercedes for a month, I carefully counted all of my loot. I divided it into bags by denomination and multiples of ten, and set off to find a bank. It was raining a bit and I was toting about fifteen kilograms of coins in a calico bag, looking very much like a traditionally-minded bank robber. My spirits were high as I approached the first bank, just around the corner.

'You would like to do what please?'

'Um, change these coins? To notes? Ah, bitte?'

'Change to another kind of money? For um, for foreign? This is not-'

'Um, nein. I mean like change the coins to notes? In Euros?'

'Ah so. This also is not possible. You may deposit this coins, but to do this you must first have an account. With this bank.'

'Was? Ok. Gosh. Um, I think my friend does.' I tend to only say 'gosh' when I'm a bit flustered, and it's usually a sign things are not going well for me.

'Your friend, is he with you?'

'Ah, no. Nah. He's not here.'

'Without this friend, sorry we can do nothing.'

'Serious? You can't just swap them for me for like a commission or something? That would be totally sweet in Neuseeland, they really like doing it. It gives them a chance to play with coins and stuff.'

'Sorry, you talk so fast! What did you say please?

'Um yeah nah don't worry about it man, eh . Danke.'

'Please have a nice day.'

The story was similar at the next establishment, and at the one after that there was the added twist that they don't even handle coins at all, and the thought of it seemingly makes them ill. The next place turned out not to be a bank at all, but a mortgage broker, with hilarious consequences. By this time it was raining quite hard and I was beginning to wonder how much fifteen kilograms of coins is actually worth in real life, and whether it was much, and suspecting that in fact it wasn't. In mounting frustration and dampness, I tried a series of casinos, figuring that they would be used to coins and probably had a system. They may very well have had, but unfortunately I was insufficiently charming and nobody wanted to try to understand what I was talking about. Probably this was because I was dripping wet, speaking English, and waving around a shopping bag full of cash. Not a threat, necessarily, but probably not worth going out of your way for.

I had a show to get to, so I decided that since I had about twenty-five kilos of instruments, amps, pedals and sundry other equipment to schlep up to Fredrichshain on the U-Bahn, I might as well haul the coins along as well. Improbably, this proved to be a good move, and set a pattern for the rest of the tour - after the show, the host very graciously agreed to take a hundred euros worth of ones off my hands, in exchange for their face value in paper money. I was pathetically relieved, both for my own financial situation and for the state of the Euro in general. After all, money is only worth what we agree it is, and the evidence from that day suggested very strongly that nobody believes in coins any more. It was nice to feel that both I and the European Union might be less broke than people thought.

So the next day, when we set off to London very very fast on the autobahn, I had in addition to my usual kit about four hundred Euros worth of one and two Euro coins. For the next few weeks I would gauge the atmosphere after each show, and if the host was convivial I would tell the sorry tale and do a deal to swap twenty or fifty of these shiny tokens for real plastic money. Between this and our practice of paying for petrol with one-Euro coins when the gas station staff were surly, my piratical hoard gradually converted into a much more freely convertible, and still satisfyingly solid, pile of cheerily-coloured European banknotes.

When I got back to Berlin at the beginning of July though, and retrieved the flight case for my guitar from the friend's apartment where it had been stashed, I looked inside and was reminded that while I had taken care of the ones and twos, there were still about a hundred and fifty euros worth of twenty- and fifty-cent coins sitting there in envelopes looking like a job to do. I hadn't taken these on that part of the tour, partly because they were really heavy, and partly because I decided that it was unlikely that even the most helpful venue owner or bar manager would remember the New Zealander who insisted on counting out hundreds of twenty-cent coins on their bartop with much fondness at all. It was this last pile of coins that became my final task in Berlin - in addition to playing shows, riding my bike and a rigourous schedule of hanging out, converting this final stack of silver became a useful thing to procrastinate about.

That's why, when a kindly soul finally took pity on me and walked me the ten minutes from Passenger cafe to her bank, and we stood and watched while the teller succumbed to her own rulebook and labouriously counted the whole jingling stash into a legitimate, numbered account, returning the pile of crisp banknotes so desirable to international money-changers, I felt a satisfying sense of a mission accomplished. The task had been hanging around for weeks, not getting in the way so much as providing a useful ambition around which to organise my plans. That was the task, and it had been ticked off - time to leave this town and follow the geese.

------------------------
*Sorry.

Teufelsberg

Berlin is not a hilly town. There are very few hills here at all, in spite of the fact that several of the suburbs are named after various notional mounds of dirt that you'd really need to be quite worked up to try to make a mountain out of. The area is well served by lakes and even fairly extensive forests, but hills really aren't a feature. The largest hill in the district, in fact, is artificial. It was built in the late forties after five years of aerial bombardment and several months of sustained artillery barrage had left approximately sixty million cubic metres of rubble lying around in Berlin, generally cluttering the place up and getting in the way of efforts to rebuild the city. So far, so WWII, you may be thinking, but the location of the hill is not a coincidence either. Faced with a decision about where to put all this rubble, the occupying Allied military commanders decided that they might as well make it useful. In the Western sector, in the area administered by the British, there stood a Nazi military college that Albert Speer had designed in such a way as to make it virtually impossible to demolish, even with the kind of ordnance the Royal Corps of Engineers had available to them in that part of Europe in the late forties. It was the kind of place where a range of terrible things had happened, and the general feeling was that it should be gotten rid of. Since it was so hard to demolish, and they had all this rubble all over everything, they came up with one of those elegant solutions that can only ever be carried out by organisations like armies of occupation, which are unencumbered by civil engineering regulations or the need to consult with residents: they decided to bury it. So they built a hill on top of the military college and called it Teufelsberg - the Devil's mountain.*


This would be worth a look in itself, I would imagine, if you were the sort of person who went out of their way to visit enormous rubbish heaps. I have my quirks, to be sure, but an abiding interest in piles of rubble has not hitherto been one of them. What I do have though is a serious weakness for abandoned Cold War-era military installations, particularly the sort where you get to climb through holes in barbed-wire fences and risk possible cross-cultural misunderstandings with bored security guards. Lucky for me then that the US National Security Agency in the seventies took advantage of the elevation provided by the artificial hill and put up one of the most aesthetically pleasing sorts of Cold War military installations there is - a radio listening post, which they used to spy on the radio transmissions of the DDR. Radio listening posts have such a strikingly attractive aspect partly because they tend to be situated in areas free of physical interference, which is to say the tops of hills, and partly because the best way to protect all the fantastically expensive receivers and knobs and dials and so on from the elements whilst still maintaining a decent signal quality is to construct buildings that resemble either giant golfballs, enormous fungi, or a space station, depending on your frame of reference.

Space Base Golfshroom.

Once the DDR shut up shop in the 90s, the NSA pulled the plug on the facility and went, I imagine, closer to people they actually wanted to listen to. They took all of their receivers and most of the knobs and dials with them, but they left the buildings, and they left the enormous mushroom/golfball/space station things on top of them. Since that time, the area has been largely ignored apart from an abortive attempt about ten years ago to turn the whole thing into an apartment complex. There's a couple of fences, but they're full of holes, and climbing through holes in fences around abandoned military installations is the height of entertainment for a lot of people. Apocryphal security guards with theoretical rabid dogs on hypothetical chains are said to roam freely in the grounds, but the day we where there I think they might have been spending time with their ideal families, because we were able to stalk our way in through the trees unmolested.

This is a little deer we surprised in the forest. He proved impossible
to catch, so we had to eat the lunch we'd brought from home.

The possibility of imaginary security guards makes the whole thing a lot more exciting, of course. It's pretty lucky that I used to train intensively in the pine forest behind my house for just this sort of mission, and it was even luckier that on the day we infiltrated the facility I was accompanied by my main training partner, who remembered all the signals and protocols that you have to use when you're busting into a highly secure US radar installation on top of an artificial hill in Germany with an indestructible Nazi military college buried underneath it like some sort of secret level. Our combined experience gave us a pretty serious bonus when it came to pulling off moves like avoiding imaginary security guards, and I can report that at no time were our ranks decimated by withering fire from camouflaged bunkers, nor were we caught by any deadfalls, tripwires, or gin traps. Not even imaginary ones.

Johnny Law is around here somewhere, I can feel it.

Once we'd had our fill of sneaking through the forest cover like some sort of elite Ewok commando strike force A-team from 'Nam, it was time to check out the primary mission objective: the domes themselves. As in the best sorts of computer games, we were working against the clock, because one member of our party had heroically elected to stay beside the hole in fence. She said it was because she didn't want to both break her neck and get German arrested in a single day, but I think actually she was Providing a Diversion and Covering our Escape Route, which are crucial and often overlooked roles in a mission and will still earn you lots of experience points. We were fortunate though to have Mr. Tim G. in the team, who is able to move pretty smartly when he needs to, and has a lot of tricks up his sleeve when it comes to being on the run from Johnny Law and keeping a unit moving efficiently in the field.

Wikisign - add your own hazard warnings.

The buildings that the radar domes sit on are really quite fun - they're huge abandoned concrete bunker type things, with lots of exciting-looking cables and broken glass and inscrutably twisted bits of metal lying about, all covered with the Graffiti that spreads in this city like mould in a fruit bowl. There were a few giddy minutes when were looking for a way up, and we were unable to find the official quite safe concrete stairs.

'How do you reckon we get up?'
'Do you reckon you can't get up maybe?'
'Nah you can definitely get up, I saw all this stuff on the internet.'
'Right.'
'And plus how did that guy get up there?'
'What guy?'
'Johnny Law?' You know who that was.
'Nah, that guy on the roof with the macbook. That's not Johnny Law, that's just some hipster writing a screenplay.'
'Oh, OK.'
'Maybe... do you think you have to climb up these ladder type things? On the outside of the pillars?'
'Yeah no, I'm definitely not going to do that.'
'Ah, yeah, I'm also not going to do that.' Naysayers.
'What if these really rusty-looking ladders are the only way up?'
'Then I'm going to probably just not go up.'
'It's only that last bit that looks hard, where you have to sort of reach -'
'I am not going to be climbing these ladders of which you speak. Nor are you. We're not climbing these ladders. They're not even proper ladders anyway, they're like reinforcing or something.'
'I'm not saying we should necessarily climb them, but like if these ladders are the only way up -'
'Stop calling them ladders!'
'Um, guys? I think these things here are the stairs?' T.G. often wanders off when people are having productive discussions, but he usually comes back with useful intel.
'Real stairs? Or fall seven stories and break your neck stairs?'

They're definitely not ladders. Don't climb them. Indiana Jones
would climb them perhaps, but he does lots of things you shouldn't do.

This is why real Ewok commandos mostly communicate with hand signals I think. As it turned out, the stairs were built to exacting US Army standards, and will probably still be there when you and I are stardust again. They were certainly adequate anyway for the task of conveying us safely to the best view of Berlin I've ever seen.

Berlin, with screenplay-writing hipster in foreground.

It really is a long way up.

Go on, look down. That's not a ladder either.

That's an open lift shaft. I'm not sure what motivated some vandal to prise open the
lift doors on everyfloor, but it certainly makes the whole experience a bit more vertiginous.

There are very few towns in the world where you can catch a train to a man-made hill and walk into an abandoned military base in broad daylight, but not get shot at, mugged, or blown up by landmines, and you can also drink the water and call a cop if your bike gets stolen. Third world levels of awesome and poorly-guarded ruins combined with first-world civil society and governance make for a pretty rocking playground. The view from up there in the radar domes is all the sweeter for the fact that you wouldn't even be able to get that high without all of this history going on underneath you, layers and layers of it piling like sediment and forming the foundations for the next outlandish structure somebody takes a notion to put up. From the top of the Teufelsberg you can see a communist TV tower, a fascist airport, a capitalist nuclear plant, and acres of forest teeming with enough wild boars to give Obelix a stomach ache next time he comes to visit the Visigoths. You can see the stadium where Jack Lovelock and Jesse Owens won their medals in 1936, and you're standing right under the flightpath of the C-47s that fed West Berlin for two years during the luftbrücke. The last military casualty of the cold war was shot by DDR border guards somewhere on the plain to the north, and red squirrels run up and down the telephone lines that the CIA used to use to pass on propaganda to Radio Free Europe. These days it's a great place for hipsters to come to do their photography assignments, although I'm told it's considered a bit of an easy brief for obvious reasons.

Me, walking on history. Tim S snapped this shot.

If you ignore things like the piles of radioactive waste and the possiblity of
catastrophic failure, nuclear power stations are pretty cool.

-----------------------------------

*The video that the link in this paragraph takes you to is way better than most of the ones I link to, so go watch it.