C.ash R.ules E.verything A.round M.e

OK, no more writing about fascists and stuff for a while, it's basically a major downer and if you want to know more about that sort of thing you should probably watch Schindler's List. Because let's face it, Spielberg has a bunch of interns to do his research for him and all I have is google and a propensity to flesh out my hunches by making things up.

Instead, today's post is about how hilariously easy it is to make money in this town by going 'on the busk,' as we put it in musician language. A lot of towns hate buskers, and consider them to be a problem akin to sewer rats or football hooligans. In London, for example, if you play music on the street you are just as likely to get set on fire by street kids or arrested for treason as you are to be given actual cash money, and if they do give you money it's likely to be foreign. In Berlin, though, they treat you almost like they would treat a normal person, and when they give you money it is done with good grace and in respectable quantities.

Here's the thing, though: unless there is more than one of you, or you have an awesome trick like the ability to set yourself on fire or dislocate all your joints at once, there's not much point in standing on the street noodling away on an old Neil Young song waiting for the good folk of Berlin to pay you. Tried that, total waste of time. I would have made more money fishing empty beer bottles out of the canal. If you're like me (and I understand that I am in many ways a typical example of my kind) the way to work it is to go to the cafes, of which there are about seven million in Berlin. What you do is, you go ask the bar staff if you can play a couple of songs. Mostly they say yes, sometimes they say no, quite often they ask to hear a bit of music to make sure that you're not going to be playing Pantera covers. If alles is gut, you go outside to where the tables are, you introduce yourself, play two or three songs, then pass a hat around.

If somebody tried this in New Zealand, they would either get ignored, punched, or told to get a real job, depending what suburb or time of night it was. In Berlin, what happens is people stop talking, look up, applaud, give you money, and buy your CDs. Perhaps they don't have very good TV here or something, but these people are totally ready to be entertained. I don't really have much perspective beyond my own experience (you can put that on my headstone if you want) but I've noticed that it helps if people know you're playing your own stuff, and I also hand out flyers for my 'proper' shows, which I think is useful as well. Being from New Zealand I think is a good thing too, because often people think that I'm a hobbit of some kind and if they give me money I will be able to cure their diseased livestock or place curses on their neighbours. Also I have a hat with a crow's feather stuck in the band, which is my secret weapon.

For tax reasons, I cannot reveal exactly how much you can make per hour with this method, but I can say that on average it is more than a nurse and less than a doctor. It seems to work best between the hours of about seven and ten pm, which is pretty much my ideal workday. Nothing much cool happens here before about 10:30 (or 2230 uhr, as we say in the Deutsch), and daytimes are for cycling around aimlessly taking photographs of Soviet architectural monstrosities, so there's about three spare hours in there for honest toil if you're up for it.

This is what it looks like when you empty out your guitar case at the end of the evening.

The great thing about busking as a way of earning your keep is that the rewards are immediate and tangible. Instead of waiting two weeks for a paycheck, you get one every ten minutes or so, in jingling cash. This is wonderful if, like me, you have an inner troll who really likes counting money, and placing it in piles ten euros high.

I am a little bit worried though that some damn knight will find my lair and kill me and steal my hoard.

All you fascists are bound to lose

One of the things that Germans seem to be proud of as a nation, and rightly so in my opinion, is that in the thirties and forties they weren't all Nazis. This is non-trivial. When a country becomes infested with jackbooted thugs, it's really quite difficult for people do anything about it - a point that is made succinctly in nerdy rhyming couplets by Maurice Ogden in this poem.

The majority of Germans who weren't Nazis were passive about it, as most people are passive about most things. A significant number, however, made a point of expressing their disapproval in a variety of ways. Throughout the twenties and thirties there was significant organised opposition from democrats, socialists, communists and anarcho-syndicalists, who distributed propaganda, organised escape networks, sabotaged infrastructure, and fought the Nazis in the streets. Many many people were arrested for these activities and incarcerated in concentration camps. Many of those incarcerated were tortured and murdered.

The thing to remember about a lot of these people is that if they had stopped doing the things that got them put in concentration camps (ie resisting and generally getting all up in the faces of the Nazis), there's a good chance that they wouldn't have got put in concentration camps. That's one of the reasons totalitarian regimes often use things like concentration camps against their political opponents; the threat of being arrested and tortured and murdered tends to have a chilling effect on political opposition. Many of the Germans who resisted in this period weren't the 'social undesirables' who were the specific targets of the Nazi death machine - Jews, homosexuals, mentally ill people, people classed as Gypsies - they were people who believed that the Nazis were evil and should be stopped. If they'd kept quiet, it's likely that they wouldn't have been arrested and tortured and murdered.


But! Lots of them didn't keep quiet, and they did resist, which is a pretty amazingly courageous thing to do.





This guy here is off to Spain to fight the fascists in the Civil War. A lot of German anarchists did that, understanding that despite the wide selection of domestic fascists they could have been fighting, their services were more urgently required in Catalonia. Many did both, of course, and I imagine that for a lot of people getting killed in Spain was preferable to getting killed in a concentration camp.

In the Freidrichshain Volkspark, a very pretty part of Berlin, there is a memorial to the Germans who resisted the fascists in this period. It was put up by the DDR in the 70s to commemorate communist antifascists and Polish soldiers who died in the war, but was rededicated in 1995 to commemorate all German antifascist resistance movements. These days it's a great place for people to skate, which I think is totally the best thing you could do on a memorial to antifascists.




The posters are by John Heartfield, who was a German photographer and montage artist who produced a lot of antifascist material. They're from this site: http://www.towson.edu/heartfield/

The Arrival

As I wander around in Berlin, in search of the fame and fortune I feel are my due, I am often struck by how much of the place looks like Shaun Tan drew it. This is probably because my own experience maps so closely onto the story of the nameless protaganist in The Arrival - I don't speak the language here, people are generally nice to me, and I left my own country because forces loyal to the government were threatening to destroy my way of life.


I don't understand a lot of what goes on here, and this is not limited to what happens outside my door. In my very bathroom, for instance, there exist inexplicable alcoves and strange extrusions of pipe and wire, the purpose of which I can only guess at.

This cupboard, for example, looks relatively innocuous, if inscrutable.

Upon opening it, however, questions arise.

It is filled with ashes, and it leads to a hole in the wall that appears to be bottomless. That's fine; clearly it's just a portal to another dimension. What I don't know, though, is the precise species of the fire-breathing lizard creature that obviously uses it for a nest. Not knowing its species, I can only guess at its habits, and I'm worried that all of my guesses will be hopelessly antipodean. In New Zealand, of course, the fire-breathing lizards nest in late winter, and are usually off on their annual migration by high summer - is the pattern the same this far north though? Should I leave the cupboard open, so that the lizard can fly out the window and catch mice for its young, or should I leave it shut until the rainy season starts and the young metamorphose into the aquatic stage of their life cycle?

Perhaps it is time I left the house for a while.