Placebo, Pernice Brothers, Dr. Hook, Leonard Cohen, Cosmo Jarvis, Death Cab for Cutie, Glassvegas, Led Zeppelin, Green Day, Dinosaur Junior, Nina Simone, Tindersticks, Adriano Celentano, Tom Waits, Hildegard Knef, Dalida...That's pretty much the playlist for this week. At least what I'm willing to admit to. I'm not saying I like all of it, but the actors want to sing it; or the productions demand it; my son plays it on guitar--and the director's ipod is always on. So it goes. (But not Nick Lowe, though there is Hope For Us All...)
Yesterday in Dortmund, the local Nazis, after being turned down by the city government, got the go-ahead from Berlin to take to the streets. The cops shut down the train station and confined the contingent that managed to make it into town to a couple parking lots safely removed from the main streets of the Turkish Nordstadt, where they'd been hoping for a good rumble. The most striking difference between the U.S. and Germany is the teutonic racial homogenity. In my neighborhood there is virtually no color--save for the bright purple and red dye jobs on the post-punk, hippie girls. In the North of the city, the ratio is almost completely reversed with nearly everyone a shade of east-Meditteranean olive-brown. (The black people in this town of 600.000 are so few, I think I've seen half of them already. Any extras being in visiting teams or bands. (The short ones with good shoes are the bands). Still--what with Third Reich reunion day yesterday, the uniformly white caste of the city was particularly extreme, as anyone likely to provoke the wrath of alcoholic teenagers and their dementedly nostalgic grandparents bolted themselves indoors. At night, when the tension finally dissipated, the Saturday night subway tunnels seemed to erupt with relief as more black and brown people then I've ever seen here hit the streets of good ol' Dortmund.
The theater's planning a production called "Heimat Unter Erde"--home underground--a multi-media docudrama on the evolution of the guest workers form the time they were brought in to work the mines through the present, alienated generation. An Arab kid with Pro-Tools, Final-Cut and a video camera was discovered and enlisted as the project's centerpiece. I'd hoped to meet him at the first tech rehearsal yesterday, but his dad had him on home lockdown til the Nazis cleared out. My brief for this piece is to get a mash-up going between the 30 man-strong chorus of retired coal miners and a band of middle-eastern Saz players. I figure a Deliverance-style throwdown might work. A face-off from opposite sides of the stage. These folks do not socialize. The conventional wisdom on traveling says that the more places you visit, the more you'll see how we're all alike. Bullshit. Of course we all eat, shit and fuck--but so does every other animal.
On a train from Varanasi to Calcutta in 1986, I sat on a beautiful wooden bench--in 3rd class of a 5-class train--next to a plump chap about my age who spoke eloquently yet obliquely of change, heroes and space travel before confiding that his oddly excellent English was derived almost exclusively from memorizing the David Bowie back-catalogue. Early in the morning, with the train stopped at a provincial station, I watched, through the slowly clearing mist, a naked man in a deep, flat-footed crouch take a shit on what looked like a pitcher's mound poking out of a pond. All was still. The man, at least 50 paces away from the train, (and over water, so maybe strokes would be more appropriate), was certainly oblivious to anyone watching him. Not that anyone besides me paid him any mind at all. I watched the supremely tranquil and organic scene and tried to imagine being this man. Over the last 24 years, I've often returned to the scene of this dump trying to reconcile our parallel lives as humans on this planet. When I long for a simple life, I think of this man. When I try and justify the complex webs of interactivity I've formed with other people, I think of this man. I certainly have no judgement to offer here. Judgment in general, going hand in hand with religion, being a sure-fire catalyst to human misery. But I think I can say that two more different beings than me and the man on the mound could not possibly exist. To try and find common ground, at least in my opinion, seems fruitless and idiotic.
But these Nazis here in Dortmund. They are so much closer to home in every way. If we switched the playlists on all their ipods, would that make a difference? We have the technology. Why Don't You Like Me!!??
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