<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
If I could make a generalization I would say that Europe is more comfortable trusting its citizens to use their own judgment and trusts that granting rights will demand responsibilities. They expect this and perhaps they get this. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In this sense I would suggest that Europe were more \u201cprogressive\u201d than the States\u2026<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But one could also argue that tables blocking the sidewalk create inaccessible cities for people with disabilities and to not address these issues is to simply silence the question or to \u201cassume\u201d able-ness of a community which is diverse and runs a wide spectrum of from \u201cability\u201d to \u201cdisability.\u201d <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Further, that allowing citizens to buy alcohol anywhere and anytime promotes rampant alcoholism that one does not have to call alcoholism because it has in fact been normalized\u2026<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One could argue for what I\u2019ll call \u201cSimilarity<\/b>\u201d \u2026 that citizens, on the whole, are not conscious, on the whole, are not conscious of people\u2019 needs that are different<\/b> from their own and the only reason America might be more apt to regulate the hell out of its sidewalks is because it\u2019s had a large and vocal community of disabled persons who have forced America to deal with cracked and blocked sidewalks. Or one could argue that litigation has become so lucrative that Americans are forced to post signs at every minor threat. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Well, I\u2019m just not sure. But I do know one thing: \u201cEveryone speaks Football.\u201d That\u2019s certainly one strong argument for similarity<\/b>.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Okay, I stole that from Coca-Cola. But living in Berlin during the 2006 World Cup, I can tell you that from this vantage point, whomever arrogant European it was who started the rumor that soccer (football) is loftier, civilized, or more interesting than football is pulling your chain. It\u2019s a myth. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Speaking from experience with drunk horny loud soccer fans from Ireland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Mexico, and everywhere else in the world, let me tell you \u2026 it\u2019s all pretty much the same<\/b> deal … and as European media will remind us \u201csex and sports have always gone hand in hand.\u201d Yipeee!! <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The world cup in Germany has brought the question of difference<\/b> and or similarity<\/b> to my front door step and it is here that I am forced to grapple with the profound realization that \u2026 what? What exactly? That working as a waitress for ten years is like riding a bicycle, pretty much the same<\/b> and easy to do once you learn … that men and women alike would sooner (much sooner) ask me where they can find a gram of coke than where they can find a cheap whore (thought prostitutes have been imported into Germany to meet the demand.) and yet I hear them talking about where the pussy is and how they wouldn\u2019t be cheap (its cheap to pay for sex with a prostitute, its not cheap to buy a girl free drinks until she\u2019s drunk enough to sleep with you). <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I started work at midnight last night and got asked at least five times about where to find coke, and twice asked if I would go fetch some guy his long papers so he could roll a joint (in exchange, he said, he\u2019d buy me a drink, but never tipped me a dime\u2014err\u2026euro ten cent\u2026)<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cI drink for free, love,\u201d I reminded the [Polish?] guy. And told him to ask for his long papers at the bar.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Four times I had men ask me where the pretty girls were \u2026 and if they couldn\u2019t get laid at this bar, where to go next (for the girls and the cocaine). <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A few asked me for the \u201cmain drag.\u201d <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
[Difference<\/b>: few waitresses in the United States would likely be asked so openly for cocaine \u2026 people don\u2019t openly roll joins in restaurants and smoke them after eating their steak and salads] <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Are these men and their drunken counterparts deplorable pieces of humanity? No\u2014these<\/i>, my proud fellow Americans, are the United Nations of the world. This is France, Italy and Ireland singing the Pogues at four in the morning. This is the \u201cWorld Cup\u201d where the nations come together to play. This is Coca-cola country. Wait-no-this is former East Germany. Or?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Here Germans watch large communal TV sets in the middle of the town square. Every bar, every hinterhof<\/i>, every caf\u00e9 has been devoted to the broadcasting of the World Cup and one could not walk a block without keeping score, whether they intend to or not. Flat screen TVs are on and thousands of fans are sitting on caf\u00e9 and bars chairs that have spilled onto the sidewalks, or the TV\u2019s themselves are located just outside the open doors of the caf\u00e9. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Here again, is difference<\/i><\/b> .<\/i>.. Americans tend to watch the Super bowl in dark sports bars or in their comfortable armchairs at home with plenty of Budweiser and expensive home entertainment systems. One is not likely to see the streets filled with fans watching out of doors with their mates on the village TV. A vision of WWII Germany; I see my father watching the war news with little boys straining to see the small village TV in the window of a grocer.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Just the other day we watched the Spanish beat Ukraine 4-0 at a wide screen set up in front of Gesundbrunnen subway station. This is another rich and layered image. You have to understand that for years East Berlin was full of ghost stations\u2014trains would have to pass through stations that, though they had been in use since the early 20th century, were suddenly manned with armed guards. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
New and renovated stations have popped up since the fall of the fall, and I assume that the concrete island of Gesundbrunnen is one of them, since it appears to be in former no-man\u2019s land near where the wall once stood. Here, on the concrete island is an outdoor caf\u00e9 with a large flat screen TV displaying the glory of our nations. And there are people that simply sit under the sun umbrellas at the subway station and watch.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Berlin is in unusual state of transition \u2026has been for a while now. It retains somehow its cultural liberalism that was apparent before WWII. This liberalism was maintained separately in the east and the west, though capitalism didn\u2019t touch the east; communalism did: cooperation, sharing, house calls, matter of fact dealing with life and body and sex \u2026 it is not the \u201cWest\u201d that necessarily brought the climate that enables the teeny-boppy magazine anyone can pick up from the corner store to contain each week a new full-frontal nude teenager on the spread (boy and girl, in a simple standing pose, un-eroticized). Caption states: I am Ulrike, 15 years old. I\u2019m writing a book about how difficult it is growing up. The magazine is an opportunity for teenagers to look at nude bodies and read about sex without having to sneak porn from somewhere else.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Difference<\/b>: No teen magazine in the United States would dare.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A documentary on the topic revealed teen attitudes varying \u2013US teenage boy: \u201cI never carry a condom\u2014I don\u2019t want to jynx myself or assume I\u2019ll get lucky.\u201d US girl: \u201dA girl that carries a condom gets considered to be a slut or a prostitute.\u201d <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Difference<\/b>, German boys and girls: \u201cOf course we carry condoms. You always carry a condom. It you don\u2019t have a condom you can\u2019t have sex.\u201d Much more matter of fact. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Similarity<\/b>: Teenagers have sex. Difference<\/b>: Societal trust in a teenager\u2019s agency and responsibility. Lack of moral stigma about having sex out of wedlock or even outside of \u201ccommitted relationship.\u201d Respect for young adults as capable of personal choices for their bodies\u2014thereby empowering them to have safe sex.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I think now of Sabine, with whom I spoke all night. A 40-year-old single mother who regulars at the Last Cathedral, the gothic bar where I dance. She always watches me with kind eyes, she tells me, \u201cI\u2019m not a lesbian, but you appeal to both men and to women.\u201d I find her to be so powerful. These women I speak with over hours, months, glasses of white wine, waiting for my set \u2026 We speak for hours about Sabine\u2019s daughter, about how her daughter wishes she were like the other mothers, not a forty-year-old goth with a heart problem. She tells me about how they speak openly, as friends, about how they went the other day to buy a bra. Miss Manson, the other dancer that was working there for a while and then got fired, she tells me about how her boyfriend impregnated her two times and then beat her stomach in to abort the child \u2026 she will never have children, she says; she is still only 22. Her tears roll down her cheeks when she tells me she wishes me the best in my marriage and that he never, ever, breaks my heart.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Similarity<\/b>: domestic violence, abandoned children, drug-addicted parents, lack of guidance.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
All this is worth speaking about. At least, I think it is? I want, so desperately, to hold on to these moments.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
You know, in the winter I thought it was the constant darkness that was driving me just slightly batty, but now I think it might be the light. This summer light never leaves me. When I wake it is fully daylight\u2014the sun burning my skin, and I have taken to switching directions on the bed halfway through the morning. You may ask why not wake with the sun you lazy girl and I will say because the sun begins to burn through my window at four in the morning and I do not get home from work until at least 3, if not more regularly close to six \u2026 When I fall asleep, therefore, also fully daylight already, 5, 6, 7 in the morning. And when I go to wait tables, or to performance, whichever it is, twilight, ten pm, the light is still drawn out across the sky \u2026and when I emerge from the smoky dark club\u2014fully daylight again. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
These are some of my happiest times, when I am biking home from work, dawn in Berlin, the light providing some sense of hope and renewal. A sense that I could get home and stay up the full day writing \u2026 but no\u2014I rarely can do it. Sleep takes me despite the light.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Yeah, it just might be the light, that\u2019s driving me insane. There\u2019s no difference<\/b> at all anymore, between light and day. Life\u2019s different<\/b> now, life\u2019s changed. I can\u2019t remember when I\u2019m supposed to be outraged. We\u2019re all relatively\u2014relative to each other\u2014deranged. Relatively the same<\/b>. We\u2019ve kitched the abuse right out of our eyes; sex is a sex of pink tits drink. Yeah, I\u2019ve been therapized.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That East Berlin has retained a sense of communalism present under the communists and has more locally aimed-business and small galleries restaurants and cafes in haphazard spaces that have not been zoned for what they are but they are small enough to function under the police radar. Accompanying that is a still thriving necessity for informal economy, creation of jobs where there are none. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In the West, both in West Berlin as well as the \u201cWest,\u201d i.e. Washington DC, one has little choice but to buy high priced coffee in fairly homogenous looking cafes\u2014and to do so one must have a career that falls into prescribed guidelines: \u201ccareer\u201d (benefits, hours, the clothing that does with it, the buying power and consumption of buying power, needless to say, a car \u2026) All this is fine\u2014fine, I\u2019ll take it! Although it\u2019s strikingly DIFFERENT<\/b> in places where that is not true\u2014places where one need not live up to the cyclical standards capitalism creates. And if one gets off at \u201cGesundbrunnen,\u201d or at the \u201cTiergarten,\u201d one notices the difference<\/b>.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In retrospect I think the maintenance of wasteland\u2014purposeful maintenance of ugly spaces, physically or symbolically\u2014has merit. Merits inspection. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Berlin is curious architecturally because it contains elements of squat city (like Havana, a revolution that happened and ended, an exodus of wealth and the lack of maintenance that followed) the glittering newness of NEW Berlin Western Capitalism \u2013 and in that vein the maintenance of historical areas we could call \u201cold world.\u201d The \u201chow quaint\u201d Europe alongside spaces that have been bombed in WWII. And then those spaces that have been built within the emptiness left by the wall\u2014no man\u2019s land\u2014utter wasteland\u2014now construction sites (sign of hope but currently an aesthetic devastation, a squat city, informal growth in gutted buildings, soviet constructed utilitarian socialist, and by all accounts ugly). If I were an architect I\u2019d have real language for all of these things. As it is, I am forced to improvise my categories. Architecture could be the lens through which we understand Berlin and our contemporary moment of very competing ideals and juxtapositions of influences. Yes, a postmodernism.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We watch football in a squat that occupies a mile of old WWII bunkers. We find a reggae party in the loft of a ruined building, hot sweaty Africans\u2014they are otherwise hardly visible in this city, except as the owners of internet cafes\u2014smoking fat joints with German dreaded hippies. We walk down the stairs hearing English spoken with Rasta accents, watch a young German youth riding a trick bicycle on the fresh wood of a skate park that has been built with communal hands out of this abandoned warehouse. No one owns this place, no one is in charge. It is four in the morning. We dive in a swimming pool that has been built out into the Spree river, no lifeguard seems to watch us and we are topless or completely naked, the water just warm enough, the sun burning. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Behind the old Wall, on the thin strip between the wall and the river, they\u2019ve laid sand to remind a Berliner what a real beach is like, and shack bars have been erected to house the wasted German youth, young and old, that dance off their come-downs to electronic music, starting four, five, six, eight in the morning \u2026 Berliners bearing shirts that say: \u201cWasted German Youth,\u201d coming down off their speed and cocaine. Dancing, sweating, diving into the Spree River and emerging from the pollution with bicycles that have been decorated, every inch, with river snails. They squirm still as we crowd around and marvel at this piece of art, just as we\u2019ve marveled around the village TV. How is it, some of us might wonder, that this \u201cprime property\u201d along the river has not yet been bought by greedy developers? Is it only a matter of time, Berlin?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They\u2019ve stopped flying the flag now, the German flags were put away the instant the German\u2019s were clearly third and not first. A young kid on network TV is asked what the colors of the German flag means and he says; those are the colors of football. Football is the only way to legitimize nationalism in a country that made a deep, deep mistake. Similar<\/b> to, or not so very different<\/b> from, the killing the United States has engaged in over the course of this past century, at least if we speak in terms of numbers and not simply in terms of method \u2013 but is anyone really counting? <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Football is the first time that Germans have flown flags in a very long time, and I cannot help but shudder when I see those colors flying. Though this flag waving is not so very different <\/b>from the US flag waving that continues, football or not, killing or not. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Brandon and I sell T-shirts at the gay pride Motz Strasse festival and I can\u2019t help but think how far he\u2019s come, from when I knew him wasted on a Berlin sidewalk telling me to just stay with him a little longer while we waited for his panic attack to pass. Now sober he\u2019s geared with sharp glossy fliers and labels for his silk-screen T-shirts. He looks like a \u201creal fine establishment.\u201d <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
German grandparents, one with a sticker that reads, \u201cI\u2019m flaming\u201d (in German) stops by the stand to smile and look us with warm eyes, their grandchild in hand. Grandma has bad teeth and they inspect the T-shirts not seeming to care that the little girl sees naked Afro-bearing seventies gay men with enormous erections silk-screened onto colorful t-shirts. The little girl\u2019s shirt says, \u201cToo cool for school\u201d (in English) and the shirts Brandon is selling say \u201cI love it when he rides my cock\u201d in seventies porn script. I can\u2019t help but think that wearing silk-screened gay porn on a t-shirt is far more subversive\u2014and ultimately productive\u2014than waving an American flag, or a German one. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Difference<\/b>: Somehow I don\u2019t see too many American grandparents with their grandchildren at gay pride festivals. And I know that Brandon and I would be thrown out for \u201cinappropriate sale of inappropriateness.\u201d <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s festivities are a mix between Folsom Street leather fair and Castro street\/Dyke march\/gay pride. Loads of info stands and nonprofit agencies and help centers for gay\/trans\/AIDS\/dykes\/queers\/freaks\/drag queens\/leathermen\/curious; I\u2019m sure I\u2019ve forgotten someone. Oh yes\u2014the beautiful blond asexual who passes with a shirt that says, \u201cThis is what an asexual looks like\u201d (in German).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Every year that I\u2019m at gay pride I feel more and more at home and less wide-eyed and curious and innocent and terribly wishing I could be as cool and beautiful as everyone else. I also remember how far I\u2019ve come from Fairfax Virginia. How homophobic I was raised to be, inadvertently.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Yeah, life\u2019s different<\/b> now; life\u2019s changed. I can\u2019t remember when I\u2019m supposed to be outraged. We\u2019re all relatively\u2014relative to each other\u2014deranged. Relatively the same. We\u2019ve kitched the abuse right out of our eyes; sex is a sex of pink. Tits. drink. We blow each other to bits. Don\u2019t tell them you like dick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Happy Fourth of July and the headlines run \u2026 a 21 year old U.S. Army Private rapes and kills an Iraqi woman, along with three other members of her family. Two sons are at school when the murders happen. Several other young American soldiers are accomplices. http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/07\/04\/us\/04arrest.html This is truly, um, \u201cf-ed up,\u201d and when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}