Things I loved in 2021

 

We're almost there! I know the 2020s have been tough, but there was a lot to love about this year. So, here are 10 things that made my year.

1) For a reason I can't fathom, I read a bunch of books about the Eastern Front in World War II during the cold, dark month of January 2021. 

City of Thieves by David Benioff is an adventure story of a young man who avoids execution in exchange for an impossible mission in 1940s besieged Leningrad and behind German lines. It's like reading a movie. Good stuff. 

We, Germans by Alexander Starritt is told from the other side. This story is told by a German artillery officer as the Wehrmacht retreats and everyone realises they've lost the war, but most can't admit it. Sobering stuff.

Just when I thought I couldn't go darker, I read Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Synder. This is a sweeping non-fictional account of how much it sucked to live in the (blood)lands between two totalitarian states in the 1930s and 40s, and a reminder that we're living in good times. Sad stuff. 

2) Every few months, I get a vicious migraine that knocks me out. I'm usually too discombobulated for screens or reading, so I treat myself to an audiobook that I don't mind falling asleep too. Jason Isaac's reading of Thunderball is marvellous. The accents. The pacing. The almost satiric humour of the opening chapters. The hilariously cheerful American submarine captain. It's great stuff to listen when your brain feels like it's being stabbed with hot nails.

3) There is high-definition "technicolour history," which is the recorded history of Ancient Greece and onward. Then there's the "black & white history" that relies on stone reliefs, monoliths, and ruins. Technicolour history isn't so kind to the Persian Empire, but black & white History is revealing the Persians profound influence at that time. King of Kings, a set of Hardcore History episodes, is an accessible, thoughtful primer on the Persian Empire. It provides a rich context of the history of the region, into the Greek-Persian Wars, and ends with the devastating arrival of Alexander. 

Coincidentally, as restrictions eased over the summer, my wife surprised me with a birthday visit to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin to see some remnants of that Black & White History.

The Sumerian god Nisroch.

4) Like many kids growing up in Ontario without cable, I spent Saturday evenings watching either hockey or the classic movies on TVO, the province's public broadcaster. One of the joys of watching The Mandolorian is catching the references, retellings, or remixes from The Searchers, The Magnificent Seven, The Good, Bad, and the Ugly, Shane, The Wild Bunch and others. I watched it dubbed in German to keep my Bad German from getting worse.

4) Dune Part I. This was a date afternoon, since the toddler is impossible to get asleep and stay asleep during normal people's prime movie-watching time. What a movie! I could've done with less slow motion brood-y scenes, but it's a stunning movie to watch that doesn't dumb down too many of the book's many layers. More than any of the other adaptations, this one captures the book's cosmic immensity of things.

5) Rise and Kill First: A Secret History of Targeted Assassination by Ronen Bergman. For fifty years, Mossad has been waged a secret war and this book reads like an epic spy novel about that secret war —  the missions, near misses, and the cast of characters that move it along. In a way, Israel's targeted assassination program's success feels tragic, since Israel's leaders often saw it as an end, rather than a means to an end. The author is legit on this topic too, and recently published this story about an AI-assisted assassination in Iran that could be a follow-up to the book.

6) I read a chapter now and then from Plutarch's Lives. The biographies of Caesar, Pompey, and Alexander the Great get a lot of love. But the sketches on Alcibiates, Sertorius, Sylla, and Lysander are also great. It takes a while to get into the language's verbosity, but if you put some mental effort into it, you get to know some interesting people and gain sense of the times they lived.

7) I've have a soft spot in my heart (and stomach) for Korean food. It might be from my time working at a Korean restaurant in my London days. Maybe its some subliminal influence from the work of Park Chan-wook. It might be Korean cuisine's focus on cabbage-y goodness (Kimchi) and meat mastery (Bibimbop, Bulgogi, pork bone soup). Or all of the above. 

Since leaving Baldwin Village in Toronto, where I had a Korean restaurant across the street from me, I've been eating Korean and searching for my favourite dish: Daeji Bulgogi, Korean grilled pork. It's also difficult to find, like a Holy Grail of grilled meat, so I haven't quenched my thirst for it... Until I found Seoul-Kwan in Berlin and I've been reunited with my pork.

 

8) Watching my wife create 12 pieces of original art for her annual calendar was probably one of the most inspiring things to witness this year. Work, family and the minor emergencies that inevitably pop up tend to suck in our time. So, it's amazing to see someone carve out time to make something. I know artists are suppose to focus on the process, not the result, but as an admittedly biased observer, I think the result is lovely.

Focus.

9) Remember seven or eight years ago when everyone in advertising describing themselves as storytellers? In a book-ish attempt to be a legit storyteller, I tried to read Hero with a Thousand Faces and couldn't get through it. The wrong book at the wrong time for me. But, this year I read the Power of Myth, which was a series of conversations between Campbell and Bill Moyers. It's an accessible shortcut into Campbell's research, theories, and his incredible compassion for the struggle that is being human. Once you read it, you'll notice all those themes, tropes, and patterns pop up everywhere.

10) Reading Ursula Le Guin's translation/adaptation of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching was one of the most strangely calming experiences of 2021. It's poetry. It's wisdom. It's like ancient Chinese Twitter for the soul. Here's a good one:

Wanting less  

 

When the world’s on the Way,  

they use horses to haul manure.  

When the world gets off the Way, 

they breed warhorses on the common.  

 

The greatest evil: wanting more.  

The worst luck: discontent.  

Greed’s the curse of life.  

 

To know enough’s enough  

is enough to know. 

"Bear Music on the Radio!"

Strange things happen when you put your entire music collection on shuffle. Sometimes, it's magical when one great song you forgot you loved is followed by another, then another, until it gets awkward. 

You know those moments? When it goes from a cool tune to something that's just for you, like that Peter Frampton song from High Fidelity, or anything from Swallowing Shit, or your super-secret anthem.

You want to go to the next song, but the skip button is too far away. It's impossible to casually make a move without drawing attention to secret song shyness. It's even worse when iTunes does that thing where it starts playing the next song before the previous song is finished. There's no time to make a diving leap for the Skip button.

It's shuffle roulette, and sometimes you got the bullet.

This was a common social situation for those of us in the 2000s, just leaving the age of CD shuffle and entering the wonderful world of digital music. A world of downloadable music where you could dangerously venture outside of your tastes, into other genres, and gleefully listen to guilty pleasures. 

We didn't understand playlists. We grew up with mixtapes, which took effort. So, most of us either learned to slap together a playlist without overthinking it or settled with Russian Shuffle Roulette and hoped it doesn't land on a bullet.

This was a problem in my household. My wife has good musical tastes. But, I'd be playing family-friendly Arcade Fire, and as the song would finish, Bane would come roaring on. The toddler gets a little freaked out, and I get a nod of disapproval.

Thankfully, I discovered a foolproof technology that prevents these awkward yet excusable social situations: the radio. In particular, the celebrity DJ on the radio. 

When Burton Cummings plays something that off-kilter while you're listening with your musically-judgemental friends, then their judge-y glares are directed towards the guy from the Guess Who.

If Henry Rollins spins some Devo after Bad Brains, we all forgive him.

Lately, we've been listening to James Newell Osterberg Jr., and he plays some great stuff... and some really weird stuff. It goes from some 70s punk band that makes you nod your head along to something as random and amazing as a Swedish pipe organist. But, I don't get any looks over the shifts from genre to genre. Why? It's difficult to argue with a radio DJ who fronts a band and is mainly known by his onstage name: Iggy Pop.

With the miracle of on-demand listening, we play Iggy on-toddler-demand. So, my almost-three-year-old son has taken a particular shine to Iggy Pop's DJ sensibilities. James Brown's Make it Funky has become "Bacon Pocket!" Listen to the song. You'll hear it. 

But it's Iggy's deep, growly voice that commands his attention. Every morning, he asks us to play "Bear Music."

Some old technologies never get old.

Berlin's New Plattenbauen

Filling in Berlin's blanks with new buildings.

While reading Farnam Street's newsletter, I came across this interesting long read, The Housing Theory of Everything.  

The TL;DR version is that overpriced housing leads to all sorts of problems — inequality, lower economic productivity, climate change, and lower birth rates. You get overpriced housing when demand exceeds supply. 

Like any theory for everything, some of its arguments are flimsy. But there are some takeaways that make sense, like building higher-density communities to increase housing supply in a smaller area.

Berlin is struggling with a housing shortage. Everyone has a story about how hard it was to find an apartment. Prices are also rising. And there's a fear that locals will be priced out of their own communities and the character that draws so many people to the city will be gentrified beyond recognition. 

Berlin has been fighting it in different ways. When we moved to Berlin last year, there was a rent cap in place. It was thrown out of the constitutional court. In the recent election, a referendum passed that allows the city to appropriate property from the large companies that domain Berlin's real estate market.

Measures like that, which run against free market orthodoxy attract a lot of love, hate, and headlines. But, there's something else grinding on, away from the headlines. 

Berlin is pocked with all sorts of bits of unused land. There are swaths of land running along the city's commuter railways. Strips of what was once the kill zone on the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall. Empty lots that were levelled in the war, and left empty for decades.

These are all spaces where new modern, residential high-rises are rising, or Neubauen. Berlin is gradually adding high-density residential housing to meet the growing demand, filling in the blanks on the city map. There's just one hiccup.

Berlin's architecture was dominated by big, stone apartment blocks built in the late 1800s (and rebuilt in the 40s and 50s) seem like they were built to last centuries. The housing built after the war feel eternal, but feel like they have some durable staying power.

Some of the new builds are nice to look at. But, having looked a few of them while we were apartment hunting, many feel like they might fall apart soon after you've moved in. They're built quickly and cheaply to maximise profit for the developers. The density pushed by that long-read doesn't necessarily mean quality.

In some ways, they're no different than the Plattenbauen, those old prefabricated East Bloc residential buildings that make seems to make so many eyes sore. The purpose was the same: create supply to meet the demand for housing. The difference is that some one is walking away with a fat profit.