Our little circles of influence

The professional day drinkers who usually gather in front of Sudkreuz train station were pleasantly surprised about a month ago. Someone had pitched a tent, laid out some food, and put out foldable tables and chairs.

It's exhausting work to stand outside all day drinking and panhandling, so Sudkreuz's hard-working professional drinkers made themselves at home. They stretched out, drank their beer and cheap wine, and enjoyed the sun.

The next day, the tables and chairs were roped off and guarded by volunteers wearing yellow vests emblazoned with the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag. What the hard-living party folks of Sudkreuz mistook for their beer garden was a meeting point for refugees arriving by train from the war. Mostly women and children.

Sudkreuz is the last stop before Berlin's central station, where thousands are streaming into the city. A colleague arriving at Berlin, schlepping luggage with two kids trailing behind her, was graciously greeted by eager volunteers, mistaking her for one of the many mothers coming from Ukraine with small children.

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You would know Under den Linden in Berlin if you've visited Brandenburger Gate. It's a popular street in the Mitte for strolling shoppers, tourists, and locals. You'll also find the Russian embassy dominating an entire block on the street.

The embassy, which also sued to be the Soviet embassy for East Germany, is now walled off from pedestrians by barriers and patrolled by cops. 

The big headlines-grabbing protests usually take place on Sundays. 

But every day I've passed, there's always this quiet crowd of protesters on the tree-lined boulevard, holding Ukrainian flags that hang limply in the wind.

They don't do much. They don't chant or march. They stare at the embassy, its curtained windows, and its imposing stone facade.

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It might be easy to lose hope. There's an overwhelming feeling of despair about this war, its utter pointlessness and cold brutality. We all wish we could bend the arc of history in a better direction.

Most of us don't have the influence to start or end wars. But we all have our own circles of influence. We can do what we feel is the right thing to do within this circle. We can donate to a cause we believe in. We can let strangers from a war-torn land into our homes. We can march on the streets. 

The point isn't if we can change the world. The point is to make decisions and act closer to what we believe is right, and be able to live with ourselves. If we can live that way, then we might change our little circle of influence for the better in the process.

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.