Why You (Probably) Hate Your Job: Richard Sennett Explains All

Richard Sennett is without a doubt one of my absolute, all-time favorite modern social critic-observers (in the pantheon with Neil Postman, Christopher Lasch, and Jane Jacobs). Sennett, who trained as a concert violinist at Julliard but gave up professional music after a hand injury, is a sociologist and philosopher at NYU and the London School of Economics whose interests range through labor relations, urban studies, and the culture of work and craft. I chanced upon him first in the bargain basement of the Brookline Booksmith, where I picked up a used copy of Authority, an examination of social, emotional, and psychological interactions interwoven in the modern concept and practice of authority, which is more than a simple power relation. It is, as are all of his books I've read, incredibly well-written and insightful.

Since this first read, I've picked up his books whenever I've had the opportunity. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities is an engaging extended essay about the growth and structure of the Western cityscape and its implications for public and private life. The Craftsman is a terrific examination of the "the desire to do a job well for its own sake" and its loss, rediscovery(?), and value in modern society. Both books were excellent; my only complaint about Sennett's essays is that at the end of the exploratory ambulations on which the reader accompanies him, he seems too reticent to draw prescriptive conclusions. With so much to think about, though, it does seem reasonable to take the time to ponder before asserting what is to be done.

Most recently I read his short essay from the late 1990s, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. The book is as good a read as all the others. His own blurb:

Drawing on interviews with dismissed IBM executives in Westchester, New York, bakers in a high-tech Boston bakery, a barmaid turned advertising executive, and many others, Sennett explores the disorienting effects of the new capitalism. He reveals the vivid and illuminating contrast between two worlds of work: the vanished world of rigid, hierarchical organizations, where what mattered was a sense of personal character, and the brave new world of corporate re-engineering, risk, flexibility, networking, and short-term teamwork, where what matters is being able to reinvent yourself on a dime.

In some ways the changes characterizing the new capitalism are positive; they make for a dynamic economy. But they can also be destructive, eroding the sense of sustained purpose, integrity of self, and trust in others that an earlier generation understood as essential to personal character. The Corrosion of Character enables us to understand the social and political context for our contemporary confusions and Sennett suggests how we need to re-imagine both community and individual character in order to confront an economy based on the principle of “no long term.”

The question is what effect do the changes in the structure of work and the work environment (flat, networked institutions, everyone a consultant, team-orientation, outsourcing, etc.) -- and their subsidiary effects on the bonds of trust that tie together any community, even a soulless corporation -- have on the development and maintenance of character:

"Character particularly focuses upon the long-term aspect of our emotional experience. Character is expressed by loyalty and mutual commitment, or through the pursuit of long=term goals, or by the practice of delayed gratification for the sake of a future end. Out of the confusion of sentiments in which we all dwell at any particular moment, we seek to save and sustain some; these sustainable sentiments will serve our characters. Character concerns the personal traits which we value in ourselves and for which we seek to be valued by others.

How do we decide what is of lasting value in ourselves in a society which is impatient, which focuses on the immediate moment? How can long-term goals be pursued in an economy devoted to the short term? How can mutual loyalties and commitments be sustained in institutions which are constantly breaking apart or continually being redesigned? These are the questions about character posed by the new, flexible capitalism."

Why is our work a source of stress, resentment and apprehension rather than self-definition and meaning, stolid and tragic though it may have once been? The diagnosis is grim. The promises of freedom and empowerment promulgated by the new capitalism are largely illusory. It is clear that the people who succeed most in this new kind of world are not those who are most useful and productive, in the traditional, ethical sense, but those who, when called account for failure, ensure that they emerge unblemished and that someone else, or no one at all, bears any blame. Hardly progress.

I won't say more. Read the book.

Mastering the Art of Posting to the Dinner Club

Several people have told us that they'd like to post something to the blog but don't know how. This post is intended to help -- and to encourage more people to participate. (We enjoy writing our posts, but we'd really love to hear what other people are reading/writing/watching/hearing/etc. We hope the blog becomes more of a conversation than a mono(duo?)logue.) Here goes:

1. Make sure you have accepted the invitation to join the blog for posting. Do this by following the link sent out in the invitation email. If you don't have the invitation anymore, email us and we'll send you another one. So far, 11 people have signed up to edit.
   
   The body of the email looks something like this:
   
   

   The Blogger user Erik has invited you to contribute to the blog: Tuesday Dinner Club.
   
   To contribute to this blog, visit:
   http://long-link-here
   
   You'll need to sign in with a Google Account to confirm the invitation and start posting to this blog. If you don't have a Google Account yet, we'll show you how to get one in minutes.
   
   To learn more about Blogger and starting your own free blog visit http://www.blogger.com.

   
   
   When you click on the link (http://long-link-here in the above), you'll be taken to a webpage that asks you to sign in. If you already have a Google Account (i.e. Gmail account), you can just enter that email address and password. Otherwise, follow the link that asks "Don't have a Google Account?". Once you set up your Google Account, try the invitation email link again and sign in with your new Google Account. You'll only be able to login to post to Tuesday Dinner Club using the Google Account with which you accepted the invitation.
   
   
2. Having signed in to Blogger using your Google Account, you'll be taken to the Dashboard, which shows all of the Blogger blogs you can post to. Tuesday Dinner Club should be on the list (maybe the only one on the list). To make a new post, click on "New Post". You'll be taken to a form that allows you to enter a title and the body of the post. It's pretty straightforward.
   
   Here is Blogger's (Google's) help page for posting to the blog via the web.
   
   Be sure to click the "Save Now" button from time to time in order to save drafts of longer posts you are working on. That won't post anything to the web, just keep you from losing what you've written if you navigate off to a different web page or something.
   
   Once you're ready to make your post public, click "Publish Post" to release it to the Dinner Club community.
   
   For posting photos, you can either upload them or add a link to an existing picture on the web, e.g. if you have a photo on a Flickr or Picasa site you'd like to incorporate into the blog. This is relatively easy to do with the web interface -- just click on the icon that looks like a miniature photo of some mountains and you'll get a pop-up that walks you through it.
   
   
3. That's should be enough to get you started posting, but if you run into trouble, email us and we'll help you out. If you don't like using the web interface, you can use a standalone blog editor, which can be much more convenient. For the Mac, ecto and MarsEdit are good ones; Melanie and I use MarsEdit.
   
   
4. If you write a post, publish it, and then realize you made a mistake, you can always go back and fix it. Login to Blogger, go to the Dashboard, select "Edit posts" under Tuesday Dinner Club. You'll see a list of all the posts ever made to the blog. Click "Edit for your post and you'll be right back to the editing screen, ready to make changes.
   
   
5. On a related note, you can also use the RSS feed for Tuesday Dinner Club. Just click on "Posts" button under "Subscribe to the Club" on the righthand side and you'll get a popup list of places you can get the RSS feed. I just use my web browser. I bookmark the link feed://tuesdaydinnerclub.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default, and whenever there is a new post, my web browser is notified. That way I don't have to remember to check the blog regularly -- my browser tells me whenever there is anything new. (I like using Vienna, a free RSS reader, to manage all of my RSS feeds.)
   

We hope these tips help, and we look forward to seeing more posts on the blog!

No Such Thing as Too Much Butter

In honor or Julia Child I took some photos of butter. My charming husband left it out over night, and what I found this morning looked like this:

I wonder if Julie and Julia would have saved it? I threw it out.

Well, I'm sharing these photos with you because I wanted to reinforce Erik's assessment of Julie & Julia. So delightful! I laughed and cried and laughed some more. (Click on the link above to see the trailer; 'cause of silly legal stuff I can't embed it here.)

Just out of curiosity Erik checked prices for the first edition of Child's cookbook; it goes for 400 dollars, and I'm sure that price will go up over the next few weeks. Fortunately I already own the first edition of Child's memoirs, My Life in France, which is a lovely, lovely book that I very much recommend.

Anyway... must clean the kitchen now to get ready for cooking dinner later. Erik's at the Farmers Market picking up fresh corn, to be eaten with plenty of butter, I'm sure. Cheers!

J, J, J, M, & M (+E) go to the movies

Among the many perks of her new gig at Brandeis, Melanie is entitled to purchase half-price "Silver Experience" movie passes for AMC theaters. We'd talked about seeing Julie & Julia, the no longer quite so new Meryl Streep/Nora Ephron film, ever since we saw previews for it. France, French cooking, a tall, striking woman, blogging, very nice husbands ... the attractions (and parallels to our fantasy life of literary brilliance, gustatory indulgence, and a chic apartment in La Ville-Lumière) are obvious! (For those who haven't heard of it yet, the movie tells two stories: primarily the story of how Julia Child learned French cooking and wrote her famous cookbook, and secondarily, as a frame, the story of a woman, Julie Powell, who blogged about cooking all of the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of one year.)

Last weekend we tried using our magic tickets to see J & J but were turned away, as they are only honored after the second weekend of a movie's run. Instead of the movie, we saw the ICA's Shepard Fairey exhibit and The Comedy of Errors, as M. wrote about -- an excellent outing, but we were still panting in anticipation of seeing the popular and critically heralded film (even crochety ex-politicians and dismal scientists recommended it).

Our opportunity came Wednesday, Nth day of a humid heat wave here that has left us steadily, sweatily dripping to the point that we're ready to consult with the village witch doctor if his rain dance can speed along relief from the braising we've suffered! (Fortunately, Hurricane Bill is supposed to send some thundershowers our way, a break in the weather that should drop temperatures ten degrees or so, in exchange for some flashes and bangs.)

We met up with our pals Jerrel and Minh at their workplace downtown, which is conveniently located next to McCormick and Schmick's, a pretty fancy fish place that we normally can't afford to frequent, but which has a dirt cheap happy hour food menu paired with reasonably priced (for Boston) cocktails. The ladies stuck with their favorite, the Raspberry Cosmimosa, J. a martini and a Manhattan, and I tried the caipirinha, something I have to admit never having heard of before. (Bartending remains a large lacuna of my social knowledge base. We're we magically transported back to the Mad Men era, I'd have to study hard to raise my mixology grades enough to fit in.) It was delicious, competitive with the Long Island iced tea I favor (disdaining the opinion of the Atlantic Monthly -- what do they know?), but the main ingredient seems exotic enough for Boston (less than 1% exported, and most of that to Germany) to keep it out of our home cabinet for some time to come.

How was the movie: Terrific! All enjoyed it tremendously. Meryl Streep was in top form, and the supporting actors, particularly the "saintly" husbands, were quite good. (I have to say that I found the actress who played Julie completely forgettable.) The script was sweet and sentimental (for Paris in the fifties and sixties) with out slipping into syrup or saccharine. The portrayal of Paris fifty years ago makes one want to pack up and move across the ocean and back in time; the portrayal of cooking and eating French food impels one to run out and buy a copper-bottomed saucepan, ten pounds of butter, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and head to the kitchen! Completely delicious, highly recommended. Bon apetit!

(At Minh's behest, we finished the evening with a visit to BerryLine a refreshing twist on frozen yogurt -- the fro-yo tastes like real yogurt, and the toppings are predominantly fruit. Relatively lo-cal, yet yum!)

Five on Monday (i.e., What We Did Last Weekend)

We had a spectacularly wonderful weekend, and here are the five favorite things we did (I'm deliberately not telling you about cleaning, grocery shopping, and napping, since these are all activities we do each weekend, more or less. Another weekend routine: to go to the Brookline Booksmith, our awesome neighborhood independent bookstore, and buy at least one used or bargain book. Not worth mentioning, really, since we do it all the time!)

1. Long in the planning, we finally got together with Matt and Norah for a Saturday outing to the ICA (John B., Erik's new playmate from work, and Jenn couldn't make it, unfortunately). E & I hadn't been to the ICA before and got seriously lost on the way there: while the building is quite obviously and visibly on the waterfront, we just couldn't find a way to bike there: we ended up on some nasty highway intersection just to be (mis-)led into the World Trade Center from which we escaped by going underground through a subway station, all the while seeing the damn thing but not getting there! Be advised, fellow-Bostoners: don't take Summer Street Bridge. Anyway... just rambling away here... eventually we caught up with Norah and Matt, who were happily sitting at the back porch of the museum, where it is really, really lovely. Perfect picnic spot, I'd say.

The reason we were excited about the ICA was the Shephard Fairey exhibition, which unfortunately ended yesterday. Amazing stuff, beyond the super famous Obama image and the almost equally famous Giant series. Norah and I almost missed the first room, though, since we were too engaged in our rant about how irrational the "discussion" on health care has become.

Just about as irrational as the "debate" between the Polish social activists caught on tape by artist Artur Zmijewski: their task was to represent their own beliefs on a poster and critique the posters presented by the other groups. Guess what happens when you throw conservative Catholics, Jewish activists, the nationalistic Polish youth, and the socialist Polish youth into one room? Posters go up in flames... Zmijewski's video "THEM (SIE)" is quite unsettling, if predictable (probably unsettling because predictable).

Aside from Fairey and social documentary video art, there was a bit of (lame) sculpture (but that's just my opinion), some good photography (ditto), and some blah painting (ditto). The coolest room in the museum: the mediathek:

You can't see it, but outside the giant window: well, it's all water. Imagine your office in here!

2. Next to the ICA is the famous Boston seaside restaurant The Barking Crab. While making written (Facebook) arrangements for meeting with Norah, I had accidentally misspelled the name and asked if she wanted to go to The Barking Crap, and really, that name fits more properly. Of course, we didn't know that at the time.... We went because we wanted to have an authentic Boston experience, which the Crab claims to offer, and because we wanted to sit outside in a Biergarten-like atmosphere to enjoy the warm evening while hanging out with friends.

In respect to the Biergarten atmosphere, the rustic picnic tables, plastic utensils, plastic flatware, and plastic glasses and pitchers, all kept underneath a giant tent, were completely and fully acceptable. So was the menu, prominently featuring fried fish and beer (and lobster). We should have been suspicious that the menu didn't list beer prices, but instead we happily ordered a pitcher along with our food. Big mistake, as it turned out. The service reminded me of airport restaurant service: the waitstaff wants you in and out as quickly as possible. Our food arrived immediately, the plates were taken before we were done (we had to stop the waiter twice), and the bill arrived with all glasses still half full. And when we didn't leave right away, we were asked after just three minutes if there was anything else...? Because otherwise...? Yes, we got the message; we had overstayed our welcome.

For a glass of beer, a plate of fish and chips, and one fourth of an appetizer (we shared), you pay 25 bucks, thanks to the hidden beer price that was completely insane. The food was okay: it was your typical pub food. Of course, you can order the lobster at 18.50 a pound, and crack is open by whacking a rock down on it, as the people who shared our table did with utmost enthusiasm. They belonged to the unbearable group of yuppies that, while a rare sight outside of downtown Boston, gathered en masse at the Crap, 'scuse me, Crab, to enjoy their fancy fare off of plastic. That's decadence.

3. Norah & Matt went their way; E & I went ours. And it took us past the Boston Commons, where we could see tents and stalls and a big stage. So we stopped, asking what the commotion was all about. In retrospect I feel sheepish we didn't know: it was Shakespeare on the Commons! For two weeks, the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company had been performing The Comedy of Errors for free each evening, and Saturday marked their second-to-last show. So we plopped down on the grass, got our share of Ben & Jerry's ice-cream ('cause all that fried fish just wasn't enough!), and enjoyed a truly magical production. It was really, really beautiful, and it was such a lovely evening, and it's such fun to sit in the grass, and... and... and... *sigh* It was so romantic!

4. I didn't need to beg Erik to come along to the Open House at NESOP, the New England School of Photography at Kenmore; he fully supports my photographic ambition.

That ambition hasn't translated into anything yet, so don't ask. But I'll tell you anyway: My grandfather was a photographer, and when he passed away all his equipment went to my dad, who then transformed a closet into a tiny darkroom. And when I was young, I spent hours in that darkroom with my dad. In high school I took two darkroom classes, and in college I went to the darkroom with my friend Konni, who's a professional photographer. Then digital photography happened, and since then I've been taking lousy snapshots with my lousy compact digital camera (and photos on our honeymoon that turned out nicely because I had borrowed a good camera, a Canon Rebel XTi). In any event, I finally dug out my old film SLR, and I'd love to get back into doing film photography and developing film myself. In addition, I'd like to get a better understanding of digital photography. NESOP offers evening workshops for people like me who like to take pictures and want to make a hobby of it. I'm thinking of taking a class this fall, and that's why I wanted to go to the open house.

Alas, the open house was more geared towards people who are interested in taking a two-year course at NESOP as full-time students. We joined a tour to see the dark rooms and computer labs and studios and the equipment room, and we met with faculty and students who talked about their work... and that was all super interesting. Erik (who particularly liked the photojournalism work) told me to keep my bicycle helmet on to keep my head from exploding from all the excitement. If you're interested, NESOP has a beautiful gallery with recent work by students: it's all really, really good work!

5. After we spent the early afternoon at NESOP, we crossed Kenmore in search of food and found Le Petit Robert, a small French bistro with an impressive collection of miniature Eiffel towers and a real French waiter who I wanted to take home with us 'cause his accent was so cute. (But E convinced me that a dog is better qualified as pet.) We went for the "express lunch option" and got really delicious food for very little money. We'll definitely go back to explore the dinner options. The waiter warned us to make reservations: apparently, the place gets packed for dinner. No surprise there!

So. That was the weekend. All those activities interfered with doing laundry, which is usually on our Sunday to-do list. Hence, I'm staying home today to wash and dry and iron and fold. And to work on my syllabi! Yes--I'm starting to teach in eleven days! Totally excited about it... and therefore I leave you with pictures of my new office that I have all to myself (taken with a phone camera):

Berlin, Part II

Visiting Berlin was a business trip: I was there to give a talk in a workshop on "automated parameter estimation methods for compartmental neural models" at the Organization for Computational Neuroscience's annual meeting. (It won't spoil the suspense to affirm already that it was just as exciting as it sounds.)

Family visitations were scheduled for the days prior to the start of the conference: The day after Sheketak, we slept in and then ate brunch at the KaDeWe. The Kaufhof des Westens (Department Store of the West) is the second largest department store in Europe, the continental crown jewel of consumerism.
Its seven floors house all manner of high end merchandise, including all the names of high fashion and expensive jewelry. Most impressive to me (and my parents when they visited Berlin two years ago) are the sixth and seventh floors, which are packed with food -- an astounding array of meats, cheeses, scrumptious confections, aromatic breads, wines, you name it. One could (as my father did) spend hours just salivating over the wares in their display cases.












Melanie and I were there to sample the KaDeWe's rightly renowned champagne brunch in the Silber Terrasse (Silver Terrace) Restaurant, one of Melanie's favorites. The setting is elegant, with dark wood and leather chairs, heavy silver utensils, fine china, and an excellent view of the bustling city. The waitstaff's impeccably solicitous, yet wholly unobtrusive service is wonderful; the waiters are veterans who know the names, habits and preferences of their clients, mostly regulars, so well that their favorite tables are reserved, their drinks poured, and their new coiffures comment upon when they arrive at their usual times. We observed this kind of ritual performed for a couple of conservatively well-dressed, aristocratic octogenarian ladies, clearly used to being served, who sat next to us and imbibed a couple of preprandial whiskeys before beginning their vino rosso brunch. (I should mention that the staff knew Melanie, too, though only from semi-annual or so dining, and we were attended to wonderfully.)

The one area where the KaDeWe is lacking, an area where it has declined from its former woolly glory, is yarn. There isn't much there for knitters, but we did cruise through that part of the store and picked up some goodies for The Stash.



After brunching and yarn seeking, we walked home past Berlin Zoo (former home of Knut) and stumbled across a quaint and nifty alley of streetlamp exemplars from all over Germany. In the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, most major cities in Germany produced their own streetlamps, the design of which (perhaps) expressed something of the cities' individual character. They ranged from the relatively utilitarian, probably indicating the lesser affluence of the town of origin, to dainty rococco, replete with curlicues and filigreed ironwork, imitations of Parisian style reflective of Germany's mild but longstanding envy of what is perceived to be the charm, artfulness and easy living inherent in French culture. "Leben wie Gott in Frankreich" -- to live like God in France -- is the universal German Sprichwort for The Really Good Life. Postwar streetlamps were clearly designed to meet practical demands, rather than to appeal to the people's artistic sensibilities -- though I suppose you could argue that enforced plainness of the GDR's public architecture (and it was all essentially public) was an expression of a "People's artistic sensibility", one subordinated to the political will of the Party. The rest of Thursday evening was spent at home, eating an excellent fish dinner and preparing slides for the CNS workshop talk.


Around midday Friday, needing to get out of the house for a while, we took a walk along Oranienburgerstrasse, strolling past the restored remains of the Neue Synagogue, two-thirds of which was irreparably damaged by Allied bombing during the war. The restored remainder is guarded around the clock by the Berlin police, a testament to the still uneasy conditions for Judaism in Germany. The problem is not the sentiments of the greater population, but the small, adamantine kernel of anti-Semites that seem to have an insatiable need to spread their ugliness.








Just past the Synagogue we ate a hearty lunch of Berliner specialties, then looked for a paper store, for it was a couple of days before our first anniversary -- paper. We did find a very quaint, cute one where I bought a couple of items, and we stop by a beading store, but there was not a lot of shopping to be done. We headed over to Friedrichshain, where Melanie's father and stepmother live. We had a pleasant, and interesting -- in the universally understood 'familial' sense of the word -- afternoon tea with them, Melanie's paternal grandmother, and a great uncle and aunt. 'Nuff said about that.








Saturday I was in class: the CNS ran a day of tutorials to teach the latest methods of the computational neuroscience experts to the masses. The location was great: Gendarmenmarkt, site of the beautiful Deutscher und Französicher Doms and Konzerthaus. The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences has its offices there, with a set of high quality lecture halls, which is where the tutorials were held.














The location was, sad to say, of higher quality than the tutorials themselves, which were aimed at beginning graduate students. Many of my fellow attendees had clearly just gotten off the plane and were stumbling about in the throes of jet lag. One man sitting in front of me suddenly pitched back and whacked his head against the screen of my laptop, which was perched on my knees.



The refreshments (Kaffee und Kuchen mit Sahne) were excellent (and I should take the opportunity to praise the extremely helpful and competent conference staff), but by the afternoon tutorial session I was about to succumb to similar drowsiness, so I left for home early, and walking towards the S-bahn station, I had an encounter with the seamier side of the city. Stay tuned....

Bueller … Bueller …

John Hughes, creator of Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, the Home Alone series, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, died this week.

I didn't follow his career, which held less meaning for me than for those a bit older, but I enjoyed some of his early and mid-career movies: As I was born just past the trailing edge of Generation X and too early to be counted amongst Generation Y, Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club are not included in the pantheon of "defining movies of my generation," but Weird Science was one of the first movies I ever saw (part of a weekend spent at a childhood friend's grandparents' house -- they should not have let elementary school kids see this one), the National Lampoon's Vacation films hit the comedic bull's eye for me before I reached calendrical double digits, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off sits high atop the list films that serve to weave together the self-referential pop cultural skein through perpetual quotation.





Ironically enough, the ability to consistently recognize allusions to these movies, among others of the period, became a signifier of social inclusion and astuteness as much as other forms of fashion following that were such sources of teenage angst for the characters of Hughes's most remembered films, see e.g. references to The Breakfast Club in Go.


Hughes's later films were not so much to my liking, and he did unleash the twin monsters of Ben Stein and Macaulay Culkin, but the admittedly superficial sense I get from reading his obituary is that he was a pretty good guy. Retreating from the hurly-burly to live in quiet seclusion on a farm, starting a fresh script immediately upon finishing the current one -- admirable ways to live the writing life.

Berlin, Part I

I have been criticized recently by a sizable majority of this blog's readership (3 of 5) for posting too sporadically, and posting too lengthily when I actually do write anything. I've also been prompted by my significant other to get on the ball and relate the tale of our Berlin-Madison trip while the memories are still fresh. So here, in bite-sized chunks, goes:

We spent the first day in Berlin as zombies, trying to beat jet lag by walking around, struggling to keep our eyelids apart. Setting out from Melanie's mother and stepfather's apartment, which is nestled near a slight bend in the River Spree a few hundred meters from the Bellevue S-Bahn stop, a quiet, green little quarter with a pleasant mix of old churches, modern offices, and Turkish groceries, we set out into Tiergarten, the city's fabulous analogue (and precursor) to New York's Central Park.

We wandered the paths of Tiergarten until we hit upon a small biergarten in a clearing, ate a bit of sausage and potato salad and drank some real bier! Actually, I had an Alster (mixed limonade and bier), one of the various Mischgetränke that are quite refreshing on a hot day (others have strongly contrary feelings on this subject). Enjoying the uniquely German pleasure of relaxing in a biergarten was the perfect way to start our visit, an experience marred only by the discovery that a bird had shat on the back of my shirt sometime during the meal.




Full and sleepy, we pressed on past the the Reichstag, long since unwrapped, and trotted down Friedrichstrasse to Dussman, a terrific big bookstore. But we were hard pressed to keep from nodding off on our feet and could hardly muster the concentration to read more than a few sentences, so we rode the S-bahn back to Bellevue and tumbled into the apartment on the verge of collapse. After a quick dinner of Aufschnitt with the folks, we were trundled into bed and slept until the next afternoon.

After a leisurely post meridiem brunch, we met with Papa and Petra near the former site of the Palast der Republik, the former home of the East German parliament and a major East Berlin cultural and entertainment center, housing restaurants, discos, a bowling alley, and the like. Long left standing in disrepair, it was gutted because of asbestos, then never rebuilt and finally torn down -- probably due to politics more than health concerns, or, perhaps because it was the site of an Einstürzende Neubauten concert. Let them explain:



In its place is simply a large open lawn, dotted with sunbathers, picnickers, and frisbee games.



After a picnic on the grass, we wandered to our evening entertainment, the Rhythym in Motion show by Sheketak, an Israeli dance and percussion troupe.


Something like STOMP with a bit of rap and physical comedy thrown in, they were quite energetic and pretty good, but not superb -- more towards a very high level of street performance.





Entertaining nonetheless. After the show, M. and I wandered back towards Bellevue and tried to find a place to get a drink outside by the river, but we ran into an absurd level of inconvenience everywhere we went and finally just headed back to the apartment to turn in for the night.