A few weeks ago I walked in on B looking at something very intently on my computer. Beads of sweat had formed on his brow. He looked up at me guiltily and I discovered that he is interested in a very peculiar type of website:
Mushroom porn.
Or more precisely, morel mushroom porn. See, B grew up hunting morels in the forests of Indiana. Apparently, there are all sorts of backwoodsy folks in the US who do this sort of thing, and some of them reap the benefits fit for a king.
I joked that B had far too many teeth and far too little camouflage to consider these people his brethren. This apparently hit a nerve and he was explained to me in no uncertain terms that morel hunting, like lung cancer, is a proud part of his Hoosier upbringing. Over the past month or so, he has become increasingly obsessed with the forests surrounding Paris, weather and soil conditions, French morel hunting message boards, and where the morels originate that have been arriving at the Marché des Enfants Rouges (answer: Turkey). He’s developed what I’ve begun calling “the manic morel face,” a combination of childlike Christmas morning excitement grin with the deranged eyes of a pedophile.
So yesterday, some of us went out to Fontainebleau with the idea of hunting for morels. We packed quite an epic picnic. I did my part by spending a small fortune at the cheese counter at La Grande Epicerie, a decision that made me the most fragrant participant in la chasse. Long story short, we didn’t have any luck finding morels, but we did have a lovely afternoon drinking rosé, sunbathing, and exploring a beautiful forest. We also saw this:
Yes, that’s a swan nesting in front of the chateau. M snuck onto the grass to capture this shot, only to have a small band of authoritarian children gather at the edge of the trail and hiss “Pelouse interdite!” (“Grass is forbidden!”). Their terrifyingly early internalization of the Law was hysterical, and we spent the rest of the day joking about p’tits collabos. A great day all in all, though I wish I’d snuck a basket of morels in my bag to hide under trees for B. I’m sure that a seasoned morel hunter like him wouldn’t have been fooled for a second, but it might have taken the edge of the disappointment that overtook his face as the day progressed. I’ve been informed, however, that la chasse has only just begun. As Clarence is a big fan of a morel cream sauce on his filet mignon, I suspect that there are a few trips to Fontainbleau in my near future.
There has suddenly been a ton of Google searches concerning Salò arriving at this here blarg. B conjectured that this was because it was Sunday, and Acattone screens Salò on Sunday nights, so maybe people were just looking for the showtime? I feel like I really haven’t written nearly enough about Salò to warrant this interest, though I wish I had. Dearest reader who is interested in Salò, have you read any Leo Bersani? I think his “Merde Alors,” published in October in the summer of 1980, is the best thing anybody has ever written about Salò. Like, ever. I’d link to it on Jstor, but you might not be a terminal student like myself with an academic subscription. If you e-mail me, however, I’ll be happy to send you a PDF.
Here’s a teaser:
Narrativity sustains the glamour of historical violence. Narratives create violence as an isolated, identifiable topic or subject. We have all been trained to locate violence historically—that is, as a certain type of eruption against a background of generally nonviolent human experience. From this perspective, violence can be accounted for through historical accounts of the circumstances in which it occurs. Violence is thus reduced to the level of plot; it can be isolated, understood, perhaps mastered and eliminated. Having been conditioned to think of violence within narrative frameworks, we expect this mastery to take place as a result of the pacifying power of such narrative conventions as beginnings, explanatory middles, and climatic endings, and we are therefore suspicious of works of art which reject those conventions. In short, we tend to sequester violence; we immobilize and centralize both historical acts of violence and their aesthetic representations. A major trouble with this is that the immobilization of a violent event invites a pleasurable identification with its enactment. A coherent narrative depends on stabilized image; stabilized images stimulate the mimetic impulse. Centrality, the privileged foreground, and the suspenseful expectation of climaxes all contribute to a fascination with violent events on the part of readers and spectators. As Sade spectacularly illustrates, the privileging of the subject of violence encourages a mimetic excitement focuses on the very scene of violence. All critiques of violence, to the extent that they conceive of it in terms of scenes which can be privileged, may therefore promote the very explosions which they are designed to expose or forestall. (28-9)
B just pointed out that I’m probably soliciting contact from a really fucked-up person. But there are just so few of us out there, yanno?
You know how Jim Gaffigan does that thing where he mimics the interior monologue of his audience members? I suspect that my reader’s interior monologue sounds something like this right now:
Oh my god, stop talking about that stupid movie. Nobody cares about Pasolini! We didn’t sign up for some academic blog! We want to hear about brunch in Berlin!
Oh, all right, twist my arm.
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I feel like waxing on about how much I love brunch will probably topple this blarg into such unabashedly bourgeois bohemian territory that the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste will never accept my application. To be fair, my primary interest in being a member of the NPA stems from their most excellent graphic design, so my motives are already highly suspect as far as they are concerned. But anyway, here we go: I love brunch. You kinda knew that already, didn’t you? Any activity that involves sleeping in, boozing during the day, sitting outside in the sunshine, talking shit with my friends, and eating things doused in Hollandaise was likely to be my bag. And I’ll make a controversial argument here and now: Berlin is the best city in the world for brunching. Now I know all you New Yorkers are getting your underwear in a wad right now, but hear me out. I’ll concede that New Yorkers understand brunch and have institutionalized brunch in a way that I totally love. Los Angelenos don’t understand brunch. It involves too much laziness and not enough striving-to-be-famous. Everybody at brunch in LA is always just stopping through on their way to an audition or Bikram yoga class. Steve Martin got it right, brunch in LA is always something like this:
So New York beats LA on this one, hands down, but New York brunches are expensive, or at least compared to Berlin. Now Paris brunches make New York brunches look like Denny’s. My neighborhood is full of 28 euro brunch buffets, and that doesn’t include coffee. I think that is about eighty-seven dollars at current conversion rates. I don’t care what you say, it’s still funny, even if the euro is tanking under a huge cloud of volcanic ash.
Berlin brunches are on Sunday are cheap, lazily paced, and often are an all-you-can-eat buffet. My two favorite buffet brunches in Berlin are at Bellaluna (Kollwitzstraße 66, U-Bahn Senefelderplatz) in Prenzlauer Berg and Café do Brasil (Mehringdamm 72, U-Bahn Mehringdamm) in Kreuzberg. At both you can eat yourself stupid on delicious things for less than 10 euro (at Café do Brasil, this includes all the coffee you can drink). And don’t you dare think that this is some kind of Country Buffet operation. We’re talking beautiful spreads of pastries, fruit, cheese, charcuterie, and smoked fish. At Belluna—which also makes killer pizza the rest of the week—you can also expect to see a variety of pasta dishes. One day there was a cold seafood salad of calamari, shrimp, clams, and mussels in pesto. I almost died. If you are sick to death of European food, Café do Brasil adds amazing Brazilian-style meats to the standard mix. The best advice I can give you for any delicious Berlin brunch locale is to arrive early and to be prepared to wait. This city takes brunch seriously.
My trip to Berlin didn’t involve a Sunday brunch, much to my chagrin. My amazing hostess D made it up to me, however, by suggesting on our first day that we stroll around darling, bobo Prenzlauer Berg and have brunch at my ever-after favorite, Anna Blume (Kollwitzstraße 83, U-Bahn Eberswalder Straße). Named for one of my favorite Dada poems by Kurt Schwitters, Anna Blume is a combination cake bakery, flower shop, and heavenly restaurant. They have rosemary honey ice cream here, people. There are fleece blankets on their abundant outdoor seating, so if it’s chilly you can wrap yourself up. And the breakfast towers, oh, the breakfast towers! Three tiers of cheese, charcuterie, scrambled eggs, homemade gravlax, roasted vegetables, fresh fruit, seasonal preserves, pastries, and baskets of fresh bread. I suspect I’d even feel warm and friendly breaking bread with Glenn Beck if there was an Anna Blume breakfast tower between us. If you don’t go for a breakfast tower, can I just recommend that you try the Anemone plate? The aforementioned gravlax-of-pure-unadulterated-bliss is paired with a heap of sweet, tiny shrimp in a cream sauce, pickled onions and gherkins, some kind of whipped creamy cheese concoction, warm slices of dark pumpernickel bread, scrambled eggs, fresh fruit, salad, and strawberry preserves. Or you can try the Oleander plate, with it’s heaps of Italian charcuterie, bufala mozzerella, and roasted vegetables. Or perhaps you are like my friend D, who is seven months pregnant with a iron-hungry little carnivore. She looked positively rapturous over her meat-laden Alpenrose plate, which boasts some tiroler schinken worthy of your unborn child. Whichever way you go, it will be perfect and under 8 euros. You’ll have to go to Berlin and get one yourself. I’ll be in Paris, hemorrhaging cash and dreaming of that smoked salmon.
Tomorrow, Clarence will let you in on his favorite French, Vietnamese, Indian, and (gasp!) Mexican eats in Berlin. Suspend your disbelief!
So I’m still partially deaf, I guess. Also still partially wallowing in self-pity about said deafness, I guess. No, not really. I am probably annoying the shit out of everyone I know by talking even louder than I normally do, which most people will attest is already pretty loud. Sometimes I worry that I’m that terrifying American girl who is obliviously shouting in public and everyone around finds me so grating that they are ready to unzip their skins and run for cover. Anyway, my friend’s ENT brother (just say YES to capitalizing on other people’s well-educated siblings) seems to think that this thing will slowly resolve itself. In the meantime, I am trying to keep reminding myself that not everyone else in the room feels like there is a pillow over their head.
I’ll tell you what, though, keeping up with this blarg thing is kind of hard when it’s oh-so-nice outside and there is other work to be done and friends to visit with and tulip-filled parks to stroll in and rillettes to eat and chilled rosé to drink. I don’t want to bore you with tales of how lovely my life has been lately. I know that it’s funnier when I’m puking on homeless people and being a sub-par English teacher to the youth of France. I will say (rather obliquely) that some really genuinely happy and positive things have been happening to me. In my typically neurotic fashion, I can’t help but wonder if I was being self-sabotaging in keeping some of these happy things at bay for a long time. But anyway, now that I’ve embraced the light, so to speak, I’m feeling pretty swell. Unfortunately feeling swell doesn’t leave me self-deprecatingly funny. Them’s the breaks, I guess.
* * *
Let’s talk about currywurst, shall we?
Currywurst is this totally weird thing that I believe is somewhat idiosyncratic to Berlin, though I could be wrong. I guess it is sold in sociological lore as some kind of an East-West fusion dish, though if I was from the “East” I’d be pretty sore about the idea that my “culture” was adequately represented by a sprinkling of bland curry powder. If you read any information about currywurst online, you might be deluded into thinking that this is a more complicated dish than it actually is. In reality, it’s a deep-fried sausage chopped into bite-sized pieces, drowned in ketchup, sprinkled with curry powder, and hopefully served with fries (mit Pommes, pronounced the way you said it before your high school French class hammered all those final syllables out of you). I guess you can get currywurst with a roll or two (Brötchen), though I don’t think anybody really does. Currywurst are sold by Schnellimbisse (snack stands) all over Berlin. I’ve been told that West Berlin currywurst was traditionally fried and served with the skin on (Darm, and it should be pig intestine, people), while East Berlin currywurst was boiled without the casing. The website from the Currywurst Museum (awesome) informs me that skinless currywurst evolved from a pork intestine shortage in socialist East Germany. Cue sad socialist funeral dirge. “When I was your age, we didn’t even have pork intestines for our currywurst!” Well, like the Cold War, I think that the West has kinda won on this particular epicurean battle. Nowadays, Berlin currywursts are sizzling in hot grease all over Berlin, so much for the better. You might be asked if you would like your currywurst with (mit Darm) or without (ohne Darm) skin, but Clarence thinks that this one is kind of a no brainer.
While the sausage itself is quite a draw—juicy and plump on the inside with a slightly fried crunchy skin—the real draw of the currywurst is that it is a condiment-lovers wet dream. If you aren’t a ketchup lover, then there is no point in going down this particular road. The “curry” component of a currywurst isn’t particularly pronounced, especially if you are coming into this situation with an American palate. This is a fried sausage swimming in ketchup and nothing else. If you want to up the fat kid ante—and if you are reading this blog, of course you do—you will want to order your currywurst and pommes Rot/Weiss (red/white), that is, with a hearty dollop of both ketchup and mayonnaise. Is there any more sublime fat kid concoction than the beautifully pink mixture of ketchup and mayo? Plus, remember, you’re in Europe, so the mayonnaise is going to be made of actual eggs, not that terrifying whipped soybean oil that passes for mayo in the United States. Long live the Continent.
I really like the currywurst at the famous Konnopke’s Imbiss(Schönhauser Allee 44a, U-Bahn Eberswalderstrasse). In addition to the fact that this is the sine qua non of currywursts stand in Berlin (with a healthy dash of Stasi lore thrown in for good measure), Konnopke’s is well-positioned if you are hanging out in the Kastanienallee/Kollwitzstrasse/Prenzlauer Allee cute-cute-cute area of town (you’re planning to already, right?). The downside to Konnopke’s is that it gets insanely crowded, as it has been written up in every guidebook and is on every tour of Berlin. If I recall correctly, Anthony Bourdain went to Konnopke’s on his Berlin show and pretended like it was some big secret. No reservations, my ass. Nobody gets to the front of the line that quickly without television cameras.
I won’t say that Konnopke’s rests on its abundant laurels, because it doesn’t, but there are definitely better (and greener!) currywursts to be had in town. One of my favorites is at the all-Bio Witty’s(on Wittenburgplatz across from KaDeWe in Schöneberg, U-Bahn Wittenbergplatz). Berlin has perhaps embraced green living more than any other European city, and Witty’s is one of the more delicious outcomes of this trend. All of the wurst at Witty’s is from Neuland organic meat (just say yum) and they serve one of my favorite organic beers, Asgaard (I especially like the Premium Pils). Perhaps best of all is the selection of dipping sauces that they serve with your fries. I’ve heard good things about the satay, but the idea of mixing peanuts and ketchup kinda grosses me out. No, my heart belongs to Witty’s garlic mayonnaise (Knoblauchmayonnaise), an aïoli-esque concoction brought down from high to make all of us happier and more peaceful citizens of this new, eco-friendly world. It’s killer.
I sadly didn’t make it to either Konnopke’s or Witty’s on my short Berlin sojourn. There are only enough days in a week, and only so many of those days can be punctuated with currywurst (bio or not, it’s always quite the gut-bomb). I reserved my one currywurst meal (you would think I planned such things!) for the Kreuzberg institution, Curry 36(Mehringdamm 36, U-Bahn Mehringdamm). FYI, the animated currywurst-consumption GIF that opens their website is alone worth the click. Curry 36 was pretty crowded, though not unusually so, when I showed up for a weekday lunch. After waiting in line for a half-hour or so, Clarence convinced me that I deserved the two-currywurst and fries combo with mayo and ketchup and a large Berliner Kindl (zwei Currywurst mit Pommes, mit Darm, Rot Weiss, you’re welcome). Some friendly neighborhood construction workers let me share their table and commended me on my oh-so-feminine meal of two huge sausages and beer. I’m one classy gal.
As with everything in Berlin, I spent a good deal of time marveling over how cheap everything was (at least compared to Paris):
After finishing my feast—do you even have to ask if I ate the whole thing?—I took my Kindl on the road (classy, remember?) and walked to my favorite park in Berlin, the nearby Viktoriapark. The beautiful, if artificial, waterfall that cascades down the hill provides a short, if healthy, hike up to the monument dedicated to King Frederick William III of Prussia and one of the nicest free views of Berlin. It’s also a lovely way to break a sweat after a decadent lunch of sausages, fries, condiments, and beer. A good way to spend an afternoon if you find yourself in Kreuzberg.
Up next, Clarence goes to brunch in Berlin! Stay tuned.
So, um, yeah, I guess I kinda went MIA there for a little while. I went to Berlin, which was delicious, and I want to tell you all about it. I was staying with my lovely friends and their three year old, so most of my time was spent shooting the shit with them (which we can do copiously), drinking beer, eating yummy things, and chasing the kid around with glee. When it came time to sit down at the old blargh in the evenings, I instead collapsed and dreamed of wooden trains and wurst. I came back to Paris on Sunday, so I don’t really have a good excuse for not posting until now. Well, there were those several huge piles of midterms that I needed to grade. There is also something else, but I’m worried that if I blog about it, I will sound verifiably nuts.
I think I’m allergic to my apartment.
Or maybe Paris.
Or maybe I’m just allergic to not being in Berlin.
Either way, I’ve been congested since I my first lungful of French air. Last night, all the snot climaxed into this bizarre thing where it felt like my ear was filled with the kind of pressure you get on the plane or underwater or when driving up to my mom’s house in Colorado, except it was a thousand times worse. I’m such a hypochrondriac that I began imagining all kinds of crazy scenarios, including early-onset deafness or black mold growing somewhere in my apartment. I even entertained the idea that an earwig had crawled into my ear canal and taken up residency. Isn’t that why they are CALLED earwigs in the first place? An hour or so on WedMD confirmed my worst suspicions, and I called B crying and spluttering that I was going deaf and if I wasn’t going deaf I was surely going mad. To his credit, he came over and watched me writhe around like a jackass for a few hours, never once remarking that I was being kind of a huge baby about some ear pressure. I think he even at one point promised to learn to sign if I was indeed going deaf. A swell guy if I’ve ever met one. My ear finally popped, slowly and pathetically, and I collapsed from all of the self-induced stress.
I still feel woozy and my ear still feels like I’m scuba diving. I’ll get to some restaurant reviews soon, and I’m really sorry to those people (Hi Mom and Dad! Hi M! Hi Londoner!) who come here everyday hoping for a post. Right after I chew this pack of gum and yawn for a couple of hours, I’m on it.
If you want something sumptuous to read (I’d say “in the meantime,” but let’s be honest, nothing I’m going to tell you about currywurst would deserve that adjective), I would you suggest you visit my friend Brandon’s new food blog Terre et Mer. The world of foodies can be broken into two camps: fat kids and gastronomes. I think it is pretty clear on which side of that fence I fall. Brandon, on the other hand, is of the latter persuasion, and when he isn’t watching Agnès Varda films, collecting rare Armagnacs, writing about Proust, or learning his ninth foreign language, he is probably eating something so rarified and delicious that the rest of us plebs can only dream about it. He’s also sharp, funny, and appears to have some serious chops for this oh so lofty blarging genre. Check him out.
Until soon, my patient, dearest reader. My jeans are tight from all the research I did for you. You’re welcome.
As of tomorrow, I’ll be homeless for a week. This isn’t a very big deal, though I’ve done a remarkably large amount of grumbling about it. My landlady and I agreed when I took my apartment that I would vacate it for one week in the summer so that she could stay here during a conference. Somehow “summer” turned into “the middle of the spring semester,” but at any rate, I agreed to this arrangement a while ago and now have to shut up and vacate the premises. File this under “one of the many consequences of having nothing in writing.” Rental contracts are totally bourgeois, man.
I’m still debating whether or not to show her the little trick for making the hot water in the shower work. Right now I’m fifty-fifty on whether or not I let her suffer through icy cold showers for a week. You know, as a simulation of what the first two and a half months of my stay in Paris were like. A little taste, you might say. Let’s see if she isn’t grumbling like a high-maintenance American after a few days.
The good news is that I’ve decided to take advantage of both my temporary eviction and my enviable “work week” to go on a trip to Berlin. I’ll be staying with three of my favorite people in the world and visiting some old haunts (as I’m sure you suspected, most of my “haunts” involve eating delicious things.) After a few months in Berlin two years ago, I swore that I would never need to eat German food again. Ha! I’m already dreaming about all of the leberwurst, blutwurst, currywurst (I know!) and pickled mackrel that I’ll be eating, washed down with copious amounts of Dunkel and Schwarzbier. Clarence is going to Berlin, people! It’s going to be great.
In the meantime, I hope you have a great Easter. Regardless of your convictions about that whole resurrection thing, I think that spring is something that everybody can get behind.
The Bear-Garden 