Those French. It really gets me how they cultivate that l’air superieur just because they can dress up the everyday, le quotidien, if you will, in that sing-song patois of theirs and all of a sudden, pouf! Tout le monde goes fou. It’s as if life, poured through the filter of French, suddenly becomes interesting. Un petit peu more exciting.  

Take boredom, for example. In America, everyone is bored. I’m so bored! people complain. That’s why we have all that entertainment—it distracts us from our boredom. But in France, no one is bored. One suffers from ennui, maybe, but not boredom. It requires élan to pull off ennui. A bored housewife in New Brunswick is a Lifetime movie. A housewife suffering from ennui in the French countryside, why, that’s literature. Ennui takes dullness and makes it fascinant.

I was thinking about all this chez moi the other week. Sitting on my chaise longue, popping bonbons and reading Proust, I was struck by how much material a Frenchman could extract from the memory of a baked good. Eight volumes, to be exact. Which got me to thinking about those French and that, with just a soupçon of frenchiness, they turn even the most mundane into a work of art. A urinal mounted on the wall in a den in Poughkeepsie is bizarre. Make it a pissoir and call it “Fountain” and it’s declared a seminal cultural landmark of the 20^th century. And it’s comme ça with everything. An entire philosophical school based on the idea that nothing means anything? If you came up with that in Cleveland, who would bother?

Take anything, n’importe quois, if you make it French, it becomes art. Misery? Art! Decadence? Art! Sexual perversion? Art! De Sade, the old goat, whose exploits are so base, so utterly depraved, that I can’t even mention them here, is considered a literary genius. An artiste! A bon vivant! French is the magic wand that can turn the merde of a marquis into gold, such is its power.

And something doesn’t need to have started off in French to get the benefit from it. Pas du tout. It works in translation as well. Jerry Lewis. No need to say more.

There simply isn’t an aspect of culture into which the French haven’t planted their flag with a triumphant voilà! Food, fashion, film… The rest of the world can merely aspire.

Those French. It would be so easy to hate them. If only they weren’t so gosh darn charmant, with all that certain je ne sais quois.

Death scenes hit me hard. Fictional or real, it doesn’t matter—I just don’t do well when the eternal footman gets around to calling. 

In high school, on a date, Maybelline Great Lash made it all the way to my chin when Blade Runner’s Roy Batty, his replicant body spotted with the chalky marks of decay, crouches down under the acid rain of a dystopian Los Angeles. When he releases the dove and says to Deckard—in cinematic slow-motion and framed by Vangelis—“Time to die,” I was buried in Kleenex.

At the end of The Notebook, undone by the pitch of the film’s denouement, I stood sobbing in the lobby of a Lowe’s Cineplex theater. Kind movie strangers came up to ask, Are you okay, honey? Do you need a doctor? I wanted to tell them that a doctor can’t help me. My problem’s with death.

And then there are the novels. Oh, the dying and dying in the pages of great books. It can take me weeks to recover.

The other day I found a wasp on a trail through the woods. He was the size of .50 caliber bullet. He opened and closed his wings, but was unable to move. It’s the staging of death that you feel in your throat.

I stayed with him and watched him die. Then I picked him up and took him home. I kept him on my desk for a week, this being of great size and great beauty. It is the magnificence of it all that really gets me in the end.

Family friends Ronnie and Frances (at left and right), my mother, Rachel, and me, 1976.

We were typecast. My sister Rachel–she of sunshine and light–was always the pilgrim, newly arrived in a wild land and looking for warm food. I was the Indian, with a penchant for fringe and accessorizing, who just happened to have an outdoor repast of turkey and corn set for guests. It’s a reductive rendition of history they serve when you’re 9, but the idea is an awfully nice one: welcome others and share your bounty.

Over the years, the pilgrims have come from all over; and when they get here, they become a part of the native tribe. I know–it’s a reductive rendition of history. But it’s a nice one.

Happy Thanksgiving–whatever kind of American you are.

In elementary school, mine was not the party-pack lunch—the lunch you see in TV commercials that explodes with all sorts of crazy lunch fun. Kids in those commercials fall all over themselves in great pitches of joy over the party-in-a-lunch-box mom packed. Those little logs of cheese, that cup of O-shaped spaghetti, the bologna on white bread wonderfulness—so much lunching good times that, once unpacked, unleash storms and storms of fun. Just not for me. 

My parents were of the mindset that lunch was an opportunity to get nutrition into me. My lunch came in a brown paper bag, a fitting indication of nutritional utility. Usually, it was tuna on whole wheat, which my mother would wrap in wax paper. By the time lunch came around, the wax paper was a soggy film and had to be carefully peeled off the tuna. At school, I was the only one not eating something that came out of plastic. And oh, how unfair it was.

But worse than not being able to pull out my own Oscar Meyer nitrite bomb from a Glad baggie was the daily disappointment of dessert. When you’re 7, how can an apple compete with the sugarland arsenal of Hostess? Twinkies, cupcakes, ho hos—in the 1970s, those were the dessert dreams of children. To me, the spongy, cream-filled cakes were a forbidden Eden, beckoning with the promise of voluptuous, sugar bliss.

Every now and then there would be one kid, one misguided soul, who thought that yes, he would like to trade his chocolate-glazed fantasy for a Washington state Jonagold. After the exchange was made, I would hold my little plastic packet of illicit joy, my personal ticket to the American lunch party, and feel giddy with the fun I was about to have.

The cake itself never fully lived up to my expectation of it. But that didn’t diminish desire. Because, even though reality was a little too soggy, a bit too pasty, I was thoroughly happy just to be part of the whole Hostess promise of it all.

Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

Once upon a time, Mrs. Puff, a modest and respectable lady, went to the theater with Mr. Puff, her equally modest and respectable husband. The year: 1947. The venue: the Ethel Barrymore Theater, New York City. 

It is December and the night is cold. Mrs. Puff wears a silver evening dress with a mink stole. Mr. Puff has on a fine wool suit. And in the theater, all around them, sit decent citizens very much like them—earnest, culturally-minded, and with a high regard for social decorum. It is hardly the setting for a revolution.

The houselights dim and the curtain goes up. It is a street scene of a working-class neighborhood in New Orleans. A jazz tune plays. And then, it happens. A man saunters onto the stage and, with the immortal lines, “Hey, there! Stella, baby!” changes the course of American culture.

Enter: Marlon Brando. In blue jeans and a t-shirt, Brando’s Stanley Kowalski swaggers, sweats, swears, and smirks his way into pop iconography. It is a new beginning–shocking and exciting.

And just like that, proper Mr. and Mrs. Puff, staring into the future of the American identity, appear so suddenly of the past.

Happy 65th anniversary, Tennessee. Thank you for Stanley. And thank you especially for Marlon.

The arrivals board at Vienna’s international airport.

In the early 1980s, Vienna’s airport was one small terminal, like a village train station, something for the few people who bothered to venture in or out. You could check in, get a coffee, and go through passport control in a matter of minutes, and you got to your gate while the coffee was still hot because your gate was just the other side of the room. Planes took off and landed on one runway. The entire happenings at the airport, inside and out, could be monitored from the one lobby-sized space. Because, aside from music prodigies and spies, no one went to Vienna. 

This is, of course, before the Asian economic boom that sent the Japanese and their Nikons into the non-Nippon world with a touristic gusto that is still hard to beat. And Americans, if they were going to journey all the way to Europe, they were heading for the big cities, cities with international oomph, or, at the very least, cities that offered a kick of cannabis with coffee. Very few headed to Vienna, which stood like a remote, lonely outpost teetering on the edge of East and West, where no one except university students spoke English and people walked around like they were still a bit stunned at having lost the monarchy, even though that had happened all the way back in the nightmare days of a closing WWI, 62 years before. The Vienna airport reflected what Austria, in the 20^th century, had become: a quaint little place with great coffee, but, on the whole, internationally overlooked.

Not anymore. Land in Vienna today, and it’s clear it’s a destination city, with a terminal that looks like an 80s vision of tomorrowland: glossy blacks, creamy whites, and lots of neon lighting. I was so impressed with the bathrooms alone, I started taking pictures of the line of stalls until I realized I looked like Crazy Lady with my suitcases and airplane hair, trying to get shots of the ladies’ loo.

The ladies’ bathroom.

The Vienna airport, with its aesthetic cool and international hum, is impressive. But, like anything that grows up and you don’t recognize at first, you’re dazzled by the gloss and polish of the metamorphosis, but you also can’t help that twinge of nostalgia for a simpler, less consciously hip time.

There are people who walk into a grocery store and, instead of seeing thousands of individual food items, see complete dinners. They stride with purpose through the aisles and an hour later have pan-roasted chicken, sautéed chanterelles, and potato gnocchi on the table. 

Not me.

I don’t so much walk into a grocery store as drift in. Then, in a somewhat stunned state, I wander through the aisles, lost, a stranger in a strange land. I look around and try to imagine dinner but, as much as I try, see only ingredients. Each item is an end in itself, not a means to a full food experience. This is why my dinners consist of sweet potatoes. Period. Or linguine with butter. I admire culinary complexity, but with few exceptions, compose only one-note meals.

It’s the same thing with clothing. Many think of clothes in terms of outfits, carefully selected pieces that, assembled together, turn magically into a complete fashion conception. I don’t think in terms of outfits; I gravitate to uniforms. In fact, if it were socially acceptable, I’d wear the same thing every day, with one kicky piece to distinguish the look from the day before.

That’s how I developed my philosophy of the one piece. If you have one great pair of boots, one incredible bag, one dramatic scarf, it doesn’t matter, really, if your outfit is otherwise uninspired. This is why I’m happy buying three pairs of the same black leather leggings, four exact copies of the perfect white t-shirt. In the end, my basket, whether in a shop or grocery store, winds up always a collection of ingredients, never an entire composition.

Due to a technical snafu, The Berlin Files will resume when the problem is resolved.

I wish you ein schönes Wochenende!

With Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951.

There they go, the good girls, the sweet ones with please and thank you and spring hair and daydreams. There they go, running as fast as they can from their canopied beds and dinner at six, into the arms of a guy with a smirk and a swagger and the promise of bad.

Blame it on the movies. Blame it on Brando. Who wants nice when you can have Brando in a t-shirt, like a god that’s gone slumming? He’s a brute of a man, but ask Stella and she’ll tell you, he got her colored lights going.

Serial fiction is back. What was standard publishing procedure in the 19th century, episodic storytelling is trending, with Amazon offering serialized fiction on its Kindle readers and writers like Margaret Atwood publishing new material in serial form. So for those of you who want to sit down with a cup of tea and a story for 10 minutes on a Friday afternoon, what follows is the first installment of The Berlin Files, a thriller inspired by growing up in East Berlin.

THE BERLIN FILES

Prologue

February, 1975.

The border running between Czechoslovakia and West Germany is patrolled by armed guards in watchtowers who survey the no-man’s-land of mines, barbed wire, and anti-tank blockades that separates East from West. Beams of light from the towers cut through the night and criss-cross the expanse in a continuous sweeping motion. On the ground, armed militia with German Shepherds track through the snow, shining flashlights deep into the pine forest that runs along the border.

Half a kilometer from the dense woods, a guard in his outpost checks his watch. It is 22:53. The transistor radio on the small wooden table in the hut crackles out KC and the Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way” from the Czech Hit Parade. The guard looks through his binoculars and scans the area. Nothing. He places the binoculars on the table and reaches for a thermos. He pours half a cup of black coffee into a mug and then pulls out a small bottle of whiskey from the breast pocket of his coat. There is a tenseness to his movements, as if he has been wound just slightly too tight. He tops up the coffee with the whiskey and checks his watch again. 22:55. As he takes a drink, sirens blast the still winter night. The guard throws his cup away, grabs his binoculars, and peers into the blackness.

Five men run through the thick pine forest trying to make their way to a clearing up ahead. The muffled sound of barking dogs and the shouts of the militia behind them grow louder. Suddenly, a mine explodes, tearing apart the body of one of the escapees. Without looking back, the four other figures continue their run to freedom. From the watchtower, the guard has one of the figures within his target. He shoots.

On the ground, the three remaining men continue their flight. Thorny branches and fallen trees obstruct their path. One man stumbles over the protruding roots of a tree long dead. He falls. His cry for help goes unheeded. As the two men ahead of him approach the clearing, they pause only momentarily as the sounds of dogs with a kill reach their ears.

Sprinting across the clearing toward the river in the distance, the two men dodge bullets and blockades. From the other side of the river, a figure is standing on its banks watching everything through binoculars. His eyes follow the haphazard darting of the two men making their last dash for freedom. One of the men runs straight into a nest of barbed wire, paralyzing him. Soaked with blood, the man screams. Behind him, the steady viewfinder of a machine gun locks him into target and spits out a rain of bullets. The body collapses, dead.

Finally reaching the banks of the river, the sole survivor dives into the icy waters. His arms crawl forward, dragging the exhausted body with them. From behind, militiamen are barking orders and shining flashlights into the darkness of the water. They spot their target and take aim. They shoot. The man in the water winces at the pain of the bullets and goes under. The lone figure on the other side throws down the binoculars and dives into the water, searching for the wounded man. He finds him and pulls him up to the surface. He fights the pain of the freezing waters, swims to the river’s edge, and pulls the man onto the riverbank. They both collapse onto the soft sand. The patrol guards on the other side watch in silence. Their job is done.