Let's Hear It for Martin Böttcher

MAGPIE TALE: Concepcion's Legacy

Another contribution to the Magpie Tales.

The peaked tip of the porch light told you everything about whose home this was at 13014 Traverse Circle. This was the Baumgartner home. Everett Baumgartner made a name for himself in Fond du Lac, a city with a French name filled with German Americans and a fondness for fast food.

Baumgartner's father immigrated there in 1904 from Munich and opened a small doughnut and ale house at the corner of Jervis and Grande. It was the pine cone gnomes or elves that people most remembered and the tamales made by the house maid Concepcion. When Concepcion delivered a blue eyed, blond haired son named Hans, it was clear that Everett's stated devotion to Lotte was filled with protocol more than passion, and soon Concepcion became the official mistress of the house.

Theirs was a marriage of weaved a curious fabric of diverse cultures long before the word "fusion" entered the American psyche and vernacular. It was only fitting that little Hans would soon be playing the music of Reynaldo Hahn on his pink toy piano imported from Japan and resting on a Ecuadorian rug. Hans would go on to learn Hmong and follow the dictates of Tristan Tzara before moving to Tacoma where he became a respected sculptor.

It was in 1937 -- at least a decade before the founding of McDonald's in San Bernadino -- that Concepcion and Everett launched what they called "America's first automotive aggregated auto mat", later being shortened to "Drive Through". People would speak into a remote speaker and seconds later Concepcion would deliver them sauerkraut in a taco shell or bratwurst wedged into a bed of beans, kartoffelbrei and flour tortilla. During the holidays, Concepcion introduced Comidas Felizadad when a pine cone elf was put in the sack with the meals.

Speculating that they would soon be millionaires, Everett built his stone castle on Traverse Circle, its peaked turrets echoing the hats of his beloved pine cone elves. Rumors suggested that it cost somewhere between $500,000 and $800,000, a staggering sum in Depression era dollars.

By 1942, when America was far more pre-occupied with the war than German-Mexican meals, the fledgling franchise entered Eau Claire and Madison under its new name -- Taco Schnell. Its motto -- muchos kraut and beans in a hurry -- might have been catchy in less German-phobic times, but its potential was never realized.

Sadly, Everett died in 1943 and never fulfilled his empire's promise. Concepcion soldiered on, but mounting debt forced her to shut down the last franchise in 1948. She continued to make the pine cone elves and bratwurst fajitas well into the early 1960s. She died in 1971, found in her kitchen holding a forked spoon where seconds earlier she had been stirring a pot of black beans and sausage.

Amerika!

Way Out Berlin or Kartoffelbrei Westerns

Bryce Digdug came over the other day for a record party. He had some real gems to share such as Dora Hall's version of "Satisfaction", the Swedish Airline Service/Mitch Miller collaboration "Let's Fly Up to Europe", Elvis' last live concert, The Ray Charles Singers (no, not that Ray Charles) and others.

Perhaps the weirdest was one from the series Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, from Karl May's series of the same name that was later made into the above film starring Lex Barker who was fluent in German, Italian and Spanish. Although I am vaguely aware of Karl May, I never knew this series which some credit as predating and predicting the Lone Ranger. May never visited the U.S. until after writing the series and never traveled west of Buffalo, so his perspective was, to put it kindly, a bit skewed. Although I've known Kafka's Amerika which has a similar perspective, this one is new to me an quite intriguing.

What Will You Play in 2020?

Are you dreading 2012? Depending on the state of that year's election, I may move to Antigua, Guatemala, no matter what the Mayan calendar says. Or, more safely, Barcelona, 20% unemployment or not.

I've also been envisioning the year 2020 a lot lately. I like the ring of it better than 2012 anyway, and there's enough time to get ready for it. Lately I've thought I will learn to play a musical instrument or at least play one better than the ones I've tried through the years -- piano, recorder, flute and snare drums. I was, however, quite a good xylophone player in my high school days and always had my heyday during the Nutcracker Suite.

Does the turntable count as an instrument? Since the days of Sugarhill Records onwards, I guess it has. I used to buy 12-20 CDs a week. Now not that many in a year. However, I've been in something of a frenzy of uploading old LPs. I used to give the line "I'm not a vinyl purist," but that was in the days before USB turntables. Granted, I am uploading the work of true artists and performers, but part of what I love about LP uploads is that it's not a passive act. One must dust the LP and check the stylus for dust, adjust the tone arm for perfect weight pressure. I equate it to the Japanese Tea ceremony. I didn't grow the leaves, I didn't make the pot, I didn't drill the well for the water. But I brought all of these elements together for the perfect marriage of elements.
Last weekend, I heard Ashley Judd on "What Do You Know" who, in explaining her decision to go back and study international affairs clarified that at the peak of her Hollywood success she was not playing the scene but staying home to listen to Beethoven and read the Russians. "And avoid STDs," she added with a wink in her voice. It was fitting to hear that just as I've been transferring a collection of Beethoven -- a rather staggering 10 LPs of his entire symphonies and overtures, several of which I have on CD, but I like the idea of having them from the LP which is in near pristine condition. It has both aesthetic and sentamental value. It was passed down from a family friend of my parents. My mother had two best friends who whose husbands were retired members of the Mexico City and Berlin Philharmonics. The Beethoven collection, not surprisingly, came from the latter after he passed on in the early 1990s and his wife wanted me to have them. I rememer adolescent years of going to his house where dusting the turntable and recounting what brought him and his wife to the small Midwestern town where he whiled away his final years as a German professor at a small liberal arts college.

When the Third Reich emerged, he left the Philharmonic to go into the diplomatic corps, was captured by the British in Cameroon in 1939, interned in Jamaica and never performed professionally again. As these sounds pass from LP to MP3, I try to think where they will be in 2020 and if any vestige of his memory will pass with them.
In the meantime, I hope to have my collection of Poulenc uploaded by or long before 2012. I am getting close on having his complete works in my system.

Why the Fat Man Isn't Laughing

Although I have always admired the music and movies of Kurt Gerron, I've only recently known his fuller story and tragic end. Peter Lorre, Fritz Lang, Lotte Lenya and others from Weimar Germany may have gone on to find glory on Broadway and in Hollywood, but none of them had quite as tremendous of a career in the late 1920s and such a tragic fall in the final hours of the Third Reich.

Gerron had a great run in stage and film works of Pabst, Brecht and von Sternberg, but his final act is the most wrenching. Supposedly by coercion he directed a pro-Nazi propaganda film about the Czech Jewish ghetto called "Hitler Builds a City for the Jews" to show the Fuhrer's humanity for Jews. The moment after it wrapped he was executed, mere months before the Allies arrived. One of his signature songs was "Ich bin das Nachtgespenst: (I am the boogeyman)", a favorite among children that sadly was foreboding of his own tragic fate. I am sure I'll post more about Herr Gerron once my copy of Prisoner in Paradise arrives.

Finding the Fatherland in Torrance

Although I often think that I am a typically rootless Californian, having only recently landed here, the truth is I have nearly a century of family history in the state. During my sojourn to southern California, I connected with various strains of my family, all connected by my great-grandfather -- "little Mr. Biggs" (he was barely five foot tall) -- who arrived here shortly after World War I in Torrance.

Torrance is a place where so many others I've known (Bryce Digdug, Friendatella, Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights) have roots. I've driven by it many times, glancing over at its towering oil derricks yet never felt compelled to actually enter this city where my great-grandfather brought many of his 10 children through the years while he wandered the country hitch-hiking, getting into bar room brawls and managing to shirk responsibility.

All of his children have been gone for nearly a decade, and on Thursday one of my cousins from Riverside took me to meet his first and oldest living grandchild, a woman of 99 whom I'd never heard of until recently. Her home was supposedly a museum to our family history, and I wanted the chance to meet her, especially since I'd heard that her health has been fading. She has recently been moved to an extended care facility that is in a private home in Huntington Beach. Two sweet Nicaraguan women greeted us and told us that she was napping but to go ahead and say hello. We knocked on the door and heard no response but entered, seeing a small bed with a mound of covers. My cousin boldly rustled the covers and then lifted them to unveil a tiny near-centurion without her teeth or glasses. A bit disoriented, she soon knew who my cousin was, and then I was introduced. I explained who my grandfather was, and she immediately responded "Oh, I used to play with Lucille." My heart nearly stopped. Lucille was my father's parents' first born child, who died in 1914 from a tragic accident at the age of three. I had never known of her as anything but a painful memory that caused my grandmother to leave the room in tears at the mention of her name. The tiny woman on the bed shared a couple of stories of playing with dolls and kittens with Luceille, and then my cousin reached for a pile of papers on her bedside that she had wanted us to have.

They were three essays she wrote in 1922 -- the year my father was born -- recounting the family's journey across the country to settle in California two years earlier. The descriptions were vivid and poetic, especially for someone only 12 when they were written. A polo match and chamber recital at the Broadmoor Hotel (which had opened only three years earlier) in Colorado Springs, the foul-mouthed, dirty oil field workers of Amarillo, a handsome Navajo boy's profile caught nearly romantically outside of Taos and a dirt road leading from Arizona into California were all captured with pointilistic detail.
My 99-year-old cousin is likely the young girl in the nautical hat above. My dad is the baby being held by his father, and his mother is the woman in the center with her head turned. This photo was probably taken around the time the family headed west, and my great grand father is the mustached man on the right.

Later that evening, I caught up with a dozen cousins in eastern Orange County, seeing my father's face reflected in almost half of the room. Amazingly, I had met only two of the relatives in the room, separated by thousands of miles and nearly 80 years of parallel lives until this journey.

Today, I felt compelled to actually enter Torrance -- a town that has produced a quirky list of celebrities that include Quenton Tarantino, Michelle Kwan, porn star Lucy Lee, several NFL, MLB and MLS players, Bill Clinton's brother Roger, a few NASCAR stars and guitarist Larry Carlton.

So I slipped over to where our family first settled in the late teen at 1321 Carson Boulevard, a mix use business of tax service, insurance and who knows what. It is surrounded by Circus Doughnuts, car washes and tire repair shops, panaderias and sushi joints.

With only minutes to spare I headed north to the famed Alpine Village, about a half a mile north of where my family first arrived in the west. Bryce Digdug often raves about this oddity on the Pacific. I've been to the "Danish village" of Solvang in northern Santa Barbara County and have enjoyed it tackiness. The Alpine Village makes Solvang look like a UNESCO cultural heritage site. When I arrived, I saw several thousand cars for a swap meet where people were sorting through rags. When the Filipino security guard asked if I were there for the swap meet, I responded that I was there for the Alpine Village and he looked a bit shocked. He pointed me to the parking lot where there were five other cars. I wandered around this odd, odd place and into its shops filled with large German women and smelling of must. Each spot smelled of mold, filled with dusty Hummel figurines or sun bleached copies of Der Spiegel. I managed to purchase a special memento just for Bryce and then headed north to LAX where I was greeted at Avis by a sea of swine flu obsessed attendants in surgical masks.

1988: Nina Hagen Presents Tomorrow's Hits Today

So many memories tied up with this one. Recorded in Toronto I think, in between Tegucigalpa and Ouagadougou. Move to Africa? Marry and settle in Toronto? Take that job in San Pedro Sula? Join Edelweiss as a bearded bandoneon player? Edelweiss!?!?!? They had that huge hit "Don't Bring Me Edelweiss". And what was their other hit? Oh, yes, "Don't Bring Me Edelweiss".

Enlightened Northeast

I'm thrilled that one of my favorite German comedies (and let's face it, nobody does comedy better than Germans), Erleuchtung garantiert (Enlightenmenbt Guaranteed) is finally out on DVD after nearly a decade of waiting. It's sort of a funnier, more profound version of Lost in Translation and perhaps more culturally sensitive. I like it, in part, because it shows Tokyo not just as a weird and expensive place but one with cemeteries, homeless people and ATM machines whee Hello Kitty babbles while eating your credit card and refusing to give a cash advance.

In an early scene, a many almost exactly my age is visited by a feng sui expert who advises him that as someone born in the year of the fire monkey, the Horthest is the favorable direction for him. "Not the South," he explains. "In the South accidents happen for you." Enlightenment guranteed.

Timeless Fashion for Our Troubled Times

Get yours at www.ichliebevalkyrie.com.dr

Some Things from the 1980s Actually Get Better

While some wily skags like Madonna become increasingly annoying with the onset of age and exist simply to produce product in order to buy Manhattan and London condos, babies and husbands, there are some performers from the 1980s who actually get better and more wonderfully weird and endearing with the passage of time. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the glory that is Nina Hagen.

Those still reeling from the loss of Eartha Kitt may take comfort in the Germanic purr of Fraulein Hagen on these old chestnuts.

Nothing Says Christmas Like Wencke Myhre

IHOP, Please Hold the Kraut Hate!

Why is it that when it comes to ethnic stereotypes, no one every objects when Germans are targets? Whip wielding or goosestepping Nazis or fat beer and streudel consumes, people seem to have no fun making fun of them, even the arbiter of taste Benny Hill with his running gag about "die Schöne Mädchen mit die Grosse Titzen."

Bryce Digdug often makes references to Torrance's Alpine Village which in on one of the flattest spots in southern California. I need to add it to my list of outrageous SOCAL sites the next time I am there. When I visited last month, my heart ached as I whizzed by both the Crystal Cathedral and the TBN fairytale castle TV headquarters and did not have time to stop to take photos and a tour. We'll always have Precious Moments Gardens and Chapel...

The Curious Appeal of Totalitarianism

What is it about once Fascist nations that appeals to me so often? Japan, Spain, Italy, Germany. Oh, and I also love France and la belle femme Madame Sarkozy, so that may squelch my theory. But French colonialists and royalists were not exactly pussycats.

Anyways, over the past couple of days I've been embroiled in the simultaneous Criterion releases of Mishima's Patriotism and Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. The second disc of the latter has some really groovy extras. I've seen plenty of interviews in Japanese with Mr. M, but there is an intriguing BBC documentary packed with several interviews with him where he speaks where he speaks in English. Sitting in front of a small statue of Mercury, he speaks as if he's channeling Noel Coward and pronounces vulgar as VULL-garr. Why did I wait so long on these two? And why weren't they released as one set? Even more mystifying is why I waited so long to get Theo Bleckmann's Berlin. It's a really superb, dense, lengthy CD. Though released months ago, it's still not on iTunes and hard to track down in stores. I've loved little, strange Theo for quite some time. I have to admire someone whose collaborated with Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, the Estonian National Chorus and Phillip Glass among many others. This one time champion ice skater who does throat singing, robot voices for Speilberg and wacko new music/jazz, actually has a near sh0w tune voice on this album. Well, maybe a show where all the sets have Dr. Caligari angles, the lighting casts shades of green on everyone's skin, and there is an impending feeling of doom despite the cheery sound of pitch-perfect voices accompanied by cellos, a deftly precise piano and wailing faint scream in the distance. Hearing a man sing "Surabaya Johnny" seems to get at the essence of Brecht's words, perhaps words that Brecht might have felt in the person.

If you've not hear it, here is the link to the recent Terry Gross/Fresh Air interview with Theo. He's wonderfully fey and dark at the same time.

Speaking of once Fascist nations, would anyone like to go with me to Buenos Aires next July?

Heute...

...In honor of Obama's recent Berlin triumph, I am listening to my favorite lesbian singer of dirty ditties, Claire Waldoff. She has the reputation of being Dietrich's first female lover, but I doubt that (not that Dietrich had female lovers but that they came that late). She's up there with Anita Berber with her monkey and monocle as far as my favorite Weimar characters.

Along with Guy Maddin, she's making me feel quite cheery in a darkly fatalistic way. how else would one want to have it.

Raccoons of the Third Reich

Although I think coatimundis are one of the cutest creatures on earth and have long considered having a skunk with its scent pouch removed, I've always despised raccoons. Is it any wonder that in Germany, a country with which I have a few issues, is now feeling the impact of raccoons of the Third Reich. In 1934, Hermann Göring oversaw the release of American raccoons that had been raised for their pelts. Apparently it was one of those fun science projects the Nazi so enjoyed, though this one came back to bite their great-grandchildren on the keister. Recently they have been ravaging the wine vineyards near Kessel north of Frankfurt. There have been a number of reports over the past few years of their growing population which has gone from the past few years. In less than a decade they have grown from around 20,000 to over a million in a few square miles. We promise to continue wildlife and livestock updates here on Junk Thief. We know that we've gone too long without discussing Vicuñas.

Dagmar's Deutsche Miserie

The weather in San Francisco has been horrific this weekend. After an almost too cool few days early in the week, we've had nearly 80 degree temperatures the past two days, making it miserable to be outside but requiring frequent trips into the heat to water plants that aren't accustomed to such horrible temperatures.

That's forced me to be inside much of the weekend but a good chance to complete Lenya Legacy DVD. Those interested in getting a copy can let me know. It's essentially a compilation of (mainly) Brecht/Weill songs introduced by Lotte Lenya and a rare, short documentary on her life and legacy. Mina Mazzini, Hildegard Knef, Nina Simone and Gisela May are all on hand, singing in a variety of languages.

The real joy of this, however, was discovering this very rare clip of Dagmar Krause singing "Surabaya Johnny". I only wish that it were in German, but she's no less dramatic in English. It reminds me why I think no one is better qualified to carry the torch of Lenya and Weill.

Little Dagmar came close to destroying at least a couple of my past relationships as I relentlessly played and played her definitive 1986 release Supply & Demand in which she sang the well known tunes of Brecht/Weill and the much lesser known but even more fascinating songs of Brecht/Eisler, the latter composed during their exile in Hollywood. Brecht and Weill were often praised for their sweet/sour or yin/yang combination, but Brecht and Eisler were more yang/yang, both ardent Communists and a much more intense, didactic experience.

And no one is better equipped to sing tunes like "Deutsche Miserie" and "The Lilly of Hell" than little Dagmar, the pint-sized red head sometimes called "The Voice of Armageddon". Hey, I'd take her over Mariah Carey any day.

I've also been listening to a good number of Dagmar's 1970s tunes with the pop band Slapp Happy, a German group that released mainly English language tunes.

No One Raps Like a Jewish Nazi

Have Yourself a Very Weimar Weinachten

Am I the only one that caught the airing of the Rise and Fall of Mahagonny last night? Having long given up on any innovation coming from PBS, I do give a tip of the fedora to them for airing it at the peak of the gooey holiday specials. It was no surprise that Audra McDonald was brilliant and brought heart to a cartoon role, but at times she reminded me of Condi Rice -- a woman who whores herself to an evil empire in order to feed herself.=. Brecht's epic theater seems increasingly shrill and arch with the passage of time, but who can fault this production for melding together references to the Third Reich and Las Vegas. Mahagonny has long been a metaphor for many American boomtowns -- LA itself, Houston, Silicon Valley -- and echoes Kafka's Amerika.

This was a perfect finale to a year that brought us superb reissues of both Berlin Alexanderplatz and Threepenny Opera. I am humming Mortitat as I write this. "Violated...in her slumbers/Mackie, how much did you charge?"

Das Leben ist wieder schön

Besides coming home to be greeted by a stunning Baske fisherman, what could be more life affirming than to return from a business trip and reach down to find this at your front door. Nothing spells the holidays to me than dark, dismal Weimar culture, and having Fassbinder's take on it, in all 14 filthy episodes of Berlin Alexanderplatz, his epic swan song. Ive even cheated a bit an sneaked a peak at the short 1931 version of the story in the supplements section. There will be true reason to give thanks this turkey day.