A significant step forward has been taken this week in the evolution of our business; we have become employers, rather than employees! Okay, admittedly we’re only talking our teenage daughter, Emily, and one of her friends, but it’s the first time I have ever been actively involved in paying someone to work for me. Even in the dark decade at HSBC, while there were occasional attempts to inflict responsibility on me, these were always resisted strenuously. My laissez-faire approach to such things (summarised as, “I won’t hassle you, you don’t hassle me”) meant I was never tagged for my leadership potential. Which is just the way I wanted it, given the sense of humour removal and frontal lobotomy which seemed to be required once you reached a certain level there.

However, I now find myself the co-employer of a workforce of two, albeit a workforce only there for two hours a day after school. Old habits die hard though, and I have largely avoided the lengthy, tedious and on-going training process, mainly consisting of teaching them the difference between poppy and picture jasper. This is likely because I’m not sure I know the difference, so such things are far better left to Chris, who could likely assemble a fetching necklace/bracelet set, in less than 60 seconds, under conditions of total darkness.

No, my role in this business deals more with paperwork than the gemstones, with the occasional assist in areas like sterling silver letter blocks, where all you need is a working knowledge of the alphabet. I can also cope if the item comes in a box with its name written in marker on the top. I know the limits of my competence, and am entirely content to work within them. It will not, therefore, be too long before my employees’ knowledge (let’s just say that again…”my employees”…cool!) will surpass mine in certain areas. It hasn’t quite happened yet, going by the comment overheard yesterday, specifically, “What colour is black onyx?”

I do like to think we are lenient bosses in most areas, though we did have to forbid the use of their mobile phones during “business hours”, or else we’d never get any work out of them! We also have supreme right of command and control over the CD player; if feeling particularly generous, we may allow them to slip one disc of their choice into the selection. There is, however, only so much Pink we can stand, especially as we struggle to reconcile it with Emily’s avowed (newly discovered, but quite welcome) hatred of pop music. There’s also her belief that punk started with Blink 182; our attempts to enlighten her as to the role of obscure bands like the Sex Pistols have met with little success, but much eye-rolling.

Still, we have been impressed by the genuine work they’ve put in – think it was a stroke of genius by Chris to employ two of them, as it makes it more of a social experience. Previous attempts to employ Emily have terminated after less than 30 minutes in a welter of whining, sighing and suddenly discovered homework, but this seems, so far, to be working. And so is Emily. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some supervisory and adminstrative tasks to perform. 🙂

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Previously: Drowning in Berlin

We may not appreciate the finer point of Munich at 7am on a Saturday morning, after about four hours of sleep – hey, they give us a sleeping car with all mod cons, we’re going to take the time to use them. This is way before our friendly tourist information hotel reservation office opens, but we find a hotel virtually across the street. We crash out there, catching up on what we missed on the train. The hotel seems to be full of Japanese tourists. Indeed, most of Europe seems to be this summer.

It is also next door to a Beate Uhse sex shop – one of three on the main street. Uhse herself, who flew the last plane out of Berlin in the final days of WW2, was something of a German institution until her death last year. Her name is still known to 98% of the population, and the company is in the top hundred public German companies, with a turnover 5 times that of Ann Summers (whose founder was inspired by Uhse). It’s listed on the Frankfurt stock exchange, and the initial offering was 63 times oversubscribed. Sex sells – even shares.

Unlike Berlin, Munich is compact enough that we don’t feel the need for a bus tour, and just saunter around town looking at stuff. We find another branch of World of Music. Our rucksacks become even heavier. The center, around Marienplatz, has a lot of old buildings, including some nice tall ones which provide decent viewing platforms – but there are equally many modern shops, which gives the place a sense of being a living town, rather than just a museum for tourists.

We find ourselves in the Englischer Garten, a beautifully-kept series of gardens, pathways and architecture – there’s apparently also nude sunbathing in some areas, but we don’t see anything untoward. By the duck-pond, I talk Chris into a photo opportunity with a swan – I snap the photo at left, and urge her to get closer. When she does, the swan is distinctly unimpressed, and emits a sound somewhere between an amphetamine-crazed kettle and a punctured balloon. I remember that, allegedly, swans can break your arm with their wing, but Chris is saved by the timely arrival of a small yappy dog which draws the swan’s ire. The insurance company would never have believed us.

To recover, we head to the Hofbrauhaus, one of the most famous pubs in the world. Hard to see why; presumably because it caters to tourists and doesn’t need repeat business, the service sucks. Though we don’t discover till later, it was one of Hitler’s favourite hangouts, too. We were much more impressed by the Augustiner Grossgaststatten, which had great food, excellent waiters, and was so good we ate there two nights in a row. There’s definitely a knack to drinking out of those huge glasses though – I vow to practice more. My only regret is I don’t get to order any Black Forest Gateau here, simply because “Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte” is my all-time favourite German phrase.

We eventually roll back to our room, and watch Euro MTV for a a bit. There’s been a gradual decrease in the number of TV channels available to us on the trip; in Belgium, you could still watch the BBC, and in Amsterdam, there was an English-language Euronews channel, but now, it’s MTV or nothing. The most disturbing thing is the volume of techno cover versions; occasionally, the results aren’t bad, e.g. Mike Oldfield’s Moonlight Shadow, but they really should have left Patti Smith’s Because the Night alone. There are some things with which mankind was not meant to meddle.

The next day, we opt to hop across the border and do Salzburg, ticking Austria off the list. If Munich is a living city, Salzburg (or at least the center of it) is a tourist slut, peddling herself relentlessly and lacking in personality. Everything is packaged with either Mozart (born there) or The Sound of Music, which was filmed around the area. Chocolates, music-boxes, little plastic busts, you name it, you can get it with Wolfgang Amadeus on it.

Despite this, Salzburg is very beautiful, with fabulous gardens (the Do-Re-Mi sequence was shot in one), a broad river running through the centre of town, any number of statues and fountains, old buildings, narrow streets, busking string quartets (playing WAM, natch!) – you get the picture. Or rather, the set of picture postcards, with Mozart emblazoned on the corner of each one.

The Hohensalzburg Castle dominates the city from its rocky perch in the centre of town. There’s a meandering path up to the fortress, but being lazy tourists, we opt for the funicular: the views from the top are spectacular. Started by the local archbishops in 1077, it was never successfully stormed, and thus is largely in pristine condition – though one pillar, pointed out on the tour, has a nasty chunk taken out of it by a cannonball – an interesting experience for anyone in the room at the time.

In the castle, was a stall offering you three shots with a crossbow for 2 Euro; I nail the first one, briefly contemplate a career as a professional crossbower, then get steadily worse, despite humming the Buffy theme. Grrr. Aargh. It does drive the selections from Sound of Music out of my head, at least temporarily, before we head back across the border to Munich, where it is chucking it down. Can’t complain, however, this having been the first rain seen since the morning of the wedding, more than two weeks previously. We bid a fond farewell to Germany, even if it might be a while till we can face sausages again, and prepare to head into the land of banks, gnomes, cuckoo-clocks and chocolate…

Next: On a Swiss Roll

The issue of music piracy on the Internet has reared its head again, with the entertainment industry blaming the likes of Napster, AudioGalaxy and Kazaa for the decline in CD sales. This should be taken with a pinch of salt, as they are quick to blame piracy for any and all ills. Witness the MPAA website, which says: “One real-world example of piracy’s devastating impact on the legitimate marketplace is with the 1999 release of the film Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace. Pirate copies of the film (created by using camcorders in US theaters) flooded the Asian marketplace while the film was still in U.S. theatrical distribution. When the film opened legitimately in Asian theaters, attendance was far below expectations.” Er, could this perhaps be because it sucked? I should also point out that the film still grossed over $920m worldwide, the majority of it outside North America. As the original Star Wars took barely 1/3 of its money overseas, it thus hardly seems in need of protection.

With regard to music, the actual evidence – largely ignored by the mainstream media for obvious reasons – appears to be that people who use file-sharing networks are twice as likely to spend more on music as they are to spend less. But regardless, I imagine few people feel particular sadness for the record companies; those with long memories will remember them saying when CDs arrived, that they would drop prices once the new medium caught on. Their failure to do so, preferring to price-gouge consumers mercilessly, is certainly one of the direct causes of any decline in sales.

They are also guilty of force-feeding the market with garbage, for which it certainly isn’t worth paying $14.99, and up – indeed, if local phone calls here weren’t free, neither would it be worth the cost of downloading. I just don’t care about an industry for whom Britney Spears and N*Sync (anyone else praying for a rerun of the Challenger disaster?) are the cutting edge, and where hype and image are more important than substance and talent. Keep cramming crap down anyone’s throat, and they will eventually gag, throw up and refuse to eat any more, no matter how good you tell them it is.

So what if Eminem loses a million sales of his new CD? While his previous LP was amusing enough, all he now seems to offer is whines about how screwed up he is (it’s all his parents’ fault, naturally) and how everyone hates him. Mr. Enema badly needs to Get Over Himself. Who cares if the executives at his record company have to cut back on their coke habit?

The entertainment industry already hated the Internet, largely because it renders them redundant. You need $20m to start a radio station, $200m for a newspaper and $2000m for a network TV station. But any idiot can start up a website (even me!), and use it to promote and distribute their book, CD, film, or whatever. It’s a level playing-field, and that infuriates and threatens media cartels. There’s no denying that the vast majority of musicians, who are at the bottom of the pyramid, benefit from the Internet and the exposure it permits. Those at the top are the only losers, and I would certainly say they deserve as little sympathy as the baseball players who threatened to strike while earning an average $2.4m per year.

The concept of copyright, as currently applied, no longer has any resonance for me. I can see why creators of work should be entitled to some protection during their lifetime, though no-one has a “right” to get paid for their art, any more than I have a “right” to get paid for writing these words. However, the principle has been utterly corrupted by the likes of Disney and the others who are largely responsible for the (soon-to-be-challenged) Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which packed another couple of decades onto the time before material become public domain – thereby saving Mickey Mouse from becoming fair game for one and all. This is merely the latest in a series of corporate land-grabs, which have extended the period of copyright from 14 years to over a century.

What moral justification is offered for this? Here’s Jack Valenti, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America – conspiracy theorists might care to note that Valenti was in JFK’s 1963 Dallas motorcade, and within hours of the assassination, became the first special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson. Hmmm. In testimony to Congress, he said: “The core copyright industries, movies, TV programs, home video, books, musical recordings and computer software…gather in some $45 billion in revenues abroad, and has grown its employment at a rate of four times faster than the annual rate of growth of the overall U.S. economy. Whatever shrinks that massive asset is NOT in America’s interests… The case for copyright term extension is that simple.“

Yes, it begins and ends with nothing more than bare-faced greed. We want to make more money, so you will change the law to let us do so. You don’t think the media companies’ $6.5m in political contributions had anything to do with the bill getting passed, do you? I’m sure it’s mere coincidence that, of the 13 sponsors of the original bill in the House of Representatives, ten took money from Disney. Indeed, the very same day Senator Lott of Mississippi signed on as a co-sponsor, his campaign committee received a Disney check for $1,000.

It is double ironic that it’s Mickey’s hands which are grasping, given how many Disney films are based on public domain works – or in the case of The Jungle Book, came out one year after author Rudyard Kipling’s copyright expired. The laws which they lobbied to pass, would have prevented them from making such films freely, and as it currently stands, copyright doesn’t protect, it suppresses. It’s acknowledged that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is based on Arthur Brooke’s poem Romeus and Juliet/ This was written less than 30 years previously and would, under existing law (the creator’s life, plus 70 years), have led to Will being smacked with a plagiarism suit faster than you can say, “First, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

Readers with long memories may remember the “Home Taping is Killing Music” campaign begun by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry in 1978. [On the nostalgia front, there was also the bizarre and highly amusing British Video Association claim in the following decade that video piracy financed terrorism. As yet, the MPAA have yet to claim that downloading Rush Hour 2 off the net is aiding Bin Laden, but after the “Drugs = Terrorism” adverts – which conveniently forgot the CIA funding pumped into Afghanistan when they were fighting Commies rather than us – it can surely only be a matter of time. (2010 update: And so it proved) Anyway, where was I…? Oh, yes…]

Funnily enough, home taping didn’t kill music: it survived, just as it’ll survive the Internet. In even the worst case scenario – the absolute and final death of the music industry – musicians would have to go back to playing live, as they did for the great majority of recorded history. They will have no option but to succeed or fail on their talent, rather than how many times MTV plays their video. It’s hard to see why anyone could realistically view this as a tragedy.

It’s our first anniversary already. First month that is, of course, it being precisely 31 days ago that I walked down the aisle at King’s College Chapel in Aberdeen. Except, technically, it was Chris that did the walking down, I just kinda slid in from the side. We both walked up the aisle though. Technical quibbles about which no-one cares in the slightest aside, it was an amazing, incredibly memorable day, not least for the torrential rain which poured down all morning – probably more than Phoenix managed in the entire first six months of the year.

We didn’t let that dampen our spirits though, despite one or two near disasters on the day, most notably Chris getting her wedding dress jammed in the front door of the apartment, without a key to open it. Much fervent application of wet-wipes by her and bridesmaid Abigail followed to remove the grease – to such success that they deserve a career endorsing moist towelettes. I was, fortunately, blissfully unaware of such things, being shut in a small subroom at the church with best man Steve and minister. Luckily, the room did not permit nervous pacing.

Chris’s trip up the aisle was in itself a tad nerve-wracking, since her veil proved rather more of a hindrance to vision than expected – I realised this when I saw her shoving the hymn sheet up under the veil, as it was the only way she could read it. Her journey might well have ended in a trip if it hadn’t been for my father (in his “giving the bride away” role) assisting her to negotiate the tricky chicane round Bishop Elphinstone’s sarcophagus.

Elphinstone was one of the founders of King’s, and as befitting his position, he is buried in the middle of the church, though his final resting place is so plain and unostentatious as to make it almost a stealth tomb. Apparently, they did have an ornate cover for it, but when they brought it to the church, it was too large to fit through the doors. It’s been sitting outside for several centuries now, testimony to the difficulty of getting a good workman in Aberdeen.

The actual ceremony was mercifully brief, or perhaps it just seemed that way, for I don’t remember much of it, and will be heavily reliant for my memories on the surreptitious video being recorded from the lap of a relation. I don’t think I embarrassed myself too badly during the hymns, even if it was rather like trying to karaoke a song you don’t know, and I found myself going in a different direction to the tune more often than I wanted. At these points, I kinda wished I hadn’t chosen the “make up for in volume, what you lack in musical ability” approach.

Before it really sank in, I was married, and the month since has flown past. In some ways, nothing much has changed, and I still find myself looking around when people refer to “your wife”, unsure whether they are talking to me. But this stasis is for the best. I don’t want anything to change, so it’s a relief to see that nothing appears to be. And there’s only 31 more days to our second anniversary…

Previously: Sex, Drugs and Clogs ‘n’ Grolsch

We arrive in Berlin after the first night train of the trip, at some ungodly hour. You’d think they’d make some allowance for honeymooners, but no, all the timetables are designed to suit the business travellers. So, we pull in several hours before the tourist office (and its hotel reservation bureau) is open. The first thing we do is get our night train to Munich booked, since we have no desire to end up in Moscow, simply because there is no room anywhere else.

Are lucky not to end up there anyway, as the ticket clerk speaks no English, so we have to rely on a combination of my German, and her infinite patience – Dutch Railway personnel, please take note. We are first in the queue and get a room in the Hotel Remter, just off the Kurfurstendamm, up the street from both a strip-club and a transvestite revue. Bet that causes confusion to inebriated customers. We turn up at our abode, two hours before the room is ready (it’s still early!) but Dunkin Donuts occupies the time, and we look at the map and plot. It’s such a large city, we opt for an early bus-tour, so we can scope out the land and then go back tomorrow to interesting places.

I’m curious to see what Berlin is like, since the last time I was here was just before the wall came down (at the time, the Eastern Bloc border was cracking elsewhere, but not in Berlin). At that stage, you had to change DM25 into their currency when you went across into the East, but there was so little to buy, I ended up getting the best seat in the house for a performance of My Fair Lady. In German. Thanks largely to souvenir hunters, there’s now very little of the actual wall still standing, and what there is, is carefully fenced off as a monument. Elsewhere, there’s just a double line of cobble-stones which mark its path. As we travel round, it’s as if the division had never existed – life has just gone right back where it left off, with an incredible amount of construction.

We notice a lot of psychedelically coloured bears lurking around the city. Before you discard this apparently bizarre hallucination, should point out we’re talking cast from some kind of plaster. There were about four different poses, but no two were alike; turned out to be an art project, and one we fell in love with. Just done a quick count, and approximately 10% of all our honeymoon photos are of Berlin bears. 🙂 One statue was sent to New York in May, and was placed on Wall Street – this may not have been wise, given the bear has long been a symbol of market pessimism. And lo, the market did duly plummet, and accounting scandals did flourish!

That night, we head off to a Goth club, with the delightful name of Golgotha – not without trepidation, since we have no real idea of how to get around after the subway closes! The area it’s in is very quiet, but the address is on a main road, which soothes our paranoia somewhat. We walk past an incredibly spooky park, which looks like something out of Brotherhood of the Wolf, and laugh – wouldn’t it be funny if the club was in there!

We pass the park and check the house numbers. Guess what? It is in there. We go back and stand at the path (all badly-lit and tree-roots) peering in, nervously. Is that howling I can hear? I tell Chris I won’t make her go in there if it bothers her, thereby artfully concealing the fact that I’m scared shitless. We see two figures looming up out of the mist towards us, and prepare to defend ourselves. It’s an elderly couple. We figure if they can cope, so can we…

	Ist das Lola?
	Lola’s bank
	Run Chris Run

Of course, nothing happens. The club is friendly, doesn’t charge admission and has good beer, though the music largely sucks. We are too happy to be with living people to mind, but are careful to leave in time to catch the last subway, and with other humans. This last plan goes down in flames when they go in the opposite direction, leaving us to make our way out alone through the park. RUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNN!!!!

The next day, we head to the Post Office, and send back to Phoenix a box of stuff no longer needed. With hindsight, we should have delayed this until after the immediately following trip to World of Music; the space freed up is rapidly consumed by CDs and DVDs. Happy times… Thereafter, we turn to the main business for the day – retracing Lola’s steps from Run Lola Run.

We had done some quick research on arrival here, Chris having found a website which lists locations used in the movie. Had we known we were going to be here, we’d have made the effort to watch it beforehand, but Berlin was not on the original plan. This lead to much “Er…is that the building?” questioning of each other; we take pictures anyway, just to be sure. [Subsequent inquiry back in London revealed we were usually pretty close to the mark!]

While running around odd corners of Berlin (and discovering that Lola would have to be an Olympic champion, or possess a teleport device, to cover all her route in 20 minutes), we stumbled across a couple of cool places. First up was Fassbender and Rausch, allegedly the world’s largest chocolate shop, which uses it to create, much like Mini-Europe, large-scale creations of famous buildings. I presume they’re varnished rather than actually edible (one hot day, and boom, the Reichstag is reduced to a puddle) but you can only admire the concept.

In the Babelplatz, opposite Lola’s bank was a window in the ground, onto an underground library, without any books on the shelves. This was a chilling monument to the Nazi book-burnings in the 1930’s, reminding me of Heinrich Heine’s prophetic quote from a century before: “Where one burns books, one will soon burn people.”

On a lighter note, we found the mother lode of bears: 125 in a circle on the site of the future U.S. Embassy, with each representing one country and decorated by an artist from there. Kind of a Uni-teddy Nations… [Go on, groan – I’ll wait here for you] Also stumbled into a street festival, with food, entertainment and, of course, beer; one of the personal highlights was hearing them play Kraftwerk over the PA. Chris amused herself with some bubbles, and going by the trail of small children she acquired, it seems that you don’t need any musical ability to be a Pied Piper.

We left Berlin that evening with a feeling that we’d only scratched the surface of the city. Chris – particularly impressed with the public toilets – said it was somewhere she’d be happy to live, and I’m inclined to agree. It’s a place with enormous potential, busy without being overcrowded, and the train to Munich reinforced our overall happiness and satisfaction with Germany. Never have I ever seen a sleeping car possessing its own bathroom, including a shower. Sheer luxury, with even a ladder that comes out of the wall so that the top bunker doesn’t have to engage in Lara Croft-ian maneouveres to reach the bed. With such attention to our comfort, it seems a shame to go to bed, but Munich beckons…

Next: The Hills are Alive…