Tag: Basso

I went to the movie theater and watched Infinity Pool today. Be forewarned that reading onward could constitute a *SPOILER* in the mildest possible sense of the word but the movie got me thinking about getting arrested in foreign countries and how the experience exists on a continuum between Kafkaesque Nightmare and Extreme Tourism. I don’t deliberately go out of my way to find myself on the wrong side of the law in nations that I am not a citizen of but I have done it multiple times.

I’ve already written about my experiences in a Mexican carcel and at even greater length about the complex logistics behind securing the release of a former fiancée who had found herself with serious charges. If reading the chapter “Napoleonic Dynamite” isn’t enough of a vicarious thrill traveling to Tijuana personally should nearly guarantee the opportunity to at least attract some negative attention from the Federales. For readers without a passport New Orleans and the entire state of Louisiana operate under a similar but distinct legal system that can feel thrillingly arbitrary.

This particular chapter is going to be about exploring the penal system of Germany which felt especially Kafkaesque given that everything was in the “original language”. For those that haven’t visited Germany the nation’s cultural emphasis on conformity and following the rules can be especially jarring to Americans who are more accustomed to blind, unerring dedication to individualism. The main difference to me was that the average German citizen seemed to have complete faith in the idea that people can tell other people what to do.

I’ve got a couple anecdotes to illustrate this point but the first one has the added advantage of highlighting another celebrated German trait: their sense of humor. While we were preparing our experimental opera, Fever of Unknown Origin, we composed, practiced and recorded the louder musical parts in a popular set of practice spaces located in a former secret police headquarters in East Berlin’s Lichtenberg district. We started sussing out another band in the building’s hallways and elevator and I decided to break the ice in the international language of bass player jokes.

I told the famous one about determining whether or not a stage was level by confirming that the bass player was drooling from both sides of his mouth. After quietly translating for one another and some subdued laughs of appreciation my counterpart, the most bilingual and extroverted of their group, fired back with one of his own:

“Why have bass players always to be ugly?”

Before we could even formulate the requisite question he was excitedly delivering the somewhat baffling punchline:

“Because they have to!”

I must admit that this one had me puzzled for a decent amount of time. The other band members were laughing and the bass player revealed his identity by grumbling in irritation so there was no denying that this had actually been a joke. At first I told myself that some subtle bit of humor was being lost in translation but eventually I realized that I was overthinking things. The point was that in Germany people have to do what you tell them to: that was the joke. The bass player was angry because now that this sentiment had been verbalized he had no choice but to become ugly.

The second anecdote is more of an ongoing scenario that I gained perspective on as my visit progressed. I had been noticing Germans from all walks of life calling after their dogs in exasperation as the animals disregarded their commands and frolicked in amusement. I was the only member of the American contingent to speak or understand the language at all but I wasn’t so well versed in it that I would comprehend overheard speech without making a conscious effort.

I usually didn’t understand the exact words that the Germans were shouting after the dogs but the energy and emotion were unmistakable. Drew was the one who finally put it into perspective. These kinds of deep cultural intuitions surrounding the interactions between humans and animals are something of a specialty of his. When I first visited New Orleans he told me about being struck with how much the city’s cats acted like people on his own first visit: they wandered the streets day and night and often slept at odd hours in unexpected places.

Eventually he realized that these traits fall under the umbrella of completely normal cat behavior and what he was actually noticing was how much the city’s people act like cats.

After we had been in Berlin for a long time Drew began to realize that the same exasperated tone that everybody was using in their interactions with their dogs could also be heard in their interactions with us. He put it together that it all came down to a dogmatic belief in the power of telling other people and animals what to do on the part of the Germans and an absolute immunity to that power in the case of some dogs and some Americans. Mostly Drew saw some familiarity in the delight on the dog’s faces as they hurriedly trotted away from commands that they couldn’t even understand and this was because he’d been doing the exact same thing.

It was also Drew who made the observation that when I started speaking to the Germans in their own tongue the manner in which they viewed me shifted considerably at a certain point in nearly every interaction: I would begin as an entertaining curiosity but inevitably shift to being a talking dog that needs to die. It should be noted that, like in the previous example, Drew’s assessment came only from his understanding of tone, body language and interpersonal dynamics. The meaning of the words themselves had no influence on him.

I mention this because I’m about to tell you what I was actually saying. As the group’s de facto translator it would have made sense for me to introduce the other project members, promote our upcoming performance project and that sort of thing. Instead I weaponized my knowledge: a night’s drinking would start off with lots of asking for absurdly long imaginary street names (hochseewaldbergturschlossvogelkatzestrasse for example) but then degenerate into profusely apologizing for being a dirty Jew that they had the misfortune of interacting with because their grandparents neglected to kill mine.

I’m not actually angry at the contemporary Germans for what happened during the Holocaust and of course they have done a much better job at acknowledging and attempting to amend for their past atrocities than, to pick a random example, the United States and our dark history with slavery and systemic racism. At nearly thirty years old I was just a bit of an edgelord and enjoyed making people uncomfortable. The previous Summer in Australia I had noticed that it made (white Australian) people squirm whenever I mentioned the Indigenous Australians or referred to their existence:

“What’s going on these days with the Abos?”

“You don’t call them Abos!”

“Fair enough, what should I call them instead?”

“You don’t call them anything!”

Anyway none of this has much to do with why I found myself in a German lockup. I have referred to Fever of Unknown Origin as an experimental opera but maybe it would be more accurate to say unscripted opera. The twenty or so project members more or less organically created whatever sets, costumes and music we felt like making and then presented these things on stage in a more or less random order. Lisers had secured public arts funding for this project but nearly all of it went to flying everybody to Germany.

The musical equipment was secured ahead of time and waiting for us but all of those sets and costumes had to be made of something. We combed flea markets, frequented what everybody called the “Turkish Market” and did a lot of digging through the trash. Somebody had cased out a space along the canal that we were all calling a garbage dump but in hindsight would probably be better described as a recycling center. We decided to pick through it under cover of night by climbing the fence and left our passports back at the shared workspace in case we ran into trouble.

Every German I spoke to about this experience afterward asked me why we didn’t just show up during business hours and ask to pick through the refuse nicely but I would put the whole thing down to a cultural misunderstanding. In the United States we had gotten comfortable with the consistent reality that spaces of this type would be unlikely to be patrolled or guarded because they didn’t really contain anything of value. In the 1998 Berkeley home I mentioned we lived next to a tow yard and made a hobby out of coming over the fence to rifle through the sequestered cars.

Obviously we shouldn’t have been doing that but the lot seemed to be reserved for the most conspicuously abandoned vehicles. In all the time I lived there I never saw anybody coming to retrieve one and they didn’t even bother with a dog. The German recycling lot was far less permissive.

The other important detail that was unknown to us at the time was that all of this was taking place against the larger context of “Action Week”. In Drew’s words once again Action Week was the annual extended water balloon fight between the cops and anarchists. It was very much a team sport. The anarchists were trying to squat or gain access to as many buildings as possible and the cops were trying extra hard to make a big show of preventing them.

At the end of the week the two sides would tally up their various wins and losses and hopefully renew their faith in the importance and validity of being either a cop or anarchist. I don’t think there was an official trophy that got passed back and forth or scoreboards but things like arresting trespassers took on outsized importance during this week. This time around things were going to culminate in a highly publicized attempt to squat the decommissioned Tempelhof Airport that ended up not being successful.

The bigger thing was that a security guard had apparently been killed with a gun somewhere along the canal a day or two before the night that we picked to sneak into the recycling center. This probably didn’t have anything to do with “Action Week” but for the arbiters of Law and Order all of it most likely felt very much connected. What I’m trying to get at is that tensions were especially high during this little window of time and if we had been more aware of these various factors it is likely that we would have reconsidered.

I think that there were originally six of us. We were having a grand time looking through the garbage for things that might be useful in constructing sets or costumes when we suddenly noticed that the darkness was being interrupted by an abnormally bright flashlight beam and somebody was yelling “HALT!” Nearly everybody scattered and made their way over one of the fences but in that moment I turned to a companion who was frozen in fear:

“I’m not running.”

I knew that this person didn’t speak a word of German even though they had been in the country for a little over a month longer than most of the group. I didn’t doubt that I probably could have escaped if I chose to run in that moment but my immediate instinct was to not leave my companion to face the German Criminal Justice System alone. Part of this decision was that my companion was gender non-conforming at the time: they used female pronouns but looked masculine and had facial hair. I’m not sure if they are as comfortable with people knowing that they ended up in a German Jail Cell as I am so I will be referring to them as Clydesdale.

Once the security guard arrived to apprehend us he turned out to be extremely square jawed, blonde haired, blue eyed and in the company of a large trained German Shepherd. I want to clarify that this person was only doing their job and we were breaking the law. All of these features were merely coincidences based on the country I had chosen to break it in. These caveats aside this was all extremely triggering to me as a Jewish person. I explained the relative innocence of what we were up to as best as I could and pleaded with him to release us with a warning but he was determined to hand us over to the actual police.

This turned into a whole lot of waiting. In the interim before the official police arrived, a recycling and garbage truck showed up to unload the refuse it had collected. The drivers of the truck were two Black men in the nearly universal embroidered coveralls of sanitation workers. We shifted our tactics to pleading with them to help us to escape from our captor but of course they couldn’t have done that without exposing themselves to some kind of disciplinary action and they didn’t even know what we had done to wind up in trouble in the first place.

What did end up happening almost immediately was that the German Shepherd became extremely aggressive toward the Black sanitation workers – far more aggressive than it had been to either of us at any point leading up to this. I’ve been responsible for the care and custody of a racist dog in the past and I know that the animals can develop these biases without being explicitly trained for them. Still I find it notable that all of the body language, context and commands should have highlighted my companion and I as the greatest threat in the situation but none of that could hold a candle to the effects produced by these men having a darker skin color.

The sanitation workers left and the real police finally arrived. When we had decided to leave our Passports behind the idea was that if we did find ourselves in this exact situation we could invent names and identities and be released, leaving an imaginary person to deal with the long term consequences. Lisers, the German artist who masterminded the entire project, had even been in this exact situation and successfully done so in the United States although I should specify that it happened under the relatively nebulous Louisiana Code.

Anyway the German police were having none of this. Our Passports were back at the Kreuzberg apartment that everybody had been using as a project art studio and command center. Nothing that was happening there was against the law but I was determined not to bring the police around out of a general sense of “punk etiquette”. No matter how severe their threats became I was ready to call their bluff – reasoning that one of our friends could probably eventually bring the Passports to a station. One of the cops was becoming so frustrated with my intransigence that he stomped on the ground like an indignant toddler:

“No! You listen to police!”

I didn’t but Clydesdale did. Their instinct was probably correct as this got things moving and there weren’t really any repercussions for the project at large. Once we were parked underneath the studio the same power struggle repeated as to whether or not we would bring them upstairs. I wanted them to keep one of us and send the other one up but they were very apprehensive about the prospect of that person locking the door behind them and mocking them from the window.

This fear was so powerful that one of the cops literally went through the pantomime of holding their hands on each side of their head and sticking out their tongue. Earlier in the trip we’d gone to a Limp Wrist show at the famous squat Kopi that represented exactly the kind of thing that the cops were afraid of. Kopi was a testament to the powerlessness of the police and a negation of everything they represented. The fact that all of this was happening during the aforementioned “Action Week” must have added considerably to these misgivings.

Inevitably they ended up bringing us upstairs and going through the cop routine of poking into everything to try to find something to catch us up on. The apartment was legally rented, its function as a studio was within acceptable zoning use and the terms of the lease, everybody there had a visa in perfect order. I should mention here that in recent talks with a few of my International artist and musician friends I’ve learned that the United States has made it essentially impossible for them to visit and perform and Germany was and still is far more progressive in this regard.

Anyway with so many artists working out of a single studio with a single kitchen and nobody having much money there had been the usual conflicts about people eating each other’s food. Somebody had left a hand written sign on the refrigerator with the instruction to “steal food from stores” as opposed to taking it from your fellow artists. One of the cops stumbled across this sign and could hardly contain their paroxysms of vindicated authority:

“Aha! What is this?”

Clydesdale looked over and in a brilliant flash of inspiration realized that the word “stores” had been written with the kind of lower case “r” that is just ambiguous enough to be mistaken for a “v”.

“What? It says steal food from stoves.”

The cops were incredulous but, in the tradition of Improv Actors, I quickly supported their statement with a monster of a “yes and”:

“Yeah! It means you can’t take other people’s food out of the refrigerator but if they cook something and leave it sitting on the stove then it’s fair game!”

This explanation had enough punk-vérité veracity and internal logic to satisfy the peace officers. For several minutes there was an excited general chatter as they translated my explanation for each other and regarded it in admiration like an elegant solution to a puzzle. It wasn’t like they could have used the original wording of the sign as sufficient evidence to prosecute anybody for anything but at the very least they would have ferreted through the fridge and harassed us over the contents.

The thing about the lie is that it both clicked into the idiosyncratic way that Germans tend to speak the English language and was possibly too well constructed for them to believe that we would have been capable of inventing it in the first place. Or maybe I’m just overthinking this like every other detail of every other thing that either exists or could be imagined to exist in the universe. Still, it’s an entertaining thought.

This brought us to the conclusion of the “Power struggle over the Passports” arc. Now there was nothing left to do but bring us down to their station and lock us into rooms until they decided to release us again. The one that had thrown the little tantrum with the stomping felt to me like he was silently gloating just a little bit so I told him that he was no better than a vampire in that he hadn’t been able to come inside until he’d explicitly been invited.

He said “Quiet, or I kill you!” in a kind of goofy voice, maybe like an exaggerated Eastern European accent, and mumble-explained that he was remembering it as a funny line from a television show or movie rather than actually saying it to me saying it to me. Obviously he just wanted to say it to me but needed some penumbra of plausible deniability in the very unlikely event that I would try to make it a whole thing with the U.N. and everything.

We got to the processing place to be processed. Mine went by fairly quickly because I was slightly bilingual or got a processing officer that was better with English. Clydesdale’s processing was more of an ordeal. The officer asked them their eye color and they said “hazel” but the cops had no idea what to make of this. I said “hell braun” (light brown) and the officer lightly grunted in irritation. Things ground to a halt with the next question:

“Do you paint your body?”

“What?!”

“Do you paint your body?”

I explained to them that he was trying to ask if they had any distinctive tattoos but my second interjection made the processing officer angry. He probably felt that I was muddying the waters as to who was actually in charge. He shouted at me in anger:

“You shut up! Police speak English!”

I thought this was especially funny because of how true it wasn’t but there was nothing funny about the next thing that happened. The officers wanted to know why Clydesdale’s Passport said “female”. We both explained that it said this because Clydesdale was female. The officers said something fucked up and ominous about making them “prove” it but then dropped the matter when we asked them what the fuck they meant. Anyway I don’t want to lessen how fucked up this was and I have no idea what they might have done if I hadn’t been there.

The officers didn’t actually violate their human rights by making them submit to a genital inspection and obviously I know that that level of humiliation comes standard issue with being arrested in the United States but seeing as that isn’t the case in Germany making somebody submit to it because you don’t think they are gender-conforming enough is on another level of fucked up.

We got put in separate cells. Narrow things made out of cement. Mine had blood on the wall. Somebody would have been banging their head against it before I got there. Squirrels freak out when you trap them in a box, they go crazy scratching at the bars until their claws bleed. Or that’s what I heard – I’ve never actually seen it first hand. I did catch some juvenile opossums once and they just grabbed the bars with their tiny human-like hands and waited.

Anyway I was more of an opossum type compared to whoever had gotten their blood on the wall and would have been a squirrel type. I was going to say that I was used to it but after doing a little bit of math in my head I realized that this was only my second time getting locked up ever. The first one would have been riding freight trains in Southern Illinois. Both times in Mexico and a couple more times in the United States would all be coming later.

Ryan Riehle told me that he was once arrested in Mexico while carrying dynamite and ended up using it to cause enough structural damage to escape from the Mexican prison but I wasn’t actually there to attest to whether this is 100% true or not.

It was a lot of hours later but still dark outside when they let me out. The math for this part actually feels a little off because of how short the nights are in Berlin during the Summer. It would take forever to get dark and then get light again in no time at all. The whole Summer I was there I only ended up going to bed before the sun came back up twice. Still it was dark when we got caught in the recycling center and dark when they let me out: I’m not gonna sit here and argue with my own senses.

I didn’t learn a ton about Berlin’s transit system because I went nearly everywhere with a bike. Wherever they let me out of I didn’t see any trains around so I figured out how to walk back to Kreuzberg and walked back to Kreuzberg. For this next part I feel like I need to describe how I was dressed. I was wearing metallic silver leggings, a metallic knit King Tut motif sweater and a lot of colorful eye makeup. I had long hair and was clean shaven at this point in time.

I referred to myself as “goth” during this time period but most of the people I interacted with might not have described it that way. I had even gotten into a minor argument with a Rastafarian in a trendy Berlin dance music club a few days before this incident on this very question but then I realized that the whole thing was a miscommunication and he actually thought I was claiming to be God.

Anyway when a group of five men with close cropped hair dressed all in black came rushing up to apprehend me from out of the shadows my first thought was that they were homophobic Neo-Nazis and I was either about to get beat to death or come extremely close to it. At this point in the night I was too tired to put up much of a fight. To my relative good fortune they turned out to only be more police, undercovers this time around, who thought that I looked “suspicious”.

“Action-Week” again, the gift that kept on giving.

I tried to explain to them that I had just come from detainment and the contents of my backpack had already been tossed over once that night so they need not have bothered. They were going to want to do it for themselves anyway. Once they established that I wasn’t carrying anything that I wasn’t supposed to be they told me that everything was “OK”. That definitely wasn’t the word I would have used but at least I was free to go.

I got back to the studio in Kreuzberg and was finally able to go to sleep. The sun had come up at this point – this wasn’t one of the two nights.

Our anti-authoritarian American ways continued to bring us into friction with a large swathe of Germans. At one point Lisers complained to me that we all needed “to be more German” and I explained to her that if that was what she had wanted she probably could have saved a ton of money on air fare. One night Popsicle and I discovered a small loft with a mattress in the Basso space where we were installing the show and decided to sleep on it. The next morning somebody discovered us and was unhappy about it:

“I don’t know how free you usually are…”

I felt like this couldn’t possibly be true.

I was pretty certain it was something we were famous for.

Us Americans I mean.