wow!

My younger sister won 2 tickets from local radio. She decided to take ME as payback for all the shows I had taken HER to(Bowie, the Who, Stones, etc).

Our spouses were PISSED about it, but hey-it was once in a lifetime. Sister Tonya had never before even left the West Coast; I’d seen a great deal of the world during my time in the Navy.

It was one full week in Berlin of virtually sleepless non-stop partying, music, and touring.

Set up by RPM, all 80 winners from the U.S. stayed at the Hotel Inter-Continental-along with many stars from the show-which, appropriately enough for a bunch of yahoos like us, was right across the street from the zoo!

Speaking of “the zoo”, it seems anywhere we went the Scorpions were already there.
I guess they’d never done the Berlin tourist gig before either.

Fans were pouring in from all over the world, and when Bruno, the concierge(a real “Sgt. Schultz” type, bless his heart), busted up our Pink Floyd guitar sing along in the outdoor portion of the hotel bar at closing time, we moved it to the fountain in front of the zoo, under the American flag-BUT NOT UNTIL WE GOT SOME MORE BEER!

There were no 7-11’s around, so we ended up cleaning out a local deli’s cooler of AT LEAST 10 CASES of Schultheiss. It was quite a march back to the fountain, picking up a ton of stragglers along the way.

Many shouts of “Skål!” came from Danish revellers. And a good time was had by all.

Got stranded in a dark, dank, bullet-riddled hash bar in East Berlin with no money one night. Kinda scary. Barkeep and taxi driver were hella cool though. They got me safely back to the hotel, where I found my sister partying in a room with a foot and a half of beer cans on the floor. Grabbed some cash, and paid the driver. Bruno was greatly relieved.

Had some beautiful VIP tickets to the show-grandstand seating, just to the right of the monstrous stage. It was a 12 hour affair with about 180k in attendance by mid-day. I Made my way toward the hopitality tents for refreshments, but was instead herded out to the general admission area by this gruff Australian event staffer. I hadn’t crossed 2 continents to risk being thrown out and missing the show, so I steeled myself instead for the long hot slog to the nearest refreshment stand a half-mile away. Seemed like a 3 hour trip fighting my way through sweaty bodies, skin heads, and a perpetual 10 foot swirling dust cloud. I made it back with only half the beers and sausages (the extent of their menu) I originally purchased.

And there was Tonya, tittering away with others from our group, sparkling wine in one hand, chocolate covered strawberry in the other.

The laughter stopped and her jaw dropped when she saw me. “Mark, where have you been??!!”

“Uh, tryin’ ta make sure my little sister had enough food and drink to get her through the show?”

“Oh. Well, why didn’t ya just go down to the hospitality tents right there? They got all KINDS of stuff-smoked salmon and capers, sushi, shrimp cocktail, fresh squeezed orange juice, iced tea, you name it…” she trailed off, as she apparently noticed the smoke coming out of my ears when I told her of my good bouncer friend down at the gate.[funny thing about that guy? Ran into him at a hash bar in town they called “The Hard Rock”. HE RECOGNIZED ME. “You’re the bloke I stopped at the gate? HA! Sorry about that mate-just havin a little fun wit’ cha’! Let me make it up-what’ll ya have?” He covered our tab as he cracked himself up about it the rest of that night.]

Personal favorite highlights and observations of the show:

The Scorpions arrived on stage in a full on police motorcycle escorted limo for “In the Flesh”.

There was a live helicopter fly-over for “Another Brick in the Wall pt.1.” Wasn’t expecting THAT.

Sinead O’Connors’ sweet and sorrowful rendition of “Mother” made me openly weep. [Unfortunately her performance was cut short due to technicalities.]

Joni Mitchell’s “Good-bye Blue Sky” made me cry too.

The Rundfunk Orchestra & Choir & the Military Orchestra of the Soviet Army were incredible.

That fully furnished hotel room chunked outta the left side way up on The Wall just kinda appeared outta NOWHERE. AND THERE’S WATERS. INSIDE IT. Cool.

The massive nightmarish Gerald Scarfe balloons puppets had searchlights for eyes.

Thomas Dolby was FUCKin’ creepy.

So was the sight of everyone waving those souless pink “student” masks in unison.

Tim Curry was excellent.

The explosions when the wall came down were DEAFENING.

And the hope expressed in the lyrics as all the major players did “The Tide Is Turning” were exhilarating, especially after the dark insanity of “The Wall”.

(excerpts)

Satellite buzzing through the endless night
Exclusive to moonshots and world title fights
Jesus Christ imagine what it must be earning
Who is the strongest, who is the best
Who holds the aces, the East or the West
This is the crap our children are learning
But oh, oh, oh, the tide is turning
The tide is turning
Oh, oh, oh, the tide is turning

I’m not saying that the battle is won
But on Saturday night all those kids in the sun
Wrested technology’s sword from the hand of the
War Lords
Oh, oh, oh, the tide is turning

(FUCK yeah.)

My sister had left with our group, but I couldn’t.I had to absorb the moment.

The backstage aftermath was conflicted chaos. Gangs of drunk skin heads led an assault on the Hard Rock Cafe trailer to protest the fact that they were out of beer, I guess. The polizei were called in to usher them out. Meanwhile, there I was, with rock fans and students from all over the world, with the locals and the polizei, and all of US, TOGETHER, were dismantling the last remaing piece of the wall left in Potsdamer Platz. And it wasn’t just a DFH kumbayah moment.

The parallels and contrasts were striking.

Pink Floyd, formed in the 60’s. The Berlin Wall, built in the 60’s.

Waters performs a magnum opus that symbolically tears down the walls that isolate us individually; we were tearing down a wall that oppressed a nation.

Proceeds from the concert that night established the World War Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief, as I was swinging hammers hand in hand with many whose grandparents and great-grand parents had helped to inflict those wars upon the world.

Spectacular theatre of the scope and magnitude of the Berlin show is a rare treat to witness in person, and rarer still to capture completely the full bombast and nuance on audio or video.

And yet one simple image broadcast to the world, of a hug, say, shared between loved ones separated under threat of death for decades, speaks directly and instantaneously to the strength of the triumph of the human spirit. As did the tinking of hammers against the wall at Checkpoint Charlie, which was quite literally the only sound heard there above all else.

That night, at that historic moment in time, was a celebration of the spirit of true liberation.

We danced on Hitler’s grave.

All the U.S.prize winners went home on the same plane except for me and my sister. I heard it was quite a flight!

I had one last burst of energy left when we landed at O’Hare and had to run from one end of the airport to the other to catch our connecting flight to San Jose. Seconds after take-off, I collapsed from exhaustion into a stone-cold dead comatose slumber. Tonya told the flight attendants to just ram the refreshment cart past my arm, leg and head, ‘cuz I wasn’t gonna wake-up, I wasn’t gonna feel it, and I wasn’t gonna care anyway. So they did. And she was right!

I left the United States with $1,000.00 bucks I borrowed from Mom.

I returned with one slim quarter.

I bonded strongly with my sister in ways I never had before. Those bonds are still strong today, 18 years later.

It was worth every penny. It was worth every mark.

It was one of the greatest experiences of my lifetime.

Thank you for reminding me of it, and I hope this post wasn’t too long and boring.

I wonder how Lefty political blog readers would score on knowledge of the issues test compared to rightwing blog readers, or just the average voter?

I know there are studies that favorably support this obviously rhetorical question. But it’s one-thirty here and I’m falling over – I’ll leave teh Googling to you, things.
Love this comment, btw.
nite pups

The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), the first phase of the project, was already online with funding from a federal grant and was scheduled to begin a beta testing on today. The Defense Department had also requested $8 million for its “Futures Markets Applied to Prediction” (FutureMAP) initiative, which would expand on the Policy Analysis Market’s terror-wagering scheme.

But late on Monday afternoon, Senators Ron Wyden (D.-Ore.) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) held a press conference to denounce the program. By Tuesday, Sen. John Warner (R.-Va.), the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, announced he had contacted the IAO and had been assured the program would be discontinued. By Tuesday afternoon, the site had been pulled off the Internet.

PAM was a joint venture between DARPA; the Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information arm of The Economist Group, publisher of The Economist; and Net Exchange, which was responsible for design, development and operation of the PAM trading system.

PAM was designed to much like other financial markets, with investors buying “futures” in events they think are likely to happen, and selling off futures as they believe events become less likely to happen. Some of the possibilities the PAM website offered for sale were the overthrow of the King of Jordan, the assassination of Yasser Arafat, and a missile attack by North Korea.

Bidders would profit if the events for which they hold futures — including government coups, assassinations and missile attacks — occur.

“Spending taxpayer dollars to create terrorism betting parlors is as wasteful as it is repugnant. The American people want the Federal government to use its resources enhancing our security, not gambling on it,” Wyden and Dorgan wrote in a letter to Poindexter.

http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/2243331

Admiral Poindexter was rightly condemned for making bets and I’m sure a cut for himself on human misery. Sill informed people making bets could harness the wisdom of crowds as a predictive tool.
Provided the terrorist were completely convinced that the terror futures exchange was completely anonymous.