das Westend

Hi, tomorrow night there´s a reading in Schwanhöhethaler. Armin Steigenberger and friends. This area of Munich is known as Das Westend (theWestend) and had a former reputation as a rough neighbourhood with lots of Turks and Greeks marginalised economically and no doubt having to fight their way in. The reading is at the Kulturladen, a small venue for readings and meetings. I´ll write a fuller report of the event. All these writers read at the Lyrik Kabinett last week, in Amalianstraße, Schwabing. A venue very like thePoetry Library in London.

I joked with Armin that the Lyrik Kabinett (and Munich) was very bourgeois. He doesn't like my perceived affiliation with the artistic avante-garde and (what he views) as its anarchic fringes, where everything is a bit topsy turvy for him, the floor unstable. Munich is the most middle-class place I've ever been in, so obnoxiously middle-class I'm sure that they'd bring the King back at the drop of a hat, and are merely waiting for the chance. In Munich I always imagined that Bing Crosby would pop up from behind the cushions to sing 'White Christmas'.