globalism

Pjiake


At a beer festival today I drank a New England-style India Pale Ale called New Copenhagen IPA from a København brewery called Jacobsen. The brewer, whose name was Pjiake, which maybe I will one day name a boat, was very nice and smart but not interested in unpacking with me the myriad layers of globalism behind how this beer came to be and came to be so called. Every time I mentioned it I would pronounce it the Danish way, like København, I guess because I am perpetually trying really hard to fit in and pronounce things in the local parlance i.e. pretentious, and then he would say it back like Copenhagen, I guess because they are trying to do an American-style beer and part of that is the American pronunciation. What a stupid perpetual motion machine of othering and fetishism we were.


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where are the black people

I’m liking it well enough here, I guess, but where are all the Black people? There are very, very few, and most of the ones I’ve met are African immigrants to Germany, Senegalese and Nigerian men in Michael Jordan jerseys who sell me crummy weed at exorbitant prices because they are savvy and I am wide-eyed and high on novelty and fairly begging for the authentic! cultural!! experience!!! of being taken for a ride in a strange land, plus the bassist from the band from Madagascar that played at Carnival of Cultures, and one Jamaican rapper I encountered at same, the latter of whose black-and-green-and-yellow things I gravitated to for homesickness for Flatbush, one presumes.
I guess I’ve been looking for the Black people speaking and dressed more or less like this nation’s natives. African-Prussian Vernacular German, anyone? But how does a place come to have such a population if previous residents didn’t specifically travel overseas to the African continent and kidnap and bring back and enslave and force foreign names and language on enough African people that, over generations, a new dimension of civilization eventually comes into being? I don’t know enough about this. Someone told me I’ll see more Black people in the clubs, but who are those people, and where are they the rest of the time?

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