List 54

Love: The Lives of Others, one of my favorite movies from the past decade. It's an incredibly well-acted, tense and moving story of life under the 1980s East German police state, and the way surveillance changes the lives of the artists being watched and challenges the humanity of one Stasi officer. (Despite the gravity of the subject, I also couldn't help but oggle the bohemian cool of the Berlin flat where much of the film unfolds.)

Like: Schmidt's, in the Mission. Admittedly, the service can be the worst combination of German + moustached hipster. But I liked the sparse interior design, and it's hard to beat the pea cake and smoked salmon appetizer, the sausage plates, and the spaetzle with cheese and bacon.

Discovery: Just how great The Sound of Music is. I was into it as a kid (Liesl and the song "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" were particularly alluring to a young girl). But that was when it came on TV once every two years and other than that you had no way to watch it. But having seen it over and over on DVD now as an adult, with Stella, I have such a new and deeper appreciation of the movie and the songs. We hope to take Stella to Salzburg one of these years.

Obsession: We finally got the coveted Josef Muller-Brockman Swiss Auto Club safety poster we've been obsessing about for seven years (see List 4) at a vintage poster auction on May 7th. How do you say "happy" in German?

Complaint: Metal. To be fair, the complaint could equally be about the genre itself or about my own failure to appreciate it. My formative music was British New Wave and ska. Erich's, on the other hand, was Metal. So while I was listening to, say, Adam & the Ants, the English Beat and Haircut 100 as a kid in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, thousands of miles away in Milwaukie, Oregon, my future husband was headbanging to Black Sabbath. Our music tastes have largely converged, but often as of late when we are driving in his German car, the German metal band Accept's hit "Fast as a Shark" is blaring. And while I admit his band can beat up my band (do the pictures leave any doubt?), it's just not my thing.