a maudlin night, before the end of time. there are some rumblings around the news about a supercollider in switzerland where tomorrow they will try to recreate the big bang.
i've been talking all day flippantly about annihilation.
i smoked cigarettes, v and r smoked as well, we listened to t. rex, cosmic dancer -- on my recommendation-- and talked about the theory of relativity, the moon. i felt a bit like i was in college, but with now a more palpable weight, a seriousness draped over the flippantness that was before draped over earnestness.
earlier we walked to videodrome, and the guy behind the counter gave a pointed and articulate summation in a clipped german accent-- somehow the same kind of clipped as his haircut -- of his opinion of 'mist', critiqueing the 'series of implausabilities'. r made a joke as we were leaving about how if the world ends she might not return the video, and the video guy explained again quite tightly that actually the world would not end, but with the recreation of the big bang time would fold back onto itself to a time many years before the existence of the videodrome, and she could return the video later after a billion or so years.
we walked out and v opened some beers with a lighter and we talked about a belt that a german friend of theirs received from a girl in the dominican republic that had a built-in bottle opener. later in the walk after rachel stepped in dog poo we discussed what shit smelled more, dog's or human's. though i can't say i participated so much in that discussion.
and these are somehow quiet days. that tonight is the end of them or any days seems appropriate, the little banalities of city life are all the more cinematic, the night before the supercollider experiment.
yesterday as i was crossing prinzenstr. i practically ran into a car with my bike. I turned to look at the people in the car, and there were five clowns. their makeup was a bit streaked, they looked like yesterday's clowns. i laughed and you could see the split-second reaction pass over their faces, from confusion as to why i was laughing, to the flash of recognition, 'ah, right, we're dressed like clowns, that's why she's laughing.'
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Saturday, August 16, 2008
"the power of taste"
it did not take any great character
our refusal dissent and persistence
we had a scrap of necessary courage
but essentially it was a matter of taste
-zbigniew herbert
our refusal dissent and persistence
we had a scrap of necessary courage
but essentially it was a matter of taste
-zbigniew herbert
alchemia
i was in krakow a couple of days ago.
krakow is mauled with tourists. yet i still wonder if places really can be “ruined”.
i was in this corner bar in the 'jewish quarter' called alchemia, which i thought was a wonderful name. blood red wallpaper with gold leaf stencils, old mirrors, creaky chairs, candle wax.
i parked myself in a corner with an open notebook. enjoying the mustiness of the place. free associated paranoiac sketching channeling whatever had passed through me that morning at the krakow national gallery.
(i think: in a cafe in KRAKOW smoking HAND ROLLED cigarettes and SKETCHING i am some faux bohemio GOOBER, does that mean i should stop sketching? i keep drawing, despite myself: no one's going to be terribly impressed, i reason, by my lack of sketches resulting from the successful avoidance of cliche-dom).
feeling back and forth guilty/vindicated/astonished at my own apathy and cynicism/ perhaps naivete: But, longing there also for that velvety darkness that surrounded artist groups in a communist regime, in wartime. here bohemia was so, erm, banal. i am so, erm, banal...
there in the corner with the notebook, and around me teenagers with their tits hanging out of their tanktops who go to the bathroom in groups of four, an old (i assume) brit in saggy khaki shorts and sneakers tapping on a laptop, an australian and a girl with him whose accent i never deciphered because he never allowed her to speak, having a painfully boring conversation about girls he'd dated or whatever, a bellowing group of fatsos in more shorts and sandals who bothered the polish couple next to me to ask them what kind of beer they were drinking in english, a table of gossiping polish girls in skirts and headbands.
i'm not saying i want to be surrounded by artists (oh god, artists!), nor by 'authentics' either, whatever that might mean.
this is what i'm talking about with ruined... it is not that the tourists and aesthetically challenged expats and curious teens are occupying a space that does not belong to them, but rather have now defined the nature of the space. when i go there, that is what i see and what i sit among, that is what it is. the central square in the old city of krakow is now what it is: completely saturated with tourists and catering to tourist needs. that is now the nature of the square. it is not that this particular demographic is betraying its true nature. that is now its true nature.
does it matter that the buildings have been there for five hundred or more years? not really. cities are TODAY. in a tourist epoch i wonder what history means at all. did baedeker's change what history is?
history is in one, history is perception:
i visit kosice in eastern slovakia because a hungarian author i discovered last year, sándor márai, grew up there and wrote memoirs about it which just bewitched me; kosice apparently was an intellectual center for the then (1900s) ruling hungarian elite.
i walk through the city seeing what the contours of those texts might lead me to perceive.... crumbling bourgeois manors, underground tunnels, hidden cafes in alleys, the light on stones. that is, something different from what others see or might be interested in. or i don't know.
how do people understand why they want to be one place or another? why do they want to be in krakow, or berlin, or new york?
is one motivation more valid than another? people read about berlin in the new york times and go there, how is that less valid than my reading about kosice through some obscure hungarian novelist and going there?
it's not.
in their tourist way, places try and return to a true nature, roots and tradition. (i mean to put quotes around all these but i don't want to overdo it.) sure this has all been commented to death, the ethnography of tourism. but i can't decide in the end what seems more fascist/essentialist: the longing for the authentic nature of something before it was, as the discourse goes, taken over by the tourists, or the performance of the “authentic”” (here i put the quotes) for the tourists and the tourists gobbling it up. i mean, why the fuck do they want to go around in horse drawn carriages? why do they gather around accordian players and break dancers and girls in “traditional” dress? neither breakdancing nor horsedrawn carriages have anything more to do with krakow than any other place, i assume. where does that shit come from? mostly it's just weird.....
on the other hand, what makes a city before it is 'discovered' any more real? maybe the nature of commenting on it is what takes it to the other side, takes out the 'realness'. people arrive to berlin, enchanted. they arrived when the wall fell, in the mid nineties, last year --- and the people who were there when they got there were already saying the city was over. sometimes these oldtimers leave, the newcomers become oldtimers and leave.
(i looked out a train window, anticipating the visit to the 'homeland' of my ancestors and contemplating warsaw and lebensraum; wondered if anywhere really belonged to anyone.)
(right, the bloodiest question of the 20th century, chuckle chuckle).
the other day i took a walk through the krakow galeria, a giant mall. there was bershka, some german chains, mexx, new yorker, all those h&m type outlets, pan-european shoe stores. people strolled around strung up to their mp3 players, their cell phones, shopping bags. and that same thought just kept going through my mind, that same tourist thought over and over (is it tourist though? more later): these people less than twenty years ago were living in a communist country, in an economy and a bureaucracy that was organized in a completely different way. these people had fucking nothing. and now, look at them – shoes, perfume, skateboards, music, movies. in the old town, a few blocks off from the tourist hives, Poles licking ice cream cones milling around the cineplex!
and so i ask myself again, is that a tourist thought? am i some how annoyed that they are not performing an authentic nature that i expected of them, that is, musty eastern european communist kitsch? (yes, for some the exoticist “authentic” fantasy is about horse drawn carriages, for others like me it is something out of “the trial” or “the master and margarita” .)
what a bore though to be disillusioned by what we perceive to be the homogenizing affects of corporate culture and fashion-- i'd like to give people more credit. why shouldn't they have their h&m if they want it? they clearly do.
we could say (and many have,) capitalism has methods more subtle than totalitarian communism, and actually people have the illusion of choice but really they're slaves as before.
maybe so. but i have to say i don't wish poverty on anyone. satiety via consumerism may mute the masses, but by and large no one's going to the gulag, the streets are more or less safe because people are not slaughtering each other over jealousy or hunger or desperation.
there is a point of overdoing it, where buying takes over your soul and there is no more human identity without stuff, and america is that point. but poland's doing pretty ok for now I think. maybe there really is a middle ground.
is that naive?
i mean just because marcel duchamp was hanging around in new york in the twenties, just because there were beat writers in tangier in the fifties, does this mean that these places at the time were just pulsing with 'authentic' creative energy? i seriously doubt it. it's that duchamp had an amazing brain and that reflected on new york. andy warhol and the factory people in the 60s, max's kansas city in the 80s, david bowie and iggy in berlin – these were moments of ferment, but they were isolated unto themselves, involving freaks and outsiders who made it happen all by themselves.
will bershka and t-mobile and mcdonald's smother krakow's creative spirit? not all that much more than stalinism, i'd reckon: and some of that stuff I saw from the 50s, the 60s and 70s in the 20th century polish art gallery was anything but tired. the only thing that really smotes the creative spirit is when people are trying to kill you, or you have no roof or food.
don't get me wrong... i by no means think that “everywhere you go there you are,”--- no, place certainly matters. but when we're talking about authenticity, especially as it relates to artistic production in cities, i think in the end it's a matter of the quality of the artists themselves, of chemistry, of the situation. you marry a particular american girl because she's right just for you. she's not right for you just because she's american, and not all american girls are right. the nature of cities influences how you behave in them, how productive you are etc., but really it's how you work together with them. is berlin over? is krakow over? maybe for me, maybe for you-- but maybe someone will marry them and still have some beautiful, beautiful babies.
krakow is mauled with tourists. yet i still wonder if places really can be “ruined”.
i was in this corner bar in the 'jewish quarter' called alchemia, which i thought was a wonderful name. blood red wallpaper with gold leaf stencils, old mirrors, creaky chairs, candle wax.
i parked myself in a corner with an open notebook. enjoying the mustiness of the place. free associated paranoiac sketching channeling whatever had passed through me that morning at the krakow national gallery.
(i think: in a cafe in KRAKOW smoking HAND ROLLED cigarettes and SKETCHING i am some faux bohemio GOOBER, does that mean i should stop sketching? i keep drawing, despite myself: no one's going to be terribly impressed, i reason, by my lack of sketches resulting from the successful avoidance of cliche-dom).
feeling back and forth guilty/vindicated/astonished at my own apathy and cynicism/ perhaps naivete: But, longing there also for that velvety darkness that surrounded artist groups in a communist regime, in wartime. here bohemia was so, erm, banal. i am so, erm, banal...
there in the corner with the notebook, and around me teenagers with their tits hanging out of their tanktops who go to the bathroom in groups of four, an old (i assume) brit in saggy khaki shorts and sneakers tapping on a laptop, an australian and a girl with him whose accent i never deciphered because he never allowed her to speak, having a painfully boring conversation about girls he'd dated or whatever, a bellowing group of fatsos in more shorts and sandals who bothered the polish couple next to me to ask them what kind of beer they were drinking in english, a table of gossiping polish girls in skirts and headbands.
i'm not saying i want to be surrounded by artists (oh god, artists!), nor by 'authentics' either, whatever that might mean.
this is what i'm talking about with ruined... it is not that the tourists and aesthetically challenged expats and curious teens are occupying a space that does not belong to them, but rather have now defined the nature of the space. when i go there, that is what i see and what i sit among, that is what it is. the central square in the old city of krakow is now what it is: completely saturated with tourists and catering to tourist needs. that is now the nature of the square. it is not that this particular demographic is betraying its true nature. that is now its true nature.
does it matter that the buildings have been there for five hundred or more years? not really. cities are TODAY. in a tourist epoch i wonder what history means at all. did baedeker's change what history is?
history is in one, history is perception:
i visit kosice in eastern slovakia because a hungarian author i discovered last year, sándor márai, grew up there and wrote memoirs about it which just bewitched me; kosice apparently was an intellectual center for the then (1900s) ruling hungarian elite.
i walk through the city seeing what the contours of those texts might lead me to perceive.... crumbling bourgeois manors, underground tunnels, hidden cafes in alleys, the light on stones. that is, something different from what others see or might be interested in. or i don't know.
how do people understand why they want to be one place or another? why do they want to be in krakow, or berlin, or new york?
is one motivation more valid than another? people read about berlin in the new york times and go there, how is that less valid than my reading about kosice through some obscure hungarian novelist and going there?
it's not.
in their tourist way, places try and return to a true nature, roots and tradition. (i mean to put quotes around all these but i don't want to overdo it.) sure this has all been commented to death, the ethnography of tourism. but i can't decide in the end what seems more fascist/essentialist: the longing for the authentic nature of something before it was, as the discourse goes, taken over by the tourists, or the performance of the “authentic”” (here i put the quotes) for the tourists and the tourists gobbling it up. i mean, why the fuck do they want to go around in horse drawn carriages? why do they gather around accordian players and break dancers and girls in “traditional” dress? neither breakdancing nor horsedrawn carriages have anything more to do with krakow than any other place, i assume. where does that shit come from? mostly it's just weird.....
on the other hand, what makes a city before it is 'discovered' any more real? maybe the nature of commenting on it is what takes it to the other side, takes out the 'realness'. people arrive to berlin, enchanted. they arrived when the wall fell, in the mid nineties, last year --- and the people who were there when they got there were already saying the city was over. sometimes these oldtimers leave, the newcomers become oldtimers and leave.
(i looked out a train window, anticipating the visit to the 'homeland' of my ancestors and contemplating warsaw and lebensraum; wondered if anywhere really belonged to anyone.)
(right, the bloodiest question of the 20th century, chuckle chuckle).
the other day i took a walk through the krakow galeria, a giant mall. there was bershka, some german chains, mexx, new yorker, all those h&m type outlets, pan-european shoe stores. people strolled around strung up to their mp3 players, their cell phones, shopping bags. and that same thought just kept going through my mind, that same tourist thought over and over (is it tourist though? more later): these people less than twenty years ago were living in a communist country, in an economy and a bureaucracy that was organized in a completely different way. these people had fucking nothing. and now, look at them – shoes, perfume, skateboards, music, movies. in the old town, a few blocks off from the tourist hives, Poles licking ice cream cones milling around the cineplex!
and so i ask myself again, is that a tourist thought? am i some how annoyed that they are not performing an authentic nature that i expected of them, that is, musty eastern european communist kitsch? (yes, for some the exoticist “authentic” fantasy is about horse drawn carriages, for others like me it is something out of “the trial” or “the master and margarita” .)
what a bore though to be disillusioned by what we perceive to be the homogenizing affects of corporate culture and fashion-- i'd like to give people more credit. why shouldn't they have their h&m if they want it? they clearly do.
we could say (and many have,) capitalism has methods more subtle than totalitarian communism, and actually people have the illusion of choice but really they're slaves as before.
maybe so. but i have to say i don't wish poverty on anyone. satiety via consumerism may mute the masses, but by and large no one's going to the gulag, the streets are more or less safe because people are not slaughtering each other over jealousy or hunger or desperation.
there is a point of overdoing it, where buying takes over your soul and there is no more human identity without stuff, and america is that point. but poland's doing pretty ok for now I think. maybe there really is a middle ground.
is that naive?
i mean just because marcel duchamp was hanging around in new york in the twenties, just because there were beat writers in tangier in the fifties, does this mean that these places at the time were just pulsing with 'authentic' creative energy? i seriously doubt it. it's that duchamp had an amazing brain and that reflected on new york. andy warhol and the factory people in the 60s, max's kansas city in the 80s, david bowie and iggy in berlin – these were moments of ferment, but they were isolated unto themselves, involving freaks and outsiders who made it happen all by themselves.
will bershka and t-mobile and mcdonald's smother krakow's creative spirit? not all that much more than stalinism, i'd reckon: and some of that stuff I saw from the 50s, the 60s and 70s in the 20th century polish art gallery was anything but tired. the only thing that really smotes the creative spirit is when people are trying to kill you, or you have no roof or food.
don't get me wrong... i by no means think that “everywhere you go there you are,”--- no, place certainly matters. but when we're talking about authenticity, especially as it relates to artistic production in cities, i think in the end it's a matter of the quality of the artists themselves, of chemistry, of the situation. you marry a particular american girl because she's right just for you. she's not right for you just because she's american, and not all american girls are right. the nature of cities influences how you behave in them, how productive you are etc., but really it's how you work together with them. is berlin over? is krakow over? maybe for me, maybe for you-- but maybe someone will marry them and still have some beautiful, beautiful babies.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
schwarzweiss
i guess i'm the only presumptuous toolbag who likes the cool rainy weather, even in the middle of july. everyone around here is so indignant, as if they "deserve" a sunny summer, and oh isn't it just typical bullshit berlin that we're deprived of what's coming to us.
it's like the headlines here... every day it's another headline about how hartz IV welfare is going up! or threatening to go down! or taxes! or kindergeld child support! we have to pay WHaT?, and can you believe they're going to give us less??? how dare the sun not come out in summer!
i pay attention to the newspaper headlines, the fact that they're there on paper and not robotically organized by google news is so retro and like, european. I'm tickled that one) there are at least seventeen different newspapers to choose from every morning at every Ubahn stop, so at least you get the nice illusion at least that print media isn't compLetely monopolized; and two) the 'yellow' press is so unabashedly trashy, with tits and 24 point fonts on the front page. (which, i'm sorry, i find appealing in my junk food-junkie/ jaded aestheticist/sensationalist way.)
since they're all laid out like that, a bed of flowers, a buffet of 'what's going on in deutschland this morning', you get this urban walking around sense of the day's critical mass.
and so the critical mass on thursday, the front page of every goddamn newspaper in germany:
http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-kurier/print/berlin/226571.html
twins born, one black and one white. OH MY GOD!
ok, granted, this is a freaky phenomenon and not very common. but seriously, who cares?
well, clearly the germans.... who gape at the reality of interracial relationships, who are boggled by mixed blood, who still seem fuzzy on the tenets of a multi-cultural liberal democracy, and grant minimal legal rights and no citizenship to those born on their soil unless they are "german".
isn't it fitting then, isn't it a relief, to see these sticky issues in black and white? eliminate all those shades of grey?
i'm not going to go on about this for fear of seeming paranoid and/or bitter. let's just say i find it Interesting when my paranoias get expressed in such a, erm, semiotic way.
it's like the headlines here... every day it's another headline about how hartz IV welfare is going up! or threatening to go down! or taxes! or kindergeld child support! we have to pay WHaT?, and can you believe they're going to give us less??? how dare the sun not come out in summer!
i pay attention to the newspaper headlines, the fact that they're there on paper and not robotically organized by google news is so retro and like, european. I'm tickled that one) there are at least seventeen different newspapers to choose from every morning at every Ubahn stop, so at least you get the nice illusion at least that print media isn't compLetely monopolized; and two) the 'yellow' press is so unabashedly trashy, with tits and 24 point fonts on the front page. (which, i'm sorry, i find appealing in my junk food-junkie/ jaded aestheticist/sensationalist way.)
since they're all laid out like that, a bed of flowers, a buffet of 'what's going on in deutschland this morning', you get this urban walking around sense of the day's critical mass.
and so the critical mass on thursday, the front page of every goddamn newspaper in germany:
http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-kurier/print/berlin/226571.html
twins born, one black and one white. OH MY GOD!
ok, granted, this is a freaky phenomenon and not very common. but seriously, who cares?
well, clearly the germans.... who gape at the reality of interracial relationships, who are boggled by mixed blood, who still seem fuzzy on the tenets of a multi-cultural liberal democracy, and grant minimal legal rights and no citizenship to those born on their soil unless they are "german".
isn't it fitting then, isn't it a relief, to see these sticky issues in black and white? eliminate all those shades of grey?
i'm not going to go on about this for fear of seeming paranoid and/or bitter. let's just say i find it Interesting when my paranoias get expressed in such a, erm, semiotic way.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
owl night
it's generally around this time of morning when i go back and forth trying to decide if i should just fucking go to bed or stick it out til the next day. i just can-not get to bed before dawn these days, regardless if there is beer or any other narcotics around. it's true there are only about five hours of darkness a night, but that shouldn't be an excuse, how hard is it to close your eyes at 2 am and just dooozzzeee
the other night some of our pan-european guests ate pasta with a spoon, that was long before we were flailing around gas-station chianti drunk to "your kiss so sweet, your sweat so sour". repitition should be funny, but when you repeat drunkness, i don't know if it is funny. things started to stop being funny after five straight days of drunk. it all ended in tears and an inadvisable 6a.m. email to the ex. naja.
the week started out -- or the former week never ended -- with the germany victory over turkey. since the saturday before i had been, you guessed it, drunk, and had left my camera on a park bench in prenzlauer berg, i was recording the screams and wails on a dictaphone, maybe i'll figure out how to post it here... chronic archiver of experiences that i am. people flooded the streets. turkish AND german flags. schlesiches tor... deutschland, turkiye! over and over. later among the staggering masses spent time with yara discussing canadian hospitality at barbie's afterwards, she had on a pink wool amoeba shaped hat and low crotched harem pants she had sewn herself.
the next night
oh fuck it
going to bed
to be continued
the other night some of our pan-european guests ate pasta with a spoon, that was long before we were flailing around gas-station chianti drunk to "your kiss so sweet, your sweat so sour". repitition should be funny, but when you repeat drunkness, i don't know if it is funny. things started to stop being funny after five straight days of drunk. it all ended in tears and an inadvisable 6a.m. email to the ex. naja.
the week started out -- or the former week never ended -- with the germany victory over turkey. since the saturday before i had been, you guessed it, drunk, and had left my camera on a park bench in prenzlauer berg, i was recording the screams and wails on a dictaphone, maybe i'll figure out how to post it here... chronic archiver of experiences that i am. people flooded the streets. turkish AND german flags. schlesiches tor... deutschland, turkiye! over and over. later among the staggering masses spent time with yara discussing canadian hospitality at barbie's afterwards, she had on a pink wool amoeba shaped hat and low crotched harem pants she had sewn herself.
the next night
oh fuck it
going to bed
to be continued
Saturday, June 21, 2008
i (heart) berlin
i get tired of berlin cast in the macro. this is the real fatigue of having visitors, i think. since i live here but i'm also an outsider i'm expected to somehow put history in concrete terms, but then synthesize the present, compartmentalize street phenomena and place it into some sort of narrative. it's kind of like being in a museum and 'explaining' a painting. everyone needs to know if where we are now was east or west/ the wall, the wall.......... even it's not there anymore we all have to know where it was, otherwise we don't know where we are...
my roommate had some arty catalan young ingenues at the house a couple of months ago, they got indignant about the idea of the artist's biography, truth is i can't remember now what side they were on, but mizzi thought it was kind of funny, this art school intensity about how to talk about painting, and he egged them on til the spittle started dribbling from the corners of their lipsticked mouths. like him i didn't give a shit either way, but i was laughing too, it's tiring.
and now the saturday ny times waxing wow about the art scene and the menus at the revived bistros of charlottenburg, fetishizing smoking. there was a ny times video from 2006 called 36 hours in berlin, with the headline, "like new york in the 80s". leave it to new york times to compound the idea that freedom is a matter of consumer choice, reduce whatever was going on in ny in the 80s into a matter of lamplight, and bring a stream of 22 year old art students into the city seeking some sort of historical timeline with no other referent than themselves.
but look out.
last night i went to a barbecue in the "hole" at görlitzer park. it was a lot of japanese people in the electronic music scene and some hangers-on with LED's and oldstyle cameras with film. they had set out hundreds of tea-lights spelling out "i (heart) berlin". as the park darkened, people ceremoniously climbed over from the smoldering wurst and seaweed rolls and began to crouch over the candles and light them. from the far side of the park you could here the screams and clapping from the turkey-croatia game, "turkiye! turkiye!"
it was a labor-intensive job, burning fingers and such. then, just as the last candle was lit, and everyone was poised to take an available-light shot of this declaration in sand, a gust of wind blew threw the "hole" and extinguished most of them. i chuckled and said to daisuke that maybe the problem was they didn't love berlin enough. he laughed and started to reassemble the heart shape into an antelope or something. people started lighting the candles again.
i wandered over to the jumbotron playing the game. i got near the back of the crowd next to the african guys who sell chiba in the park, one of them kept banging on the blackboard that i guess belonged to the restaurant with the jumbotron, screaming in a rastafarian accent, "kreuzberg on fire! kreuzberg on fire!" if turkey won, wednesday would be turkey versus germany, kreuzberg on fire indeed.
as turkey put in the last winning penalty kick, the crowd went apeshit, knocking over tables and dancing in front of the screen, their shadows blocking the projection. girls in red headscarves with crescents and stars embraced, men in mustaches jigged. the germans among them, also notably the only people with alcohol in hand, smiled curiously at the displays of passion going on around them. the africans cycled back into the darkness of the park.
back at the barbecue someone had reassembled the heart back into the shape of a heart. drunk, i talked with some of the musicians briefly about nationalism and guns, and headed back through neukolln to another party.
the neighborhood was exploding.
last night marked the beginning of "48 hours neukolln", the open-door gallery and installation fest in the stealthily gentrifying northern part of the neighborhood. but around midnight, close to kottbusserdamm, the art patrons faded into black, the tastefully candlelit galleries dribbled away amidst the incessant honking and bright red flags. cars sped down kotti, girls hanging out the window, flags everywhere. "turkiye! turkiye!" firecrackers exploded, bottles smashed. as i approached hermannplatz, people and flags had taken over the intersection, dancing in the headlights. the polizei looked on, as did many germans, beers in hand. the germans looked cowed, confused, and a little disapproving. maybe because if they dance in the streets with german flags (which they secretly long to do, and did to a certain extent last week when germany beat portugual) they feel like nazis? maybe because blatant nationalism doesn't jell with the subtleties of pomo conversation and experimental noise installations? maybe because neukolln will never, ever, belong to them?
i don't know, but i'm sort of looking forward to kreuzberg on fire.
my roommate had some arty catalan young ingenues at the house a couple of months ago, they got indignant about the idea of the artist's biography, truth is i can't remember now what side they were on, but mizzi thought it was kind of funny, this art school intensity about how to talk about painting, and he egged them on til the spittle started dribbling from the corners of their lipsticked mouths. like him i didn't give a shit either way, but i was laughing too, it's tiring.
and now the saturday ny times waxing wow about the art scene and the menus at the revived bistros of charlottenburg, fetishizing smoking. there was a ny times video from 2006 called 36 hours in berlin, with the headline, "like new york in the 80s". leave it to new york times to compound the idea that freedom is a matter of consumer choice, reduce whatever was going on in ny in the 80s into a matter of lamplight, and bring a stream of 22 year old art students into the city seeking some sort of historical timeline with no other referent than themselves.
but look out.
last night i went to a barbecue in the "hole" at görlitzer park. it was a lot of japanese people in the electronic music scene and some hangers-on with LED's and oldstyle cameras with film. they had set out hundreds of tea-lights spelling out "i (heart) berlin". as the park darkened, people ceremoniously climbed over from the smoldering wurst and seaweed rolls and began to crouch over the candles and light them. from the far side of the park you could here the screams and clapping from the turkey-croatia game, "turkiye! turkiye!"
it was a labor-intensive job, burning fingers and such. then, just as the last candle was lit, and everyone was poised to take an available-light shot of this declaration in sand, a gust of wind blew threw the "hole" and extinguished most of them. i chuckled and said to daisuke that maybe the problem was they didn't love berlin enough. he laughed and started to reassemble the heart shape into an antelope or something. people started lighting the candles again.
i wandered over to the jumbotron playing the game. i got near the back of the crowd next to the african guys who sell chiba in the park, one of them kept banging on the blackboard that i guess belonged to the restaurant with the jumbotron, screaming in a rastafarian accent, "kreuzberg on fire! kreuzberg on fire!" if turkey won, wednesday would be turkey versus germany, kreuzberg on fire indeed.
as turkey put in the last winning penalty kick, the crowd went apeshit, knocking over tables and dancing in front of the screen, their shadows blocking the projection. girls in red headscarves with crescents and stars embraced, men in mustaches jigged. the germans among them, also notably the only people with alcohol in hand, smiled curiously at the displays of passion going on around them. the africans cycled back into the darkness of the park.
back at the barbecue someone had reassembled the heart back into the shape of a heart. drunk, i talked with some of the musicians briefly about nationalism and guns, and headed back through neukolln to another party.
the neighborhood was exploding.
last night marked the beginning of "48 hours neukolln", the open-door gallery and installation fest in the stealthily gentrifying northern part of the neighborhood. but around midnight, close to kottbusserdamm, the art patrons faded into black, the tastefully candlelit galleries dribbled away amidst the incessant honking and bright red flags. cars sped down kotti, girls hanging out the window, flags everywhere. "turkiye! turkiye!" firecrackers exploded, bottles smashed. as i approached hermannplatz, people and flags had taken over the intersection, dancing in the headlights. the polizei looked on, as did many germans, beers in hand. the germans looked cowed, confused, and a little disapproving. maybe because if they dance in the streets with german flags (which they secretly long to do, and did to a certain extent last week when germany beat portugual) they feel like nazis? maybe because blatant nationalism doesn't jell with the subtleties of pomo conversation and experimental noise installations? maybe because neukolln will never, ever, belong to them?
i don't know, but i'm sort of looking forward to kreuzberg on fire.
Thursday, March 06, 2008
blood, gutz and fucknuts
there's a transit strike, so went to meet mia over at warschauer sbahn since that was the only thing running out of prenzlberg, walked along the quiet skalitzerstrasse rails for about 20 minutes over to festsaal, she was on the guestlist so split the entrance with me, another one of those noise concerts in a basement.... choked with smoke, tin foil on the walls, the usual. the second set was this japanese guy with long hair, not many people know this but apparently quite famous, a little blinky light over all the cords and consoles, leaned spread leather legged over the table, turning knobs, breathing into tiny speakers, and this japanese woman in a black see through shirt began sort of humping the amp, slowly rolling along the floor, lifting her hair in chunks over her head, she had this world weary but yet masturbational look on her face that seemed appropriate for an 'interpretive' dance to beatless, melody-less music, i was sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor among the cigarette butts, and girls were taking pictures, i took pictures like the other art girls, luckily i had some earplugs, but this sonic place that goes nowhere.... i thought again about what the fuck people think when they go listen to 'experimental' music. the set was interminable.... i don't know if i'm ready to pretend i liked it, i don't discount it, but... later i was outside smoking and some guy started talking to me, he said he had heard my american accent, talking nervously and asking who/what/where/why questions, and asked me if i liked experimental music, he was from kansas, but seemed to want to mention bands that i might know, which i didn't, and i was thinking, again, who truly likes this stuff? there was this potbelly fucknut jiggling his legs later to 'sudden infant,' --who was pounding microphones against his clavicle and hopping on pedals -- and the fucknut was screaming 'fuck yeah' or something, as if by jiggling around all the rest of us could see that he uniquely appreciated this completely inaccessible music. we knew him from before, he had followed us to a party after the last noise concert i accompanied mia to back in september or so, with another fucknut german friend -- i remember we had all been walking along near frankfurter tor, and we were all talking about why germans seemed to prefer amphetamines over crystal meth, and i commented, because they are control freaks, and fucknut #2 huffs, that's just stupid.
anyway: this snobbish exclusion, it seems, of all those who 'don't get it'... i suspect, in my ripe old age, and having heard quite a bit of 'experimental' music and seen lots of weird art shit in my short, urban time here on earth, i feel confident now to say this.......... there is something to be said for the tonic note. for the carefully placed, but not excessive, dissonance. there is something to be said for melody, for figurative representations (read:words). none of this is new, the return to pop.... but now that i think of it, the sensation is that it's almost provincial: only those who feel inadequate in their own cosmopolitanism have the need to somehow show that they can appreciate the unappreciable.
of course there are levels, and there are geniuses, there is john cage, there is le monte young, i could go on... but this shit was a scene.................
at the end i had retired to the dressing room with some other pretty young things to take refuge from the noise of the last set, then came out to see there was a guy in a tangled blond wig turning more screechy knobs to a butchy lady screaming in the microphone and breaking beer bottle after beer bottle on the floor. in a moment, someone started beating the wig guy with a bat, he toppled over a table, fell onto the floor full of broken glass, the lightbulb busted and went out, the music stopped.
in the cellphone light, the wig guy was covered in blood. the fucknut guy with the jiggling legs had a spray of blood on his forehead, he seemed proud. the rest of us were practically deaf....
and now im home listening to brian jonestown massacre. so SUE me.
anyway: this snobbish exclusion, it seems, of all those who 'don't get it'... i suspect, in my ripe old age, and having heard quite a bit of 'experimental' music and seen lots of weird art shit in my short, urban time here on earth, i feel confident now to say this.......... there is something to be said for the tonic note. for the carefully placed, but not excessive, dissonance. there is something to be said for melody, for figurative representations (read:words). none of this is new, the return to pop.... but now that i think of it, the sensation is that it's almost provincial: only those who feel inadequate in their own cosmopolitanism have the need to somehow show that they can appreciate the unappreciable.
of course there are levels, and there are geniuses, there is john cage, there is le monte young, i could go on... but this shit was a scene.................
at the end i had retired to the dressing room with some other pretty young things to take refuge from the noise of the last set, then came out to see there was a guy in a tangled blond wig turning more screechy knobs to a butchy lady screaming in the microphone and breaking beer bottle after beer bottle on the floor. in a moment, someone started beating the wig guy with a bat, he toppled over a table, fell onto the floor full of broken glass, the lightbulb busted and went out, the music stopped.
in the cellphone light, the wig guy was covered in blood. the fucknut guy with the jiggling legs had a spray of blood on his forehead, he seemed proud. the rest of us were practically deaf....
and now im home listening to brian jonestown massacre. so SUE me.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
in defense of a stagnant landscape
i was walking home from friedrichshain tonight, walking my bike with my laptop strapped onto the back of it, that same walk always, across warschauer bridge, past the east side gallery, the oberbaumbruecke, falckensteinstrasse, across deadly dark görlitzer park, up glogauerstrasse that over the canal turns into pannierstrasse, the 29 busstop... and i thought about the violent stasis that is berlin, how people age but still all dress like they're 22, the same paths and schedules, mysliewska at 7 a.m., a beer at bagdad at schlesisches tor, a schwarma on boxhagenerplatz, the shortcut from the pizza place through the playground to cuvrystrasse and the benches there where people take ice cream cones the minute a slip of sunshine comes through, the ebb and flow of a house party and the cracking speakers, the drugs, the haircuts.... it all stands still ---- yet at the very same time, along with this stagnant (if admittedly comfortable) social paralysis, comes a dramatic change in the physical shape of the city around us.
i think since the sky is the same color of grey every day we don't see the violence in the landscape.... for example one day i'll be walking my bike with my laptop strapped on the back, and i'll realize that by that crosswalk between warschauerstrasse and the oberbaumbrucke across from the (also stealthily new) universal records, a four story fucking toyota dealership will have sprouted from the earth. or i'll be walking my bike with my laptop strapped on the back over warschauer bridge, and a fucking stadium will have materialized. or a new overpass between the ubahn and the sbahn. one day i'll buy a beer with my guy at bagdad at 7am after they will have put up all the chairs around us at mysliewska and walk over to that abandoned lot by the river, festooned with grafitti and reeds, where we would dangle our legs over the side and write songs we would never put music to about blowing up universal records and brian jones turning over in his grave.... one morning we'll walk over there and for once the crack in the fence will be chained shut. one day i'll go for a schwarma at that place on boxhagenerplatz and i won't be able to walk out the door because it is clogged by a 10-person-thick gaggle of dreadlocked nineteen year old italians all wearing identical kaffiyeh scarves and bellowing.
or one day i'll be planning an event for an independent project i will have been working on at a historic squat-slash-punk/artist collective near the warschauer tracks, and won't be able to get in touch with the woman who provides the space because she'll be too busy with hearings as to whether or not industrialists will be allowed to purchase the space and make it into a mall.
i think since the sky is the same color of grey every day we don't see the violence in the landscape.... for example one day i'll be walking my bike with my laptop strapped on the back, and i'll realize that by that crosswalk between warschauerstrasse and the oberbaumbrucke across from the (also stealthily new) universal records, a four story fucking toyota dealership will have sprouted from the earth. or i'll be walking my bike with my laptop strapped on the back over warschauer bridge, and a fucking stadium will have materialized. or a new overpass between the ubahn and the sbahn. one day i'll buy a beer with my guy at bagdad at 7am after they will have put up all the chairs around us at mysliewska and walk over to that abandoned lot by the river, festooned with grafitti and reeds, where we would dangle our legs over the side and write songs we would never put music to about blowing up universal records and brian jones turning over in his grave.... one morning we'll walk over there and for once the crack in the fence will be chained shut. one day i'll go for a schwarma at that place on boxhagenerplatz and i won't be able to walk out the door because it is clogged by a 10-person-thick gaggle of dreadlocked nineteen year old italians all wearing identical kaffiyeh scarves and bellowing.
or one day i'll be planning an event for an independent project i will have been working on at a historic squat-slash-punk/artist collective near the warschauer tracks, and won't be able to get in touch with the woman who provides the space because she'll be too busy with hearings as to whether or not industrialists will be allowed to purchase the space and make it into a mall.
Friday, January 18, 2008
i'm in pest
i'm all by myself in budapest. i have been coming home mostly around when the sun sets. i am on kiss joseph street. i am told this is in a gypsy neighborhood, and that it is terribly dangerous. the truth is there is something ominous about this city, but it's not isolated to whatever mind-barrio people have delineated, the eighth district/gypsy town. all over town i find people lingering/loitering too long in what i consider to be my personal space x-zone.
and then it's all so hard to pin down -- it's both bleak and glitzy here. you think about how extraterrestrial societies are depicted in the movies, like, everything is the same, there are pop songs and tv shows and streets and transportation and telecommunications, it's just in an utterly indecipherable language ---- and there you go, here, everything in hungarian. i mean, if i were in some village in uzbekistan and they were speaking uzbeki, the alienation factor might be tempered a bit by the different physionomy of the people, the clothes, the technology. but here ... even though the girls dress pretty much like they do in germany, the furniture is in the same basic shapes we've come to recognize on planet earth, and there are drugstores and supermarkets, i can't shake the feeling -- with pretensions of 'taking a vacation'-- i've sidestepped onto another, slightly thwarted plane where yes means no and mp3s played backwards reveal some deeply embedded astronomical formula that they're currently decoding back on the mothership.
i also get the sense that they DON'T GIVE A SHIT. I mean, not in the not giving a shit way that the germans don't give a shit, as in, i'm the postlady and i don't give a shit if you get your mail or not so i'll just leave it on the windowledge at the bar across the street... no, they don't give a shit in a way that germany DOES. germans have this puffed up sense that their language is universally relevant but at the same time out of the grasp of all those drooling bumbling foreigners who want to bask in their light, the light of being born with a german tongue.... and so they chuckle to themselves smugly when they have to translate into english for you, naja, you'll never learn...
but the hungarians, i dunno, i can't say their isolated because this is clearly a major metropolis, but they don't speak english, really, and they don't care that you don't speak hungarian. they don't care that their language is just... impenetrable...
anyway, i'm sure someone has written all about all this.
of course as i'm reading hungarians in translation, márai, esterházy, and as i get seduced by that trashy-belle-epoque-smudged-by-iron-curtain-grime-mixed-with- romantic-irrelevant-nationalisms i'm thinking i might want to try and learn some hungarian. maybe it wouldn't hurt to spend a little more time here.
(once again sucking up to the historic oppressor of my ancestors... my slovak great grandparents and their like were the peasant servants of the hungarian bourgeois... hmm, the hungarians weren't so great to the jews, either...)
hang on a second though. i'm not going to erase anything from up there, but maybe will go on to nullify it. buckle up.
as i stumble along in the footsteps of my complimentary "visual guide: budapest", i wonder what tourism is, what it means to be in different countries, if it really 'opens your mind' to travel. because really the more foreign everything is the more the mind grapples along towards essentialisms, like all my waxing-stereotypical above. i wonder if everything isn't just a question of moods, levels, what you like and what you don't like. i mean, what does it matter at all to me that my great grandmother might have been a servant to the great grandfather of that guy leaning over me on the tram to blaha lujza tér whose grandfather is still grumbling about the loss of what's now slovakia in the treaty of trianon in 1920? it's interesting to know that history in the name of my future integrated-theory-of-everything, but going back to some 'homeland' to rediscover some biologically based or ethnically inspired temperament -- that's all just baloney. really. and anyone who's going around (and i mean YOU jonathan safran foer) thinking they can discover something about themselves by excavating some history book, or sorry, wikipedia identity, and visiting what they perceive to be it's physical nerve center might feel all warm and liquidy inside with whatever mental scrapbook they take home as a footnote for the crappy 'tongue-in-cheek' tour-de-barf they'll write back in park slope, or sorry, berlin, but the truth is we're all alone in the present with our complimentary guidebooks, there's no going 'back,' there's no going home.
and then it's all so hard to pin down -- it's both bleak and glitzy here. you think about how extraterrestrial societies are depicted in the movies, like, everything is the same, there are pop songs and tv shows and streets and transportation and telecommunications, it's just in an utterly indecipherable language ---- and there you go, here, everything in hungarian. i mean, if i were in some village in uzbekistan and they were speaking uzbeki, the alienation factor might be tempered a bit by the different physionomy of the people, the clothes, the technology. but here ... even though the girls dress pretty much like they do in germany, the furniture is in the same basic shapes we've come to recognize on planet earth, and there are drugstores and supermarkets, i can't shake the feeling -- with pretensions of 'taking a vacation'-- i've sidestepped onto another, slightly thwarted plane where yes means no and mp3s played backwards reveal some deeply embedded astronomical formula that they're currently decoding back on the mothership.
i also get the sense that they DON'T GIVE A SHIT. I mean, not in the not giving a shit way that the germans don't give a shit, as in, i'm the postlady and i don't give a shit if you get your mail or not so i'll just leave it on the windowledge at the bar across the street... no, they don't give a shit in a way that germany DOES. germans have this puffed up sense that their language is universally relevant but at the same time out of the grasp of all those drooling bumbling foreigners who want to bask in their light, the light of being born with a german tongue.... and so they chuckle to themselves smugly when they have to translate into english for you, naja, you'll never learn...
but the hungarians, i dunno, i can't say their isolated because this is clearly a major metropolis, but they don't speak english, really, and they don't care that you don't speak hungarian. they don't care that their language is just... impenetrable...
anyway, i'm sure someone has written all about all this.
of course as i'm reading hungarians in translation, márai, esterházy, and as i get seduced by that trashy-belle-epoque-smudged-by-iron-curtain-grime-mixed-with- romantic-irrelevant-nationalisms i'm thinking i might want to try and learn some hungarian. maybe it wouldn't hurt to spend a little more time here.
(once again sucking up to the historic oppressor of my ancestors... my slovak great grandparents and their like were the peasant servants of the hungarian bourgeois... hmm, the hungarians weren't so great to the jews, either...)
hang on a second though. i'm not going to erase anything from up there, but maybe will go on to nullify it. buckle up.
as i stumble along in the footsteps of my complimentary "visual guide: budapest", i wonder what tourism is, what it means to be in different countries, if it really 'opens your mind' to travel. because really the more foreign everything is the more the mind grapples along towards essentialisms, like all my waxing-stereotypical above. i wonder if everything isn't just a question of moods, levels, what you like and what you don't like. i mean, what does it matter at all to me that my great grandmother might have been a servant to the great grandfather of that guy leaning over me on the tram to blaha lujza tér whose grandfather is still grumbling about the loss of what's now slovakia in the treaty of trianon in 1920? it's interesting to know that history in the name of my future integrated-theory-of-everything, but going back to some 'homeland' to rediscover some biologically based or ethnically inspired temperament -- that's all just baloney. really. and anyone who's going around (and i mean YOU jonathan safran foer) thinking they can discover something about themselves by excavating some history book, or sorry, wikipedia identity, and visiting what they perceive to be it's physical nerve center might feel all warm and liquidy inside with whatever mental scrapbook they take home as a footnote for the crappy 'tongue-in-cheek' tour-de-barf they'll write back in park slope, or sorry, berlin, but the truth is we're all alone in the present with our complimentary guidebooks, there's no going 'back,' there's no going home.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
either sacco or vanzetti, not sure which
last night ended up with another group of people at sofia's, it was two for one night, people were hanging on to their cigarettes for their dear lives, guzzling augustiner and berliner, this haha hilarity among those walls with relief paintings of vesuvius and sofia loren and the same vaguely familiar toothless faces crouched on the bar.. as the evening progressed some grizzled germans came in and played some bad honky tonk guitar, the guys selling motz magazine circulated, in the ladies bathroom there was a rubbing on the wall of either sacco or vanzetti, i can't say i know which is which, on the speakers below the din billy childish, the sonics, i noticed in the corner a band of spaniards and argentines living the berlin kreuzberg night, dreadlocked with funny stockings and cackling, and at a certain point i realized i had drunk enough so that i wasn't going to remember anything that the people in my party were saying. i wondered briefly then why i kept accepting more beers, or why we do it this way, why choking on smoke is the thing to do. there's just a little bit necessary to loosen all our lips but then we tangle them all up....
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