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.