life on the ninth planet: Maybe... forever 17

life on the ninth planet: Maybe... forever 17

Maybe... forever 17

Times are hard. We've got a job to do: To be who we are. That ain't happening by itself, you know. It is HARD WORK--unrelenting, unforgiving, a constant effort. A moment of indecision, hesitation, or--god forbid!--self-doubt and you are a Maybe. Your life is a minefield of opportunities not to be missed! Go get 'em! Your time is NOW! Make every second count! 
Because, if you fuck it up, you will never be you! Your full potential will never be realised. You will just be like all the others, a face in the crowd, one of the pack (refer to my post on Westfield), a fine specimen of a failure. 

Being who you are may once have been an automatic thing, the one thing in life not requiring any thought or effort. You were life's gift to the world. You could not help being you. No longer! You are a work of art now, the unfinished masterpiece that is yours to ruin. As Lily Tomlin said: "When I was young, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I know that I should have been more specific."

Who are you? That painful question we had to answer when we emerged blinking into the light of puberty. Am I cool? Popular? Loveable? Or at least, likeable? Sexy? Rich? A winner? Or was I a version of At Seventeen?

So, what it's it like to be At Seventeen as an adult? Mediocre? Pressing your nose against the windows, behind which the popular kids are having a party? Who are you if no one sees you? 

Porsche has the answer to the problem:

"the cure for all things identical? Identity. The new 911..."

All you need is €100,000 and you are somebody, ahead of the pack, a recognisable face, in the fast lane, winning. No more Maybe. Forever 17...
 

Shopping at Westfield East London

After a while, it seems that the world consists of nothing but light, in all colours, different shapes, moving relentlessly through a procession of images, or fixed to provide orientation through a structure whose physical presence fades from conscious awareness. With it disappears any normal concept of time passing. Light in the shape of a familiar brand name or logo or the discovery of a desired item--a shirt, a perfume bottle, a computer, or a box of vitamins or anything else that stimulates desire, fantasy, or longing--marks the passage of time. How long have I been in here? Wow, I have been looking for one of those…  Where did I come in? Was it on this floor where the SUPERDRY shop is?

Light is being reflected in surfaces of glass and polished granite, gleaming metal bars, doors and in the eyes of the other shoppers. There is a sky high above, high above a roof of glass, which reflects the lights below, intersected by strips of fluorescent colour, lights shaped into sculptures hanging between floors and shops. This universe of lights, a wonder, is drawing me here and there, through another set of doors outside onto a piazza in the middle of buildings whose shapes elude me. But there are lights, giant screens with images of a seductive model, but a minute later it says CAUTION in bright orange and black lettering. Another is of a formula one car and race drivers, a couple pushing a pram walk through it, their reflections mingle with the image, or are they the image? There is a fountain, lights rippling across the surface of the water running down an illuminated column. The windows reflect the bright dots from the fairy lights in the newly planted trees, which are multiplied into many dozen. Of course, Christmas soon. Which way is north? Where did I come in? It must have been the floor below. Or maybe two? It was near the MARKS & SPENCER'S if I remember well. Was there a STARBUCKS, too? Or was that more in the middle of the mall or was there more than one? So, outside... Which way is Canary Wharf? That I would recognize…

So here is JOHN LEWIS. I like the shop; it is owned by its staff. That is why they are so friendly, I suppose. The food places at its entrance are better, more organic, more exotic, more expensive than the other place in the middle with the screaming children, nagging parents, and queues of teenagers lining up in front of beeping fast food counters. Those people would not shop at JOHN LEWIS, anyway--good things they eat their food elsewhere. The APPLE shop sure was full, though. I use APPLE so their logo always jumps out at me. I was surprised to see DEICHMANN, the German discount shoe shop. Isn't this place a little better than that? Of course, a floor above was PRIMARK, too. Not for me, probably all made by Vietnamese child slaves. FAT FACE is more my sort of thing. Or CARHARTT. Is that end where I came in? But a few floors down?

If I just walk past TOPSHOP again, that must be where I came in. Maybe I should go down the escalator first. Once I find M & S, I will be fine.

round midnight

An Era of Terror--THE WEEKEND by Bernhard Schlink

Violence is the central theme in Bernhard Schlink's novel THE WEEKEND. An aged Red Army Faction terrorist is released after decades in prison and spends his first weekend in freedom in the circle of his former friends at his sister's dilapidated country house. How was it back then, in the 70s and 80s, how did it feel, how does it feel now? What happened to the dreams and the hopes that drove the RAF and its sympathisers? What happened to those who had not gone to prison? The children, friends, widows, sisters and brothers of the terrorists and their victims? Who is the hero now? The violence is relived in the discussions, in between the words. What about regrets?

To my faint memory, the RAF and its bombs, kidnappings, and shootings were a distant drone, far, far away from my family, my town, my life. My beige dad, getting ready for the office, would adjust his tie, which my mom had picked out of the wardrobe in the morning, and speak of "the students", expelling a disgusted jet of air through his nose. "The students" would march for causes I knew nothing about. "The students" had long hair and wore beards, they shook fists, they took drugs, they had lots of sex, they sympathised with "the terrorists" . "I don't mind long hair if it is cared for", my mother would say, presumably slightly more open to the idea of hairy men getting plenty of whoopee. My father who had chosen an early and lifelong career in the civil service over university was less sympathetic; after all, "the students" were sponging off his taxes and deriding him as "spiessig" (conformist) at the same time. Terrorist attacks seemed less of a threat to our way of life than the insult. How dared they?

Gerhard Richter Confrontation 1

Gerhard Richter Erschossener

Gerhard Richter Jugendportrait

In our 70 sqm housing association flat--1 double, 1 single bedroom--the political debates and armed fights were far away. The portal, through which they entered most people's living rooms, television, did not exist in our flat. We were a little better than that; we read books, listened to worthy music on the small wooden radio in the living room; vulgar, ostentatious, and loud stereos were for other people. Our living room carpet had a fringe and my mother had a comb to straighten it with, several times a day. She would hoover the entire flat every day, but still bend over countless times to pick up specks of dust or any other blemishes on domestic perfection. For many years, I seemed to see her bum more often than her face, always bending over. Maybe wiping away the fingerprints my careless little fingers had left on the surfaces, or dusting the shelves. "Take your shoes off", I heard as I unlocked the door--unnecessarily, of course, as they were already off. The assassinations of Jürgen Ponto and Hanns Martin Schleyer were as real to me as news items on the radio tend to be; Schleyer's past as SS officer not even on my radar. I remember a woman in black, with a veil--whose widow was it? Were these deaths punishment for sins or necessary steps towards a new order? Was our world so bad that it required such violent acts to force change? Was death a price worth paying? I was puzzled.

I was 14 and my father's gleaming Volvo stayed in the garage for the weekly shopping trips to Aldi's; my mother and I got the shopping home in bags, backpacks and a little shopping caddy, and our arms would ache when we had finally reached our flat. Bombs would go off; a plane was highjacked by terrorists and stormed by GSG9 in some place in Africa while my mother and I carried bed sheets to the laundry press.

 In the mornings, she would cry, silently but visibly. "What's wrong?" "Nothing, don't mind me!"  My mother, like a caged bird picking at its feathers, spent her time cleaning, hoovering, decorating, filling our home with her presence and her little girl fantasies until there was no space to breathe, then finally exploding it with the terror of her panic attacks, her uncontrollable rages, her overdoses, and her affairs. I ran away, first into the depths of my own mind and the nearby woods, then under the humid covers of my bed in adolescent boy dreams, then as far as I could to a small town in the Wild West, but that was later…

Gerhard Richter Beerdigung

 In the post offices there were posters with portraits of terrorists, killers, out there, apparently threatening us, but I never felt threatened. Ordinary looking women, some men with beards, their faces largely unremarkable. But dangerous and free. Danger had something to do with sex, but I did not know what. I studied the men more than the women. I always studied men more than women. The underwear pages of the Neckermann catalogue, for example. I would start at the belly button, then move my eyes down, focusing on the little hairs some models showed above the elastic, then on the bump in the briefs--there were pages of them, one like the other, in different colours. The faces of the men never had beards; the men might have been working in a bank, perhaps. People talked about the Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe, their politics, their crimes; I looked on from a safe distance. They had what I did not; they knew what I was too scared to know. I never shook my fist and shouted "Down with…" I was too ashamed.

When I finally told my dad, he said, "That would not have happened under Hitler". I left, numb and impotent. My grandfather told me about boarding schools and the war, no women around, loneliness and fear and the cold, but he was not alone; first, other pupils and, later, other soldiers, also far away from home, felt the same. They would share sleeping bags for warmth and comfort  and companionship under skies filled with thunder and flashes. He understood, he said, what it was like, having lived and fought under Hitler. We were walking through the woods nearby, dark and green, anemones covering the ground. We had walked there together hundreds of times in our lives. Old bunkers were overgrown with weeds and shrubs; concrete corpses slowly decomposing and crumbling, but my grandfather remained always warm and strong.

As memories are, these are shreds, mostly wordless. Words are fences around these memories, they are never the memories themselves. In the story of the released terrorist, the characters have all erected their own fences, as much to give meaning to experience, to killings, death, and wasted lives, as to prevent meaning from emerging. Hollowed out phrases from a political battle of 40 years ago are razorwire against personal regret or pain. As I read Schlink's precise and lucid prose, THE WEEKEND frames my own blurred images, the smells, glances, and tremors of my adolescence in an era of terror.

Unter Grund

Now without a car in Berlin, I have returned to being an avid user of public transport. Berlin's underground system was built nearly 50 years later than its Paris or London counterparts, during a period that was characterised by both Wilhelm II's narcissistic aspirations to grandeur--he had a lot of catching up to do with his cousin Victoria--and Berlin's emerging role as the hub of Modernity. Growing in size from a population of 1 million to over 3 million between 1885 and 1915, the city had to rapidly expand and construct housing and transport infrastructure to cope with the influx of masses of workers, impoverished landed aristocracy, adventure seekers, and administrators. The most heavily industrialised city in Europe of its time, its horizons were illuminated by the orange glow of factories at night and darkened by smoke during the day. Moving armies of workers every day, and connecting new residential city quarters with the centre and the vast green spaces of the countryside surrounding Berlin, the transport system was essential to the function of the city and, by extension, of the new empire. 

Corresponding to the various currents of taste and fashion, some stations on the underground system are quite grand and elaborately decorated, but the majority are functional, with tiled walls, straight lines and right angles. Most stations display tile work that is unique to each station in its colour, surface texture or pattern. Such tiling creates closed, sleek, and durable surfaces. Post-WWII, large parts of Berlin had to be reconstructed and, with it, its transport system. Some underground stations survived relatively unharmed, but many had to be rebuilt. The basic concept remained, but the style of tiling, notably the colour schemes, changed.

Closed surfaces do not remain closed for long; technology had to be updated or water damage occurred, and the walls had to be reopened, resurfaced, and retiled. Not always was there money to return the tiling to its original state, or no match for the original tiles could be found. Then there was the emergence of graffiti and vandalism, especially from the 1980s onwards. The resulting cracks and scars on the walls are the cracks and scars in the vision of modernity, the utopia of a world forever marching towards prosperity, technological progress and enlightenment. That vision had already exploded with the terrors of the Nazi regime, but that was a collective terror. Many of these contemporary cracks and scars represent the terror of individuals and their modern tribes, not society at large.

These are pictures of the U-Bahn station Spichernstrasse, clearly a post-WWII effort. In addition to the actual wall surfaces, I was fascinated by the reflections of the strip lighting on the tiles. Overall, these bare looking walls have recorded the passage of time over the last decades, creating layers of history, fashion, economy, and socio-political trends that belie their original intention of a timeless aesthetic determined by function.

Isle of the Fences

Two weeks ago, I made my final move to Berlin. Just before, I took a last walk through the East London neighbourhood where I had lived for nearly a quarter of my life. As with my flat, which I had left last summer, there was no sense of nostalgia; I was rather asking myself how I felt about the place now. What I noticed most of all as I was ambling along was the abundance of fences, gates, walls, demarcations, boundaries. I was struck by the fact that most of them were merely tokens, often barely reaching knee height, which is odd as such barriers to me would imply some attempt of protecting of what is on one side from what is on the other.

Sure, a few are magnificent, like this one surrounding a school in East London (raising the question whether they are intended to protect the little darlings from gun toting terrorists or the surrounding neighbourhood from the armed drug dealers and strumpets on the inside that are apparently the nation's "investment in the future").

Morpeth School, Tower Hamlets

 Many fences are interrupted, or have large openings; they are clearly not designed to prevent access. Here access is barred; 5 yards on, one may cross freely; what is the point?

I imagine that a major purpose for such fences is the demarcation of property. In continental European cities, the closed facades of urban housing serve themselves as demarcation; in London's "garden style" urban developments, the boundaries between public areas such as streets and residential and other property are marked by walls and fences. In most American suburbs--equally following the ideal of a "garden city"--such fences are, however, largely absent. Lawns and flower beds sufficiently mark a lot as private property. In London, too, one would easily recognise the garden surrounding a house or the ground of a council estate as "private", and distinct from the street. Nevertheless, a wall or fence may be a sort of exclamation mark behind "mine" (And don't you forget it! Here, inside this fence, this is mine! Not yours! And not anyone else's! Mine! See that little fence? You cannot help but notice. Mine!).

Apart from demarcating property, such boundary structures also distinguish between inside and outside. Such distinctions can seem pretty sharp, as between "inside" Canary Wharf, a private commercial property development, lavishly and expensively furbished, and the "outside" of Tower Hamlets' grim council dwellings on the other side of the wall. The idea of an outside seems to be deeply rooted in British perception; as an island nation, anything foreign is automatically on the outside of a natural geographical border. But also groups of people are regularly identified under the implied heading of "not one of us"--the junkies, single mothers, bankers, homos, immigrants, pedos, nutters, welfare thieves… They are on the outside, do not belong with "hard working British families"; they are even a threat to them.

Threat seems implied in the distinction between inside and outside. One must ensure that "mine" stays "mine", that property is protected. Consequently, the area is brimming with penalty warning notices and surveillance cameras. Orwell Court was actually on my council estate, an ironic monument to the visionary author. 
Smile. You're on 24 hour CCTV.

What is on the outside cannot be trusted. And it is arguably true; what is the property I keep for myself to someone else? I dangle it in front of his nose: Have a look, but don't touch; remember it is mine, not yours; do not come too close; only look. Is property provocation to someone without? If the people on the inside want nothing to do with those on the outside, what allegiance, what respect do those on the outside owe the insiders?

None, apparently. The fly tipping, graffitis, vandalism, theft, and nightly disturbance on the estates make that clear. What respect has the outsider for something that excludes him? In a paradoxical way, could the fences and walls actually erode respect for property and its owners? If the fences turn out to be too low, is the answer "build higher fences"? Is the fundamental problem that people need more protection from each other?

Only six months after moving away from it, the neighbourhood and the estate feel foreign and strange to me.  As I looked around the estate and at my old flat--the new owners had erected a large wooden wall around its front garden--surveillance cameras were twisting their spindly mechanical necks to follow my moves in the drizzling March rain. I was definitely on the outside now.