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.

What a Choquer--the face of modern France

Who are the French today? What is their character, their identity, their reality; what are their aspirations?

Luc Choquer went about to answer these questions in a manner that recalls August Sander. The result is a sort of typography of contemporary French people, and by extension, of French life. Choquer has taken hundreds of photographs over the years, entered homes, asked people of all walks of life to pose for him. He often uses flash, slightly underexposing a picture's background, increasing its saturation, and using flash on the foreground and the subject(s), creating a slightly surreal effect, lifting the subjects off the background.

After seeing it, what can be said? In a  conversation with my friend Marc who saw it with me , we argued about whether Choquer's images showed something specifically French. He felt that the pictures could mostly have been taken somewhere else, that the people and their environments lacked a specifically French quality.

So, indeed, the people in the pictures look like any other, pretty much. Dancers during a break, kids by the swimming pool, middle class couples in the gardens of their representative houses with pools, another couple in their beige living room on a pompous fauteuil and a fake window, teenagers on the street--one can almost hear their "urban" music (or whatever that overproduced, sampled hiphoprappop shite is called in France... sorry, my age shows, I know)--and rich people at a horse race that look like any rich people at any horse race. With minor variations, they could be German or English or American or Dutch or in any industrialised Western country. I would not have recognised them as particularly French, either. France to me means also buildings, an infuriatingly difficult language to penetrate, an incredible sense of beauty, elegance and presentation (and vanity), a visible pride in public spaces and public institutions, and stunning wild landscapes, food and wine, and much more. Little of this shows in the pictures.

Choquer's images are representations of the aspirations of French society. It is a distinctly middle class vision, this idea of risig above one's station in life, of deciding to be "someone". And it so happens that those aspirations are pretty much the same as in any other Western country.

What surprises me is how readily I identify clues about social class, educational level, or certain attitudes. I respond by finding certain people or features--clothing, living environment, for example--attractive, but others not. Indicators of masculinity, assertiveness, independence, intelligence, health make it likely that I regard the people in the image with positive feelings because they correspond to my own aspirations, to how I would like to see myself or to be seen. And again, small things can turn me off--trying too hard, artifice, obvious vanity. These are the things that I was taught to detest from a young age, and, not surprisingly, most people that I associate with. Cue "The White Ribbon" by Michael Haneke for more on my northern German Protestant background.

Corresponding to Choquer's typography, there are advertisements that target these groups of people and feed their aspirations. Looking at the pictures, the ads and the products that these French people consume are easy to imagine. I may not be familiar with the brands, but I know how they are placed and what social prestige they may carry. I am aware how well I speak and comprehend that language of consumerism because it is absolutely international, the Esperanto of globalisation. Mass consumption requires mass taste. Yet, this language to Marc or me--and I suspect to many others--is not a language adding to the complex canon of meanings, traditions, images, and cultural signifiers familiar to us; quite the opposite, it subtracts. We lose a part of our cultural identity and thus a part of our bond with our patrimony and heritage and those that used to share this with us.

The face of modern France is a face like any other?

Avatar!

This evening I did something unexpected; I watched Avatar, James Cameron's CGI avalanche. I had not specifically meant to; my list of current films to watch runs to about a dozen and Avatar wasn't on it. But my mate so wanted to see it--Sigourney Weaver would make him swoon even if she advertised incontinence pads--and he paid, so what the hell...

It was pretty much what I had expected. Overwhelming, really. Scenes of extraordinary beauty, finely rendered to the last pore, hair, and leafy vein. Breathtaking action in 3D had me jumping in my seat. Even an old (in terms of practice) cynic like me was impressed.

Of course, my cynicism is no match for that of Avatar's producers. Avatar is a technological marvel rendered to perfection by countless processors, using the most advanced digital imaging technology ever, but what does it do? It spools off a story of aggressive cartoon cut-out technology junkies vs peace loving indigenous people (beautiful, naturally, because in Disney-nature beauty equals goodness) living in harmony with Mother Nature, an actual divine being encompassing all living things--people, trees, animals, flowers etc. Through their righteous determination, the goodness of their spirits, the purity of their intentions, and with the help of Mother Nature herself, the evil technology junkies--easily identified as Uncle Sam's finest--are defeated and Mother Nature, uncorrupted by the forces of technology and profit, continues to prevail in peace and, erm, harmony.

This most enchanted vision of Nature is entirely a high tech pixel storm, using the very same technology that the military uses for flight and battle simulations. An army of tens of thousands of software programmers in Utah and elsewhere in the US are working their fingers to the bone to ensure that, should Uncle Sam ever decide to invade and exploit another planet and annihilate its people, Mother Nature can go fuck itself. The film denounces the blind pursuit of profit, yet is the result of an unprecedented marketing process; its concept includes video games, computer applications, books, and a host of product spin-offs from the start like no other film before it. And, of course, it has become the highest grossing film within weeks.

Cameron & Co could have stolen Alien or Fifth Element or any number of other themes, and I would have bowed my head in reverence. But they chose this, the most outrageous lie possible. Not only do form and content not overlap, they live in different galaxies. It is propaganda of the very highest production "value", a lie so out there, told with such verve that one is simply overwhelmed by it.

Like oil companies drilling to save the planet, like George W Bush and Tony his poodle announcing "a final push for peace" while they are amassing the largest invading army in decades off the borders of Iraq, like junk food companies sponsoring the Olympics, Avatar is pure propaganda, a patently untrue story that we are desperate to believe. Not believing it is rather more painful.

It is indicative that this is the first major film of its kind. Ultra-expensive, technically without peer, it was never going to bite the hand it serves. 

 

She is alive!

Good night.