Think pink

[imomus]

I did a long interview yesterday with the Financial Times, for a feature the FT magazine is running about Berlin, and whether the city's current status as an ultra-cheap haven for creative types can last.

Reporter Eleanor Lee enjoyed my descriptions of the city as a creative class paradise ("I want all this on a T-shirt!" she said) but wondered if it was sustainable; wouldn't Berlin rapidly become as expensive as London and New York? My answer was that it's the lifestyles of London and New York that are "unsustainable", that Berlin's post-materialist, liberal and experimental lifestyles are important as a way to find "post-bling" ways to live in the 21st century, and that, even if Berlin is only the pleasant anomaly that it is due to odd historical circumstances, and even if its local dodgy economy only survives by massive subsidy from the rest of Germany, and even if the current bubble is only going to last for, say, ten years, it's still worth it, and worth being here. Ten years of brainstorming, ten years of ethical, aesthetic and political R&D is still something.

The image of a "bubble" kept coming up in our talk (in a pleasant cafe in Mitte), but so did a more abstract idea: indirection. I found myself championing "indirection" as a virtue, and arguing that indirection can only happen in bubble-like conditions. I wish I had a better word for what I'm talking about. Let me try to define it.

Indirection is what happens when you go to university to study literature for four years, despite the fact that the market really has very little use for people who've read a lot of old books. Indirection is what happens when you don't have to spend all your time earning the money to have something to eat and somewhere to live, but can actually pursue things for their own sake. Indirection is a company pouring money into research without demanding to see specific results within a limited time period. Indirection is when you're sure that creative activity adds economic value, but you can't say exactly where or when.

Indirection is related to play, and related to delay. Indirection says that there's virtue in not taking the most direct route between two points. Indirection is therefore in contradiction with traditional logistical and economic wisdom. It's more intuitive, more mysterious. And yet I'm convinced that it can also be justified in economic and logistical terms. It's crucial to human life, collectively, the same way childhood play or nocturnal dreams are crucial to the development of an individual. Someone who neither plays nor dreams cannot function as a pragmatic human being.

After the interview I took Eli to my favourite "creative class" bookstore, ProQM. Here, Berlin's arty types come to browse books and magazines they can't afford, to get ideas from other cities. Eli bought the Europe Endless edition of 032C magazine, and I bought Cabinet magazine's Insecurity issue. In the back of it I saw a book being advertised: a book on the colour pink.

"Pink," the blurb reads. "From the rosy tint of wind-reddened cheeks to the first flush of arousal, from cherry blossoms to Pepto-Bismol, pink is a sweet, intimate, fragile and sickening shade. Few colors trigger more contradictory associations and emotions—tender, childish, plastic, pornographic—or are so symbolic of both high and low culture. Pink is sometimes awkward, even embarrassing, but on the other hand it is enjoyed and associated with the idea of beauty... Viewer reactions are determined by cultural factors. For example, the positive perception of pink in Japan seems strikingly masculine to the Western viewer; every year the country pauses to contemplate the pink blossoms of the cherry trees, which, after just a few days, drift like snow to the ground, symbols of the death of the samurai, who falls in the bloom of youth."



When I got home I noticed all the pink stuff I've filled my new apartment with: light streams into my bedroom through pink plastic strips I've hung over the window, my clothes are packed in a pink crate, I spend much of the day in a pink bathrobe, I drink green tea from a pink cup, my dish-drying tray is pink plastic, the entrance to my kitchen is draped with a pink woollen boa, pink pages from Japanese magazines adorn the walls. The bubble I live in is a pink one, a flat in a city dominated by a tower currently stickered with big pink pentagons. Nearby, I sit giving pink opinions to a reporter from "the pink paper".

Comments

[ohfuckyou.livejournal.com]

Few seem to realize this -- but pink is gangster. F'real.

[martinish.livejournal.com]

they even make pink (http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinish/153552675/in/set-951959/) in Berlin.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ha, that's funny, I've photographed that factory too!

Indirection

[neil-mctaggart.livejournal.com]

People used to go to art college to learn indirection. There may be what might be called Indirect people, those that do not wear watches and are not dictated to by time and prefer to 'see where something goes' without always needing a brief or orders from above to enable them to function. They can create in a bubble that seperates itself from the constraints of everyday society. This is not a dream but reality for some people. A blissful existence, although it requires a different mindset to mainstream pragmatic teachings.

[http://users.livejournal.com/__aglamourgirl/]

I love berlin. I wish I can live there on day. And I wish it will still have the flair it had when I went there a year ago.

[evalien.livejournal.com]

The room bottom left is fantastic. Pink and red is a great combination, i was also planning on doing that to my bedroom whenever I move coming year. I often wonder if fashion seeps into your mind if you wish to or not. A little more pink in your surroundings every day until you suddenly find yourself considering to paint all your walls hotpink.

Life without indirection seems horribly depressing. One straight line from birth to death.

[neil-mctaggart.livejournal.com]

Kirsty Walk(british TV)etc. did a programme recently focusing on the culture of modern Berlin. It seems that although it is cheap to live in Berlin, it is also difficult to work or actually make money in the place. Momus is in the ideal position there of not having to rely upon Berlin itself for his income. It would be good for someone with say an internet job or live in Berlin and work from a distance to Britain say.

[hulegu.livejournal.com]

La Gazzetta dello Sport (http://www.gazzetta.it/) is pink! For that alone the Azzurri deserved to win the WC.

[nickink.livejournal.com]

I see you have carpet there - I would have had you down as a wooden floor man?

[(Anonymous)]

I took some pics of it last year too... does anyone know what it actually does? The huge pipe that runs in a circle through it looks fantastically pointless (it looks as though it just loops back on itself).

something in the air

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

thanks for putting a "word" to delay, play and indirection

i like how you said a while back you were envisioning these states even in the school classroom with your workbook drawings

i used to refer to a "lost generation" when examing how i fell further through the "safety net" than you appear to have but it appears you have a similar inclination to reap and glean the fallen harvest of the detour and the sideshow

i always thought you had followed a particular postpunk academic agenda or path

i cannot resist referring you to an online chat i posted about the "pink"
http://niddrie-edge.livejournal.com/43837.html

my latest post is a tribute to the Bartleby's
"i prefer not to"

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There are wooden floors everywhere except the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. I tend to live on the floor, Japanese-style, so it's nice to have one room with a floor that's soft enough to do that with. Tatami mats would be better, but I fear Baker the rabbit would devour them at one sitting.

Re: something in the air

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah, a nice tour through pink!

That reminds me, about ten years ago I wrote a song for Laila France called The Pink Song (http://www.phespirit.info/momus/19960116.htm) which is very apt.

[glowingwhispers.livejournal.com]

With regards to cities, do you Toronto very well?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The perfect symbol for indirection! Perhaps it's an "indirection factory", manufacturing personal bubbles for Berlin creatives?

[desant012.livejournal.com]

Unless Berlin suddenly becomes a holy city for financial institutions, marketing and PR work, and wealthy, do-nothing socialites, it might not explode like London or NYC. If it does, it'll become a museum city without any real cultural output like NYC is becoming.

Remember when you used to live on the LES, Momus? Well, your old apartment is filled either by a Wall Street hedge fund guy, or an overstuffed San Fran transplant with a lot of mom's money to burn and dreams of the cool kids taking her art seriously. and yes, the area is still just as run-down and roach-infested.

Berlin (and others I'm sure are out there) sounds like the antidote for all this, and hopefully we won't all miss out on it before it's too late like it is in so many other major cities.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I played a show there a few years ago and got a certain sense of vitality from the bit where Younge Street meets Chinatown. But I don't know the city well.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I was sitting three months ago on a doorstep right next to where I used to live on Orchard Street, and Albert Hammond Jr of The Strokes walked out of one of the houses. So that's who lives there now! (And yes, there are still rats.)

[glowingwhispers.livejournal.com]

In the last few years, the cities gone through an artistic rebirth. I'd recommend giving it a more penetrating stare.

[(Anonymous)]

one needs only to look slightly more east to find the true heaven for the creative types. Yes, Berlin is great, but it is like comparing Arp of the 1960 making sculptures for the UN to the shit disturber in Zurich. Lodz in Poland is a place filled with empty 19th century industrial architecture where artists without state support work, and actually have something to say ( its not hard given Polands current politics). It might not be as comfortable as Berlin, but its a lot more interesting in terms of art,......and its much cheaper.

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

Just out of curiosity, Momus: what cities do you see becoming the "next" creative class utopia? Or to put it another way, if Berlin were to go all London-New York on you tomorrow, where would you dip your toe into next?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I actually wouldn't feel comfortable living in a country where lunatic twin brothers are currently shocking the EU they've just joined by trying to re-introduce the death penalty. And if "having a lot to say" means you're condemned to spend your creative life making protests against Tweedledum and Tweedledee... no thanks.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, locally Leipzig is where the artists are going. If New York gallerists come over here talent-hunting, they tend to go to Leipzig too, because a lot of the painters etc, the ones who need a lot of cheap space to work in, are there.

I wouldn't go there, though. The next city after this for me is Tokyo, expensive though it is. I'm just going to have to scale down my needs even further, live in less space, and do more commercial projects to support myself there.

[http://users.livejournal.com/__aglamourgirl/]

yeah. that's true. if one studies there or lives there with thier parents or has an internet job, as you said. i guess surviving in berlin isn't as funny or "indirect" at all.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The New Leipzig School (http://www.signandsight.com/features/287.html).