Hip Homing: A Retraction

[imomus]

So there I was, in my Barcelona internet cafe, trying to find the 'fobo' area that would remind me, more or less, of every other fobo area in every other big city I'd ever been. There I was, posting a missive entitled Hip Homing in Barcelona. It was abject and disgraceful, and Lord Whimsy was right to burst out with a protest. The interesting stuff, Whimsy thought, would be more likely to happen as a result of accidents, mis-steps, wrong corners, wobblings and perverse driftings through the unknown city.

'Hip homing'; it's a horrible phrase. I would like to retract it here. No hip person would ever speak of 'hip'. My first Barcelona missive verges, deliberately, on the self-parodic. It revels in the revelation of something abject, craven, or at the very least embarrassing; my enslavement to a set of values dear to self-regarding loafers and creative professionals in their 20s and 30s, not to mention a breed of progressively-minded city planners and real estate agents. And yet I was parading my craven capitulation to the values of these 'progressives' because, underneath a layer of shame, my soul contains a bedrock of respect for these values. I'm not ashamed of them at all, and this retraction is no retraction at all.

So I made my purposeful way towards the Calle Doctor Dhu. I knew the Calle Doctor Dhu was the epicenter of charismatic hipness because I'd found a reference to it on a Japanese website, and the Japanese always seek exactly this 'creative yet safe' sort of neighbourhood. You'll find them in the contemporary art museum bookstore. And there they were, indeed, at MACBA and CCCB, the two major galleries the City of Barcelona has placed in the teeming, multi-ethnic Raval district, the twin turbines of a quite conscious urban regeneration effort.



How many times do we hear of some rising urban area that it's funky, young, happening and vibrant, that there are lots of little art galleries, skateboarders and chic bars there? How many times do we arrive, breathless and expectant, in said area to see guys with baggy-ass jeans and carefully messy haircuts with something going on at the back leading expensively cute dogs through the streets? Skateboarders, graphic designers, street artists? We hate it, and we love it. We want to be a part of it, and we want to be indifferent to it, way ahead of its codes and modes. We want to live there, and also say we've lived there longer than the montebanks and arrivistes who now despoil it. We want to monkey, in other words, with the binary real / fake. We want to say that this area, even when constructed, as in Raval, by an elightened city council, is real, or, if not now real, was once real, and, if not now real, then bad and getting worse.

My abject confession recalls an essay I wrote back when I first arrived in New York, Fobo. Fobo is faux bohemian. As the fauxhawk is to the mohawk, so Fobo is to the Bohemian. A threat, and a guilty secret. In the essay I said I was hoping to find 'an apartment in an area which was once funky but is now just expensive, which was once creative but is now plastic, which was once a place of production (studios) but is now a place of consumption (boutiques)'. I don't claim this isn't my real attitude. But clearly there was some self-distance, some irony in my presentation. What made me feel okay about admitting to my craven wish to find the pioneer spirit in so diluted a form was that I was sustained by some perverse doublethink. The fake might be even more real than the real. To be girly might be even more macho than to be macho. The constructed might be more admirable than the spontaneous. And to play by the rules might be even more radical than to appear to reject them. This year's sincerity might be found in exactly the place where last year languished the cravenly fake.



So instead of stressing that one was here long before any of this nonsense started, when only the salt of the earth lived here, when it was truly dangerous to walk home at night, when there was only cold water, drug dealers, a Chinese grocer and a halal butcher, perhaps one could talk about the socialist vision of the city of Barcelona. Perhaps one could talk about rent control, to make sure that the Indians and Chinese who live in Raval are not threatened by rent speculation following on from their area's beautification. Perhaps one could note that the exhibition at MACBA is called Utopias, and that the big show at the Barcelona Forum presents a beautifully-designed case for ethical trading, social inclusion, biodoversity, and linguistic pluralism. That Barcelona is phasing out its bullfighting because of animal cruelty concerns. And that what some see as 'self-regard' might appear to others as the very essence of renaissance humanism, that swaggering south European culture based on the lethal, beautiful combination of self-confidence and money.

Comments

Re: tagging vs. families

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I suppose its been around since we have (30,000 year old cave marks in Australia and the marks of Napoleon's soldiers at the Sphinx can attest to that). I do like the work of artists who derive from the graffitti aesthetic like Barry Magee, Jeff Soto and Margaret Kilgallen. Philly literally has hundreds of public murals--even one marking the birthplace of Larry Fein.

Re: tagging vs. families

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

I would think there is a distinction between those who feel they are destroying their own property or neighborhood, and those who simply wish to create a noticable mark on the surface of the police state. Infantile as the impulse may be, the caged bird sometimes pecks our fingers instead of merely filling the air with delightful melodies, in stark contradiction to our better conception of the proper outlet for such frustrations. What we fail to acknowledge, in many cases, is that the delightful melodies may not originate in the same purposes we imagine for them.

I find the above almost-repudiation of the notion of community property interesting, in that an unspoken notion of the appropriate is postulated (and seemingly accepted) here between several punters.

In any case, I was nearing the completion of a dreadfully tedious round of weekly shopping recently, and had elected to purchase several cans of white spraypaint, ostensibly to paint a wooden bookshelf for placement in my studio, when my state identification card was demanded by the cashier, who explained that no one under the age of eighteen was permitted to acquire such items from their establishment.

Oh, the cool, clear satisfaction of representative government!