Living in NKLN to keep PZBG alive
Jul. 19th, 2009 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusWhen you do a lot of interviews you tend to trot out rather similar answers to (inevitably) similar questions. But sometimes the phrasing of a question, a nudge or an effort -- a mental splurge further -- brings you to a new statement, a new insight which you find yourself making on the record. Those are the times it's really fun to do interviews -- as much fun as I'd imagine psychoanalysis must be.
On Friday I found myself sitting in my favourite Prenzlauer Berg cafe during a violent thunderstorm, talking to Jenna Sutela from a yet-to-be-launched Finnish design webzine called OK-DO. Just before Jenna arrived I snapped the photo above, which shows a part of the cafe sign (the word "happy") and, above it, the building's seriously bullet-pocked facade, a remnant of heavy fighting on this street between Nazis and Soviets back in 1945, and a very Berlin reminder of how even the happiest area might have been -- within living memory -- a site of strife.
Jenna's questions were nudging me towards the relationship between place and creative process, and I found myself telling her (it happens in psychoanalysis) something I didn't even quite know myself until I started saying it: that I live in Neukolln in order to incarnate the values of Prenzlauer Berg, whereas if I actually lived in Prenzlauer Berg I'd have to rebel against them.
Now, Prenzlauer Berg is what I've called an "end of history district" -- "no tension, no build, no conflict, no surprises". Here, all the problems of life seem to have been resolved, and here everybody thinks the same way. Everybody in Prenzlauer Berg is white, is creative, has excellent taste, and is reproducing. I exaggerate, of course, and the bullet scars show how recently things were different (why, even fifteen years ago this was a dangerous area, I hear). But that's the impression I get of PZBG now.
PZBG isn't Neukolln. After the interview was finished I met up with Hisae and we walked up Lychener Strasse, feeling like people shopping on holiday. There was lots to investigate: a new, super-chic stationery store, a Japanese crafts shop selling delightful handmade cloth bags from Kyoto, a shop selling sexy dresses for young pregnant mothers, the biggest organic supermarket I've ever seen, and Sasaya, Berlin's most tasteful, tasty Japanese restaurant, where we leafed through copies of Men's Fudge and Numéro Japan.
It was all great, but at the same time it was all way too bourgeois. Living here, I'd feel there were no more battles to fight, no more doors to kick open. History would stop, there'd be nothing to do but create future generations to hand one's good-taste, enlightened, healthy-living values down to.
Stuff in PZBG is stuff white people like. I'm a white person, and I like that stuff, but it all feels a bit tribal when you're there in PZBG, in the thick of it. You can't really feel individually responsible for that stuff any more. And if you're like me, you want to feel personally and individually responsible for communal and tribal values. Because you're perverse, or something. So what you do is live somewhere else, somewhere like Neukolln, and live in poverty, and only aspire vaguely to PZBG values, without ever seeing them realised around you. Because, as Kafka said, happiness consists in having an ideal and not advancing towards it.
Living in NKLN as a way to keep PZBG values alive in yourself, that's perverse! But it reminds me of how I felt when I married Shazna, my Bangladeshi wife. I felt like I could, for the first time, stop slumming, stop denying my bourgeois origins, but incarnate those values completely, precisely because Shazna didn't come from that background, and perhaps aspired towards it. If I'd married someone from my own culture and class, it would just have been robotic and tribal and idiotic. But because there was a cultural exchange going on, I could actually be proud of my Edinburgh New Town values, and since I was the only one there (in Paris, with Shazna) subscribing to them, I could feel personally responsible for them, feel like I owned them.
It's also possible that I came to share Shazna's aspirational perspective towards those values, in other words that I came to see them as something difficult-to-achieve rather than something fated and inevitable. And that's a bit like living in NKLN and only making the occasional trip up to PZBG, and working to bring little bits of PZBG to NKLN without seeing the hood swing entirely that way, and feeling the strangeness and frail glamour of PZBG, on tourist trips up there, without ever having to feel it pressing in on you from all sides like an oppressive totalising tribal system, a binding etiquette, a monoculture.
I don't want to live in PZBG because I don't want to have to rebel against it.
On Friday I found myself sitting in my favourite Prenzlauer Berg cafe during a violent thunderstorm, talking to Jenna Sutela from a yet-to-be-launched Finnish design webzine called OK-DO. Just before Jenna arrived I snapped the photo above, which shows a part of the cafe sign (the word "happy") and, above it, the building's seriously bullet-pocked facade, a remnant of heavy fighting on this street between Nazis and Soviets back in 1945, and a very Berlin reminder of how even the happiest area might have been -- within living memory -- a site of strife.
Jenna's questions were nudging me towards the relationship between place and creative process, and I found myself telling her (it happens in psychoanalysis) something I didn't even quite know myself until I started saying it: that I live in Neukolln in order to incarnate the values of Prenzlauer Berg, whereas if I actually lived in Prenzlauer Berg I'd have to rebel against them.
Now, Prenzlauer Berg is what I've called an "end of history district" -- "no tension, no build, no conflict, no surprises". Here, all the problems of life seem to have been resolved, and here everybody thinks the same way. Everybody in Prenzlauer Berg is white, is creative, has excellent taste, and is reproducing. I exaggerate, of course, and the bullet scars show how recently things were different (why, even fifteen years ago this was a dangerous area, I hear). But that's the impression I get of PZBG now. PZBG isn't Neukolln. After the interview was finished I met up with Hisae and we walked up Lychener Strasse, feeling like people shopping on holiday. There was lots to investigate: a new, super-chic stationery store, a Japanese crafts shop selling delightful handmade cloth bags from Kyoto, a shop selling sexy dresses for young pregnant mothers, the biggest organic supermarket I've ever seen, and Sasaya, Berlin's most tasteful, tasty Japanese restaurant, where we leafed through copies of Men's Fudge and Numéro Japan.
It was all great, but at the same time it was all way too bourgeois. Living here, I'd feel there were no more battles to fight, no more doors to kick open. History would stop, there'd be nothing to do but create future generations to hand one's good-taste, enlightened, healthy-living values down to.
Stuff in PZBG is stuff white people like. I'm a white person, and I like that stuff, but it all feels a bit tribal when you're there in PZBG, in the thick of it. You can't really feel individually responsible for that stuff any more. And if you're like me, you want to feel personally and individually responsible for communal and tribal values. Because you're perverse, or something. So what you do is live somewhere else, somewhere like Neukolln, and live in poverty, and only aspire vaguely to PZBG values, without ever seeing them realised around you. Because, as Kafka said, happiness consists in having an ideal and not advancing towards it.
Living in NKLN as a way to keep PZBG values alive in yourself, that's perverse! But it reminds me of how I felt when I married Shazna, my Bangladeshi wife. I felt like I could, for the first time, stop slumming, stop denying my bourgeois origins, but incarnate those values completely, precisely because Shazna didn't come from that background, and perhaps aspired towards it. If I'd married someone from my own culture and class, it would just have been robotic and tribal and idiotic. But because there was a cultural exchange going on, I could actually be proud of my Edinburgh New Town values, and since I was the only one there (in Paris, with Shazna) subscribing to them, I could feel personally responsible for them, feel like I owned them.It's also possible that I came to share Shazna's aspirational perspective towards those values, in other words that I came to see them as something difficult-to-achieve rather than something fated and inevitable. And that's a bit like living in NKLN and only making the occasional trip up to PZBG, and working to bring little bits of PZBG to NKLN without seeing the hood swing entirely that way, and feeling the strangeness and frail glamour of PZBG, on tourist trips up there, without ever having to feel it pressing in on you from all sides like an oppressive totalising tribal system, a binding etiquette, a monoculture.
I don't want to live in PZBG because I don't want to have to rebel against it.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 09:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 10:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 10:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 10:40 am (UTC)Your stretch to the word "colonist" relates to the conversation we were having yesterday about the word "condescending", and my point that there are other modes than condescension for people from different backgrounds to relate to each other. And I think people who reach for those words tend to have been educated during the PC era, when it almost seemed like no contact between different groups should happen, because all contact would necessarily evoke slavery, colonialism, or be "condescending".
There's a word for failing to relate to the class or race other, and it's segregation.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 10:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 10:49 am (UTC)I'd add that I think of PZBG as a largely "segregated" area and NKLN as a mixed area.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 10:55 am (UTC)Again and again I come up against this PC fallacy that if we hide difference everything will be fine. And you hide difference by policing the language that describes difference, or by acting on the cynical assumption that all contact between different people is abusive contact engaged in cynically.
It's so depressingly 1990, that way of thinking! It's guilty, and yet fritters guilt's transformative energy on cosmetics! It aspires to unite, yet ends up dividing! It aspires to be radical but ends up reactionary!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 11:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 11:50 am (UTC)Now, though, the block is alive with the din of white childrens' voices and the squeak of pram wheels. There's a new ice cream parlour round the corner, Fraulein Frost, that throngs with kids and their bobo parents all afternoon:
Things get even more intense along the canal at the Weichselplatz. PZBG-ification is advancing. I'm not sure what happened with the gangs in the schools. Maybe the law was changed and you can bus your white kids up to PZBG schools now. Or maybe the gangs just bottled out and the prams moved in. Meanwhile the funky culture moved deeper into NKLN (http://imomus.livejournal.com/471981.html).
I'm not really complaining -- this happens. It's okay as long as the neighbourhood doesn't swing, ie become monocultural.
Berlin - NYC
Date: 2009-07-19 12:04 pm (UTC)Your description of Neukoln sounds like Bushwick in Brooklyn. Kreuzberg sounds a bit like Williamsburg but still more like East Village...
I didn't see any "monocultural" places in Berlin and I loved it. Berlin is very much like NYC but not so uptight and there's no Times Square and Statue of Liberty, thanks God
Re: Berlin - NYC
Date: 2009-07-19 12:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 12:53 pm (UTC)I love that apparently your rebelious nature it's one of the most central, most solid bits of your personality; it's the bit you can't negotiate with, so you arrange everything around it.
It is central to the 'Momus' persona, I'd think.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 01:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 01:34 pm (UTC)Isn't the high moral stance of green liberalism and socialism really just a rationalization of what was initially an adolescent rebellion against a system that didn't accept us?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 01:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 02:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 02:23 pm (UTC)I think values can be both positional and substantial. In other words, you can embrace a set of values for the reasons that Bourdieu outlines in Distinction -- as a way to mark your position, separate yourself from those other people -- but also because you find inherent value in the content of the things you like. You know, liking Bach makes you look smart, but Bach is also good. So I'd dispute your "only".
Isn't the high moral stance of green liberalism and socialism really just a rationalization of what was initially an adolescent rebellion against a system that didn't accept us?
I'm going to have to object to "really just" in that sentence! People who embrace those politics clearly believe that equality and sustainability are important goals. Why try to shrink it down to the Oedipus complex when you have, you know, the future of the world in there too?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 02:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 03:06 pm (UTC)For instance, right now I'm wearing a t-shirt turned inside out, because I've decided t-shirts with slogans or images on them are naff. I'm listening to a very abstract piece of music by David Toop, partly to erase or complicate the courtyard ambience of Michael Jackson hits and make the soundscape in my flat a bit "classier". In both cases, my stance is a collaboration with the "naff" things I'm deliberately snubbing. They become the ground to my figure, the thing that makes it connote. I really have to thank the people I'm rebelling against for "collaborating" with me in this way! Without them, I couldn't be me.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 03:11 pm (UTC)"‘You’ll have trouble keeping that suit clean!’ laughs the 537th person today. Yet when I take off my jacket and neckscarf and pretend to be normal, I find myself envying some other besuited dandyish guy walking about.
I just like to look like myself. Only problem is, to most people I am not myself, I am ‘Oy! Suit!’ until further notice. Roll on further notice."
Dickon's "I just try to look like myself" is disingenuous. I don't think he's admitting how much of a collaboration his look is, precisely, with those 537 people shouting at him on a daily basis. They create Dickon just as much as Dickon does. When will the British discover dialectics?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 03:11 pm (UTC)Besides, I'm a lot less confident than you are that the gentrification of (north) Neukolln is leading to much real mixing, rather than just pricing some groups out of the area. To stereotype wildly, the current population seems to be an even mix between arty prenzlauerberg types, the old white folks, and Turks. But I can't think of a single bar/cafe/whatever with a clientele mixed between those groups. While I see the local government making a lot of efforts to bring different people together, I don't see the exiles from prenzlauerberg making that much effort to integrate into the neighbourhood.
Take all that with a pinch of salt, though -- it's in large part the guilt of a poorly-integrated (ex)Neukolln resident, whose hopes for the place never stood much chance of being realised.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 03:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 03:23 pm (UTC)We'd all lose our flavours if we mixed in the assimilation sense. What we need is to integrate, in other words live together while preserving our differences.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 04:11 pm (UTC)I like to visit, browse through pretty shops that I cannot afford to buy anything in and leave..
I stayed with my friend in Schoneberg, near Yorkstrasse.
This area seems impervious to the sort of PZBG gentrification that you refer to, perhaps because there is an agreeable mix of demographics in relation to ethnicity, age, income etcetera.
Areas that seem impervious to gentrification interest me because I wonder can areas like Neukolln and Friedrichshain can resist gentrification indefinitely.
Having lived in Berlin for several years, what are your thoughts on this?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 04:43 pm (UTC)sexy
Date: 2009-07-19 04:48 pm (UTC)Utopia
Date: 2009-07-19 05:09 pm (UTC)Dada, Situationist International, Fluxus; they all appear to have at their heart an idea of a utopia. Did they really want this? Does anyone ever really want the realization of a utopia?
I'm using cultural examples (those who fought their battles against State ideology via the cultural branch of it; or cultural ideological State apparatus to quote Althusser) but I'm sure examples could be brought from other areas.
Where does the idea of Utopias come into your discussion Momus? And what are your thoughts on it?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 05:16 pm (UTC)The idea of living in Japan for me is slightly daunting in that it's going to shatter a long fostered romanticism. I doubt a year there is enough to do that though. It's not that I envisage Japan to be perfect so much as the portrait of Japan I've created is the result of selective focus. I will have to one day face the imperfect reality if I ever want to live there longterm however. If I were to live in Japan longterm, I know I would grow contemptuous towards and rebel against many aspects of its society but I'm relatively sure Japan as a country is more aesthetically and philosophically compatible with who I am as a person than Britain ever could be, I'm making that bet. I don't think I need Japan to exist in my heart as a fantasy paragon.
It's like you're saying "Neukölln is who I am, Prenzlauer Berg who I want to be." You know that if Prenzlauer Berg became who you are, you'd suddenly have to deal with the reality and you know that reality wouldn't be perfect. But surely the reality of Prenzlauer Berg is better than the reality of Neukölln?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 05:46 pm (UTC)....and then there's this!
http://www.eyeworks.tv/en/p460d1e579a1b3?movie=49d0b49e913fb#flash_player
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 05:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 07:05 pm (UTC)Those are fallacies in themselves. It's about the fervent efforts to discourage clearly outmoded terms in everyday discourse---the most obvious example in the US is "nigger." That's it. PC doesn't propose to "hide" anything; on the contrary, it wants differences to be a point of interest and respect, not discrimination.
PC is somewhat of a misnomer; it's not about being politically "correct," but about being civil and considerate of others. It's usually non-progressives who scoff at this kind of stuff.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 07:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 08:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 08:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 09:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 09:16 pm (UTC)Friedrichshain, on the other hand, is already fucked, I would humbly submit.
I know nothing of the Yorkstrasse area. It's one of those "between" districts that you fly over on the elevated train.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 09:19 pm (UTC)No, I definitely prefer NKLN, partly because it frees me from the sense of relative deprivation and sibling rivalry PZBG would nurture. This is why people don't get happier as they get richer -- they tend to live amongst people as wealthy as themselves, and the sense of well-being is relative, so you're always neck-and-neck with the Joneses, cursing under your breath.
Re: Utopia
Date: 2009-07-19 09:26 pm (UTC)I'm not sure that they do, you know. I think it's really the designers and architects who are the utopians. Artists are too skeptical of all forms of planning. They're irrational and pessimistic. They don't believe in the future, they believe in the unconscious.
I don't think I believe in utopia either. If I somehow ended up in one, I'd be dropping banana skins, scattering thumb tacks and sticking chewing gum on all surfaces.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-19 10:22 pm (UTC)Re: Utopia
Date: 2009-07-19 10:28 pm (UTC)(some devils-advocate-ism here, i'm not pushing a position, just wondering out loud)
I think the 'artists' involved in these movements - to generalize unforgivably - were also, and perhaps largely, reformers. Reformers exist in all areas of society, within the cultural apparatus, the educational, the family, etc. They just happened to know art. Art was their tool of reform.
Do you really believe that Debord et al didn't believe in the future?
The SI incorporated architects, what with Unitary Urbanism and all that.
I can't help but feel deflated by your post today. It seems to advocate game-playing, running on the spot. Perhaps it just annoys me that, if we don't believe in Utopia's then we should just stop the pretence and quit talking about them! Perhaps they are a necessary pipe-dream ...
But Momus wants to live in that famous commune called, er, Tokyo..
Date: 2009-07-19 11:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-20 01:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-20 01:37 am (UTC)I understand what you're getting at, and I think for most people that would be true, but I've always got the feeling that Dickon would dress as he does if he were the last man on Earth. If I may speak for Dickon, he seems subject to different motives than someone like you. He's not a provocateur. He's an aesthete.
Re: But Momus wants to live in that famous commune called, er, Tokyo..
Date: 2009-07-20 02:13 am (UTC)You set the scene.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-20 03:45 am (UTC)-Jace
mix
Date: 2009-07-20 11:24 am (UTC)but there are!
just around the corner from where you live,
pflüger/kottbusser there is this hip turkish bar/restaurant thingbing
and one or two more on kottbusser.
something hip on pannierstrasse, close to sonnenallee
but flughafenstr. is really best,
here the turks are bulgarians.
About these prnzl brg and also those new bars/ shops / boutique's, gallery's/resto's around north neukølln, it is all so interchangeable. And it looks very much like people looking at peolple looking at themselves.
David
Date: 2009-07-20 03:55 pm (UTC)I think we are hard-wired to compare ourselves to the people in our immediate vicinity, and when those people are similar to us, the comparison is quantitative and one-dimensional; "Are they better than me? By how much?" This breeds stress.
In NKLN, the group we compare ourselves to is so heterogeneous that it is pointless to keep score. Instead, it is possible to embrace the minority that resembles us (the would-be PZBG:ers)
In PZBG, however, it is possible to compare. Not as easy as it might be in a non-creative neighborhood where the size of the check is everything, but still possible.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-21 07:10 pm (UTC)although this comes from a man about to make the exchange from wedding to nkln.
so there you go
†††
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Date: 2009-07-24 03:09 am (UTC)