MediaMarkt and Flohmarkt change places

[imomus]

The earnest student of mankind via his tools has a choice between the sane, logical layout of a culture's newest human devices -- and, by implication, its conception of knowledge and its vision of the world -- in a modern store like MediaMarkt or the insane, cluttered and absurd layout of yesterday's tools, technologies and trash in a flea market. In the Berlin district of Neukolln the temporal distance between the sanity and the insanity of objects is a brief five minutes -- the time it takes to climb the hill from the big MediaMarkt in the Neukolln Arcaden to the Flohmarkt in the car park beyond the old Kindl brewery.



But can this neat distinction between the sanity of new objects and the insanity of old be maintained, when you visit them both in quick succession? A kind of irrational excitement grabs me in MediaMarkt when I -- for instance -- look at the pocket data projectors, an excitement which has nothing to do with any objective "need" for such a thing. And might there not be a kind of wise poetry in the irrational layout of the flea market, a serene sense of affectionate detachment from human culture, an older, wiser take on the follies and foibles of past production?



After a visit to the flea market, it's MediaMarkt which begins to look frail and irrational, its styles balanced precariously (precisely because this "media" comes so directly from the present and nothing but the present) on the edge of obsolecence, its textures charmlessly pristine, puritan, frigid, unloved and unlovable, its appeal based on all the worst aspects of human nature (for laziness is what draws us to convenience, restlessness and boredom to innovation, conformity to the latest must-have, and so on).

In some weird way, MediaMarkt (several football-fields'-worth of fluorescent-lit, air-conditioned Koolhaasian junkspace) and the Flohmarkt change places, and it's the flea market which represents what is cutting-edge, clever and new. It's at the flea market that panhandling pioneers sieve gold from the obscurities of the anxious interval. And it's at the flea market that I can become a dung beetle, rolling my own special ball packed with the future, rife with fertile possibilities.



For where else but the future can these communist opthalmologist's glasses with their strange nasal rubber bridge come from? Yes, yes, the past, of course they come from the past, but it's a past so forgotten, so sublimated, so de-contextualised that it looms before us like a spectre of the future, with the future's strangeness, the future's deviancy, the future's capacity to shock us out of our complacency and see human production -- the huge machinery of the concretization of our conception of the world and our place in it -- as gorgeously, ridiculously, ingeniously, patently insane.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Your hair looks good like that. You should keep it like that.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Being the kind of person who wants the Flohmarkt when he's at Mediamarkt, Japan when he's in Europe, the past or future when he's in the present, and so on, I can't wait to be long-haired again. So I expect it will remain in permanent flux.

[(Anonymous)]

These are cool frames indeed. I wonder - when you find new frames, do you go to the optician and let him put the correct glasses into the new nasenfahrrad or do you go with whatever was in there when you bought it? In other words - do the frames you buy become objects of daily use or are they strictly and only a fashion requisite for posed photographs?

I'm afraid this question ended up sounding like a loaded one, especially in the anonymous context, but it's really not!

Rural middle-class values – or something new?

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with you that overly hipster areas are bland (so cool there is nothing to discover, nothing to wrestle with aesthetically, no surprises, no challenge) but I'm not sure if car boot sales and flea markets are a radical enough answer. Shabby Chic, make do and mend, recycling – we can hardly say these approaches are challenging. If Click Opera's readers were a bunch of millionaires it would be a statement – otherwise isn't it the day-to-day approach of every "property rich but job poor" shire.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The pair I bought in Athens are a really good, sturdy frame, just the right shape, so I did indeed get my prescription lens put in by an optician here in Berlin, and they've become my daily-wear glasses (weaning me off contact lenses, in fact).

The pair I bought yesterday at the Flohmarkt are a bit more gimmicky and weird, but actually the lenses in them are almost my prescription anyway, so I can wear them from time to time.

Love that word "nosebicycle", by the way!

Re: Rural middle-class values – or something new?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't know if day-to-day accoutrements need to be a "challenging statement" -- let's leave that to art, shall we? But I do actually get something of art's sweet tang of weirdness from the stuff I find in German fleamarkets. And I should probably have talked more about the "double strangeness" -- for me and Hisae, anyway -- of the stuff on display in German flea markets. It's not only from the past (a "foreign country"), but from a foreign country. And often not only from the past of a foreign country, but from a disappeared state operated via a vanished social system.

That gets pretty damned weird, man! Art struggles to keep up.

Re: Rural middle-class values – or something new?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Shabby Chic, make do and mend, recycling – we can hardly say these approaches are challenging.

Try living like that for twelve years.

Re: Rural middle-class values – or something new?

[(Anonymous)]

Okay - it's financially challenging.

But there is a dullness to poverty / subsistence. Even Quakers are instructed to "live life adventurously". Imagine being too much of a subsistence drone to join the Quakers!

spectres of (groucho) marx

[(Anonymous)]

there's a more rousseau-like romanticism to this entry than usual (scoffing at "modernity," arcane, conspicuous diction--"And might there not be..."), and yet also a weird admittance to a commodity fetishism, um, fetish ("irrational excitement...nothing to do with objective need..." etc etc). madison avenue is pleased that you've internalized their m.o.--see edward bernays--and marx is tsk-tsking. the ending is nicely ominous, though.

nice to see hisae is embracing the homeless look, too, by the way.

[mildsevens.livejournal.com]

yes, the glasses do look nice! :D

these junk areas are so full of inspiration...i get so much joy out of creating something out of these nothing (easily passed over) objects, or "outdated" objects...and not only that...but the journey of digging through these random piles!

Re: Rural middle-class values – or something new?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I live in a town founded by Quakers, and they're better in bed than you might think. All that sublimation allows them to screw like lapsed Catholics.

I think selling this lifestyle as more radical or new is just asking the wrong questions of it. I think those questions are a relic of an age when we actually had a choice in the matter.

Re: spectres of (groucho) marx

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Well, when "modernity" or what passes for it (I didn't sign on for this particular flavor, and I think we can do much better) becomes a shorthand for the cattle chute that we are forced to traverse on a daily basis, then we should beat the hell out of its sides, don't you think?

Beats meekly accepting what's plopped on your plate.

the past

[sundialtone.com (from livejournal.com)]

The past doesn't exist. Only the present exists and we constantly reconstruct the past from artifacts in the present (including our memories).

We do the same with the future. That is, the same way our minds have facilities to reconstruct the past, they also have facilities to envision the future.

So the way I see it there's a nice symmetry between possible pasts and possible futures.

Re: spectres of (groucho) marx

[(Anonymous)]

um, yeah. that's what i said momus was doing. rousseau-like, and all. i know you can read.

Re: spectres of (groucho) marx

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Nice snarking with you!

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

As we know, capitalism needs to create false 'needs' by making and portraying certain things as outdated, obsolete, undesirable. People are conditioned to consume out of fear - one of the worst things is to be considered behind the times, unfashionable.



the short life 'cycle' of consmuer goods seems to be getting worse - perhaps illustrated by mobile phones. People don't even think about dumping perfectly working phones for a newer model. jump this to about 1:05


Ads like these don't help, exhorting people to ditch TVs which have a longer lifespan, use less electricity, have better picture quality and are far easier and cheaper to fix than new flat screens:


So where does all that end up? Sadly those who pay the price for this moronic 1st world consumption are the same as always - those who can least afford it, in the dumps of india and other 3rd world countries, where all the invisble residues of our media markt sprees end up after a year or two:


so, the fleamarket is more than just a groovy place to pick up some curios. In many ways, it's become a life-saving alternative to destructive mass consumerism. Along with the TV/Hifi/PC repair shop, it needs to be promoted and supported. With the bankruptcy of the capitalist model, it's far more in tune with today's economic suituation.