Of Amsterdam, the second time around
Posted: June 8, 2012 Filed under: Food, Wandering in the city Leave a comment
Oh, Amsterdam. So lovely a little city.
The canals lined on all sides with rows of bicycles haven’t (despite their endless reproduction in all tourist materials on the lowlands) lost their charm. Dutch still-lifes and the Vermeer of the woman pouring milk in the Riljksmuseum still stun–regardless of the mass of postcards of these works they make. Dutch design and architecture, Dutch aged Gouda, Dutch people (though perhaps not Dutch cuisine) make strolling through the city at as slow a pace as you’d like a true pleasure for any visitor.
What is more, it seems a truly livable city. Particularly if you avoid certain stretches of the center and all of the Red Light District (though it is well worth suffering a trip through if you’re somewhere in the Western canal rings and need to get to fondue at Café Bern).* Infrastructure devoted to bikes and trolleys, the enormous and lovely Vondelpark and the fact that when the weather is nice, the Dutch seem to congregate in any available outdoor space, make it a place you want to stay for a stretch. Maybe a very long one.
I remember roaming in Amsterdam when I was 18. Then, because all travel was novel and certainly anything ‘abroad’ was exotic, it was strange. Now, it feels a little bit like visiting a prettier Brooklyn. The people there in the central districts are kind and good-looking, well dressed, and unflinchingly fluent in English. You can duck down an alley and find fantastic art, perfectly prepared Indonesian food, magical canal-side cafes serving La Chouffe and you’ll barely notice that you can’t utter a word in the native language. Of course you can end up in a mass of tourists oohing and ahhing at the ‘native’ bridges and photographing themselves alongside a mass of bicycles, or perhaps a live sex show. But I am willing to entertain the possibility that this darker under belly buoys up the rest of the urban culture there.
I prefer my most recent trek through the city to the one I took, low, some nearly 15 years ago. But that may just be because I like me, and cities and me in cities more now. Either way, if you find yourself meandering around Europe for any reason, Amsterdam is worth time. Maybe lots of it.
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*And you do need to get to fondue at Café Bern if you’re anywhere in Amsterdam. Trust me.
On quiet Berlin and the gifts and prohibitions of public space
Posted: May 28, 2012 Filed under: Language and text, Wandering in the city Leave a comment
I loved Berlin. I loved the S-bahn and U-bahn systems (as poorly mapped as they are by the city). I loved German beer and German wine, German food markets. I loved the Berlin hipsters and German typographical design. I could live, I think, forever in Berlin.
I am not sure if the city itself and its particular histories offers this experience to all who travel there, or if it was my own thinking, but it seemed a city devoted to the prohibitions and affordances of urban (and otherwise) space. There is, of course, ‘the wall’ and all it did and did not do, all its remaining traces in the city. These are visible. Where it once stood is marked on and off again throughout the city in various forms. Sometimes a piece of it still stands. Sometimes its former position is noted as would be the division between traffic lanes–a line below you that you cross with or without noticing.
There is also a relationship Berlin seems to have with space, with architecture and with urban planning, that is unusual in the travel I have done elsewhere. Such diverse building styles, so much space devoted to the public, so many ways to navigate…
The first full day I spent in the city I went to the Hamburger Bahnhof where, in addition to an incredible exhibit of the relationship between fine art and architecture (Architektonika 2) there was a large room devoted to Anthony McCall’s work, Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture. I have no interest in describing the pieces (because I could not do them justice) except to stay that you feel what they are doing to you and to the space around you in a way unlike any other sculptural works I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing.
Later in the week I also spent some time wandering in the Tiergarten–a park which beats Central Park in New York City and Griffith Park in Los Angeles by epic strides.
I visited the Bauhaus Archive, a Gropius-designed building, constructed posthumously and in a space he did not intend but which none-the-less houses one of the nicest special collections I’ve come across. Klee, Maholy-Nagy, Mies Van der Rohe, Breuer–all are present in the archive as artists in process more than they are as authors, monoliths.
Finally, the biergarten. Germans, despite what must be very cold winters, know how to drink outdoors. And they know how to do it with delicious sausages. I could spend every summer afternoon in a biergarten if the company was right. We went to this one: Schleusen Krug. Next to the Zoo. We saw some idle donkeys on the way in.
All of these travels through the city, and many more I took in the five days I spent in there, were made more potent by the fact that Berlin seemed always to be functioning in a hush. Even in crowds and on main drags it felt quiet, warm.
Let me close by saying (it really has to be said): Ich bin ein Berliner!*
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*I’ve been told that this most globally known of quotations is inaccurate. JFK apparently accidentally said “I am a doughnut.” But that would work, for the purposes of this blog, too. Berliners love their doughnuts. They are, in my experience, delicious.
Play of the Day
Posted: May 26, 2012 Filed under: Plays of the days, Wandering in the city Leave a commentIn Berlin tonight, on our way to dinner, we made a left onto Leibnizstrausse, passed Walter Benjaminstrausse and made a right onto Kantstrausse.
Even better (though I did not wander here): Karl-Marx-Strausse intersects somewhere in this city with Hegelstrausse.
I recognize this spatial joke is selling itself to a very tiny niche market. It just happens I’m in that particular niche. Hopefully one among you, oh readers of mine, is too.*
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*Mexico City has its own version of literary and philosophical street-naming phenomena. I’ve mentioned it before. I probably will do so again.
Of Rotterdam and the erasure of spatial histories
Posted: May 26, 2012 Filed under: Technology, Wandering in the city Leave a comment
I have given up chronology. On this blog, for the time being, and perhaps also in life. It is so unlike experience and it rarely coincides well with narrative. So, while I’ll post a note dedicated to each of the three European cities I’ve visited in the last two weeks, the order and content of these missives* will not run parallel to my own geographical trajectory.
The first of these notes (you’re reading it now) is about Rotterdam, a city intimately acquainted with the refusal of chronological history. Bombed twice in World War II, once by the Germans (a port city, it was an appropriate target) and once by the U.S. (by mistake, at least according to my Dutch sources) the post-war city served as a kind of tabula rasa for modern architecture. Rotterdam is all shiny surfaces, covered in a patina of dust knocked up by continuing construction. There is only one section of the city which resembles a pre-war Rotterdam and, as far as I could tell, it devotes itself to nostalgic tourists. The bulk of the city is new and committed, it seems, to the endless positioning of itself in the present. The “architectural capital of the Netherlands,” and home to the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi), Rotterdam is in a constant state of (re)production.
It also manages to be charming. Really. I should know. I got lost in the city at least once a day for the four days I spent there. Alleys to jog down, small green spaces and canals to hop across abound. I was particularly fond of the Museumpark which houses both greenery and striking contemporary architecture. Planned and delivered by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA, it is Rotterdam high brow, perhaps par excellence.
All this city space was made more thoroughly enthralling by the fact that my days were spent attending workshops and talks for the Prototyping Futures/Occupying the Present symposium hosted at the Piet Zwart Institute. Talks by 2012 Architecten; Men in Grey, Danja Vasiliev and Julian Oliver; the truly wonderful Active Archives folks; and many astounding others made space in Rotterdam, in cities everywhere (and in our imagined futures) come very much alive. I was particularly fond of the workshop I attended with the Failed Architecture group. You will, eventually, be able to see my notes on the matter in the archive (also active) of the conference.
I wondered often as I wandered through the city if novelty wares on the people of Rotterdam. To have a history built, erased, rebuilt, erased, remodeled and built again (even if at the slow pace of material construction) would mean a different sort of narrative of urban life than the one that exists in a Paris or a Buenos Aires. I also wondered if such reformulation, such spatial re-telling isn’t so much more in line with the way we engage history and spatial narrative in the contemporary moment. Wouldn’t Los Angeles or Rotterdam (and the two have much, I’d say, in common) be more suited in their development, in the way they’ve turned their backs on certain of their traces, to life in the contemporary moment? Is not novelty and the quick rise and demolition of structure just the stuff to which we’ve** become accustomed?
These are urgent questions, but ones I won’t attempt to answer here. Let it just be known that Rotterdam is an urban landscape well worth exploring. And one that might, despite itself, tell us much about city histories. Certainly, if it gets its way, it is already telling us mountains about city futures.
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*Can, indeed, you call something that exists somewhere on a server a missive? What is ‘sent’ on the internet?
**’We’ is always dangerous. I know. For the purposes of this particular entry, I’ll go out on a limb and say I’m speaking from a very particular, U.S. and Western European stance. Call it ‘Global North’. Call it ‘developed.’ Call it what you will.
Of your brain on transatlantic airtravel
Posted: May 20, 2012 Filed under: Mishaps Leave a comment
Dearest readers of mine, yet again I am in transit!
I arrived in the fine city of Amsterdam on Wednesday morning. I passed just a few quick days in that gem in the crown of enthralling European cities before heading to Rotterdam (where I currently sit) for what has proven to be a very engaging event at the Piet Zwart Institute. On Tuesday, I’ll move on to Berlin. More will follow on these ventures, I promise. For now, though, because I am only just now recovering from my jet-lag, I wish to tell you that air travel really screws with your brain.
It is, in a word, insane that I awoke in sunny Los Angeles and, some 24 hours and change later, I snuggled into a hotel bed on an entirely different continent. That such materially and existentially challenging movement was made possible by a jet the size of a large house (and made of extremely heavy parts) which shuttles its delicate carriage through the air, actually flying, at inhuman speeds is proof enough of the schizophrenic nature of contemporary travel.
For this, and perhaps many other reasons, it isn’t surprising that air travel does weird things to people. I’m not going to list all of the varied phenomenological and ontological upheavals excavated in us creatures by such travel. This is a topic for a much more studied, extensive volume. Instead, let me just point to one curious and mesmerizing phenomena: in-flight entertainment.
In-flight movies pull at human heart-strings in ways cinema on the ground does not. Seriously. The worst possible movies can make you ache with appreciation for the universal human condition. Or quake in terrible fear at the coming apocalypse. Or whatever.
You don’t have to believe me alone (or the fact that I once cried watching the abomination known as Glitter on a plane). Just Google it. Reuters, CNN, even This American Life have commented on the bizarre way we emote, rocketing forward some thousands of feet above the earth, while we watch movies that rank among the worst products of the American culture industry.
There are any number of theories (as far as my minimal research into the matter has discovered) about why it is that we feel so deeply as we stare at a screen, crammed next to rows upon rows of strangers, while we’re traversing the planet at high altitudes. Because the format of the blog seems so often to be confessional (and because certainly this particular blog is) I will add my entirely subjective, experientially rooted theory into the proverbial hat as well: We cry or cackle or desire as we watch the well packaged, corporate-sponsored drivel on the screens before us in our tiny seats because such drastic spatial transitions highlight, in a way no other means of travel seems to be able to, the temporal. Anything that truly brings the temporal into focus must bring with it the ephemeral and we know that once we’ve alighted on the ephemeral we have, alas, begun to share a little bit of space with our own, inevitable (if eventual) dissolution, decay, death. Death is the absolute universal. Or so, at least, I am told. It is the thing which binds all creatures, one way or another, to each other. It is the un-narratable experience we all will, none-the-less, share. If in high-speed, above-the-planet transitionality we are aware (consciously or otherwise) of our very material mortality then all stories to which we can even vaguely relate sparkle with the common. Death links me, weirdly, to Mariah Carey. So in that moment, careening at a pace I cannot conceive toward Paris from Los Angeles, I buy it. I buy her plight. I long for her success. I weep, awed, that she could achieve such glory in the face of such adversity.
If this seems hyperbolic, so be it. I tend (oh readers, as if you don’t already know) toward grand gestures. But what, I ask, is grander than a metal capsule in the sky packed full of us headed off that we may live (and die)? And what greater gesture of our shared precarity could any among us make than to feel and feel deeply when a story about living in whatever possible way, stripped thought it may be of criticality, is offered to us?
Play of the Day
Posted: May 8, 2012 Filed under: Plays of the days, Wandering in the city Leave a commentI was recently asked to be the ‘cultural consultant’ on a film set in Albuquerque. It is the pet project of an art-wardly thinking (if I may coin a term) friend of mine. I went over to said friend’s house tonight for dinner to give him notes on the script and was pleased to discover that, based on dialogue alone and some minor aesthetic directions, I could geographically locate the homes of the characters.
Landscape sticks to a person. One knows the city that is, for better or worse, one’s hometown. It’s the kind of epistemological position you can struggle against but never, entirely, escape.
Good to have confirmed that space-based knowledge travels. And good that Los Angeles can deliver to a wayward Burqueño, via the strange machinations of film-making, home.
Of urban sprawl and Chinese dumplings
Posted: April 25, 2012 Filed under: Food, Technology, Wandering in the city 1 Comment
I am currently working on a long-past-deadline dissertation chapter dealing with the potential for positive activation of urban sprawl. ‘Sprawl’ is a shudder-inducing term for most, and frequently cited as cause for Middle-American, New English or New Yorker hatred of my sweet, sweet city, Los Angeles. We are sprawl, perhaps par excellence. But I’m gonna just jump the gun to my head that is said chapter here and tell you, dear readers, that sprawl can rule. Yep. I will defend that disastrous result of population explosions and epic infrastructural development and say that sprawl can be outright lovely.
Now, in my ongoing (its a Sisyphean endeavor) project I am interested in artists and activists who use new technologies (particularly autonomous networks) in an effort to provide alternative communication routes for city-dwellers via sprawl, but for the purposes of this little post I’ll set that aside and talk about something else. Lucky you, that something else is the dumpling.
If you want to argue that urban sprawl is not only existentially but socially disastrous, I ask you to calmly and reasonably consider the fact of Arcadia. This enormous suburb (why we still use this term in L.A. is beyond me–no visible marker exists between an ‘us’ as city-proper and a ‘them’ as external to city-proper) is home to the most ridiculously delicious steamed and fried dumplings in the universe.*
‘Proper’ Angelenos and suburbanites alike flock to the always-packed dumpling houses of Arcadia because, well, that’s where the best of Chinese dumplings are to be had. Whether you’re rocking soup dumplings or dim sum, in perfectly pillowy form, the best are to be had well outside the manufactured Chinatown of central L.A. Din Tai Fung is perhaps the most obvious go-to, and given their long lines it’s a good thing they have two locations in the same block. If you don’t believe the authenticity of such a place, may I point out that they’ve got locations in Tai Pei (and Japan and Singapore, etc. etc.). They don’t fuck around. The corporate nature of the endeavor is noticeable in the friendly but impressively efficient way the servers move you through the menu and deliver those aesthetically pleasing silver pots of impeccably built steamed pork and seafood pockets.
Other favorites include Dumpling House, the new and highly lauded Wang Xing Ji, and any number of spots folks who can’t read in ideographic languages rarely visit. If it weren’t for Jonathan Gold we foodie types with a penchant for decent Chinese would probably be doomed. And perhaps it is for the best that even he can’t get into the far reaches of the Arcadian culinary scene.
The point (excuse my meandering lazily towards it) is that this enclave of amazing Chinese cooking is a fact of the weird way sprawl works. Communities pop up, having chosen to move to cheaper outskirts or being forced out of city centers by any number of cultural or economic forces. The requirement of a little bit of travel to get to the glorious things somewhere in the outer reaches only makes such stuff more fascinating. You can, in your journeys to such places, learn entirely new things about the city’s cultural and material geography.
(Sub)Urban enclaves are magical city spaces. They invite city-dwellers (and all sorts of other adventurers) to navigate their way into the dynamic pseudo-external urban landscape. And such ventures always offer rewards. Contemporary sociality works, indeed, via such movement. It can be abominable, no doubt, in the way it sometimes bulldozes natural and social landscapes which pre-exist city expansion, but it is how we all, now globally, seem to be moving. Nostalgia will save no trees on this one. And, worse, such false narratives can’t be eaten with chopsticks.
I have no interest in defending the often insidious aesthetic and cultural phenomenon that come along with expanding urbanity. But I also have no problem enjoying, in an ever-increasingly urbanizing and sprawling world, what the so-called ‘outside’ spaces have to offer. It is the only real choice we have, I think. And if such a choice is offered with steamed, folded, gooey little bits of epicurean goodness, I’m gonna go ahead and say, o.k. Let’s go. Sprawl, why don’t you. I’m in.
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*Obviously this is hyperbolic. I have not eaten dumplings everywhere in the universe.
Of the trouble with consumption and its pleasures
Posted: March 20, 2012 Filed under: Mishaps, Wandering in the city 1 Comment
I am a Marxist living in contemporary Los Angeles. I also happen to be a Marxist with a taste for caviar and nice red wine, oysters and the general revelry that is always fomented by consumption (not ‘shopping’ so much as out-going–to dinner, to bars, to see movies with boats of overpriced popcorn in tow). I am also (like all humans) a social creature, and the spaces of consumption are all too frequently also the places we gather. If you too are a Marxist or a Post-Marxist or any kind of reasonable, left-wing social critic, you will have already formed a clear response as to why this is not a particularly new conflict, nor one which requires a long-winded defense of position. But you’re reading this so probably you aren’t any of those things, or not comfortably situated as such. So, here goes:
The fact of the total surrender to commerce as the site of both pleasure and resistance, to play and to purchase, is–to put it mildly–an engaging problem. Not just for me but for scholars and activists and those (perhaps fantastically) nostalgic for a public space that belongs, instead of a public space that belongs to. It is also the source of considerable anxiety for the average person. If the present political discourse in the U.S. doesn’t convince you of this, think of the places you long to be and think of what it will cost you, in hours of labor, to get there, to visit, to stay.
One is rarely sure how to ethically engage in the world if the dynamics of global capital find one vexed. The thing about such problems is that they are always simultaneously economic and political, global and local, personal and social. Or, at the very least, I am not the only one who has to think “oh how I long for that lounge chair on the far-off white, coastal sands,” while simultaneously thinking about said sands as exclusive, expensive, impossible, troubled…
There is something to be said for desire being, ultimately, the near-perfectly harnessed fuel of late-stage, global capitalism. The problem is, of course, that desire is also what frightens the shit out of those of us whose shared desire (among many and conflicting) is to believe that capitalism is, in fact, late-stage; that the small spaces of resistance left to us, even if they too are the spaces of consumption, are still charged with meaning and possibility. We are terrified that our desire, as it turns out, is just as functional to keep this weird, post-modern version of abstraction moving mechanically forward. And–even more than that–we, despite such fears, continue to feel like we have to believe in such possibility. Because otherwise, wouldn’t we just give in and invest?
I don’t claim to know with certainty, one way or the other, whether such spaces or those of us who inhabit them have revolutionary potential. Nor do I feel I should apologize for the very obvious fact that the system is the system we live in and that my own desires are conditioned and in many cases entirely manufactured by that system. It allows me to eat oysters and love commodities which I know are built, very specifically, to sell themselves to me. It even gives us Marxist critics a handful of bars and restaurants to meet in. But, if Marxism has any say in the world today, desire may well be also how capitalism builds within and against itself the very contradictions that will ultimately make it unsustainable. People love things. This is true. But they also, even when they’re not so good at it, love sharing things with each other. They are biologically predisposed, in fact, to love. Mirror neurons. Facial recognition. Gestural cognition. We are animals who desperately need other animals, who need shared environments. We are only always in an ecology. There is no vacuum, no subject sans milieu.
Is this an excuse for the pleasures afforded us meager subjects by commerce? By caviar and Pinot Noir? The short answer is yes. The long answer is no. Otherness and exclusion always, even if just a little bit, also always excludes and others us. Me. You. And all those somewhere, fictionally, in between and outside.
I’m not joking when I say I love love. It might be the last space that really does belong. But it can easily belong to too. So what of pleasure? One eats and drinks and is merry, I suppose. But it’s worth thinking about what such eating and drinking and merriment might be if it were, legitimately, a communal affair. Speculation, of the sort not quite done by capital, goes a long way. What did Marx do, after all, if not desperately imagine a future? His did not, alas, come into being. But if we’re not careful, our own imagined futures will become advertisements for Corona and private, polluted beaches. And, what’s more, beaches onto which we will never be able to wander.
There’s no opting out. So eat your oysters. But with that slithering sumptuous little creature, swallow down as well what kind of creature you are.*
P.S. The joke of the title image for this post should be clear enough: Capitalism can’t kill love. Even if it can often co-opt it.
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*I do not normally engage in such politically charged exposition on this blog. But I believe it. So, read and be warned or scoff, but know where I stand.
Play of the Day
Posted: March 3, 2012 Filed under: Food, Plays of the days Leave a comment
I could live on mollusks alone. Seriously. They are astoundingly delicious. And weird. The combination of these two qualities makes them a near-perfect food.
Last night I had two mollusk dishes and both were so wildly pleasing as to border on the pornographic. Thank you very much L & E Oyster Bar. On special (and first up) were smoked mussels. Served with chorizo toast, these were so delicious that I could have consumed the olive oil caper sauce they came in as a digestif. I probably would have too if I hadn’t been in the company of such classy clientele. They might frown on such behavior.
Then two-dozen outlandishly tasty raw oysters. My god. Decadence, thy name is mollusk. If there’s a better reason to jump for joy who cares?
On gentrification
Posted: February 6, 2012 Filed under: Wandering in the city Leave a comment
I live in a neighborhood that is, as is said, on the ‘up and up.’ This is to say that it’s a neighborhood that used to be cheap, and primarily filled with working class families–usually Latino–and is now slowly transitioning into a much more expensive area filled with white, upwardly mobile hipster types like (I hesitate to admit it) me, and my slumlords (read: my spectacularly kind and thoroughly interesting college friends who are renting me a standalone room in their backyard at a deeply discounted rate).
I’m in between Atwater Village and Glassell Park with a slight leaning on the Atwater side. The neighborhood is jokingly referred to as the place hipsters go to spawn.*
This is northeastern Los Angeles and a veritable hotbed of such hipsta-fying trends. Considering I have also lived in Eagle Rock, Silverlake and (albeit very briefly) Atwater Village proper over the course of my adult life, I may, despite myself, be among the rushing blood which makes for the pulse of gentrification in L.A.
This is something of a quandary for a Marxist like me. I am a student and thus poor (but with a wildly cushy safety net provided me by the very parents who–despite themselves, perhaps–turned me into a poor, radical academic). I am also of Anglo stock with an unusually high level of education (economically unsound, even–my PhD isn’t too likely to get me employed any time soon, thank you very much State of California). I follow a certain group of what can only be called fads–in music and food and, to some minimal degree, clothing and technology. These trends can be securely located in the ‘hipster’ trajectory–read: white, educated, privileged and ever-so-slightly off center.
There is, however, one benefit to the early waves of gentrification in Los Angeles and, I imagine, everywhere else. In its nascent stages, it makes for fantastic and incongruous juxtapositions. The boxes of old encyclopedias and scientific discovery anthologies left out by older residents are picked up for their kitsch value and made into art by the newer residents. Some thirty-something lady (I’m not saying it was me) walks down the street in a pink onesie and cowboy boots and is so ridiculously beyond the cultural scope of onlookers as to prevent any cat-calls. Broken Spanish is exchanged by locals and transplants alike over the wandering elotes cart.
It means no one knows quite how to behave and so everyone has to, more or less, come to some kind compromise. This fact has huge linguistic impacts, as well as some less savory cultural ones.
No one I like wants to live in a homogeneous neighborhood. But no one I like wants to be a contributing factor to the homogenization of a neighborhood either. The former fact has an antagonistic relationship to the latter. Show up, and you bring a wave of your kind with you. Stay away, and a different sort of homogeneity prevails.
This is nothing, I suppose, but the truth of urban development in late-stage, post-modern capitalism. It’s a rough lot. Though one wonders, even someone like me, if there isn’t a tiny liminal and ephemeral space, somewhere in the flow. And, one hopes to be lucky. One hopes that such a space not only exists but can be positively charged.
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*O.K. It’s me that refers to the neighborhood thusly. But I bet I’m not the only one.
Itinerant Me 