I’m writing this blog post from the road. The old fashioned way. After writing all day and going for a much needed run, I find myself wandering around Auguststrasse, a street full of galleries in Mitte. Not much of a gallery-hopper in my real life, upon finding them closed at 5pm on a Monday, I am forced to acknowledge that I don’t really know when one goes to a gallery. A total cretin am I. I have a sneaking suspicion they’re only cool to go to on the weekdays if you actually have the money to buy something, otherwise stick to the openings when at least there is some social element added to the often sparse collections, you know, just for funsies.
Anyway, after an hour of walking around I’m drained. I think Rome took it out of me and my feet are on sight-seeing strike. Lucky enough I spied an almost painfully charming outdoor café/restaurant. I’m here to say that Berliners are THE authorities on how to maximize outdoor space. The sidewalks of Paris? Spare. The Placas of Barcelona? Barely populated. It’s not that it’s crowded per se (okay fine, some parts are) but they’re very clever about the balance of space-people-landscape.
When I went out on Saturday night in Kreuzberg I was totally blown away. EVERYBODY was outside. I kept thinking that it would be a good night for burgling. There were far more people outside any given bar than inside it. (I suppose it helps that you can walk around with open containers.) Every inch of sidewalk was taken up by chairs and tables and in some cases there were set-ups that looked like living rooms; carpet, end tables, lamps, the works. Bar after restaurant after bar after slapdash art studio with the doors open after neon-lit club after bar after kebab stand after hair salon cum gallery after bar. End on end, nothing but venues for young bodies drinking cheap summer beer on a cheap summer night. For all the broken beer bottles and men watering the flowers, you’d think it would be pure debauchery, but as far as I could see nothing was out of hand. No fights, no girls vomiting in the gutters, no one beyond the pale wasted. It’s hard to explain how a place, a crowd, can be so vibrant and appear so pedestrian at the same time. Corrections: it wasn’t at all pedestrian to me, but it seemed that way to them. As if roving hordes of the insistently cool were a normal affair. To me it seemed like a holiday. Nope, just Saturday. Their relatively blasé attitude signaled to me this wasn’t a scene. Who knows, maybe by German standards (and I’m sure my new friend Max would have something to say about it) it was/is, but my poser radar wasn’t blinging off the charts the way it does when I cruise by some of the hipster hangouts in the Mission. Maybe I’m being starry-eyed about Kreuzberg, who knows. There’s always someone around to say this neighborhood or that has jumped the shark, but I don’t really give a shit about anyone else’s perceived cool timeline. To me it is alive and new and I’m glad I’m here.
So that’s a slice of Kreuzberg, but really I haven’t even started. I could write a dissertation on the graffiti her, it’s so engaging. Not the individual pieces per se, but the strange effect of it en masse. It makes me wish Mara was here so we could talk architecture and zeitgeist. More on that later maybe.
So, I think now is a legitimate time to bring this up considering I’m in my third country of the trip and have a fair amount of quantitative (in my humble scientific opinion) data under my belt. So I’m going to make the kind of broad sweeping generalization that I abhor in others.
Americans are the WORST about their cell phones. The fucking WORST.
There, I feel better already.
I am sitting right now in a huge outdoor restaurant with approximately forty tables I can see clearly. Luckily they’re all spaced out nicely across the garden, not stacked on top of each other, so I have a great 360 view. I can see exactly ONE person with their cellphone in their hand, he’s alone at the table and he’s texting. Everyone else? _________. I see a couple phones on tables but no one seems all that concerned with checking them. It’s about six or seven pm, still conceivably within working hours and no one I think can accuse zee Germans of being lazy or dodgy about work. I’ve seen this scene repeated a hundred times on subways, on platforms, in terminals, on the street. You just don’t see someone swerving like a drunk, walking into some old lady because he’s pecking away at his iPhone or blackberry. It’s all terribly civilized. Of course people are on their phones, I’m not saying you don’t see cell phones in Europe, that would be a ridiculous statement. What I’m saying is that you don’t see them glued to 9 out of 10 heads that you pass on the streets, or on your way to the next train. Proportionally it’s much, much, less. Same goes for iPods but that’s a whole different kettle of fish.
Now, before I go too deep into my rant (there’s MORE you say), let me say that I’m not claiming to be a total innocent. I’ve been known to uncomfortably text while waiting at a bar, or even during dinner on occasion. I’ve fallen prey to half-attention-giving and other transgressions (though I’m not nearly as bad as some). As such I am condemning myself here as well when I say that it’s the epitome of rudeness and in my eyes modern society’s most distressing adaptation. Why? Simple. When you are with someone in the flesh (or a lot of someone’s) and you are constantly and pseudo-surreptitiously texting/emailing, you’re telling the person in front of you that they are of secondary importance. Plain and simple, it’s rude. (Cue all my friends reading this and hating me.) I notice in the absence of a cell phone for the last two months, just how much more present I am, and how present and engaged those I’m with are too. It’s so refreshing and I feel even more how unacceptable the alternative is.
Obviously exceptions will persist since we’ve changed the way we socialize and make plans so dramatically in the last even five years. A quick text to tell a friend where you are and when to meet you? Fine, say excuse me and get’er done. What is not cool is getting embroiled in a multi-text conversation about who’s there, who might be there, if it’s cool, why they can’t meet you and how it might be possible to sway them, sexting, etc. If the pursuant conversations are vital, fine, step out for five minutes and take a call. Think about it…what would you do if in the middle of a conversation over coffee a friend whipped out a notebook and started writing a letter. Lending of course half an ear and punctuating her sentences with “uh huh” and “oh yeah?” and other faux-attentive hallmarks of actually paying attention. You’d be pissed! You’d demand to know who they were writing to and why they were doing it now. My question is how is it any different cumulatively? It’s NOT, yet somehow the former is almost completely acceptable in the U.S. Not the largest of national shames of course (hello BP) but definitely endemic of a growing acceptance of human disconnection and social isolation. Not helpful cultural shifts in terms of quality of life. Disconnecting locally to plug in globally. How is that a step in the right direction.
Far from a luddite, I’ve thought a lot about this shit and it’s even more alarming the further you extrapolate out from the dinner table. I’m not saying we should all throw our phones in the trash but I do think it would behoove us to consider that as with everything, you get the bad with the good. Especially in San Francisco we seem to bumrush the latest technology, embrace it, nay smother it, (yep said nay) without stepping back to consider the implications. Radiations levels (shout out to Gavin Newsom), precious metals whose sale directly supports war and genocide, neural rewiring, and last but not least simply spreading our attention to thin and taking what’s in front of us for second best. All things to consider, but most of us don’t. For once I’d like to see us take a step back from the latest Silicon Valley coup, and think about how we can incorporate it responsibly into our lives, trying to capitalize on the advances while admitting (god forbid) that there could be drawbacks.
And don’t even get me started on this guy.
So that ladies and gentlemen is your evening rant, live from Kreuzberg.Tonight I’m going to sit by the river at a bar with some new friends and have many conversations where the only distractions are the party boats whizzing by blaring techno and revelers calling to the shore in a language I can not understand.
(There’s got to be irony in there somewhere, right?)
Author’s sad little qualifier* It’s late and I’m re-typing this quickly so I’m not employing the usual fine-tooth (ish) comb as usual. Deal with it.
AMEN!
Posted by: Makenna | July 25, 2010 at 11:26 AM