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.
Okay, you ready?
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.
