in the hall of mirrors

Duisburg VI: Landschaft

The buildings around Gerhard’s home, and in fact the apartment/performance space/gallery where Gerhard and Kunsu live, are the artistic fragments left from a demolished industrial center, a series of overwhelmingly boring buildings that have been reduced to beautiful fragments and tentative skeletons. The entire area has been turned into a park, but a strange one: a white tower rises out of a grassy lawn, but it was really just the Treppenhaus (staircase) of one of those boring buildings that are so long gone; the metal ripped from the sides, twisted cables falling away, and it has lights that go on at night that suggest the typical modern German staircase that everyone in the country has gone up and down so often: stark but workable, sensible, well-lit, here isolated from its former surroundings.

And there are glass shells that were the skylights of a former building: the building has been removed all around and, as with all these buildings, the remains painted white – except the glass, which becomes weirdly ethereal, sculptural. And the steel wings across the path from them, which were once structural, deep bones holding up a working ceiling: now that they are alone, and painted white of course, they fly against the sky.

The ‘waves’ (Wellen) – the up and down curves of concrete with grass on them – are the only part that was actually created new; and they are indeed beautiful and peculiar. People sit on them in little groups, smoking and chatting; Gerhard and Kunsu once saw a couple making love in the bottom of one of the waves, under the illusion that no one could see them. The tree didn’t work, unfortunately – as you can see in the picture, it died – because of something that a good gardener could have guessed: since its water table is raised two feet above its surroundings, the water doesn’t rise that far and the tree died. But it has formed its own stark sculpture, which fits remarkably well with the industrial fragments all around.

There is at least one 'real' sculpture – one that, as it happens, emphasizes engineering ability above all: this hugely heavy, rusted thing is cantilevered, and you know that despite its weight it will never fall.

In the middle, a beautiful but architecturally complicated Jewish museum (impossible to photograph, it would just look like slabs of concrete – they are arranged in a fan, and it would take a helicopter to really capture the shape of them). And then at the end, the white structure that has Gerhard and Kunsu’s pleasant working apartment upstairs, full of books, two offices, the large bathroom, the smaller bedroom; light and full of a quality of getting things done. Downstairs are concrete floors and a good German grand piano (I kept thinking: how uncomfortable, I would want some sort of rugs; then I realized how good the room must be for all kinds of performance and recording – all hard surfaces, no dampening). The other half of the building is gallery plus office; parts of the building on both sides straggle, fragments from the old industries, now made surprisingly artistic, almost like a weirdly beautiful Japanese garden out of chunks of steel and concrete.

Duisburg V: Chili Dreams

A day of eating too richly, after good work and good talk with Gerhard – there was that breakfast, for one, then a trattoria at lunch, then an Asian fusion restaurant in the evening, one that put chilis in practically everything. And tonight two unsettled comic dreams: one where, as a younger man, I am a member of a Baptist church, and being tricked/roped into marriage to an older, otherwise respectable black woman – I manage to insist against the marriage at the last minute, and on my identity as a gay man, complete with noble defensive speech followed by physical escape. The other dream a tangled one of teachers and students scattered at night through a large, closed department store, and some windfall of money and mail that is initially supposed to be distributed, fairy-like (don’t laugh) to the benefit of all; but it all goes slightly wrong, things are filched and misused, students take advantage of the covert friendships.

Both border dreams, both nonsense of course: but both rather unsettling… the peculiarities of sleeping in strange (solitary) beds….

Duisburg IV: Daybreak

It is gray out – technically like Newcastle, but not quite the same: since this is not so far north, the sun doesn’t have such a sharp slant, and doesn’t feel as bleached, as pale. Clearly it is, however, still northern Europe, and not exactly tropical; but I am experiencing good bourgeois well-being, from that breakfast, from the dependable heating and water in the shower, from the sturdy houses.

The birds, in the courtyard of this old building, this nunnery – the bronze plaque says it was built in the early sixteenth century – were amazingly loud from about 5 am onwards. Not an unusual sound, just normal European songbirds – not like the strange, braying calls of birds in Hong Kong, which were so aggressive, so sensual – but these are remarkably energetic songbirds: perhaps because it is spring, perhaps because these trees, this sheltered courtyard in this quiet neighborhood, seems so perfect, to them.

I actually needed earplugs....

Duisburg III: Breakfast

Wow. German breakfast…

‘Full English breakfast’ is something I seldom have at home, as it is a rather elaborate restaurant ritual; and besides, although I enjoy it while I’m eating, all those fried meats tend to return and get re-tasted all day.

Modern German breakfast – I don’t know how long this has existed in this form, but it was very familiar to me in Kiel, Darmstadt, Berlin, and in various trips to Switzerland, Hamburg, usw. – is several pieces of really good, warm, bread and rolls, with sliced cheese and meats, butter, and various pastes, and jams and such. Along with, as in this case, a soft-boiled egg, yogurt with nuts in it, very strong tea, orange juice; plus half a tomato (as the vegetable course). The student version, which I remember from my months of sleeping in the Darmstadt university student dorm with Herbert – the gentle, charming Herbert, who liked California police uniforms, and is now a Heilpraktiker in Berlin – has only the primary elements of this breakfast – bread, cheese, pastes, in bottles and on boards scattered across the table.

I know that the sliced cold cuts and little pastes in plastic containers must be the modern devolution of something that probably looked quite different a few decades ago, but I love it this way – the wide and bizarre selection (you can have anything at all on your bread, from Nutella to liver pâté), the richness of each… and, best of all of course, that really good bread. I’m not much for French bread; and I know that English and American bread are pallid imitations of what they so badly recall. But German bread, now that’s real bread…

And I eat it all. Even the tomato.

Duisburg II: Single w/ Bath

This room, so efficient and so uninspired, is not only part of a former nunnery, it’s also part of a new atelier – this is actually a building where artists are ‘in residence,’ where they use the studios on the ground floor to make art, or perform. So it’s meant to be a Machine for Living – but not just for any old kind of living, this is meant to be the plain but supportive background for getting some good, hard work done. Which is good since that’s what I’m here to do – like Gerhard himself, who cheerfully and without question (or depression) bangs out a huge variety of musical and conceptual projects and collaborations, day after day, year after year. This room is clearly supposed to put me in that frame of cultural expectation, that frame, of mind – this is a room designed for one who is going to be productive, who is going to Produce.

Anything so utterly opposed to my more self-indulgent but also more commercialized way of living is hard to imagine: this is a room for the artist who is also a worker, in fact for a Worker-Artist. This doesn’t displease me, but – it is so strongly stated in every detail of the décor and architecture that the pressure makes me slightly uncomfortable; as though the ghost of Brecht is leaning over my shoulder to see whether I’m toiling away in a properly meaningful and determined manner, as though Grass and Enzensberger will come inspect my work every morning at 8:45 to make sure I am not falling into some kind of false consciousness.

The bathroom is efficient and well-made, of course, with far better water pressure than I’ll ever have in England, but on the other hand more severe, less indulgent furnishings than I would have in America (right down to the seriously recycled, dark brown, distinctly scratchy toilet paper). Which brings me to that last seriocomic detail of German furnishings, one that I found so utterly peculiar when I lived in Kiel, Darmstadt, Berlin for a year, and incidentally one that the tacky but famous Erica Jong also found bizarrely fascinating when she visited Germany in the 1970s. It’s those toilets: they are designed such that most of the bowl, the entire back in fact, is essentially a shelf – water, rather than sloping down into a drain, washes across a carefully designed flat space where shit (well, what do you want me to call it?) sits, neat and presented, as though it were itself a piece of art. (As maybe it is.)

Jong was both amused and offended by the German toilet; so was I, when I lived here – shit does not vanish quietly away, it is shown to you, as though you would want to examine it for signs of poor digestion or liver problems. Most unexpected is the smell: on a German toilet, the smell of your own shit hits you like a ton of bricks, right on cue – it doesn’t vanish self-effacingly into the water at the bottom of the toilet, it asserts itself. This is most disconcerting when you haven’t, uh, had such an experience for a while.

I have always been certain that this basic, daily repeated, experience of the senses, which is so bound up with postwar Western Germany, reflects so many deeply Freudian aspects of its culture – but before reaching too far or digging too deep, let’s just note two obvious ones: a peculiar sense of a formal, rationalized hypochondria, of treating the body’s processes as designed engineering systems that require constant quality control; and, at the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, that annoying tendency of too many kinky Germans to be way too fascinated with shit, as well as with urine. You learn, living in Berlin, to stay far, far away from anybody who claims to be kinky: because in Berlin, even more than London, and almost more than New York or Amsterdam, kinky is really kinky – it all reflects those you-don’t-want-to-know-about-it aspects of modern urban culture.

… So, okay: how do you define German-ness? These are my pictures of the West (to be precise, the most bourgeois portions of the north-west; for me this includes Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Köln; even Hamburg and Stuttgart are a little different from this portrait, turned away from this ‘essence’, but in opposite directions). Then there’s the East, which I just experienced as it was disintegrating in the blender of post-Wall Berlin. But I’m always struck by nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century images of being German, especially, for instance, Katherine Mansfield’s short stories: they seem to be about a way of being German that has vanished from the earth – the sentimental self-indulgence, the Romantic German.

I never really saw any of that Romantic quality. So, the question is – did it vanish, in two huge wars, in decades of vast destruction and rebuilding and Vergangenheitsbewältigung? Or is it still here, somewhere – but – you have to sit quietly, without moving, until it appears – in the corner of your eye?....

Duisburg I: Arrival

I keep smiling at things, all sorts of things, in a half-humorous, slightly bemused way – recognizing bits of Germanness that are so utterly, well, German: the way one notes the distinctly odd but predictable behavior of an old friend.

Gerhard has had me put up in a room in a reconditioned cloister, on a side street called the Nonnengasse – Nuns’ Alley. (I can’t help but imagine this, rather bizarrely, in a picture of rauchende Nonne – late at night, in the darkness of the alley, jaded-looking nuns in full habit and wimple, smoking, peering into car windows, and glaring at passers-by. What can I say, I spent lots of years in San Francisco, these things occur to me.)

Gerhard and Kunsu live, and are permanent artistic residents, at a ‘new space’ for performance, art, etc. in what used to be the Altstadt of Duisburg – everything in this part of town, as far as you can see, is reconditioned or newly built in one way or another; it’s kind of like the new government building in Newcastle, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, any old industrial town that has been refitted to fit a new service population –

but no, it’s not quite like any of those, because this is an extreme form of the German version of such a refitting: not very commercial, but very, very high-minded. Lots of new arts spaces, and all the architecture is stunningly imaginative and corporate at the same time. Which is what makes it so German that it is kind of funny: my room is tiny, severe, sort of monastic (what’s the feminine of monastic? – nunastic? –) but also utterly modern and intelligently engineered. The heating works perfectly, the windows open in two directions, the furniture is severe but well made. Very, very German – it’s been a long time since I’ve been in Germany for any length of time, and as Germany was the first major travel I did in my life away from California (initiating a decade of travel so frequent and extreme it actually wore me out), I have many feelings, many memories, related to Germanness, even everyday Germanness.

Even these light switches, here – the usual flat square that flips up and down, well made and extremely, well, definite. The small lamp that is both well-made and irretrievably dowdy – which sits on a hand-woven doily in two distinctly unattractive shades of brown, a flash of the tasteless crafts I associate with the ehemalige Ost (the former East Germany) and the Eastern European lands beyond; the kind of grandmotherly, hopelessly ugly but comforting, hand-made objects that filled the formerly Eastern Bloc apartment I occupied for six months in Alexanderplatz, in Berlin, in 1993, four years after the Wall came down. An apartment that was, by former Eastern standards, rather nice, rather chic – by ours almost unbelievably old-fashioned (that cumbersome, ancient washing machine).

But, here, that doily is a weird detail in the midst of the completely bürgerliche comfort of what used to be the heart of the industrial West, a land so heavily stamped with the ultimate in carefully, if rather tediously, planned living…

On the shelves above the bed are neatly, carefully bound, but in this case utterly boring, German books – they are, after all, the kind of books that get left behind in a public room, books that nobody could possibly want: old Krimis (mystery novels), collections of folk poetry, second volumes of multi-volume sets, university catalogues from five years ago, and an illustrated book of stories from Schiller’s early life, retold for the impressionable and the young. The nadir is an earnest tome titled 500 Jahre Kirche in Ruhrort (okay, for you in the back, who don’t get it: Five Hundred Years of Churches in – well, it’s a corner of Duisburg that used to be its own rather dull little village next to the Ruhr River, that has borne for centuries the ultra-unimaginative name of ‘Place On The Ruhr’). This is the modern German equivalent of those jokey Edwardian potshots taken at country British house libraries, especially by writers on weekend visits who have forgotten to bring a book to read: when they are faced with the Complete Sermons of lots of paleo-Georgian ecclesiastics stuffed in with tedious accounts of My Memoirs of Sixty Years of Hunting in Eastern Essex….

Funny, what associations this all brings back to me: the well-made, the dowdy, the severe, the comfortable. Quite different from my forays of the past five years into the chaotic but more stylish areas of Italy, of Spain, where life is so much more fun but, on the other hand, things don’t work anywhere nearly as well.

... transitional...

Off to Germany tomorrow; Duisburg, to work with a friend for five days, on a long-overdue book that is about his work.

Haven't done much real work; kept up with some administration. Continuing rather irritable with many students; some are brilliant, inspired, interesting, others just slogging along, skipping classes. I am uninterested in dragging them in. Barked at various people the past few days; feeling fairly, as so often here in northern England, hemmed in, bored, stuck.

(Didn't mention, though, an evening with P. for his birthday; and I notice I don't talk about him much. A warm coal of trustworthy emotion in this rather chilly, unsatisfying place.)

It did occur to me today, as some Cirque du Soleil DVDs went past: I may be rather disappointed with what I've done in life, how productive and how skilled I've gotten; but at least I do things that tend to get better as one gets older. How unlike the short and early-ending careers of circus acrobats, of dancers, of musical comedy performers – of porno stars.

So: perhaps in a week there will be a chain of Germany posts... no promises, though.

Off to take a walk, though it's already dark out....