Geoff Stahl
A return to Berlin (and Zionskirche’s morning wake-up peals, silently pictured above), and some hard changes which will have to remain embedded between the lines. Here’s something to distract you:
So, Wallpaper magazine has joined the fray and made the claim that Montreal is one of the world’s greatest cities to live in (a great design city to be more precise). Along with Spin, Rolling Stone, the New York Times and even Richard Florida’s recent case study, Wallpaper has proclaimed Montreal this year’s urban hotspot. The backlash against this was, as expected, immediate and predictable, exhausted before it even began. Of course they got things wrong (Spin’s map of St. Laurent was off, to say the least) and of course they misrepresented the economy and the politics, and they exaggerated certain facts and obscured others. But by definition they’re puffed-up publicity pieces so why would you expect anything more (or less)? The question to ask is: what is the right way to represent Montreal and why should it matter now? In international urban hierachies, Montreal seems to be the one Canadian city that has consistently edged out TO for the honorific of “city of cool.”
In the same issue, they looked also at Manchester, Stockholm, and Hamburg, three cities I’ve visited on occasion. The issue gave me pause to recollect.
Manchester was a bit of a shock for me, in part because this was a place I had invested so much musical affectivity in (see Manchester post below). From the Buzzcocks to Joy Division to the Smiths and finally to the Stone Roses, to my adolescent self, Manchester was a city which seemed to be Britain’s cultural centre. A dire one at that, but its miserablism was absolute in its effervescence. Manchester was as gray and rainy as I had come to expect. In fact, on my first visit I had lucked out and had hit Manchester at a point where it stayed sunny for days, raining only on the day I left.
Having been back a few more times, the city has acquired a slightly different appeal. I can only imagine what the place looked like prior to 1996 (the IRA bombing) and 2002 (the Commonwealth Games). What has struck me about early 21st century Manchester is that amid all the top-down imposed slabs of sheen and lustre, there’s an irrepressible, bottom-up roughness that still persists, in the people and places. I think there’s a good exposition of this in Dave Haslam’s cultural history of Manchester, Manchester, England: The Story of the Pop Cult City, which, while at the same time it lovingly mythologizes the city, also binds Manchester to its working class heritage in a way that stresses the constant serrating of that sheen by the city’s jagged edges.
Hamburg was nice enough, looking a bit like a cleaner Liverpool in certain places (I’m getting rid of the necessary Beatles connection early on), with a spot of Venice thrown in (Hamburgers (?) will be the first to tell you there are more bridges there than in Venice). After giving a seminar on scenes and subcultures, I spent a good afternoon down around the port, which, once you get used to the scale of the place and enormity of some of the freighters cruising by, is actually not a bad place to while away the remains of the day.
I was also shown one of the hangouts used by the Hamburg Swings, a group of youths who, during the Second World War, fought against the dominant fascist image of proper youthfulness (you might recall the Disney flick about them, “Swing Kids”). To those who’ve written about it, this was an early example of youthful countercultural resistance, which led to the arrest and imprisonment of many of its members. And that resistance was countercultural; it was not organized in the same way it was among swing kids in places like Paris or in the Czech Republic, which were fueled by their own patriotic fervour (what’s fascinating about descriptions of the Hamburg Swings is their emphasis on “English-ness”: they carried umbrellas, used English expressions, listened to the BBC and often carried an English newspaper, cocked ostentatiously in their pockets. Their “English-ness” was seen as an affront to the Nazi’s “German-ness,” and they apparently mocked the official Nazi greeting with “Swing Heil!”).
And, of course, I did the Reeperbahn as well, stopping by for an early evening Chinese meal. Leaving the restaurant, it was clear that the street’s night shift was slowly coming on duty. Perhaps a (im)proper night there might be in order at some point.
Stockholm remains a small mystery to me, having only glided along its surfaces. I’ve done my fair share of plodding about there, but I spent most of my time on the island of Södermalm, the funky chic part of the city, so I can’t speak so much to the other neighbourhoods of Stockholm (though I’ve mentioned other areas in earlier posts). Judging by the number of art galleries, as well as sundry ceramic and design shops, Södermalm knows precisely what its civic purpose is. Only recently has design, to get back to the Wallpaper issue which got me going here, become a conscious part of how it markets itself (to its citizens and the tourists), but it’s definitely flourishing there.
A late podcast for you. Some recent electronic tunes, to keep your mind on things upbeat.
Tracklisting:
1) Vitalic - My Friend Dario
2) Whitey - Leave Them All Behind
3) Mount Sims - No Yellow Lines
4) Out Hud - A Requiem
5) Ada - The Red Shoes
6) Popular Computer - Darling
7) Justus Köhncke - Elan
Iso G.