| Luxus, Glenn Patterson, published by Millenium
Court Arts Centre, Portadown, 2007. (Luxus:
A Visual and Verbal
Collaboration by Victor Sloan and Glenn Patterson)
______________________________
Luxus m
– luxury
Collins
German-English Dictionary
‘Brothers and sisters
the time has come for each and everyone of you to decide whether you
are going to be the problem or whether you are going to be the
solution. You must choose brothers. You must choose.’
MC5, Kick Out the Jams
‘You’ve never been
more beautiful/ your eyes like two full moons/ than here in this
poor old dancehall/ among the dreadful tunes/ the awful songs we
don’t even hear…’
Magnetic Fields, ‘Nothing Matters When We’re Dancing’
There used to be so
many fish shops in Cold War East Berlin people fed the cheap fish to
their cats.
What you think you
know you don’t.
A dead goldfish can
be revived with a drop of whiskey or, if that fails, by
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Some of what you know
you wish you didn’t.
A barmaid arriving
for work here one morning found a goldfish motionless on the floor.
She popped it back into the tank above the bar – no whiskey, no
mouth-to-mouth. The goldfish came round, though for days afterwards
it would make sudden dashes towards the surface as though trying to
leap out again.
I know a metaphor
when I hear one. I know a fishy tale. I know enough not to mix them
up. I do. I know I do.
*
I am on a stool below
the fish tank, mid afternoon, midweek, month of March, my
forty-fifth year. The Artist is behind me somewhere, preoccupied
with tiles and tabletops and the ghost of last night’s
bums-on-seats. The Owner is at the far end of the counter, looking
uncomfortable with the daylight. In the window to my right a twist
of yellowed tubing hangs like something intestinal, an appendix
maybe, leftover with the tiles from the days when this was a kosher
butcher’s shop. (Just saying the words ‘kosher butcher’ in Berlin
is to flicker-book through a whole century of horror.) At night this
tubing gets a neon rocket up its arse and does its best Starry
Plough impersonation as if to proclaim it is a country – a universe
– unto itself in here.
Last night I sat
until the stars blurred, over the shoulders of the Teacher Who Fell
Off a Chair and the Diplomat’s Son Who Sat On Che Guevara’s Lap, and
one for the road became two, became three, became drink and pray
there is still ground beneath you when rise from your seat.
This afternoon,
though, I am not looking at but beyond, to the crane
lowering klieg lights from the penthouse across the way. Prenzlauer
Berg – for that is where we are, the Artist, the Owner, the goldfish
doo-wopping at the waterline, and me, the Writer – Prenzlauer Berg
is the German film industry’s backdrop of choice just now.
Prenzlauer Berg is an estate agent’s wet dream. If it is luxury you
are after you will find it in spades in Prenzlauer Berg.
Just don’t come
looking for it in here.
Luxus.
It is held together
by Polyfilla and gaffer tape. You don’t even want to think about the
wiring. A bulb blows, that’s it, gone, and who knows when it will be
replaced. If.
Luxus.
It is Warhol. It is
Dada. A whole fountain of inverted meaning. It drags luxury down
from the penthouses, back through that little twisted tube hanging
in the window. Think about this, it says. Think again.
*
Jesus, in some
medieval versions of the nativity, was born in a penthouse. The
‘house’ is a red herring; it is the ‘pent’ you need to focus on. The
Middle English word is pentis: a lean-to, an add-on, an
appendix.
*
When I first went to
Berlin in 1991 it was like a wall coming down in my understanding of
Europe. It was like a wall coming down in my understanding of home.
The city’s own wall had been dismantled almost two years before,
although in places it looked more like half an hour ago. Actually,
never mind the Cold War, in places it looked like the Second World
War had just ended. On the day I arrived I walked with the friend I
was staying with across the no-man’s-land of Potsdamer Platz,
Hitler’s bunker to our left, the Brandenburg gate beyond, and on out
east, past buildings that were more bullet-hole than brick, to her
flat in Prenzlauer Berg.
I had never walked so
far across a city (I’m from Belfast, I had never had that much city
to walk across), or cared so little about the distance. I had never
been, have never been since, so excited by a city: its history, yes,
but also its here and now. And nowhere felt more here and now than
Prenzlauer Berg. It was in Prenzlauer Berg, around the Gethsemane
Church, that resistance to the GDR had burgeoned and it was to
Prenzlauer Berg after the regime collapsed that much of Berlin’s
alternative nightlife gravitated. Behind every shot-pocked tenement
block, it seemed, was another courtyard – hinterhof – another
staircase up to another one-room bar, or gallery or performance
space, or bar, gallery, performance space rolled into one. I didn’t
get to bed until breakfast the next day. It was all so thrillingly
ad-hoc: provisional, I would have said if someone else hadn’t
already had a monopoly on the word.
I was
living in Lisburn at the time and running a weekly writing group in
Portadown Library. The group finished at nine o’clock. The last
train to Lisburn came through at a quarter to ten, suspicious
objects on the line outside Newry permitting. For half an hour or
more every Wednesday I would sit in Portadown station, on the border
between the Protestant and Catholic ends of town, alert to every
footfall, and curse the place for a god-bothering dump. I cursed
Lisburn too. I cursed Belfast. I cursed them twice as roundly when I
had to come back from Berlin.
If
Berlin’s wall could come down, why couldn’t our walls?
Perhaps because (it
didn’t occur to me to think it back then) the citizens of Berlin
hadn’t asked in the first place for their wall to be put up,
extended, reinforced by petrol bombs – or worse – and by injunctions
and judicial reviews over who could do what where and when.
Fifteen years on the
only bits of the Berlin Wall left standing are monuments and outdoor
museums. (At least that’s one thing no one can teach us here in
Northern Ireland, how to put up a memorial.) Out towards Wedding,
where there was for a while in late Sixty-one a literal window of
opportunity for people wanting to escape west, until the buildings
on the east of the wall were demolished, tram tracks are being laid
up the middle of the death strip. Potsdamer Platz, once the
crossroads between the American, the British, and the Russian zones
of occupation, is now home to a mega mall and cinema complex with
landmark buildings for Daimler-Chrysler and Sony. Not far away, near
Alexanderplatz, where on 4 November 1989 a million people gathered
to protest against the old regime, the Ideal Worker looks
bewildered, as if he has awoken from decades-long sleep to find he
is no longer a colossus but a buffoon: a pavement ranter, a bottom
pincher. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism, on the border of Mitte
and Prenzlauer Berg is as derelict as a Seventies Belfast cinema.
(My own childhood cinema, closed since 1975, has just been
reincarnated as Tivoli Court Apartments.) I want to draw an arrow
pointing east from the Institute a couple of thousand miles:
business as usual, contact Kim Jong-il. Actually I want to catch
myself on, and start saving now to buy property in Pyongyang. One
nation’s post- is another nation’s pre-.
Fifteen years on,
Prenzlauer Berg has lost some of its old identity. No longer a
borough in its own right, it was recently re-designated one of
thirteen ‘localities’ of Pankow. The word on the street, and in the
bars, these days is improvement, not improvisation. Or at least that
is the official word, but there is still dissent, if you keep your
eyes and ears open. On Schönhauser Allee someone has taken the
trouble to climb to the top of the scaffolding around a building
under renovation and write, ‘Fuck the Free World’.
And then
there is Luxus.
*
Luxus is Latin for
dislocated. You can find a bit of it in ineluctable, that which
cannot be escaped.
*
The Artist has a
friend – the Critic – who has a flat off a hinterhof on
Kollwitzstrasse and who has, in his turn, a friend upstairs with a
bed where I can sleep. The Friend’s place is not so much a flat as a
flat-sized hi-fi: a state of the art within a state. He has built
the system himself, from components bought and bartered and salvaged
down the years. It was either that, he suggests, or carrying on
drinking as he used to, alcohol in the GDR being as cheap as chips…
or fish. He tells me how in those days he used to smuggle his
reel-to-reel tape recorder through the streets to friends’ flats to
record illicit LPs. He tells me that was how he first heard Kick
Out the Jams by Detroit’s MC5. His expression tells me the rest:
this was true revolution. I begin to think I can never have really
listened to the MC5, as opposed to listening to stories about them
(proto-punks, White Panthers). My expression must tell him this.
When I get in from Luxus the afternoon of the klieg lights I find on
my pillow a copy of the CD he has burned, complete with colour
printout of the sleeve, Rob Tyner double-exposed on the back,
hollering into the mike.
He is
hollering now as I write this, ‘I’m at my borderline, I’m at my
borderline...’ and for a moment I’m at Portadown station all those
Wednesday nights ago, on edge.
Back in the bar that
night it is Magnetic Fields on the sound system, 69 Love Songs:
a quieter subversion (note, not 68 or 70 Love Songs). The appendix
has turned to plough again in the window, the world beyond to so
much fog. (On our way here I lost sight of the Artist somewhere
around Prenzlauer Berg’s famous Water Tower then saw a flash in the
murk: some idea he had had about trees.) The Teacher Who Fell Off a
Chair is in again and the Diplomat’s Son Who Sat on Che Guevara’s
Lap. It is always a balancing act, that dependency of customer on
bar, bar on customer: who will blink, or change, first?
Magnetic Fields have
arrived at somewhere in the low fifties of their repertoire, ‘The
Death of Ferdinand de Saussure’: ‘We don’t know anything, you don’t
know anything, I don’t know anything about love.’
Saussure was the
father of structuralism. What I know about structuralism could be
scratched on the short end of a brick: signifier and signified,
binary oppositions…
Male implies female,
dark, light, communism… what?
When I ask the Owner
later that night what he was thinking, opening a bar whose upkeep he
occasionally seems indifferent, even hostile, to, he shrugs and
says, ‘I just wanted there to be a place where I could go.’ It
doesn’t seem that extravagant a luxury in a city of three and a half
million, in a neighbourhood of a couple of hundred thousand. And I
remember how after my first visit to Berlin I became obsessed with
the idea of opening a bar in Belfast. A friend and I had it all
planned. We would take over the down-at-heel Du Barry’s Saloon Bar
near the Albert Clock. The Humanist, we were going to call it, for
the four weeks it would have lasted before we went bankrupt. We
wouldn’t do an awful lot to it. There was too much being done
to bars as it was. (Du Barry’s was comprehensively done to a few
years later.) Still, we might have changed a light bulb.
The Owner doesn’t
tell me that he was jailed under the old regime for refusing to
work. He doesn’t tell me either what he thinks looking past his
small constellation of lights at the luxury apartments across the
way, but I think I can guess.
The opposite of all
that went before is not this.
Appendix One
White Panther Party 10-Point Program
1. Full endorsement and support of
Black Panther Party's 10-Point Program.
2. Total assault on the culture by any
means necessary, including rock ’n’ roll, dope and fucking in the
streets.
3. Free exchange of energy and materials
— we demand the end of money!
4. Free food, clothes, housing, dope,
music, bodies, medical care — everything free for everybody!
5. Free access to information media —
free the technology from the greed creeps!
6. Free time and space for all humans —
dissolve all unnatural boundaries.
7. Free all schools and all structures
from corporate rule — turn the buildings over to the people at once!
8. Free all prisoners everywhere — they
are our brothers.
9. Free all soldiers at once — no more
conscripted armies.
10. Free the people from their “leaders”
— leaders suck — all power to all the people! Freedom means free
everyone!
— John
Sinclair, Minister of Information, White Panther Party. November
1st, 1968
(John Sinclair managed the MC5 until
1969, when he was sentenced to ten years for possession of two
joints. The band subsequently distanced themselves from his
statements urging violence.)
Appendix Two
69 Love
Songs
1. "Absolutely Cuckoo" – 1:34
2. "I Don't Believe in the Sun" – 4:16
3. "All My Little Words" – 2:46
4. "A Chicken with Its Head Cut Off" – 2:41
5. "Reno Dakota" – 1:05
6. "I Don't Want to Get Over You" – 2:22
7. "Come Back from San Francisco" – 2:48
8. "The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side" – 3:43
9. "Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits" – 2:25
10. "The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be" – 1:11
11. "I Think I Need a New Heart" – 2:32
12. "The Book of Love" – 2:42
13. "Fido, Your Leash is Too Long" – 2:33
14. "How Fucking Romantic" – 0:58
15. "The One You Really Love" – 2:53
16. "Punk Love" – 0:58
17. "Parades Go By" – 2:56
18. "Boa Constrictor" – 0:58
19. "A Pretty Girl is Like..." – 1:50
20. "My Sentimental Melody" – 3:07
21. "Nothing Matters When We're Dancing" – 2:27
22. "Sweet-Lovin' Man" – 4:59
23. "The Things We Did and Didn't Do" – 2:11
24. "Roses" – 0:27
25. "Love is Like Jazz" – 2:56
26. "When My Boy Walks Down the Street" – 2:38
27. "Time Enough for Rocking When We're Old" – 2:03
28. "Very Funny" – 1:26
29. "Grand Canyon" – 2:28
30. "No One Will Ever Love You" – 3:14
31. "If You Don't Cry" – 3:06
32. "You're My Only Home" – 2:17
33. "My Only Friend" – 2:01
34. "(Crazy for You But) Not That Crazy" – 2:18
35. "Promises of Eternity" – 3:46
36. "World Love" – 3:07
37. "Washington, D.C." – 1:53
38. "Long-Forgotten Fairytale" – 3:37
39. "Kiss Me Like You Mean It" – 2:00
40. "Papa Was a Rodeo" – 5:01
41. "Epitaph for My Heart" – 2:50
42. "Asleep and Dreaming" – 1:53
43. "The Sun Goes Down and the World Goes Dancing" – 2:46
44. "The Way You Say Good-Night" – 2:44
45. "Abigail, Belle of Kilronan" – 2:00
46. "I Shatter" – 3:09
47. "Underwear" – 2:49
48. "It's a Crime" – 3:54
49. "Busby Berkeley Dreams" – 3:36
50. "I'm Sorry I Love You" – 3:06
51. "Acoustic Guitar" – 2:37
52. "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure" – 3:10
53. "Love in the Shadows" – 2:54
54. "Bitter Tears" – 2:51
55. "Wi' Nae Wee Bairn Ye'll Me Beget" – 1:55
56. "Yeah! Oh, Yeah!" – 2:19
57. "Experimental Music Love" – 0:29
58. "Meaningless" – 2:08
59. "Love is Like a Bottle of Gin" – 1:46
60. "Queen of the Savages" – 2:12
61. "Blue You" – 3:03
62. "I Can't Touch You Anymore" – 3:05
63. "Two Kinds of People" – 1:10
64. "How to Say Goodbye" – 2:48
65. "The Night You Can't Remember" – 2:17
66. "For We Are the King of the Boudoir" – 1:14
67. "Strange Eyes" – 2:01
68. "Xylophone Track" – 2:47
69. "Zebra" – 2:15
Appendix Three
Localities of Pankow
Blankenburg
Blankenfelde
Buch
Französisch Buchholz
Heinersdorf
Karow
Niederschönhausen
Pankow
Prenzlauer Berg
Rosenthal
Stadtrandsiedlung Malchow
Weißensee
Wilhelmsruh
Appendix Four
Portadown
Station
Footfall
12,000 pw
Sex
49% - M
51% - F
Social-Economic
AB - 34%
C1 - 37%
C2 - 18%
DE - 11%
Employment
Status
Employed -
70%
Student - 17%
Housewife -
3%
Other - 10%
Frequency of
use
Daily - 43%
Weekly - 29%
Less
Often - 28%
Copyright Onscreen Solutions
Appendix Five
24 November 2006
The slogan on the
posters might have come straight from my early Nineties nightmares.
‘Don’t Cross the Line,’ it reads, above a graphic of a car trapped
on a level crossing. The view across the line from platform one
appears little changed: same ferns, same row of rooftops, same
aerials angled towards the distant Denny factory sign, around which
the same inexplicable steam billows. But the waiting room now has a
plasma screen above the ticket booths with ads for Rushmere Shopping
Centre, Craigavon Borough Council, Chestnut Lodge. The straplines
bleed into one another: ‘something for – something to suit –
everyone… no one feels left out.’ Inclusiveness is the new
exclusiveness. Second-class has been written off, or at least
written out of the script. In this world of Passenger’s Charters and
Independent Monitoring Results on reliability, punctuality, and
speed in picking up the phone, of leaf-fall leaflets and improved
cross-border service, we are none of us lower than enterprise class,
even if those that were first are not now last, but just first plus.
In a break between
the ads the plasma screen treats us in our percentages (see Appendix
Four) to archive footage of a Model T Ford with DIY propellers on
the roof. The blades turn silently, furiously, but the Model T never
leaves the ground. All the while a news-bar rolls across the bottom
of the screen, ‘Assembly to meet’, ‘Baghdad bomb victims buried’;
‘Wagon Wheels firm for sale’.
I walk out of the
station (High Street Mall, Magowan West, Matalan to my right) a
little before eleven o’clock, so never discover how the plasma
screen – the waiting room – copes with Michael Stone wedged in a
revolving door at Stormont shouting No Sell Out Paisley. I carry on
through the underpass to where I parked my car, trying not to give
credence to the lines scrawled on the walls.
‘Fuck Ulster,’ (talk
about a lack of ambition) ‘Shoot all Huns.’
Appendix
Six
Googliography
White
Panthers
http://www.luminist.org/archives/wpp.htm
Black
Panthers
http://www.luminist.org/archives/bpp.htm
Plough
and stars http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Sparta/1648/ceacht_e.htm
Plasma
ads
http://www.onscreensolutions.co.uk/home.asp
Structuralism
http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=122
Enterprise
http://www.translink.co.uk/enterpriseservices.asp
Appendicitis
http://www.medicinenet.com/appendicitis/article.htm
 Glenn
Patterson
 
Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry
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