A body walks through the city while listening to a DJ mix. The switching between sites is like switching between tracks is like switching between worlds. An essay poem inspired by a mix of the New York-based artist Zarina.
00:00:00
Exiting the house door. Walking westwards in parallel to the S-Bahn rails.
Birds like surf and car traffic like synthesizers.
I hope that you are the one / If not, you are the prototype / We’ll tiptoe to the sun / And do things I know you like.
Feeling like being thrown into an opening sequence in a film. Hiding under the patterns of the public. The last rays of sun shine on the body like searchlights of the thief in the backyard at night. Bad metaphors are either a matter of taste or a lazy perception of reality.
00:06:27
Walking past two people sitting on the curbside preparing their daily dose before tiptoeing to the sun. Coming across a café. The guests are sitting on the pedestrian street watching the passers-by like their private reality TV.
Feeling silly. Broken into fragments. A thought follows a thought. Just like that. Isn’t it impossible to perceive the whole? Life like in the films of Robert Altman: short subjective presences, dialogues, and images arise randomly and overlap.
00:07:33
Passing by an improvised homeless shelter.
The street turns into hypertext. Feel turns into belief, belief turns into incidentals. Every manhole cover, leaf, branch, dewdrop, bird, bush, or piece of gum sticking to the asphalt refers to something else. Like rock or classical music, whose majority of creative patterns have become symbols and caricatures of their own: the copy of the copy of the…
00:10:48
Passing by a taxi stand where seven cars are lined up behind one another. A few drivers stand in a circle gesturing with their arms thrown over their heads, the smoke of their cigarettes like extensions of their fleeting thoughts. A breakbeat transforms the scene into a memory glitch.
Being in a club. A bassline sends out circling vibrations in all directions like a water runner on a puddle. A snare splits the air like thunder. Hi-hats circle the head like wasps around a glass of lemonade. A sound like an approaching train. A tabla, in triplet 16th notes, spirals its way out of the mixer.
Being torn between the now and the past. The body memory of a rave. Intensified frequencies let bodies talk by means of the movement that occurs between them. No space where people throw gun fingers in the air is ever empty.
00:31:04
Bump. Collision with a man. «Idiot!», he says, loud enough to hear but too quiet to cross the threshold of verbal violence.
Some bodies fancy themselves to be an island, an independent entity loosely floating around in a universal ocean. Preferring Glissant’s idea of archipelagos, a constellation of islands, aware of the fact that they are interdependent. Like dancing, being in public is a matter of space politics, and how they are driven by certain habits. They are often gender-specific. Thinking of a passage in McKenzie Wark’s new book Raving. «Straight cis men can’t dance without this self-consciousness. Can’t let the beat take them. Can’t dissociate out of their masculinity» (Wark 2023, 28).
00:32:28
Mumbling back: «You’re the idiot!», loud enough to hint a sense of mutual resonance, but too quiet to inflame a conflict. Two police officers who are checking someone’s passport, turn their heads. Smiling dumbly as to signalize they were not meant.
Being approached like that on the street is an «interpellation». An everyday instrument for reminding the individual of being a subject, i.e. «subjected». In In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical, the poet Fred Moten describes this as the moment when a police officer on the street calls out to a person, «Hey you!». As soon as one turns around, one becomes a subject. It suddenly encounters a larger social order and is confronted with an outside.
00:40:31
Changing the street side to avoid eye contact with an ex-lover.
The nervous system streams reality without ad interruptions.
00:42:34
Heading towards the canal. A street sign floats around in the blackish fluid, which mirrors a broken image of the city as blurry lights reaching into the sky. Laughing people sit on the curbside.
Heartbeat in sync with the snare drum. Typing «Lidl» into the Maps search. The nearest one is 3.9 kilometers away. Neighborhoods like that. The breathing of people in cafés, the exhalation of restaurant ventilation systems, the neon light of the agencies, and if you want, some other urban contrasts. All the while listening to a drone or so. This is the shit. Complete dissolution when people are doing something mundane.
00:44:00
The reggaeton-like rhythms slow down the heartbeat, as the walking tempo has become slower. Stopping at the traffic lights as the engine of a sports car begins to howl like a nervous bull eager to hunt the red tissue.
Wait, or is the sound coming from the music? The merging of «real» and musical sound creates a tension like an impending thunderstorm. The clouds over Berlin are moving fast, as if they didn’t give a fuck. Outside and inside, fantasy and reality: blurred. A sonic worlding happens when everyday sound turns into music, and when music feeds back into everyday sounds. The ear, freed from the usual jump-cuts, is not interested in difference. It waits until composition occurs.
00:48:21
Standing in line for a double espresso, slightly overhearing an ongoing conversation about some TV show.
There is a kind of automated dramatization when music collides with dialogue. The evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres. The alienation effect of randomly juxtaposed sensations, LOL.
00:49:07
Constantly dodging people on the crowded sidewalk.
Being like Super Mario bumping its head on obstacles to raise the score, forced to act as the situations are produced on an assembly line. No time to overthink. Bad metaphors are the result of a lazy perception of reality.
01:04:34
Passing by islands of people sitting on the grass as the sun starts to hide behind a cloudy horizon. Letting go of the tension of the contested traffic zone.
Urban life like sonic hypertext. Every manhole cover, leaf, branch, bird, spit spot, bush, and chewing gum stamped into the street refers to something else. All interwoven yet immediately flattened by the three rhetorical sweeping attacks developed in liberal democracy in order to keep real difference at bay: metaphor, synecdoche, and metonymy, there to bring the supposedly escaped unknown back home. Wanting to be something instead of just like something. A bass drum or a drone in a club music tune that is not related to a pre-existing musical or «natural» source.
01:32:59
Watch the moving feet to avoid stepping on broken glass.
Feeling like copied and pasted by an anonymous pointing finger. One second we are happily strolling around and the next, the moment is gone and one has always been the abyss in a universe of arcane patterns.
01:38:14
Approaching the park exit, sensing the change of temperature as the houses radiate the heat stored from the day.
Three oncoming men. At 21:19, the poorly lit path turns into a paranoid contact zone. A shootout between looks and affect. Automated matching of class characteristics, walking styles, and voice intonation. Wondering what this would be like as a woman or PoC. Between real threat and imagined danger lies only a thin membrane. Tension and release. Like jazz, foreplay, or a good dubstep.
01:43:41
Stepping on asphalt.
The streets appear swept empty. Becoming invisible, enjoying it. As a white male, you can flow through the world without hurdles like through the Gruen transfer of a shopping mall. This game changes completely for Black, trans, female, or PoC people, often disguised in microaggression. Claudia Rankine in Citizen: «In line at the drugstore it’s finally your turn, and then it’s not as he walks in front of you and puts his things on the counter. The cashier says, Sir, she was next. When he turns to you he is truly surprised. Oh my God, I didn’t see you. You must be in a hurry, you offer. No, no, no, I really didn’t see you».
01:47:01
The mix is over, but still not back at home. Like in John Coltrane’s «Interstellar Space» or Jlin’s «Carbon 7». Music that refuses to return to the key tone. Alienated and loving it.
