Memory Stick
And here we are, in a time in which a Kamchatka pensioner doing the crossword can check the Internet for the image of a cookie that made a French writer famous. We live in a time in which the bizarre collectors of Vaginov’s novel, the founders of the “Society for the Collection of Trivia,” should be acknowledged as visionaries. A quick Internet search for unusual museums proves the point: Museum of Toast Portraits of Famous People, World Carrot Museum, Virtual Museum of Scams and Frauds, Museum of Odd Socks, Gallery of Obscure Things, Museum of Funeral History, The Trash Museum, Virtual Museum of Cigar Box Art, Zymoglyphic Museum, Banana Museum, Pretzel Museum, Museum of Toilets, Museum of Modern Madness. . Theorists of popular culture would no doubt claim that virtual museums are an ironic subversion of the cultural canon, for as we all know, the institution of the museum is there to keep strict watch on the canonical order. But even this is a moot point, because we live in a time in which museum architecture has turned the traditional concept of the museum on its head, a time in which a museum’s architecture is inevitably far more important than its contents. Today, museums are rarely built to house art, rather, they are, in and of themselves, works of art. The hypothetical notion — those with art will also need a museum — has today become — those with a museum will get art.
We live in a time of archive fever. We compete with our media gods and goddesses. There we are, walking through the world with our memory sticks around our necks, each of us with our own homepage, each of us with an archive stored on the web. There are also those who wear their archives on their own skin, in the form of tattoos. And we are everywhere: our fingerprints left on scanners at border crossings, in medical clinics and files, on all kinds of cards confirming our membership in different organizations — from fitness clubs to the Subscribers for Posthumous Assistance. We haul our invisible freight through the world, our documents, our power and phone bills, our address books, our bank and business cards. We walk through the world well networked and connected, with MySpace and Facebook, phone numbers stored in mobile phones, family albums stored on the web, with souvenirs and photos of our children in the windows of our apartments (a little Dutch quirk). All of these are our archives. They’re how we assure ourselves of eternity. And the more voluminous the archive that trails us, the less of ourselves there is. Yet we head off into battle with renewed energy: with camcorders and digital cameras, recording our voices, our thoughts, our everyday lives down to the minutest of details. In this private big brother show, this public big brother show, we record everything: the hypothetical moment of conception, the embryo, the baby in utero, birth, first steps, first words, first birthdays. And the richer our archives become, the less of ourselves there seems to be. We don’t communicate with each other. None of us has the patience for others’ photo albums, holiday pictures, or videotapes, which long went out the window in any case. Oh so modern, we put things on YouTube so anyone can gawk at them. We used to send out ghostly signals of our existence, and now we make fireworks out of our lives. We enjoy the orgy of being, twittering, buying new toys, iPhones and iPads, and all the while our hunger just grows and grows. We wear memory sticks around our necks, having of course first made copies. The memory stick is our celestial sarcophagus, our soul, our capsule, our soul in a capsule. One day we will be catapulted into the Great Archive, where someone will find and open us like a black box.
In the meantime, our work will see us turn up in some new place, in a cheap hotel room, with a completely unjustified sense of control over our lives. With indignation we’ll discover that the cheap room doesn’t have an Internet connection, or a television. We’ll try and fall asleep reading a book, but we won’t quite manage. .
You cannot get to sleep because you lie so narrowly, in an attempt to avoid contact with anything that isn’t shielded by sheets and pillowcase. The first sign then, in an excessive attention to the bed, an irresistible anxiety about the hundreds who have slept there before you, leaving their dust and debris in the fibres of the blankets, greasing the surface of the heavy, slippery counterpane. The dust of others, and of other times, fills the room, settles on the carpet, marks out the sticky passage from the bed to bathroom.
[9]
And as the pale morning light comes through the window we’ll helplessly watch the dust falling upon us like a fine snow.
June 2010
[1]Danilo Kiš, The Encyclopedia of the Dead, trans. by Michael Henry Heim (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 39.
[2]Ibid., 43.
[3]Ibid., 39.
[4]Ibid., 40.
[5]Ibid., 41.
[6]Ibid., 43.
[7]Ibid., 42.
[8]Ibid., 56–57.
[9]Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 17.
AFTER WORD
A POSTCARD FROM BERLIN BY DAVID WILLIAMS
1.
The shopping bag, the shuffle, the Old Testament beard, and the pants pulled up around his belly button mark Detlef as gently eccentric, and the couple of thousand people gathered in Berlin’s Mauerpark on a sunny Sunday afternoon love him for it. Twenty years ago the Mauerpark was a no man’s land between East and West Berlin, and Detlef, singing his almost famous German version of Sinatra’s “My Way,” would have been shot. The impresario of this celebration of the awkward and the awful (and ironic?) is an Irish bicycle courier who goes under the pseudonym Joe Hatchiban — from the Japanese Juhachiban, (“number eighteen” or “lucky karaoke song”). YouTube confirms that like Detlef, Hatchiban is now a local and budding global personality. In his many media interviews he concedes the strangeness of hosting karaoke afternoons on a former death strip, but like the journalists who interview him, he struggles to articulate what it all means. Der Spiegel suggested that it was “just a good old-fashioned good time.”
2.
In “Karaoke Culture,” the essay that opens and defines this collection, Dubravka Ugrešić writes that as a cultural critic (a “dubious guild”) she is, in karaoke, ready “to see more than just desperate squawking to the backing track of ‘I Will Survive’.” As she maintains, “karaoke supports less the democratic idea that everyone can have a shot if they want one, and more the democratic practice that everyone wants a shot if there’s one on offer.” Mauerpark karaoke celebrates feeling über alles: the worse the performance, the more enthusiastic the crowd. One struggles to imagine the skinny Canadian tourist squealing Prince’s “Kiss” and doing one-armed push-ups in the loneliness of his bedroom, but give him the Mauerpark crowd and he’s ready to go. Anonymous and amateur, the Canadian tourist doesn’t “display any artistic pretensions, or any particular concern about authorship.” His creation is neither plagiarism nor imitation, “because both terms belong to a different time and a different cultural system.”