Al Burian

            The Süddeutsche Zeitung informs me that a group of Parisian hausbesetzer, or, as the French so charmingly call them, squatteurs, have occupied a building downtown. This would not necessarily be big news, except that downtown Paris is not like downtown Detroit- these people are not living in an abandoned factory or warehouse. Their squat is literally an abandoned castle, in one of the cities’ most expensive neighborhoods, nestled between restaurants and art galleries. The paper begins its account with a description of the castle’s interior splendor. Saxophone is bleating out of one room; a play is being rehearsed in another. Not bad! The owner of the castle, an eighty-seven year old woman whose plans to refurbish the decaying building ran aground sometime in the 60’s, has come by once or twice and apparently has hit it off nicely with the squatters. “She even brought wine,” one of the occupiers is quoted as marveling. The SZ op-eds, “French citizens have a high degree of sympathy for protest, be it strikers, demonstrators, or a worker taking their boss hostage in the office. Perhaps in these small revolts they hear the echo of the great revolution.”

            An echo it is: Jeudi Noir (“Black Thursday”), the group responsible for the action, are not militant left-wingers, they are performance artists, trying to bring attention to the current housing crisis in Paris, where rents are astronomical, despite almost ten percent of apartments in the city sitting vacant. “If a building is empty, the homeless have a moral right to occupy it,” says a Jeudi Noir spokesperson. The group originated when its founders met while viewing apartments they could never afford for fun. They decided to begin bringing champagne and confetti to these apartment viewings, transforming them into “happenings.” And now, having snuck in the side door at the Place des Vosges 1-B, they’ve constructed their biggest performance piece yet, a semi-permanent installation with references to 1980’s and 1790’s political activism, all at once. A coup!

            In my own neighborhood, long over-run by restaurants and art galleries, the squat at Brunnenstrasse 183 has just been evicted. The building had been occupied since 1992, and almost two decades later remained one of the last of its kind left in Berlin. Seventeen years, admittedly, is a long time to go without paying rent. At the time of its closing Brunnenstrasse 183 housed a weekly bike workshop, a library, a bar, 47 people ages 5 to 62, and prominently in the storefront, the Umsonstladen, or Gift Shop, where everything was free and a sign on the door advised you that “you are now leaving the capitalist sector.”  I visited this place a few times, picking up everything from literature to a spare coffee mug. The atmosphere inside was always tense and unfriendly, with unidentifiable oi-punk blaring from a small tape player in the corner while people with short hair in front and dreadlocks in back stood huddled in groups, muttering to one another and eyeing you suspiciously, as though you might be a narc. 

German squatting has a general air of intense political seriousness, as opposed to French performance art squatting. “Interior splendor” is not a phrase I would use to describe any such locales I’ve visited in Germany, though, in truth, I have seen some pretty nice ones. Anarchy does not generally equal chaos in the case of autonom spaces; mostly they are orderly and regimented, often adorned with elaborate chore wheels and bi-weekly mandatory meetings to attend. That’s too much bureaucracy for the USA mind to handle– we want freedom with our anarchy. America is all splendor: Providence, Rhode Island’s Fort Thunder, the closest US approximation to European squatter mentality I’ve seen, had some moments of interior decoration that were pretty stupendous. Like Jeudi Noir’s castle, a simulacrum, aesthetically influenced by the unorthodox arrangements of squat living conditions, but without articulated or overtly political intentions. Jeudi Noir has no economic analysis of why so much real estate is sitting empty; Fort Thunder had no concrete strategic resistance plan in place the day the landlord came to throw them out. 

The eviction on Brunnenstrasse was brief and dramatic: the street cordoned off by cops, the park filled with spontaneous protestors (the age of the cell phone: satellite lines jammed by crust punks calling all their friends to get over here, fast), then the cops were in the building; a few hold-outs up on the roof waved flags, briefly, and that was it. The crowd dispersed as ethereally as it had materialized, back to the Rosenthaler U-Bahn station, back into the flow of things, back into atomized life. The next day, I passed by the building, now a ghostly apparition, with empty windows and its monumental mural still out front. Wir Bleiben Alle, say huge, four-story letters painted along the entirety of the apartment house. We’re All Staying. As the days go by and the window are knocked out and boarded up the mural grows to seem somber as a tombstone.

One thing that bothers me about Berlin in the year 2010 is that, if you approach things naively, with no sense of the heretofore, and just go, oh, this place looks pretty cool, there will always be some old-timer who has been around forever on hand to say, no, this is nothing, you should have been here 15 years ago, you should have seen it then, everything was so much better. It’s not that I can’t sympathize with the vantage point: news is mostly bad, and everything does seem to get a little worse every day, when you calculate it along those lines. Especially so when you have in your recent history a notable period of mass euphoria and widespread access to the feeling of freedom to measure your hangover against. Freedom! Despite their organizational efficiency, the Germans love their tastes of it too. The “you should have been here in 1920, that was when it was really going on” crowd is just going out of circulation in Berlin, and already glasnost has upped the ante. Against 1989 partying, maybe everything seems bounded, limited, an ultimate disappointment, a shadow of what was, or what could have been. But things are moving in both directions. It depends on whether you are counting deaths or births. 

            I left all of my LPs in Chicago, stored (hopefully) safely at Andy’s place, in an apartment equipped with two hyperactive pit-bulls to ward off thieves with a taste for 80’s hardcore and/or Reckless records’ $3-and-under selections circa 2000-2008. I did, however, bring one handful of records, using no particular selection process, merely grabbing the top of the pile of recently listened-to discs. A few months later, in the here and now, that selection process has proven itself an interesting psychological experiment. Like all civilized humans, I possess more MP3s than I will possibly ever be able to listen to in my lifetime, and yet I find myself, more often than not, turning to those 20 or so randomly selected LPs for musical solace and listening pleasure. It might be the physicality of the objects which makes them appealing, or it might simply be that while sitting at the computer typing it is more pleasant to have sounds coming from elsewhere in the room than from the tiny, tinny speakers directly below my face. And there is something cool about having such a limited musical palette: it reminds me of being a teenager, back when I actually only owned about twenty or thirty records, and each new purchase was like opening up a new world. When I got my first punk record, around 13, I hated it, but what could I do? I only had about six other ones. So I was forced to listen to it, to try to figure it out and understand it, and when I eventually did, the moment of illumination was amazing, one of the watershed experiences of my life. The records that ingrained themselves in my soul the most deeply, in retrospect, were the ones that I listened to because I had no other choice.

            So here I am, once again unable to discern whether I am the victim or the beneficiary of my own impulsive actions. Should I really be listening to Poison Idea’s “Feel the Darkness” this often? How about Kool Keith’s “Sex Styles”?

            A good number of these records turn out to be my friends’ bands. Mike Taylor’s new project, Flaws, make a showing at the top of the pile, not only because it’s an awesome LP, but also because this was the last record I got in Chicago, received in the mail only days before I split town. The Rights Reserved LP, on the other hand, has been in regular rotation since I got it in the mid-90’s; listening to it evokes countless great times with those boys in North Carolina, and the silk-screened cover gives it a personal touch that makes me understand, in a literal sense, why they call these objects records. Sweet Cobra’s “Forever” is both very sad - guitarist Matt Arluck passed away just a few months ago - and very funny, since singer Botchy Vasquez’s primal bellowing is offset for me by the memory of Botchy watching Sesame Street with his son and singing along (in a tender falsetto) to “everybody poops.”

            The strangest record in my small collection, though, would have to be Canadian Rifle’s “Visibility Zero.” Listening to this never fails to conjure odd feelings and memories. In 2006, I was living in squalor on the south side of Chicago, having grown a long and tangled beard, as well as an unhealthy fixation on the Unabomber manifesto and the idea of “going off the grid.” I was playing no music, doing no writing, making no art. I had given up. Then, one afternoon, Jake and Tim stopped by the house with a demo of their band in tow. They played it for me and asked if I’d like to join as second guitarist. “This was demo of the month in last month’s MRR,” Tim assured me, as if I needed those credentials of quality in order to make my decision. The music was not really my thing at the time (I was in a heavy Stevie Wonder phase, incongruously enough), but still: upbeat, melodic, gruff punk rock– why not? That affirmative decision led me to a year and a half of unbridled, debaucherous fun with the Rifle, who turned out to be basically my dream band. I accompanied them on a few short and entertaining tours in vans of rapidly descending vehicular soundness: off to the east coast in Tim’s mom’s mini-van, then back around again in a clattering econoline borrowed from friends of Felix von Havok in Minneapolis. My official contributions to the band include playing on the second Canadian Rifle 7”, and on the purely brilliant “Live in Elgin” tape, which contains, between the out-of-tune musical mayhem of its songs, hands down the finest between-song banter in the history of recorded music.

            However, even the good vibes of these stalwart young men could not prevent my downward slide back into comatose depression, and I quit the band melodramatically one morning in November 2007, as they were on their way to pick me up for a short weekend trip to, of all places, Canada. The band immediately reformulated and soldiered on as a three piece. They recorded this LP sometime in early 2009. I’ve regretted my decision to bail out quite a bit in the ensuing time, and it was only upon hearing the record that I realized what a good idea quitting had been: no longer required to actually participate, I am now free to like this band. And like it I do: upbeat, melodic, gruff punk rock– why not? My one complaint would be the last song on side A, which doesn’t do much for me; but even that has an upside. Now, instead of having to have long, convoluted arguments about it in an unheated practice space, I can just skip that one.    

            Remember that time the band crashed on your floor and your cats peed on my sleeping bag? I was thinking about it even then. The whole drive home, in fact, I was fervently imagining the better world, out there, waiting for me.

            In the storage room at Andy’s house in Chicago, in the sleeping bag (as we were leaving, you, a mohawked midwestern twentysomething, had mumbled, “hey dude, it’s punk rock. And, you were sleeping in Missy’s favorite spot”), contemplating my present place in space and time and finding it, as usual, inexplicable- my mind wandered back, once again, to fixate on a brief conversation I’d had with Krawalla, in 1999. I had said, Berlin seems like it would be a cool city to live in, and she’d offered me a room in her apartment available immediately; I explained that I had a job and the band going on back at home, which got me an invitation to join her band and a list of possible job options that all sounded better than the one I had. Yeah, I’d thought enthusiastically, this seems like it would be a pretty cool city to live in, but then the conversation had veered on into something else or I’d gotten distracted from the future possibility by the now of some great graffiti mural or weird old building. That conversation replays itself in my head and I realize that that was it, the moment to jump ship, and I missed it, ten years later, no matter how much time goes by, I’ll always have missed it.            

            But, actually: as anyone who has walked the plank can tell you, there is not one brief, momentary opportunity to jump ship. It can take all day. And so I missed plenty of other opportunities too, over time, and each time I did, the myth of what I was missing became that much more amplified and compelling to me. Oh, that roiling sea, and the tantalizing continents beyond it!

            Utopia achieved: single apartment, Zionskirchstrasse, Berlin. This is literally my wildest dream, the fallback fantasy I would turn to whenever my life seemed too rough or uncivilized. My imagined life here was so nice, so pain-free and flawlessly executed, that it almost atoned for my actual life, with its various wrong turns and disastrous collision courses. Somewhere else, in some alternate reality, I was living in Prenslauerberg and doing everything right. 

It’s strange to have your wildest dream snatched from you; it gives you less to dream about. It makes being depressed inconvenient: when things go wrong or get trying, where am I supposed to wish I’d rather be now? And doing what?