Samsterdam's blog

...space...Once, when I was younger, I took a topical film class and was never able to watch even the most mindless film without considering framing decisions, pace of editing, shot variation, lighting, and art direction, ever again. Then, I took a class about the partner concepts of space and place, and I was never able to be anywhere at any time without considering how my surroundings were acting upon me, and how I was behaving in them.

It seems strange I lived most of a whole life, having scarcely considered an idea so pervasive and omnipresent. It seems futile now to consider other countries a foreign entity, or my own so familiar. To think of my room as a rectangular space filled with my belongings, and not a place ridden with energy and happenings, seems just as misguided. I see now that we govern the role our familiar spaces play in our lives, the acts we perform in them. I see also that a place, and my sense and understanding of it, is informed—even created—by the extent to which my person remains intact in it.

If you go somewhere unfamiliar to you, and find you feel more yourself than ever, that there’s a strange and metaphysical force working on you…it may be the way the buildings are stacked, or the way the buildings are sprawled, or the ratio of green to gray, or the amount of sparkly mineral in the pavement that reminds you of a certain stretch nearby your house, or the way the people glare as you pass, or the way they give you the sensation the same language is being spoken, or the complete and utter lack of resources, or an abundance of them…there’s likely to be more of you in that sensation than the place itself.

I’m grateful that this class served as my goodbye to Gallatin, as I attempt the oh-so-collegiate move to another country. It has helped me to see the move as merely a concrete shift of location, and to not assume that certain emotions and events will have any bearing on the new. The lighthearted participatory and conversational component in our class was an educational merit and privilege that was not lost on me. Voluminous gratitude to Steve, and all you radical people.

Why did you choose to recall a past foreign experience, as opposed to exploring something in your immediate midst?

It was important to me to write from an outsider’s perspective, as most of my work done in this class has been about being a native New Yorker in New York City. It’s easy for Western European cities to feel comfortable, as one can usually point to more similarities than differences between there and America. But I was really never able to decide if that was true of Germany.

So which place is your favorite—Lyon, Brussels, Berlin, or New York?

Your loyalties shift when you live in a place for a time. There’s a lot of amorous fawning over one’s abroad location—it’s normal, I think, to even deprecate America from abroad and upon return. It’s a bit of a defense mechanism, but I definitely sensed it was a common way for myself and my fellow abroad students to deal with being away. There’s a lot of talk about how impossible people make it for themselves to live in the present, to actually be with the place they’re in. But I certainly find that one’s favorite place is always the place they’re currently in. You follow yourself everywhere. In these pieces, I tried to convey that who I am as a person, and how that was conveyed through my actions, were the most influential factors to my sense of place.

What are these pieces about, at their core?

They're about how when you’re in a new place for a long stretch, you still instinctively do the things you would do in your native country—eat the same things, behave the same way. I wasn’t under the constraints of needing to feel like a German, for example, because I sensed I naturally would after living in the place for 4 months. A new and unfamiliar place does not necessarily provoke a different behavioral set.

How do you engage with the authors we’ve read this semester?

The idea to write anecdotal short pieces was obviously inspired by Frazier’s style in “Gone to New York.” The incorporation of other people’s stories, and bits of history (most noticeably in the Lyon/Beaujolais segment) is reminiscent of Frazier’s style-switching between narrative and academic. But more often than not, unlike Frazier, I aimed to cover a broad range of observations, as opposed to exploring one. This is the tourist’s perspective. In the second piece, I write about a singular incident, which should express my growing comfort with the place—and is hopefully mirrored in my ability to write about it as an actual participant in the scene. The act of wandering and leading a lifestyle based on exploring is also meant to mirror Auster's "City of Glass."

How do the three pieces differ?

I wanted to write three that covered a spectrum of sentiment about the places, and my growing or dwindling sense of rooted-ness. In the first, I attempted to recount all my first impressions of the beginning days of being in Berlin, where I’m on shaky ground with the place. I wanted the tone to convey that since I was with forty kids who were my age and also native to America, I was hyperconscious of the moments in which things were unfamiliar, but that I was somewhat immune to the true feeling of loneliness that can sometimes induce. In the second, I relay an anecdote where my friends have become so comfortable in the place that they actually feel entitled to elicit a reaction from Germans, the native people. Whether it was done fairly or politely is definitely arguable, but our actions convey tremendous comfort with and control of the situation. In the third, I’m exploring places that felt very unfamiliar and unsettling by comparison. My observation of the culture is surface-deep, and my description of activity disjointed. I was sensing a tremendous lack of sense of place, and the culture divide felt more tangible, regardless of how familiar my Western European surroundings may have still been. The simple fact I was surrounded by less people like me is most of where that sentiment stemmed from.

photo courtesy of the author

BEGINNINGS

When I arrive at Arwobau Apartments in 63 Adalbertstraße in the East-Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg, I feel perfectly at home. I meet my roommate—a pink-haired and petticoat-ed artist from L.A. who calls herself Fiasco—and her best friend, who treat me to a just-cooked meal of vegan pasta, having already grocery shopped. I know instinctively that in this place, I will feel challenged, but never miserable.

I take my own trip to Kaisers, the market that lies just beyond the perfectly square reservoir and sloping green banks of Engelchen Park, where I find myself strangely drawn to German adaptations of American favorites—Special K with chocolate and strawberries, and the like. I buy my first canvas shopping bag, which depicts a frog kissing a lipstick-ed tortoise, encapsulated by a circular rainbow. “Schützt unsere Umwelt!” they say—Protect our Environment.

Later, downstairs in the room that looks just like mine, two floors down, I define NYU culture for Sean, a Duke student on the program. Having been thrown into a pool of what Sean is now calling “hipsters,” and having just drank the amount of vodka one might drink when you’re a Duke student with all NYU kids, Sean decides he’s going to style himself as one. He won’t be wearing underwear, he proclaims, since this is “what hipsters do.” He puts on a striped cashmere sweater—it gets a 4/10 from me and I beg him to put on my try putting on my wayfarers and flannel shirt. Instead, Sean moons me and twenty others. We talk and eat Haribo gummy bears, a German candy—not Japanese, like I thought. We research Kreuzberg bars on Time Out Berlin.

photo courtesy of: Michael Kenna: His brilliant photos profile the tone of "nothing," "nowhere," and "nobody." Those displayed are from his New York City series, featuring Grand Central Station.

If you distill Paul Auster’s “City of Glass” of its impressive plot intricacies and sweeping symbolism, you are most likely left with a vague series of locations and aimless wanderings. In this story, a character’s sense of self is defined by his sense of place, and quite often, by his disconnect from it. Daniel Quinn must ultimately resort to the visual to decipher Peter Stillman’s intentions—murderous or not—operating under the philosophy that Quinn himself lives by: that you know a man best by the path he walks.

There is a synonymity between Quinn and Stillman. Both are wanderers, walkers of places: “As he walked up Riverside Drive, he became aware of the fact that he was no longer following Stillman. It felt as though he had lost half of himself. For two weeks he had been tied by an invisible thread to the old man” (Auster 143). For both Quinn and Stillman, “City of Glass” is about their processes of place-and-self-integration. Auster writes of Quinn, “Remarkable as it seems, no one ever noticed Quinn. It was as though he had melted into the walls of the city” (178). And as far as Quinn from tell from his post in the alley, the Stillmans (both Sr. and Jr.) have done the same. Decidedly isolated from the locations that would bring Quinn back to reality, and to his case’s imminent solution, place and self become one and the same. This deminishes the possibility for actual places to provide any insight, and completely eliminates the significance of time. ...

In “City of Glass,” time acts as a marker, but also as a “noplace.” From the very beginning of the book, Auster (author, not character) writes in a bizarre mix of present, future, and conditional tense, always pointing to the inevitable future in which Quinn “would later forget” or “would later come to realize.” The thematical concepts of “nowhere” and “everywhere” merge, as do “nobody” and “everybody.” When Quinn finally tracks down the real Paul Auster and is introduced to his son Daniel, Daniel proclaims, “Everybody’s Daniel!” (157) It is the moments like these that foreshadow Quinn’s final goal to become one of the “numerous [people] with nothing to do, nowhere to go” (160). And when he does, he comfortably and silently realizes that the complete expulsion of all material goods is what gives him the most grounded sense of self and place.

With the elimination of meaning from place goes the elimination of meaning from objects. In the beginning, Quinn and Stillman are conjoined in spirit by their red notebooks. But then Stillman deconstructs Quinn’s notion of the object: “You see, the world is in fragments, sir. Not only have we lost our sense of purpose, we have lost the language whereby we can speak of it. These are no doubt spiritual matters, but they have their analogue in the material world. My brilliant stroke has been to confine myself to physical things, to the immediate and tangible” (120). If you change the function of an object, he says, it’s form changes, as with an umbrella when it’s fabric is torn off. You can no longer call it what it was. In the end, the notebook is the only thing that continues to give roots to Quinn’s sense of self and place. And he is left to write with the deaf mute’s pen, a symbol whose significance only increases with Quinn’s voluntary collapse into nothingness.

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The Sewer: ...and a vehicle to navigate!In my experiences as a tourist, there had never been a place I had not enjoyed in some capacity. Even if I didn’t make a personal connection with a place, and even if the visit was itself unpleasant, as a tourist, I could often reconcile a negative experience with an appreciation for what the place as an object--what it does for its locals, and where it lies in context of its environment.

And then there was the Sewer Museum in Brussels, Belgium. We visited, of course, for novelty, and perhaps for a few hilarious photo opportunities. We soon realized not even the acquisition of such a funny story to tell later was worth this trip. Infested with bugs and permeated with a horrendous odor, we wandered through (having not been supplied with a so much as a slicker), the only visitors in the place. Hands full of camera equipment, I dropped my scarf on the ground and the guide (the place’s sole employee--he also ran the coat check, the ticket counter, and the gift shop) gestured wildly that I must throw it out immediately.

It’s hard to understand why a city would pride itself on a place so inarguably unpleasant. Attachment to one’s homeland, as Yi-Fu Tuan describes it, can run so deep that it grants affection, for better or worse, with an indiscriminate gauge. Plus, if it’s there, why not put it to good, profitable use?

Visibility of space is another of Tuan’s theories that the Sewer Museum calls into question. Often, cities resort to the notion that “out of sight, out of mind” is the mantra to live by. Brussels is unabashed about most of its unpleasantries, so they not only refuse to mask their elaborate sewer system, but capitalize on it. The creation of space with defined boundaries, in defined physical terms, is most definitely in play here. But the Sewer Museum in Brussels explores the boundaries of convention with abandon, confident that the exposure of all aspects of their city enhances their culture and the experience of their tourists. And though I lost my favorite scarf and a little dignity in the process, the Sewer Museum definitely did.

Exploring...the vast abyss...

"Mass."

Though most of our human interaction occurs at emotional grade, there are moments where we react to a person’s physical being. We may find ourselves more at ease when in the company of someone we find comforting, or for no reason at all become suddenly repelled on an anatomical level. The modes of inter-personal physical relationships are fascinating, and these reactions—those that occur on a strictly tangible level—are why Tuan refers to people as “bodies” in chapter 4 of “Space and Place,” entitled “Body, Personal Relations, and Spatial Values.”

He writes, “The word ‘body’ immediately calls to mind an object rather than an animated and animating being” (34) but for me, the word “body” conjures up images of atoms, floating in space and bouncing off of each other, slowing up and speeding down with changing conditions. Our physical behavior sometimes mimics that of molecules, functioning at the most basic, biological level, governed by our ingrained bodily instincts. We fight over space and share in, when so inclined.

"Torque."

Tuan states that our two modes of physical being are the position we take, and the distance at which we place ourselves from others. As soon as he added the element of axes to his argument, I was reminded of a dance piece I participated in through my dance company. The overall theme of the concert was Transformation, and this one piece, as a subset of that theme, was about physics. The choreographer explored how objects transform through the lens of science, and articulated these changes through movement. The piece was split into five sections, and each focused a different element of physics: velocity, torque, mass, area, and acceleration.

The dancers articulated equal and opposite reactions, combining direction with speed and moving along axes. We behaved as molecules would under varying sets of circumstances. But we also operated independently of each other, operating under the influence of inertia, on a certain trajectory: “Every person is at the center of his world, and circumambient space is differentiated in accordance with the schema of his body” (41). I have included some pictures from the piece for visual correspondance.

"Area."
"Velocity."
"Acceleration."

The Dalton School

As high school graduation neared imminence, I remember being genuinely shocked at the discovery that most of my fellow students had grown embittered and disconnected from school—from the headspace, the ideals, even the place itself. “I’m so excited to never set foot in here again,” they would say. I would have stayed in high school forever, if it had been an option.

The Dalton School is renowned for cultivating an unlikely connection with its students, as it did with me. A “Survivor” is what they call people like me—a person who attended The Dalton School from Kindergarten to 12th grade. As a self-proclaimed “highly progressive” Upper East Side Private School environment, Dalton has gone to great lengths over the years to ensure itself as a place that nurtures all multiple intelligences. This standard has always been clearly and meticulously articulated in the school’s geography, architecture, and design.

The possibility of becoming truly acquainted with a city lies at the hands of many variables. A person can hold residence in a place forever and never quite gain a full grasp on its tone. The intended effect of an initial city plan is subjected, following conception, to the influence of all who pay a visit, either leaving a permanent park or passing through.

“The Stranger’s Path” as John Brinckerhoff Jackson describes it, is relative mostly to a town’s population. This path—its length, its depth of connection to history, its full realization—are intended to ease a traveler, typically a tourist, in gaining familiarity with a city or town and getting a sense of its essence. This path, Jackson asserts, generally begins with the bus or train station and ends with a city hall or the like, all along advertising “in crude form” the merits and amenities of the city. It becomes increasingly luxurious as it nears its end, a far cry from the poor establishments that surround the path’s starting point.

Köln Cathedral with Hauptbahnhof (at right)

Cologne, Germany, though, is a fine example of one such place that does not adhere to Jackson’s theory. Granted, he explicitly notes that “The Stranger’s Path” is markedly evident in American cities and towns, but Cologne exhibits a shockingly opposite effect from the one Jackson describes.

...en route...

The Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s national train system, runs entirely above ground. It is typical for a traveler to maintain full sight of a city through the process of approaching and entering the Hauptbanhof, or central train station. And when the traveler first exits Cologne’s Hauptbanhof, they are spat directly into the city’s main Platz, and at the foot of Cologne’s massive cathedral, the largest in the world.

Port Washington, Long Island

As a born New Yorker with a metropolitan solidarity complex, confronted deeply and many times over, I have always found it impossible to conceive of people having affection for the suburbs. My mother grew up a Long Island baby boomer in a town called Bellmore—her memory set is littered with stories of toy trains, milk men, weekend excursions to other parts of Long Island to see cousins with distinctly ‘50s names (Howie, Stewart, Dale), and her stay-at-home mother—with her many cocktail parties, her homemade trail mix, the year she decided to go to night school only to resign to the notion that her husband’s Mercedes dealership was sufficient to fund the family, her bridge games.

As soon as high school wrapped up, my mother fled to New York City and never looked back. Her brother, upon graduating law school, married and also moved to New York City—14th street (in the ‘80s), actually, a far more adventurous move than my mother had made. But as soon as the first child arrived, he and his wife moved promptly to Port Washington, Long Island, where they would buy a backyard swing set, two cars, a Wheaton Terrier, renovate the basement into a play room, and send a boy and a girl to a school with an emphasis on Hebrew Studies.

It’s understandable—considering the critical mindsets of so many like myself—that DJ Waldie feels he must make a case for the suburbs as pleasant living. Though expressed with a heavy-handed poetic device of muted, yet descriptive nostalgia, Waldie even apologizes for the notions we have so deeply engrained in us about the wasteful sprawl of the suburbs, and their capitalization on a rapidly dwindling American Dream. And yet, some really hold deep respect and admiration for the kind of lifestyle the suburbs have been able to afford their families. My uncle certainly thrives in his environment, even relishes in his daily commute to-and-from his law offices, located in New York City’s Midtown. And though I personally don’t see the appeal, many would.

Granted, there are some suburbs that (now approximately 60 years after their origination) do anything but cultivate an air of happy living. Some suburbs are pockets of immorality, promoters of crime and drug usage, places where kids hang out in 7-11 parking lots, operating under the (sometimes correct) assumption that it’s a more pleasant place than their own home. But my cousins, and everyone I know they know, are happy going (yes) to soccer practice, coming home (yes) to a table of milk and cookies, and doing homework in the family room with one short break to (yes) play fetch with the Terrier in their gated-off 20x20 foot backyard. Albeit routine and subdued, they live the kind of austere, monk-like existence that Waldie so clearly outlines. And they’re happy.

Kengo Kuma's "Water Block House Fragments" (2008)In the second half of “The Geography of Nowhere,” Kunstler transitions out of his embittered examination of gentrification and city planning. Adding elements of the psychoanalytical, he exposes the international notion of home, and the various materials we employ to help construct this ideal. Whether these materials function to our benefit or our detriment, though, is up for discussion.

The Prefabricated Dwelling, a style of architecture often simply referred to as “prefab,” has always been the ultimate in aiding denizens of the world in their reluctance to settle down. Those who value change in landscape over change in real estate or interior decoration are typically those who appreciate prefab homes, which are typically constructed of small, light, uniform pieces that can be stacked and packed into a small space and easily relocated and reassembled. The Lincoln Log cabin is one of the first examples of such a model, but one that uses materials typical of home construction.

In the Museum of Modern Art’s recent exhibit, “Home Delivery,” architects and masters of innovation from all over the world contributed their designs for prefab dwellings. Many of the featured designs were highly unconventional in their layout and use of materials. Perhaps the most organic and resourceful in his prefab home design was Kengo Kuma, a Japanese architect whose professional aim is to “recover the tradition of Japanese buildings and reinterpret it for the 21st century.”

Kuma’s “Water Block House Fragments” from 2008 are a stackable and interconnecting series of clear jugs that hold water. The jugs can be filled with dyed water to maximize the house’s outrageous aesthetic, or with clear to remain minimalist. During a move, the jugs are emptied of their water so that they are nearly weightless to transport. But when a plot of land is selected and the house is ready to be assembled, the jugs are individually refilled, immediately converting the house’s building blocks back to an industrial, stable material.

It’s not clear to me from Kunstler’s point of view how he would regard such an artistic and abstract foray into the notion of house-building, but it seems to me as though Kuma and his contemporaries have struck a happy balance. Their designs are, by nature, marketable to the restless human way, but they narrow that audience down to a niche that appreciates art and aesthetics in an unconventional manner.