Karaoke Culture

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.”

3.

Whether we are polite children of the southern German provinces or bourgeois-bohemian migrants from across oceans, Berlin is not so much a projection screen for fantasies of a life more exciting (and certainly more affordable), but a screen on which to play out these fantasies. A little rebellion here, a little self-invention there — karaoke on the death strip is just the start. In the spirit of the mayor of Berlin’s declaration that the city is “poor but sexy,” we think of ourselves the same way. We don’t wonder whether the one-in-five Berliners who are structurally unemployed would perhaps be happier being a little less sexy, if only they were a little less poor. At this moment Berlin is the ultimate karaoke-city, a place to be “somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else.” As Ugrešić writes, “karaoke culture in all its manifestations unites narcissism, exhibitionism, and the neurotic need for the individual to inscribe him or herself on the indifferent surface of the world, irrespective of whether the discontent individual uses the bark of a tree, his or her body, the Internet, photography, an act of vandalism, murder, or art. In the roots of this culture, however, lies a more serious motive: fear of death. From the surface of karaoke culture shimmers the mask of death.”

4.

Ugrešić’s 1997 novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender was elegiacally named for a museum that no longer existed. The museum, housed in the building in Berlin in which Nazi Germany signed its capitulation to the Soviet authorities, had closed three years earlier. It re-opened in 1995 with the somewhat more benign name, the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst. The barracks surrounding the museum so poignantly described by Ugrešić’s narrator have now largely been torn down, and the Soviet officers’ quarters next door to the museum are currently being converted into luxury apartments. As Ugrešić writes in this collection, “freedom from knowledge, from the past, from continuity, from cultural memory and cultural hierarchy, and an inconceivable speed — these are the determinants of karaoke culture.”

5.

Christoph Koch, a German journalist, has just published a book about his trauma of going forty days and forty nights without the Internet or a mobile phone. Other journalists have been interviewing him about his messianic survival in the wilderness. In recent years hotels, cafés, airports, and all kinds of other places have advertised Internet access as a selling point, but we can’t be far from a time when black zones beyond Google’s reach will be priced at a premium.

6.

Ugrešić the essayist has always been a switch hitter. Within collections, and even within individual essays, she writes alternately as elegist, diatribalist, satirist, ironist, and on occasion, moralist. Her first essay collection was published in 1993, and in the original Croatian was called Američki fikcionar (American Fictionary), but the book appeared in English as Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream. In response to Ugrešić’s notes on couch potatoes, organizers, shrinks, and jogging, a reviewer for The New York Times wrote “judging by this book, Ms. Ugrešić saw little of the United States, made few friendships of any depth and watched television a lot.” Much got lost in translation with that change of title.

7.

Almost three hundred years ago Jonathan Swift modestly proposed that the starving Irish sell their children as food for the rich. At the time, and in the intervening years, some readers have taken Swift literally, but no one has ever taken these people seriously. In “Assault on the Minibar,” either Ugrešić or her narrator (which?), fed up with the totalitarian assumption of guilt that she is going to steal from the minibar and not pay for it, confesses to scratching “Death to the Minibar!” into the little locked fridge, throwing it in the bath, and turning on the faucet. Thinking about the victimized little minibar in Room 513, the aforementioned New York Times reviewer will no doubt be first to call the police.

8.

In this summer of 2010 Ugrešić presented a version of the essay “The Elusive Substance of the Archive” as the closing keynote address at an academic conference in the United Kingdom. Backed by small armies of footnotes and appeals to the authority of literary history and literary theory, we scholars (and those of us impersonating scholars) had hammered the theme of “Archive” for almost a week. At the conclusion of Ugrešić’s address the applause continued well beyond that required by courtesy. In three-quarters of an hour, the reflections of a novelist seemed to contain more truth about the subject than we had collectively managed, with the help of Benjamin, Joyce, Borges, and Sebald, in days. These lines hit hardest: “We walk 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. We, are everywhere. . And the more voluminous the archive that trails us, the less of ourselves there seems to be. . We don’t communicate with each other. . 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.”

9.

A visit to the “Foreigner’s Office” (Auslandsamt) in Berlin is a bowel-voiding experience, more like a Battle Royale fixed by the invisible hand of fear than a tranquilized wander through IKEA. My game began on a January morning at 5:30 A.M. The Office is located in a semi-industrial part of Wedding, a Berlin neighborhood that has all the social problems of a Parisian banlieue—with all that word implies about migration and poverty — yet none of the architectural violence. Were it not so poor, Wedding would be pretty. A Bulgarian friend — an experienced player — had given me an insider tip on the unwritten rules of the game. The first and most important rule, she declared, is to be in line outside the building no later than 6:15 A.M. The second is to have memorized the building’s complex floor plan, so when doors open just before 7:00 A.M. you’ll get to the necessary section among the top dozen finishers. If you don’t manage to pull a waiting number by 7:10 A.M., you won’t be among the day’s competitors. The only consolation is that — at least at this stage — disqualification is only temporary. You can get up at 5:30 A.M. and compete again tomorrow.

10.

The floor plan of the Berlin Foreigner’s Office offers a fascinating lesson in German (and European) geopolitics. Asylum seekers are quarantined in a separate building; illegal “new entrants” to Germany aren’t allowed above the ground floor (i.e. they’re non-starters in the game who never even get to level one); Turks have a spacious floor to themselves; alone together, former Yugoslavs (minus the upgraded Slovenians) get to renew old acquaintances on a floor of their own; the Soviet Union, minus the three upgraded Baltic states (replaced by Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan!), is reassembled in Berlin exile — Eastern Europe is certainly not lost; while a wild mix of countries, from Indonesia to the United Arab Emirates to Somalia, mingle in an exclusively Muslim brotherhood. Even the grouping together of the entire Americas, Oceania, Israel, much of wealthier Asia, and central and southern Africa has its own “leftover” logic.

11.

With the dulcet inflections of my New Zealand accent, my German is gentle on local ears, and a Danish bloodline on my maternal grandfather’s side has granted me a fortunate “northern” complexion. When longer than a couple of inches, my hair resembles sheep’s wool from my homeland, and so I keep it closely-shorn. Even the most distinctive piece of clothing I own — calf-height sheepskin-lined winter boots — make me look more like an Austrian high-country farmer than a “real” foreigner. I mean, it’s not like I’m a Romanian Gypsy in Sarkozy’s France, I think — I’m not even a Romanian Gypsy in Romania. But sitting in the waiting room, I’m convinced that disqualification looms. Maybe they have it on file that twelve years ago I got caught without a ticket on the Munich S-Bahn? And that, like all unreliable foreigners, I gave a false address? And what of my history with minibars?

12.

The setting has changed, but the smell of anxiety in the room is one I know well. I remember it from over a decade ago when traveling the Gastarbeiter bus routes between Sarajevo and Munich. I’ll never forget the silence at every westwards border crossing, a silence that could hang in the air for over an hour, which is often how long it took for Croatian, Slovenian, Austrian, or German border guards to enter the bus. The delay seemed like a carefully calibrated fear multiplier — and it worked. On a bleak January morning in Berlin, the same delay does its work on me. Like the narrators of “Battle Royale” and “The Fly,” I go back over the details that have gotten me to the waiting room, hoping to exonerate myself from blame while simultaneously “stitching” them together. My parents may have taken me away from my first homeland of Fiji at a young age, but the rest I did on my own. I sometimes think of my willing departure for Bosnia in my early twenties as “an irreparable mistake committed at the age of ignorance” (a Kundera line from my internal repository). But the “thread” continues to this day in Berlin, as I, neither Ossie nor Wessie, working on the translation of this collection, find myself in so many of its scenarios.

13.

Most often we talk about certain musicians providing the soundtracks to our lives, or of friends who act as mirrors in which we see our own changing reflections. Whether in the sadness of Bosnia, the museum and karaoke-city of Berlin, or lost in the fibre optic Google galaxy, worried that its speed is wrecking my capacity to watch Andrei Rublev from beginning to end, Dubravka Ugrešić’s writing has been with me for some time now. From former Yugoslavs at “home” and in the diasporic cities of Western Europe, North America, and Australasia, to inquisitive New England college students and their well-educated parents, to the global metropolitan literati dreaming of having the guts to write like her, Ugrešić’s writing undoubtedly accompanies a mass of unnamed others. The essays in Karaoke Culture are new postcards sent from a space both inside and outside the global village. They are written by an author who when making jokes makes sure she has her turn on the receiving end, when mourning or moralizing questions her right to do so, and who when serving up satiric indictments has her own name appear among the accused. In a less anonymous and less liquid epoch, these things might have been called the responsibility of the writer.

Berlin, February 2011