The Character of Characters

To walk into the Buchstabenmuseum Schauplatz on Leipzigerstrasse is to enter open storage, the most gratifying kind of cramped space. Just inside the door is a neon T, twelve feet high, from an old DTV sign, just one piece of retired information in a mass of rust, paint and chrome. It‘s a grammar of factories, facades and commerce – disassembled, discharged from their origins and not exactly repurposed. – by Emily Segal

The Museum for Letters, Characters and Typefaces is really only these 200 square meters, packed with signage and vernacular type from public spaces in Berlin and surrounding areas. It feels like a walk inside an erector set or typesetting kit, with the kind of pleasurable violation of aura, scale and proximity also found in cargo holds, Costco and Vegas. 
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Curators Barbara Dechant, a type designer, and Anja Schulze, a press agent for the Stadtmuseum Berlin, started the project in 2005 based on Dechant‘s private type collection, and moved into the Schauplatz in 2008 when their cellars were full. The goal was to set up an archive and ‚recycling center‘ for three-dimensional lettering (not print) – a space for reading letters not just as text but as physical objects. The museum, which houses more than 300 pieces, is currently open only every second Saturday of the month.
Negotiating the chaos – which is dotted by official museum wall tags explaining the fonts‘ history – the curators point out their oldest example, a white handmade script that spells Schuhe, 50 or 60 years old. Then there‘s an M, one of 8 or 10 Ms left over from the big DDR Markthalle complex, next to a big white A from Kultur Kaufhaus Dussmann.  The thin bright blue „Rundfunk“ in the corner was scored „unofficially“ last year from the former Deutscher Demokratischer Rundfunk media center.
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Usually the acquisition process is classic urban rummage: Dechant and Schulze hear about a building about to be demolished, rent a half-ton truck and go rescue the letters themselves. But in the case of a set of big yellow letters that used to label a building in Lichtenberg, it was actually in the contract for demolition that the letters should be taken down neatly and delivered to the Buchstabenmuseum, which suggests the possible future of the museum as an official repository for landmarked type. The curators plan to move into a (much) larger space, where the letters could be spread out and the viewer could „see their patina.“ The imagined Buchstabenmuseum would have a permanent exhibition on the history of type with room for experimental shows and artists‘ projects.
The sole exception to the museum‘s three-dimensional-letters-only rule is an original menu from the „legendary“ Cafe Adler at Checkpoint Charlie. And not everything has a rich historical patina – there‘s a bright white neon sign from a 2009 H&M ad. Dechant finds the LED lights and attenuated R of a contemporary, chrome Daimler-Chrysler sign so „delicious“ she‘s painted full scale replicates of the letters on her bedroom walls.
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There isn‘t much room to walk among the piles. Hopping through, it‘s easy to take a turn and catch a view of the letters that isn‘t legible at all. All of a sudden, it‘s just stuff, junk, architectural detritus. When all textual, commercial and mnemonic qualities are lost, these materials could be as much cornice as phrase. This  moment –  when a letter‘s physical dimensions stand in the way of its interpretation as text – is the principle of the Buchstabenmuseum. For one, the curators see it as a semiotic challenge for exhibitions: „When we see an A or a B we know what that means, but when we look at the lettering of another culture we don‘t know the semantic content,“ remarks Schulze. „It would be an interesting approach for an exhibit, how signs of different cultures function as documents.“ This extends to other ideas Schulze outlines for the future: exhibitions about special characters, ligatures, the &-sign and the @-sign, plus the relations between letters and food, music, and cars.
It‘s underwear in the case of the Palmer‘s Unterwäsche P, books in the case of the DTV T that dominates the space: the letters wouldn‘t exist without the commercial production that the signs hawked in the first place. The Buchstabenmuseum‘s ‚method‘ of piling up letters as three-dimensional objects only emphasizes how the these big neon signs and rust angles are, first, artifacts of the world of manufactured things and second, things themselves.
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The museum‘s mission statement mentions „the increasing homogenization of the urban landscape“ and the „rise of the Corporate Logo“ as reasons why traditional signage must be rescued. One excellent example, the entire phrase ‚Rathaus Passagen‘ in acrylic, was recovered after the old sign was retooled in Plexiglas three years ago. But this kind of corporate rebranding and urban turnover is both scourge and source. Regarding a set of landmarked signage from the Karl Marx Buchhandlung in Friedrichshein, Schulze explained: „We‘re obviously happy that those letters have been preserved as a monument – they‘ll stay on the facade regardless of what business comes next in that space – though of course we had the hope that we‘d be able to take them in. On one hand it‘s a shame that these traditional companies close and are torn down, but at the same time we have an opportunity here to further explain the histories of these places. We‘re ambivalent.“
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Despite the museum‘s purported mission to present „the letter as a content-free sign,“ every letter in the room is not only an alphabetic sign but also a trace of what‘s left behind: either a building that‘s been torn down, or the new sign in its place. Every letter is a trophy of its origins. The Buchstabenmuseum can‘t help being about urban development; it is as much a typography museum as an archive of branding, logos, and corporate identities stamped on urban space. In light of this, it seems fitting that the store room is financed as a kind of public service by Tobias Wilmerhold, who‘s building a Motel 1 across the way in the clearing on Leipzigerstrasse –  the museum‘s own space is predicated upon this kind of regeneration and displacement.
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Dechant points out that the font on the wall labels is the standard font used on all German highway signs: unobtrusive, easily read, commanding. „It‘s like a system font on your computer,“ she says, „a font that‘s nothing.“ In any case, the Buchstabenmuseum itself proves that when it comes to letters, there‘s no such thing.   ◊

Momus

The musician-slash-writer-slash-blogger-slash-theorist Nick Currie aka Momus is hard to miss for his trademark eye patch and the group of oriental girls that are usually found in his wake. I’ll always think of this arrangement as Momus’ take on Muammar Gaddafi’s Amazonian guard. Last year he published two books, the novel The Book of Jokes (Dalkey Archives) a campy take on Arabian Nights, and The Book of Scotlands (Sternberg Press), which offers bizarre solutions for the nation-island. His literature is as provocative as his canny lyrics, dealing with subjects from incest and violence to futurism and the British government – though his soft voice always made it all sound like photo captions read from Vogue Bambini. I’ve interviewed the time-traveler via email: Momus in Osaka, me in New York. – by Eva Munz

You’re kind of an ethnological mystery to me: you were born in Paisley, Scotland, lived in London, Paris, Tokyo and New York. Why on earth did you choose Berlin?
I was living in New York, but two disasters befell it: Bush and 9/11 (I watched the second plane hitting the south tower from my roof in Chinatown). Everything changed; suddenly New York was full of flags, paranoia, and rubble. So I went to Japan, but I had visa and language issues, and my relationship with my girlfriend began to fizzle. So, in early 2003, I needed to choose a place within the Eurozone to live in. At first I went back to Paris, but I’d lived there before and found the city a bit aggressive and intense this time. A trip to Berlin in February 2003 convinced me that it was a much better city for me. I’d been visiting the city for years, and had had good experiences. There was a post-protestant deadness I liked in Berlin, a sobriety, as well as a liberalism (also post-protestant). There was also a sense that the city was unfinished, and welcomed input from visitors – particularly artists – on the existential question of what it could become. You don’t get that impression in Paris or London. Berlin’s attractive fluidity, and the excess capacity in its infrastructure (its empty buildings and trains, cheap rentals, and so on), was really attractive to me. I moved to the city and began to both buy into and sell (via my journalism and interviews) the myth of Berlin as a paradise for »creatives.« I don’t think it’s so much of a myth, actually. Berlin really is a paradise for creatives. It contains, preserved in aspic, every subculture which has ever existed. But it’s a laboratory as well as a museum; the cheap prices and lack of opportunities to sell out really do encourage experimentation. If you’re able to structure your time and impose self-discipline, Berlin is a great place to get things done.

Do you have a next dream destination where you’d want to live?
I’m in Osaka right now, and I’m thinking seriously about moving here next. In a way Osaka is the Berlin of Japan; it’s possible to live here very cheaply. Apart from the bread, beer and asparagus (better in Berlin), the food in Osaka is vastly superior and the city has a density, intensity and commercial dynamism Berlin couldn’t even dream of. Weird underground music (Oorutaichi, Doddodo) thrives here. It never gets too cold. And there’s some gorgeous scenery very close by; the ancient cities of Nara and Kyoto, the mountains and forests of Shikoku.

Where have you been in the last year? Which places did you travel to?
I spent a month in New York doing an art show, a month and a half in Osaka and Tokyo researching contemporary art – I’m curating a Japanese art exhibition in the UK in 2012. I traveled to Athens and the Greek Islands, and performed in Boston, Philadelphia, London, Utrecht, Eindhoven, Frankfurt, Paris, Madrid and Warsaw.

Does the rudeness of Berliners ever bring tears to your eyes - especially after living in Tokyo? (I lived in Asia for 8 years and upon my return I was traumatized.)
I think Japanese people are rude in their own, more subtle, way. For instance, if you’re a foreigner in the company of a Japanese person, they ignore you completely. And you’re constantly asked whether you know how to use chopsticks! I like the absolutely fanatical devotion Japanese bring to their service industries, the complete lack of ego, the sidelining of personality and mood. But I also like the complete opposite: a waiter who’s openly grumpy if he’s having a bad day, for instance. That strikes me as very human, and not a bad thing. The British and the Germans are like that. Grumpy, human. There’s something a little scary about the Japanese way, as well as inspiring and sweet.

Do you speak German?
If not: is that kind of liberating?
I speak a kind of pidgin German which gets me by. But yes, I do find it liberating not to read the newspapers in Germany, for instance. I devour other countries’ newspapers, which gives me the impression that the bad things newspapers tend to report only happen elsewhere, and that Berlin is the still eye at the centre of a global storm; a place where nothing happens, and you can just get on with your daily domestic life.

You’ve been wearing an eye patch over you right eye since you rinsed your contacts in contaminated Greek tap water in the late 1990s. What’s wrong with the Greek?
To be fair to Greece, it was actually cabin water from a ferry between Italy and Greece, so it might have been Italian! Anyway, the amoebas which infested my contact lens are very common, they’re called Acanthamoeba. What’s not so common is to get them living on the surface of your eye, and to lose the use of the eye because of them.

Are you aware of the loss of vision?
Do you remember the difference a second eye made?
I’m a little bit in denial about it. I keep the eye shut when the eye patch isn’t on, so that I don’t notice the black void on the right side. It frightens me, that void. Apart from allowing me to avoid people on the right of me in crowded railway stations, the missing eye also gave me depth perception, which was very nice when looking, for instance, at a naked woman’s body. Now breasts seem flatter to me, and essentially the same as photographs of breasts.

You have a very distinctive style in dressing. Kind of a salvation-army dandy chic. Japanese wabi-sabi with a Scottish quilt thrown in. How would you describe your sartorial choices?
I deliberately try to challenge a style of dressing I’d call »global monocultural,« which really means American. So I never wear jeans or hi-tech running shoes, and rarely T-shirts. I haunt uniform shops, especially those which combine traditional workwear with a certain secular sacredness (so Berufskleidung stores in Berlin, or Japanese workwear shops). I’m particularly attracted to clothes which encode otherness and inhibition. So, old people’s clothes, clothes from obscure professions and traditional cultures (as long as they aren’t too New Age looking), priestly clothes, peasant clothes, women’s clothes, clothes for fishermen and golfers, clothes donated to secondhand stores by the relatives of the recently-deceased. I mix these garments up, breaking their grammar in the manner of those childrens’ flip-card games where you can give someone a Scotsman’s beret, a Flemish peasant’s breasts, a miniskirt and some riding breeches. I’d recommend Tibor Kalman’s book (Un)fashion.

How would you dress if you were for some reason really, really fat?
Like Leigh Bowery.

The Madrid based design group created a Momus doll from red fabric with eye-patch. Do you think they did a good job in appropriating you?
Yes, I think they did. We should all aim to be reducible to affectionate stereotypes.

I listened to a ton of Momus albums in the late 90s. The only thing that ever came close to your brittle voice, smooth pop arrangements and canny, provocative lyrics was Pulp’s »Different Class.« Do you ever have the feeling that you were not rewarded with the stardom/money you deserved?
Yes. It’s an international conspiracy – the Japanese were the only ones who didn’t get the memo.

What does money mean to you?
It’s a kind of thermostat which regulates our body’s input-output systems. And by »our body« I really mean our need to exist physically in the world.

You were an early blogger and have written about design and art for the longest time, last year you published your two first books. Does that mark the end of your music, or is it just a gentle shift of balance from one leg to the other?
I actually would like to end my music career and be known entirely as a writer from now on. Working on music actually gives me a kind of nausea now, because it triggers low-level tinnitus. So I get hot and uncomfortable around music, like Alex from A Clockwork Orange listening to Beethoven after he’s been given Ludovico’s Treatment.

You go by your nom de plume Momus as a musician and as a writer. What’s the difference between Momus and Nick Currie? What do your friends call you?
Nick Currie is the creation of my parents, my school, and society. Momus is my own creation, or rather an elective affinity with a character from mythology, a minor (and »failed«) Greek god exiled from Mount Olympus for simply doing his job, which was to criticize. My friends call me Nick, but I like it when they call me Momus.

Your music is basically poetry. What do you read? Which authors and books do you find influential?
I’m attracted to the classics: Lucian, Juvenal, Martial, Horace, Virgil, Aesop, Propertius. I’m also drawn to figures like Pope, Swift, Sterne, Leopardi, Gogol, Kierkegaard. Then, from the 20th century, people like Kafka and Brecht, Calvino and Pirandello, Ronald Firbank, Marcel Schwob, Bruno Schulz, Ivor Cutler and Viv Stanshall.

At a book reading for Solutions you showed an incredible talent for accents. I have a fetish for accents. Which accents do you like in particular? Which ones are you good at? Are there any you despise?
My sister is much better at accents than I am (she’s an actress). I tend to do Cockney, Scottish and American, and that’s it. I dislike Australian accents, perhaps. When I was young I disliked the Scottish accent intensely and tried to lose mine. I called the Glasgow accent »the Glasgow accident«!

You seem so incredibly productive and document a lot of the things you do, see in your blog. Do you ever hang around, loiter, do nothing for no particular reason?
I think I might often seem, from the outside, to be rather passive and dreamy, but my mind is always racing. I totally understand what Kafka wrote in his diary about »this tremendous world I have inside my head.« The anxiety is that your time will run out, and you won’t have been able to share even a tiny fraction of those dreams, visions, insights and ideas, and you’ll die and that world will vanish.

You’ll turn 50 in February. How does it feel?
It’s perfectly horrible!   ◊

Donna Daytona

A few months ago, I had the honor of standing in a crowded room next to Donatella Versace. As I meticulously studied her appearance, I noticed the watch on her feeble little wrist: a Rolex, Daytona model, a men’s watch from the most ubiquitous luxury label in the world. It looks like a child‘s definition of the word „expensive“. There are buttons and an extra dial, with which Donnatella can mark the time waiting for her driver to navigate the Milan’s shopping district. And it’s all in bright, yellow gold. – by Marco Rechenberg

A Rolex Daytona is actually supposed to be worn in stainless steel, because in any case it’ll be rare and totally overpriced. In white gold it breaks the bank, and looks exactly like the stainless steel one, so unless you have the microscopic vision of the members of new York’s Diamond’s Dealer’s club, only the beholder will know its real value. Clearly Donatella Versace is not interested in such nuances. She opts for the shock value of the garish yellow gold variation. It dangles thick and heavy around her wrist, making even the lifting of a cigarette look like a workout. 
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In contrast, the other signoras in the room mostly do without watches. And if one was to be seen, it was no doubt some soulless, diamond-encrusted ice, a present from their personal Berlusconi-wannabe. Understandably, people in fashion aren’t always interested in watches. The watch-making industry still holds on to unbearably slow, tedious and conservative collections. Nevertheless it was a watch – Donatella‘s gold monster – that managed to enhance the afternoon. It gave it an air of Plein Soleil, Alain Delon, sort of. Even if the reasons for this were never too clear to me, I instantly felt sympathy for Ms. Versace wash over me. Perhaps it was about her brother’s sad demise or the stoicism with which she‘s led the fashion house for more than ten years now. Plus her unique looks, her body, the hair. Then there are the concerns about her daughter, the spindly poor little rich girl. That very afternoon I saw what made me so enthusiastic for Donatella Versace: the bar of gold on her wrist, worn with the same insouciance with which she sends her garish turquoise down the catwalk. 
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It didn‘t take long before I felt the desire to own that watch. On a man’s wrist, I imagine, it could develop its full potential. It‘s a watch that‘s charged so heavily with sexual motives, I’m surprised that I’ve never heard of a gay man with a watch fetish. And yet, there are some conceptual problems in this aesthetic equation: someone has to pay for it. A Daytona costs about as much a liver transplant. Also, as was warned, many people perceive such a heavy golden watch as aggressive. I believe this is a simple misunderstanding: such openly displayed splendor is just a gracefully extended invitation, to a different kind of time.   ◊

T H E - O R I G I N - I S S U E

If the egg is not necessarily of any specific type, then it could be said that the egg came first, because other animals had been laying eggs long before chickens existed, such as the dinosaurs. If only an egg that will hatch into a chicken can be considered a chicken egg: then a reconsideration of the original question suggests some animal other than a chicken laid the first chicken egg which contained the first chicken. In this case the chicken egg came before the chicken. If only an egg laid by a chicken can be considered a chicken egg: then a re-consider- ation of the original question suggests the first chicken (which hatched from a non-chicken egg) laid the first chicken egg. In this case the chicken came before the chicken egg. Again, this would not necessarily be a straightforward event.
(Wikipedia, »The Chicken or the Egg« )



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