jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Yesterday, I escaped the puerile, disgusting, and (worst of all) staggeringly unfunny Poultrygeist to enjoy a banana in Central Park.

Today, unrelenting construction noise on our block makes me wish I could seek refuge at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, where the cherries are in full bloom. They’ve delighted us in the past — but alas, the Tribeca Film Festival begins today, and Cannes announced the linup.

A vaguely appropriate Ginsberg poem has been added to my muxtape.

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. Lloyd Kaufman, 2006. N/R

This is not what architect Peter Eisenman had in mind when he designed the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of concrete slabs (or stelae) on a 4.7 acre site between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate: “The stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.” (Wikipedia)

It’s possible that the man hopping from stone to stone like Q*Bert in the photo above is enacting some sort of postmodern commentary on Eisenman’s intentions — after all, “losing touch with human reason” is second nature to some of us, and “an uneasy, confusing atmosphere” is what we like to call “the modern condition.” Either way, instead of remembrance, introspection, and grief, the 2,711 stones seem to invite inappropriate behavior. Visitors can be seen sunbathing on the stelae, playing hide-and-seek, or eating curry sausages.

Other scandals and failures accompanied the memorial: the stelae were covered in anti-graffiti paint by Degussa, a company that produced Zyklon B for the gas chambers, the stones are already beginning to crumble, light fixtures are broken, and Der Spiegel reports that in the darkness, drunkards from a nearby club come to urinate and horny couples screw in the maze.

Perhaps R. Mutt would have enjoyed the Stelenfeld’s playground repurposing, but there is a harsh lesson here about the disconnect between artistic intention and actual use; clearly, the memorial’s symbolism is too arbitrary, too wide open to interpretation, to produce the desired effect. I don’t know of another memorial that fails on such a spectacular scale.

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flickr lets users drag and drop photos onto a Yahoo map now, so the pictures know where they were taken. You can search the map or look up individual users or areas. I’ll have to play with it a bunch more to figure this out, but obviously, this brings us one step closer to recreating a complete model of the world on the Interweb and finally making reality obsolete.