Feininger had been a student at Bauhaus and never meant to become a photographer. Initially he was trained to be a cabinetmaker and then later worked as an architect with Le Corbusier. At some point he gave up on architecture itself and focused on its photography, which led him to become a key photographer at Life magazine for over 20 years.

When he immigrated to New York in 1939 he found his urban utopia, a place even more bursting with life than Paris and Stockholm, where he had lived before. Besides his work as an alround photographer capturing everything from fashion events to car accidents, he found time to walk the streets of New York and portrait it in all its facettes. But unlike Henri Cartier-Bresson or Robert Capa he never waited to capture the one decisive moment. He rather tried to built the perfect impression by craftfully staging the picture he had in his mind.

As one of a few photographers of his time he was capable of successfully mastering craft and techiques with art and design. He considered craftsmanship to be the basic tool for his artistic expression—he saw the camera as the photographer’s typewriter. And this, in the end, made him an expert among experts. He wrote a number of standard references to photography, one of which you will probably know if you ever got serious with this artform: The Complete Photographer from 1978.

His work continues to define the image we have of New York until today. This probably explains the nostalgic feeling of ours when we saw the exhibition. If you have ever been there or not – Feininger’s pictures still feel strangely familiar.

Andreas Feininger
New York in the Forties
18.02.09 – 18.05.09

Bauhaus-Archiv
Museum für Gestaltung
Klingelhöferstraße 14
10785 Berlin

[Show as slideshow]

At U Street Corridor, Reps Won't Find Rest

Black Broadway
3:40 p.m.: Green line from College Park, Maryland, to Washington, D.C.
Greenbelt metro station: the beginning and end of the Green Line. I am struggling to find an analogy more befitting this day: “The beginning and end.”

The train is almost empty, save a few voices announcing their soon arrival at friends’ or families’, eager to watch as the nation turns the page on a new chapter of American history. It is rainy and gray. I squint my eyes, hoping that might magically turn the gloomy downpour into drops of catharsis. In America, today is the day of reckoning – the “final verdict on eight years [of failed policies],” as Obama likes to call it. Regardless of where one stands, November 4th, 2008, will be a day of either gloom or catharsis – the beginning or end. Some things not even man can control, no matter how hard we try. But today, that won’t keep people from at least trying.

4:00 p.m.: Arrival at the U Street Corridor.
“Black Broadway,” as it was known in its heyday during the first half of the 20th century. The home of legends: Jazz greats Duke Ellington (a D.C. native), Sarah Vaughn, Billy Holiday, and Miles Davis were U Street staples, and, as the story goes, it is where Dr. Martin Luther King grabbed a spoon at Ben’s Chili Bowl after his “I Have a Dream” speech.

After the assassination of Dr. King on April 4th, 1968, U Street erupted into 4 days of riots, destroying businesses, and causing both unemployment and insurance rates to reach for the sky. Meanwhile, the gates to an inferno of drugs and prostitution seemed to open ever wider as investors fled “Black Broadway.” The winds of change first swept through the Corridor with the onset of the 1990s, and today is considered to have just the right degree of luring-but-safe ruggedness to make it hip in a city which, on the surface, tends to get lost in suits, ties and pearly whites.

Politics is for people, by people; a perpetual negotiation of grants – of trust, of power, and of liberty. Win some, lose some. While former D.C. mayor Marion Barry was shunned for being caught smoking crack cocaine at downtown Vista International Hotel in 1990, black Washingtonians assured his 1995 reelection despite a 6 months prison stint: Barry had reached out to the black community, he had created jobs. As gentrification has pushed housing prices up, and the prostitutes down a few blocks, many of the neighborhood’s black residents fear to be pushed away.

U Street is all about politics. And here, as in the rest of country, the people have learned about the proteanism of politics the hard way. And yet, on this rainy day, no one squints. On Black Broadway, everyone is eagerly anticipating the biggest show in town: The 2008 Presidential Election. Judgment Day is here.

The Other Bradley Effect
50-year-old Bradley rests in the rain outside of Garnett Patterson Jr. High School, doubling today as “Precinct 22” polling station. He has just voted for Obama, and has been voting since he was 18.  To him, this election is about redemption – he has said his final prayer in the voting booth, and now it is in God’s hands. We both ponder the scene before us in bemusement: I, 26, white, and ever so European; Bradley, 50, black, and a D.C. native, telling me that the fate of the nation is in the hands of God.

“They could put both in office, for all I care,” says a withered voice behind me. A short man slides by me, and joins Bradley in contained excitement. He is easily in his late-60s, with keen eyes behind tinted glasses in brown plastic rims, gleaming from under a red baseball cap. They shake hands, and nod consentient. “But you just voted, so you must believe there is something you can do, right?” I try. “Well, I’m voting for everybody else; for the future generation. Obama, a black person, that’s historical,” says Bradley as he shakes my hand goodbye.

Captain Crystal
Inside the polling station, a speech-impaired woman greets me warmly over a steaming Styrofoam box. Admittedly, reports of endless lines and long waiting hours had me bracing for a long, busy day “in the field.” “It’s been crazy out here,” Captain Crystal, three-time Precinct Captain, reassures me, as I, to my great surprise, discover a meager line of 6 people waiting to vote – in 5 minutes, it will be down to 2, tops.  “It’s the rain,” the Captain insists, “just give it another hour.”

Crystal boasts how this year, they have done their best to accommodate the large turn-out by providing Optical Scan screens to ensure that impaired voters, too, get to cast their ballot. “Everybody wants to vote,” Captain Crystal tells a small team of local young journalists from Howard University and myself, “so we’ve trained volunteers, line control workers, and hired management to make sure to help them – the elderly, the illiterate, disabled people, and the deaf and blind. We’ll help them vote, but we’re not going to tell them who to vote for.”

Captain Crystal is markedly proud. She and her team has been at the station since 6 a.m., and do not expect to leave Precinct 22 before 10 p.m. She bolts to and fro.

“International man! Over there, that’s the press area,” the Captain demands, navigating me to a green paper patch stretched along one side of the polling room floor. “International man,” that is me. I hear the budding journalists from Howard U giggle behind me, strutting their notebooks and digital cameras. They are not a day over 20. Meanwhile, I try to “capture the moment” with my 2 megapixel camera on my Nokia phone. My digital camera ditched me last weekend at the Beauty Bar in the Big Apple, and has probably been living it up with Cosmo-sipping hipsters ever since.

Precinct 22: No irregularities, no nothing. No 2004 voter suppression scenario, no dirt to dig up. This ship won’t sink on Captain Crystal’s watch.

The Promise
It is rainy still. A stocky, middle-aged man greets me with a gratified smile, and calmly seeks shelter under his umbrella. He lends an air of class to the grayness – no squinting necessary. Trivial exchanges give way to conversation. Meet Robert Harp, self-proclaimed long-time Democrat (with the exception of Gerald Ford in 1974).

“What’s your proudest moment during this election?” I ask him.

“Obama has run a noble campaign. He’s stuck with the issues, and stated them clearly. And he’s provided comprehensive solutions,” Robert begins. “He could’ve played the race-card, but he didn’t,” he continues, signaling a silent nod to the historicity of U Street, and the polling station behind me, where a majority of the voters I have witnessed today are African American.

We discuss John McCain and the early primary debates. “He could have made a good president,” Robert says, “but then he started bolting from one position to another,” reiterating the claims that McCain has appeared “erratic” in the final stages of the campaign. VP pick Palin, the negativity, and then the economic meltdown: “the darkest moments of the campaign.”

My jacket turns a darker shade of grey, as our conversation continues under the drizzling DC sky. From a working-class upbringing in Brooklyn, NY, through making peace with one’s roots, to a successful life in Boston and DC: Robert’s life reaffirms that the appeal of Obama’s story, in many ways, rests in the shared experience of the American people.

Our conversation makes a last stop at the debate over “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” as Palin dubbed him, in what seemed a blatant attempt to invoke fears so effectively aroused during the Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s.

“What about the American Dream? Is that why there’s so much focus on the middle-class?,” I ask. The idea of liberty – the freedom to succeed, and the freedom fail – is sacred to most Americans. “Are Americans afraid that if they take their eyes off the middle-class, they’ll loose sight of the American Dream?”

Robert looks up: “What I’ve learned from this election is that we are one nation. But in the last years, that has been constrained.”

For millions of Americans like Robert, the 2008 Election is not just about reclaiming Washington, but about reclaiming the nation – the promise. Or as Obama would have it: Reclaim the audacity of hope.

I bid Robert farewell, and head down U Street. Rain still. I squint my eyes as I pass a barbershop. Four kids are lined up, getting groomed for the moon landing of our time – a new frontier – while their parents are out trying to guide the hands of God.

By Peter Dahl

[Show as slideshow]

Anyway, I just read a blog post on woot.com that has occasional reviews of funny used books. This one is called “Street Smart” and was written by Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa and their lawyer Murray Schwartz.

In his blog entry Jason Toon highlights the funniest and most paranoid moments of the book (including Guardian Angels fashion) and wouldn’t miss the chance to spice them up with a handful of hilarious comments. My favorite excerpt from the book is probably this one:

Wow… I’m so glad my ass is here – safely in 2008!

I mean, what is this guy doing down there? How long did he have to wait under this car? And most importantly: what happens now?

One of your white slippers you have just seen for the last time, buddy! But wait, this guy is stuck under your car. Maybe you just wait until he will crawl out of there? Or get in the car and move it just a little bit? If people really tried to rob others like that back in the 80ies, then it was probably the most brainless era in crime history.

So when I read this and the comments on the blog entry, I begin to understand: all the fears that my parents were (and still are) expressing about me moving to big cities are clearly relics from the 80ies:

Can I find an apartment in Berlin? Hell, yeah! Back in the 80ies? Maybe not so easy… Isn’t it ridiculously dangerous in the big city? Not really. Maybe more than in a small town. But I’m not afraid of people shoving me off the subway platform. Which has – by the way – most interestingly taken place in Berlin recently.

But enough of that. I don’t wanna spoil the fun.

Go and see the full blog entry here.

Have a nice day!

By Semir (double post)

They just can’t see the ingenuity of the planners. If you make the American embassy on Pariser Platz look nice, you’re just inviting the terrorists to destroy it. Now, bombing a plattenbau in Marzahn has about the same effect as targeting America’s outpost on the island of freedom.

And don’t even worry about the interior design. It’s not like you will ever have to step inside it (or for that matter close to it, for the embassy is 26 m from the street) because the consular section remains in beautiful Dahlem.

If you too want to celebrate the completion of this befitting embassy in the historic center of Berlin, join the tapmag team for the “Deutsch-Amerikanisches Volksfest” at Brandenburger Tor on July 5th. But when George H. W. Bush and Angela Merkel officially open the embassy a day earlier, on July 4th, one thing is already certain: You’re not invited.

Following Will.I.Am’s wildly popular “Yes We Can,” featuring soul saint John Legend, basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and the angelic Scarlett Johansson (just to name a few), TI$A (from the superior, but much overlooked, hip-hop/r’n'b producer/writer/super group Sa-Ra Creative Partners) drops another MTV/Hollywood gem to keep the election spectacle vibrant.

This time around, Obama is backed by R&B young ‘un Chris Brown, and hip-hop icons Jay-Z and Kanye West (really, just to name a few!).

In what is likely to go down in Election-’08-history as probably the most neo-artsy-add’o'lescent-chic contribution (don’t fret if you don’t know the word, I just made it up!), probably one thing stands out more than the neon-rocking dancers: the demographics! Predominantly African-American, young and “hip” (I struggle to not add the “hop”) voters.

Admitted, I can picture 55-year-old Sam from Bucks County, PA, driving home from the daily treadmill singing his heart out to the tunes of “Hot 4 Hill,” but I just can’t see him do the bump ‘n grind with the missus, or hanging out with his buddies on the front porch, to the sounds of “We hood, we votin’, and throwing it uuup!” (as much as MTV would like us to think that the elderly actually do that).

In effect, this could become indicative of the challenges facing the future Democratic presidential candidate. If Obama is elected, will Hillary’s “Sams” look to the Republicans for an encore (I propose: “Insane 4 McCain”)? If Hillary is elected, will Obama’s “TI$As” choose to dance it out in the streets rather than duke it out in the voting booths? Basically, will either candidate be able to beat their (wanted or unwanted) demographic pigeonholing as the clock winds down on the Dems?

While I can already see the Berlin club kids dying to jump on this bandwagon, I’m looking long and hard for the Hillary voters “up in this…”

By Peter Dahl

“The Dynamics of the City – Fragmentation and Concentration” was the topic of a keynote lecture by Columbia University Professor Peter Marcuse (if the name sounds familiar, you might have heard of his father Herbert) at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin tonight. The lecture was the opening of a conference on cultural diversity in New York and Berlin.

Sitting at a panel next to moderator Margit Mayer of the Free University of Berlin, Marcuse started by asking the audience, “why we don’t we just celebrate the fact that we are culturally diverse and ignore it?” He certainly had no intention of doing that. Cultural diversity, he says, has been used as a justification by the powers that be to divide a city. Setting up his discussion on ways to solve existing problem in the cities, Marcuse challenged the conventional approach that focuses only on the “excluded,” saying that the “excluders” need to be looked at as well.

Marcuse introduced six terms for a culturally distinctive area:

• Ghetto – An area where a population group lives involuntary
• Enclave – An area where a group comes together voluntary and out of solidarity
• Quarter – A generic term for a neighborhood of distinctive characteristics
• Gentrified area – One of the above turned into a neighborhood for the affluent
• Suburbs – The result of a more or less voluntary withdrawal from the city
• Citadel – Privatized “public” place, like a gated community or Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz

Professor Marcuse criticized the Chicago School’s model for the development of the areas. The Chicago School postulated that the normal, and desired, development would lead from ghetto to enclave to quarter to a coherent melting pot, or an omelet, where you can’t recognize the different ingredients. Marcuse’s ideal city would be more like a stew. But then, he says, it has not happened like the Chicago School predicted anyway, citing specifically Harlem as a counterexample. After the Second World War, Harlem, having made the transformation to an enclave, became “abandoned” and only decades later started to be gentrified.

Marcuse then turned to the role of public policy. Again, there are different approaches to reducing inequality. One is “gilding the ghetto,” where such an area is supported financially and with infrastructure, and where incentatives to inhabitants to stay and work there are given. The other approach opens up the suburbs to the previously excluded. The current, in his words “neoliberal,” approach is essentially support of gentrification without much regard for the current inhabitants. He cites the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards as an extreme example hereof.

In what would later draw some dissent from the audience, Marcuse sees a parallel between slavery and the treatment of German “guest workers”. He does that to set up his statement “that there is a direction in Public Policy that is not all benevolent,” neither in Germany nor in the U.S. Following up, he picks on a Tagesspiegel article that shockingly finds that the interests of migrants are not so much different than those of the “majority,” and whose last line, I kid you not, is: “Wahrscheinlich sind Migranten irgendwie auch nur Deutsche.” (Probably migrants are also just only Germans) . The impression that he gets from the article is that if migrants are not “already basically German, they ought to be.” A wrong notion for Marcuse:

He concluded with a commitment to diversity, arguing that it is not the problem:

The conference “New York – Berlin: Cultural diversity in urban space” will continue until the 20th of October at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, Berlin. Admittance is free of charge.