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Cover, Bricks and Mortar by Clemens Meyer.
By DARYL RASHAAN KING January 14, 2025
Bricks and Mortar
Clemens Meyer
Translated by Katy Derbyshire
Clemens Meyer is an art writer and actor. Born in 1977 in Halle, Germany. When he was 12, the Berlin Wall fell. During his childhood, he grew up in Leipzig, then East Germany. After. Studying creative writing at the German Literary Institute, Meyer immediately went off to the Saxon Ministry of Science and Arts in 2002. Bricks & Mortar was a fascinating thing to read because Meyer writes in a polyphonic tone, meaning that multiple voices are going on at once. It was first published by Fitzcarraldo Editions on 17 October 2016 (UK), the 2 May 2018 (US). The French paperback spans 672 pages. It was the winner of an English PEN Award and Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. Bricks and Mortar covers the sex trade in an unnamed former GDR city.
One moment the reader is in 1989 and then the present. It serves as document of how the sex industry developed from prohibition to full legality. The text deserves multiple readings and a course on how to correctly note the distinctions between the development of the main character. The story reads as something so personal that it lures you into its spell. However, it will take more analysis for the reader to fully recognize how the progress of the character took place in stages, with interjections from other characters. Using Alfred Döblin, Wolfgang Hilbig, David Peace, Russ Meyer, Takashi Miike, Gaspar Noé and David Lynch as references, Meyer created a post-modernist piece of question. While We Were Dreaming was published in 2006, and Die Projektoren in 2024. In between Meyer wrote shorter pieces such as All the Lights, 2008, Acts of Violence, 2010, The Downfall of Action Ltd.: Frankfurt poetics lectures, 2016, Dark Satellites, 2017, and Movies that you better read, with Claudius Nießen, 2016.
Magnanimous is the only way to describe Bricks and Mortar by Clemens Meyer. Throughout my reading of the book, some moments seemed as if it was written when I was reading it two/ three weeks away from Christmas. The book immediately reminded me of the first five years after graduation, a critical moment in my life. Meyer’s still has me wondering how the sex trade could reflect the “horrors” of my 20s? What connection did the GDR have in 1989 with Brooklyn in the 2010s? The characters' voices demand that the reader flip back a few pages to reread what was jusy read because everything flows smoothly. It is within these moments of both reading and writing that it is impossible to not reflect on the significant number of sex traffic cases that were either started in 2024 or closed.
Meyer reaches across time in such a harmonious way that it connects with reality today, even if faintly. It is weird reading a book about prostitution where everything echoes with corporeality and factuality. At the same time, the United States is facing an opioid epidemic in the United States. Meyer proposes a what-if scenario for whores: would they “run a deli and sell flowers, beer, newspapers?” What if I had studied economics instead of visual arts and then my M.B.A? As the peruser of Meyer’s literary technique, one is constantly engaged in a thought-provoking journey, oscillating between 1989, ’93, and ’00. The imagination is abruptly interrupted by a sentence, or statement, that catches you off guard, especially when you see sections in italics with “/” to separate the sentences. It's clever wordplay amidst the conversations, and interactions between prostitutes and “guests.”
Headshot, Clemens Meyer.
The fragmentation of the sections offers factual wisdom, extending to far as direct financial advice I have written in my notebook after using such apps as Nerd Wallet. I am thinking about what is going on as symbolism, visualization, displacement, and magic exemplify the beauty of an existential moment. It’s the day after my mother’s birthday and I am reading “It was Mum’s birthday yesterday. The book's title, “Bricks and Mortar,” is dropped like a clue, resolving this grand opera. What were we doing before this scenario where American women have no abortion rights, are also facing an increasing amount of chronic widespread illnesses, whilst battling to survive?
Deep within the text, Meyer writes and describes the connection and movement between 3rd, 4th, and 5th dimensional exploration. 3D objects, 4D Time, 5D the internet/ artificial intelligence, something unbound by the positive and negative nuclear forces, gravity, and needs regarding how far human beings are willing to push themselves. In between now and the past, I know and remember creating multiple brain, mind “beta blockers” within my own false construct of reality to be either successful or conquer “poverty.” I realized this after going to private school and not immediately getting a job. The best that I could do at the time was administration work at the School of Arts, choosing the 1st round of Columbia’s next year of MFA students.
Something across our generations isn’t working because dystopia, my favorite literary genre, appears more and more like reality. As I was reading Bricks & Mortar, I realized, while being caught in the blur of reading the text, how I became so busy conceptualizing that I got caught off guard within the text. Meyer writes about the “Bunker worlds” of one character's imagination and dreams. It reminded me of how I adapted to the circumstances and created a vision of the life and world I wanted, while driving myself to struggle because I understood the importance of “(standing) up against the hierarchies.” In my opinion, as Meyer certifies, we need to achieve a more socialist and communist future. The urgency of the need for social change, as proposed by Meyer, is palpable, making the reader feel a sense of thrill. WM
Daryl Rashaan King currently works as a Teaching Artist with Leap NYC; a Chef de Partie at CUT by Wolfgang Puck, The Four Seasons Tribeca; and the Vice President of the Asian American Film Lab. He is the founder/ principal of kokuoroi, a multidisciplinary creative studio. The studio focuses on problems derived from urban living, viewed through the perspective of King, a Brooklyn native. A graduate of Columbia University, who originally specialized in painting, some of King’s goals include obtaining both an M. Arch and an Expert Diploma in Culinary Arts. He would also like to pursue various art and design programs and to live abroad. King has already earned certificates from Parsons in Streetwear; completed part of the Sustainable Design Foundation at Pratt Institute; and volunteered in Cusco, Peru at the construction site of a new Lower School. His work has greatly evolved since taking an Information Architecture course focused on Future Cities, hosted by the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. A former varsity wrestler, King has hopes of learning and practicing new martial arts. When he isn’t working, enjoying music, or playing video games, King’s focus is on the future.
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