Embedded Files
Jaded journalist japes scream sitcom adaptation
WHAT THE PAPERS SAY
"Kämpf describes a world that's overflowing with events, news, and permanent availability, while the inner world is suffocated by emptiness. At the same time, he pulls the fourth estate's trousers down. He does it in such a brash, entertaining way that it's a delight."
Berner Zeitung, 24 October 2018
"Matto Kämpf is capable of shining a light into the murky depths of the superficially staid and mundane, and flipping trivial farce into the bizarre macabre."
Tages-Anzeiger, 24 October 2018
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Master satirist Matto Kämpf presents Aunty Iguana. This satirical road movie introduces us to three journalists for the culture section of a mid-tier newspaper in a mid-tier town. The trio are comfortable but caught in a daily grind that consists of the boring routine of the newsroom, a big helping of music, and a bigger helping of booze, burying the bright future they once imagined for themselves. They may have just turned 35, but they feel old. And for people in their mid-30s, they are already showing symptoms of the onset of fogeydom and becoming set in their ways. What they're best at is having a good moan: from their point of view, the past is a petrified lump, the future groping indefinite mist and haze, and the present a hardship.
A road movie revs up when a promo CD for Chinese punk band Aunty Iguana lands in the office, instilling unexpected excitement and an even more unexpected openness for adventure in our trio of lackadays. Heroes of a coming-of-age novel? Not quite. Wherever their journey takes them, be that Beijing or Naples, La Brévine, Baden-Baden, or Lyon, somehow their offbeat, ludicrous conversations and self-referential inspirations always bring them back to themselves and their ironical and cynical way of thinking, talking, and living.
A classic feel good feel-bad book.
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Jaded journalists
Sunk beneath autumn mists
Thrash and amuse us
AUNTY IGUANA
pp.8-13
He stood up and died.
– “Finally a sensible start to a book,” shouted Hans, squeezing himself sideways past Sportarse’s bike. Sportarse had left his bike in the corridor again. His wet, nine-thousand franc boastcycle. That means we’ll have to spend the whole bloody day forcing ourselves past it to get to the coffee machine. Not getting to the coffee machine is horrific. A nightmare scenario. When the coffee machine breaks down half the editorial staff gathers round it waiting for it to be repaired. The other half shake their heads and drink tea.
It was raining this morning: dirty rainwater was draining into the carpet from the tyre grooves of Sportarse’s bike. Property damage. The Idiot must be alerted. The Idiot is the editor-in-chief. A paternity-proud plank, thick as two short ones, appointed following convoluted nepotism. He is the pen behind laughable editorials which leave the rest of the newsroom burning with embarrassment. The Idiot’s boss is the idiot-in-chief. A nebulous figure, rich as MSG, and, thankfully, only rarely present.
Sportarse rides his bike even when it’s raining buckets. In fact, when it’s raining he rides his bike almost ostentatiously. He hangs his sopping raingear up in front of the window and thereby darkens the office and our souls. And he shakes his wet hair. He’s blond, of course. Sport is blond.
We are the culture desk. Lena, Hans, and me. Lena writes about art, Hans writes about film, and I write about music. We all do literature. We all have to do theatre. We all hate dance. Musicals we try to hush up. We get high before operas and scribble giggling nonsense in our notebooks while the cast struggle and sing in front of us.
Once, the entire staff was split between different offices. Now, everyone is stuffed into one open-plan office. Twenty-three of us. One day the walls were gone. They made sure in advance that it was structurally feasible. Whether or not it is interpersonally feasible was never investigated. Madness lies at the heart of the idea to bring journalists closer together. According to Idiot, from now on we should all start strolling around in a state of peripatetic fascination with one another, exchanging information. The fact remains: we continue to email each other everything, and wish we had the walls back.
In order to get any peace and quiet we stuff our ears with earplugs or with blaring headphones. The other day, Lena warned us what might happen if we didn’t:
I keep hearing, like a horror film, the way our colleague on the local news desk is dumping a supposedly unhygienic landlord in it citing health and safety. Either it makes me upset, or I start fantasising about pouring cheerfully bubbling seven-hundred-year-old deep-fat-fryer oil all over his Cook Report.
Lena, Hans and I sit right at the back of the back of the office. Daily, we receive astonishing numbers of books, CDs, exhibition catalogues, what’s ons, and festival programmes. As much as we can, we try to block off our corner by inconspicuously piling the empty parcels on top of each other. Sadly, the construction project is always quickly spotted and the Idiot has the misused boxes taken away.
Year round you will see Sportarse spurting through the newsroom in armless t-shirts. Seasons are for losers, is what he’s trying to tell us. He purposely wears t-shirts that are too tight for him, so we can enjoy his muscles too. Me, Lena and Hans wear tent-sized shirts into which, if need be, we can retract ourselves. At least Sportarse is shorter than us. So we can look down on his toned body in more ways than one. In terms of skin tone, Sportarse’s head is reminiscent of a blushing pig. Lena, Hans and I look like pale rashers of bacon surrounded by black. Not with kohl, but by life. We are musclefree and not as thin as we used to be. We meekly give gravity its due. Sportarse sits bolt upright on his office chair, a rocket just before take-off. For him, even sitting is sport. We, in contrast, coat our chairs like limp lettuce.
Once the first dozen espressos are taken care of, which today means passing the Sportarse bike twenty-four times, industrious clacking sounds from our corner. It is the most productive part of the day, ten to half eleven. We take from nine to ten to wake up, read emails and drink espressos. We only need to arrive at the culture desk at nine because we spend our evenings as culture vultures. The others need to be here at eight. At half eleven our will to work wanes and we sit there long enough not to be the first to go to lunch.
At noon on the dot we storm out of the office, off to El Burro. We’re safe from the editors there. We schlepp halfway across town to get there and spend a full two hours on lunch. Noon to two, like the old days. Not that it would be necessary to run off to the other side of town, most of them bring their food with them. They spoon it down in front of their screens, because they want to get gone as soon as possible. Because they have kids or hobbies or do sports. Lena, Hans and I don’t have any kids or any hobbies or do any sport. We are the eternal teenagers, always on the move, although we’re already halfway through our thirties.
In a meeting, the seriousest of the extremely serious politics desk genuinely wondered out loud why we get paid the same as them. We parried this surprise bouncer with fits of astonished coughing. Sure, the question Why not? was hanging in the air, but remained unsaid. The Idiot didn’t raise it either, probably because it wasn’t on the agenda.
Back to El Burro. To reach this gem we have to walk from the new build business district to the old working-class neighbourhood. From light-bathed glass facades to dusty curtains. In El Burro, Luis immediately serves us three bottles of San Miguel, which we down, happy and exhausted. Then comes the rioja, and poring over the tapas menu. We know it off by heart, but we put new combinations together every lunchtime. El Burro is a restaurant from yesterday. Faded bullfight photos are gummed to the walls. A wooden board hangs over the bar decorated with corks glued into the shape of a guitar. Music is conspicuous by its absence and the neon light is piercing. There’s no daylight, because the woollen blanket-style curtains are permanently closed. By the door to the toilets is a Miami Vice pinball machine, out of order since 1985.
Stood behind the bar is José. Rooted there. A Castilian oak. That’s if he is from Castile, naturally. He has been standing there for 43 years, he’s the proprietor. They say his German improved during the first two years, for 41 years it’s been getting worse again. He used to get the drinks ready for Luis, now all does is stand there.
Once we’ve ordered the tapas, we start discussing the articles we’ve just written. Or ad lib new theories of art. Today, Lena says:
The more plot a film has, the worse it is. Plot is concealer for the director’s impotence. A good film doesn’t need a plot.
Yes. In principle, Hans muses, but there’s always the exception that proves the rule. For example, when you have a supposedly subtle portrait of an Azerbaijani village and the dramatic climax after two-and-a-half hours is a donkey keeling over.
The debate is cut clean off. Chorizo, pulpo and jamón enter stage right. Rejoice! Fingers trembling with delight, we don’t know where to begin. Then Hans starts wolfing it down and expounding on something incomprehensible. The word framework escapes from between two chunks of squid.
Once the feeding frenzy has died down a little, Lena tells us about Hundetta von Darmzweist, an artist who menstruates on buffets at other people’s private views. We discuss whether or not that’s cool. Cool or not cool? Fundamentally, that’s what we’ve always discussed. Since we met. Since we first got to know each other 15 years ago, at a university welcome event, and discussed whether we thought it was cool. The fact that there were speeches, I’m sure we didn’t find cool. That alcohol was available, we probably thought was cool. At the end of high school, we only got the speeches, so this was progress. We spent the rest of the evening sneering in a corner, laughing at the expense of the old farts’ cultural offerings. Kids, that’s how you end up covering the arts.
© Matto Kämpf 2018, translation Bryn Roberts 2018
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