OZ Had Been Painting for Thirty Years
Ello appeared that week with the energy of a rumor about a better party. Within forty-eight hours, half the internet had made accounts on the new Facebook alternative and discovered it was an empty room with good graphic design. You made your account, you looked around, you logged back out, and by the weekend the conversation had moved on to something else.
That was the mood that Friday—a lot of activity that didn’t resolve. Someone should have launched a campaign to change Berlin’s unofficial city motto from "poor but sexy" to "Döner, which sauce?" Someone should have gone to a party and tried to hold a conversation about the most taciturn supporting actors of the silent film era, or the significance of 1974 as the year of the common swift, or the time their printer had a paper jam—sustaining it past the first thirty seconds of polite confusion. Someone should have bought a CD, physically, not streamed anything, as a small deliberate gesture against what the decade was becoming. And if you happened to meet someone who shared your exact name, well.
OZ died that week. Walter Josef Fischer, the Hamburg graffiti writer who had been painting his name and a smiley face on every unreachable surface in the city for three decades—train cars, bridges, walls above the waterline, places that required both nerve and preparation to reach. He’d been called the most prolific graffiti writer in the world. He was hit by a train while painting on the tracks, which sounds both inevitable and wrong, the way some deaths do. The city he’d covered in marks outlived him while his marks stayed up. A minute of silence felt inadequate. Two or three still felt inadequate.
The rest of that Friday’s instructions: find every poster of Sami Slimani—a German lifestyle influencer whose face was papering city walls that season—and cover it with a photograph of a lonely sausage. Ask the famously unimpressable bouncer at Berghain if he knows where the nearest bar is, purely to watch him not react. Eat only food that rhymes with "windshield wiper."
None of it was meant to be followed. The point was to carry the list in your head while doing ordinary things—commuting, shopping, arguing—and feel briefly adjacent to something more interesting. OZ understood something like that, I think. The whole city as a surface. You don’t wait for permission to leave a mark.