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The German-African couple in the laundry saloon. The sneer on the middle aged woman’s face that reveals the alcoholic in her. Her emptily aggressive eyes, pockmarked skin and the tense rhythm of her high-heeled feet. The middle-aged and calm handsomeness of her African boyfriend. The boy in the saloon with Dirty Harry sunglasses, thin sideburns down his cheeks; his laboriously prepared hip-look in his trendy jacket; his coffee in a paper cup, which he sips delicately in a chill-out bar flair, while sitting on a chair next to washing machines and dryers in a dimly-lit salon, in the middle class neighbourhood of the town. The thin, nervous man folding his two dozen or more, gleaming, snow-white socks in meticulous attention on pages of newspaper. The paper intensifying the bleach of the socks. The aggressive glances he throws at people glancing at him.

The hospital-like muteness of the German city I’m living. The city space where only the justified sounds can be heard. The people roaming it. The fellow passengers on the tram. The old woman with stress stricken hands and a distant, lonely face. The boys opposite to her, wearing back-from-80s sports shoes with straps of raw blues and reds; their wide and kitschy belt-buckles and the strips of blondish hair-dyes. The girls who all try to look like the last pop diva. The clothes worn without any self-inquiries. Hairstyles chosen by looking through the mirror. The zeitgeist of the adolescent trauma wrapped up in pinks and the solarium tans and fat bellies in low-waist pants. The migrant workers in the morning on the way to their lowly paid jobs. Sleep-sickness and something more in the eyes (is it the future or the past?). The short young boy who did the wrong drills in the gym and ended up looking like the cartoon character (the one that was crunched into a wide widget by virtue of a concrete block). That boy displaying his aggressive karate moves on the peroxide-blond Britney Spears-look-alike middle class girl of 14. The kicks he simulated on her. Her tolerance for them. The hoards of middle class girls on their Friday-night-out fun, talking unfeasibly loud, as if to convince themselves of the escapade they are living. Their 15 year old faces and their absurdly adult makeup’s.

The fellow city dwellers who talk aloud to themselves on the trains, in the budget-supermarkets, on the streets. The loneliness of elderly. The unceasing inner quarrels of the lost. Counting numbers, comparing prices, settling scores with those that haunt them. Or simply talking to themselves because nobody listens to them like their own selves do.

Trying to fit in something impossible. A city. A routine. An imperative. The fact that life is slipping through our hands every moment, being spent on things we hardly care for. Looking for and not finding the excitement and meaning in our days while those unbelievably inconsistent sights and meanings crowding our sight. Everything in a silent cohesion when nothing really fits. The urgency and certainty with which people move around. The certainty with which people believe in their perceived personal meanings. The certainty with which people cling to their gods, habits, values and possessions. City, the manmade totality of concrete, flesh, metal and glass. City looking like a mirror, showing the impossibility of it all and the inevitability of religions, dogmas and the violence.

All we choose to see is architecture and commerce, while humans are instinctively and properly left unnoticed. Yet we still move around in cities, seeking someone-s and something-s to console us, when what confronts us is the shades of the insanity we may end up in. Faces, hands, feet, actions hinting at our probable tomorrows. Being afraid of them. Sensing the ease we adapt to all this and being more afraid for it. A whispering comprehension of our walk-on part on somebody else’s documentary and knowing that there is no foreshadowing, the insanity is present and the insanity already resides in the observer.

The sum of our lurking insanities. Could this be a definition of ‘the urban?