The Flea Market

A girl in her sando stood quietly behind her little table, upon which seven or eight hand-made bracelets were laid, and a piece of paper that said je 5€ (5€ each).

I think she’s selling those, Lui told his friend, who was walking a few steps ahead of him.

His friend just nodded without looking back, busy looking around other people’s tables.

They’re cute, Lui added, and for a split second considered turning back to support the burgeoning salesperson, but quickly remembered that the frienship bracelets he collected from the Eras tour had never been once worn by him.

Someone else will support her, he just thought.

The Stuttgarter Flea Market was modestly sized consisting of around 50 merchants gathering at Karlsplatz, just around the corner from the city’s central point, the Schlossplatz, and took place every Saturday morning, so long as there wasn’t extremely bad weather.

That day when Lui and his friend came by to visit, it was warm and sunny, not too warm, but the sun was still stark enough that everyone kept under the shade of the trees that lined up around the plaza, leaving the square itself empty, apart from the statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I on his horse, battling the heat all on his own.

Lui had purposefully avoided the flea market, or any market for that matter, out of fear of going home with a bag full of books and DVDs that he knew he had neither the time for, nor space in his small apartment to place.

But that day he made an exception for his friend, who had asked to be joined in celebration of his tenth year since moving to Germany, by spending a day in Stuttgart at some of his favorite places, one of which was the flea market.

This friend loved collecting vinyl records, and occasionally CDs and DVDs, and he actually played them as they should be played — intentionally, from front to back, stereos on, sat on his chair and with the liner notes at hand.

And at the flea market, he could get a second hand record for five euros, sometimes even one, but only after flipping through so many boxes to see if anything’s of interest to him — you cannot expect categorizations nor alphabetizations of items at the flea market.

Vinyls are forever, he often told Lui, whenever Lui opted for the cheaper CDs, referring to the fact that CDs oxidize over time whereas vinyls, although they too get dusted and deformed by heat, have a better chance of keeping the recorded information intact for longer periods, if stored properly.

They also fare much better as artworks to display on one’s shelf, or even walls.

Whenever Lui dropped by his place, he would let Lui play a record on his player, always checking that Lui dropped the pin correctly — softly and never pushing down. He had records from artists as old as Puccini and as new as Miley Cyrus, but most of his collection were from the 80s — from disco and synth-pop to rock & roll and soul-r&b. He had the complete works of Madonna, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, the Eurythmics, Sting…

Three years ago, before he met Lui, if one were to arrange his records by Year of Publication, one would find a record from every single decade since music recording began, but one would also notice a hard stop around 2009, which coincidentally was the year he turned twenty and basically stopped catching up with new music, partly due to the already large collection of artists he had been following up until then, but also because he began to think of the newer pop music as too loud, too sexual, and too samey.

But due to the influence of Lui (who in turn started following American pop music in the 2008-2012 era because of maximalists like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Beyonce), he started opening up to new artists again and realized that although they had become more whispery with their singing, more autobiographical with their lyrics, and more bedroom with their production, that they still made good music worthy of standing next to those of who one would call today as legends from the 60s ‘til 80s.

So now you would also find in his collection, records from newer artists like Taylor Swift, Lana del Rey, Miley Cyrus, Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish, and by the end of that day, spoiler alert, Ariana Grande’s latest record petals.

Conversely, it was this friend who introduced the Opera to Lui. The first time they went to see Puccini’s La Boheme, he instructed Lui to read the plot, the history, and the production of the piece beforehand, as it was rarely about the story nor the lyrics, but rather the presentation of it, so Lui simply had to bathe himself in the visual and auditory experience of the piece, which was transmitted to the audience from the stage without even microphones nor speakers as digital interfacing — such that the emotions, the singing, and the live acting can all be conveyed as purely as possible.

So it was there at the Opera house, where Lui experienced music so painful and heavy that he almost had to leave the place midway through an aria, or so farce and slapstick that he felt like it was kids dressed up as adults playing on stage. He knew that Opera was a dying form of art, and he understood why, Musicals usually offered a more uplifting, more digestible and recognizable music on stage, but it was with the Opera where he felt stripped to the most fundamental of human existence through music that were at least a hundred years old.

—

Whenever one of the tables at the flea market had a box of records, Lui and his friend would stop and flip through until they realize that either the merchant’s taste didn’t match theirs, or that he clearly overpriced his items.

Lui, who hadn’t been collecting vinyls, only looked at the covers — to study how the artists translated their music into a visual world, and perhaps to learn more about their point of view. There were days when he particularly liked covers that featured the artist’s face prominently, big enough to rest his own cheeks to theirs, and other times he liked those that had paintings or abstract artworks instead, what would’ve cost a sum for the real thing.

They also stopped for the boxes of DVDs, in case they found gems that weren’t easy to come by in any one of the what felt like 20 or so streaming services, because unlike with music streaming where every platform gave you access to virtually all recorded music, movie streaming was more scattered, limited, and changing. Being subscribed to Netflix nor Disney Plus nor Apple TV hardly felt like owning any of the movies in them anymore…

Going through those boxes also taught Lui of what movies and records had been popular in Germany over the years —

Eric Clapton’s Unplugged, any one of the Lord of the Rings movies but never the complete set, and Fuck ju Goethe, were some of the items he knew he could always find in every visit.

It also taught him of how the medium for consumption had changed over the decades, such as how he would only find ABBA’s Gold collection in CD but rarely any of their individual albums, which only came in vinyls, or how it’s almost impossible to find any physicals from the last five years — at least not at the flea market.

Lui also liked getting a sense of the seller’s tastes, and sometimes even their life story, just by going through their boxes. He could tell, for example, that a bookseller had frequented museums in his life from all the selection of giant museum books he had, and books focused on a singular artist’s works — Picasso, Michelangelo, Dürer and so on. Another seller would have more travel guides, old maps, and cookbooks instead. And one seller at Berlin’s flea market, which Lui wished they had in Stuttgart as well, had a rare collection of books from Nobel Prize winning authors such as Ernaux, Fosse, Ishiguro, Hesse, and others…

Let me know if you find one from Mann, Lui instructed his friend, as they were going through one bookseller’s collection. He remembered that he recently remarked that Mann was a glaring hole in his small collection.

I’m sure we’ll find him at this bigger seller, his friend replied, referring to this one merchant who only sold books, and even set them up like a real bookshop with a few shelves, and organized then by genre, language, and even certain authors. They also saved you the time of having to ask for the price of each book by already writing it on the last page. They had a few English books, some French, Russian, Italian, and Spanish as well. A special corner was dedicated for Stuttgart writers and other books from Baden-Württemberg. And of course, a full shelf for German literature, alphabetized by surname — and Lui was sure he would find Mann there.

To be honest he expected a special section only for Mann’s work, but perhaps Mann wasn’t as beloved in Germany as he thought he was. Perhaps Hesse was a bigger titan in German literature, as he had now seen two booksellers having dedicated spaces for him and not for Mann. But nonetheless Lui did find a copy of the Magic Mountain, separated in two parts, at the German section. Each of them had 10€ written on the final page, with a note that Lui understood to mean “the two parts must be bought together for that price”. The price was a bit more than what Lui had expected from a flea market, and he might be able to find the same book for close to the same price at a regular bookstore, but he also thought that that was the price you pay for having these items organized and made easier to find…

He opened the book and read a sentence from it, to gauge if the writing style resonated with him — the German was frankly too hard or too dry for him to understand… Uncompelled, he put the book back to the shelf and scanned the other titles in this little shop.

There were so. Many. Titles. Had all these books really been read by their original owners? So many authors he hadn’t heard of before as if every single person who lived had written their own book. Lui surmised — he would only be able to experience a minuscule dot in the whole space of existing literature in the world within his lifetime. So he better make sure that this dot was what truly resonated with him.

Why even create and consume new works at all? Lui further inquired to himself. When every week there are flea markets like these, where you will see folks passing down used but still functioning books, toys, movies, records, paintings, antique decorations, jewelry, electronics, glassware, clothings from the past century or longer…

But of course, he remembered, just as he was compelled by his innermost driving forces to write his own stories, everyone else must have a similar compulsion too. In fact whenever he got overwhelmed by the abundance of choices, and made helpless by the challenge of scouting for the true few ones that were made for him, he would often surrender and think, I know which one’s truly made for me — of course, it’s the one that I personally made, which in the end would add to the already enormous pool of works.

But does every work, including his own, deserve to be mass produced, put into stores, with only some of them making it into people’s homes? Should they instead be made for order, passed around, or even pilgrimed for consumption, like a museum? As much as digital media should have solved this problem, people still want to hold the things that they loved, see it existing with them in the real world, taking up similar spaces next to them, even if only for their short lifetime, until they then occupy a space at one of these flea markets.

Lui surrendered and decided he wasn’t getting the Magic Mountain. His friend seemed settled at not getting anything either.

But a visit at the Flea Market never felt like a waste of time — it was often a history lesson, an art museum stroll, a study of the art of sale and an inquiry on consumerism, all wrapped into one. If not intellectual, it’s communal — where generations, cultures, interests, histories, and languages crossed paths, bargained with each other, and got passed on for a new life.

So even if Lui and his friend didn’t end up bringing anything home with them that day, they had still picked up a thousand little pieces of humanity with them, and a renewed sense of their own interests and lives.

They followed the flea market with stops at the record store and bookstore, this time to be surrounded by the new releases, the premium items, the reprints — and where Lui’s friend was able to get hold of a copy of Ariana Grande’s petals as he had planned, and Lui a copy of an exemplar of that year’s Deutsche Buchpreis longlisted novels (he had promised himself that that he wasn’t reading anything new from that year until he’d caught up on his backlog from the last years — so this exemplar was just a tease for what he might be reading next year).

With rumors of this big Thalia bookstore getting shut down and replaced by an office building, and this last surviving record store in Stuttgart fighting for its life while the music sections in Müller, Saturn, and MediaMarkt shrunk by the day, it was becoming a moral obligation to support these stores in the age of streaming.

Germany’s situation was already a lot better than the Philippines — on Lui’s last visit there, he failed to find any store that still sold records and movies, even in its capital Manila, nor street vendors selling pirated DVDs. What was perhaps more depressing, was that the National Bookstore, which used to be his Toy Kingdom when he was a kid, was turning into a dominantly school supplies store, having only a small section for books. What was once a huge magical place for him, had become small, dim, and dusty. (To be fair, everything was bigger and brighter to him when he was little).

After their shopping, Lui and his friend decided to have lunch at Ochs n Willi, a true Swabian restaurant just at the heart of Schlossplatz, where they each had maultaschen, käsespatzle, and Sportsweizen, and where Lui got to hear more stories from his friend’s past ten years in Germany.