(Jamie and I in our flat: set the scene and situation. Jamie compares the trail of hot girls on Instagram to a dinner party.)
It turned out the plug adapter I brought with me only worked on the continent, so I needed a new one in order to charge my laptop in the U.K. I was told to go to a pharmacy called Boots, so I searched for the nearest Boots from our flat in Ladbroke Grove. I got dressed, put my headphones on (Playboi Carti, Self-Titled), then let Google Maps guide me from our building. I walked down Bassett Road, up St. Helens Gardens to Bramley Road, past the clinical white scaffolding hiding the remains of Grenfell Tower, then right on Freston Road and past the park known simply as Norland Open Space. After walking up a flight of stairs and across a highway, I was greeted by the behemoth facade of Westfield London, a mall in White City which, after renovations in 2018, is now the biggest shopping center in all of Europe. I had visited a number of the Westfield Group's early developments, most memorably the West L.A. complex formerly known as Fox Hills Mall, but this felt like a magnum opus of sorts; a glittering polygonal exterior of glass and LCD mega-screens provided shell for the standard assortment of luxury boutiques and general appliance stores. Upon entering the mall, it took nearly fifteen minutes to find Boots, as I wandered aimlessly before locating a map and finding my destination. After acquiring my goods, I thought about all of the ways I could waste my time at the mall before realizing I was hungry. I spent another fifteen minutes wandering before finding the food court, which had its own wing on the third floor. Every cuisine I had become accustomed to in the states was available at Westfield London. After two laps around the perimeter I decided on Master Bao. I ordered a pork bao with a side of fried chicken and a Coke, then put my headphones back on. It had come time for Smoove L, a Brooklyn drill rapper with two songs that stuck inside the crevices of my brain for weeks on end. I found myself listening to him more out of need than want. Halfway through "Idgaf" the restaurant pager started vibrating and flashing; I returned it to my server and picked up the lone tray on the counter. I turned around and surveyed the large seating area in the center of the court. There were no empty tables in sight, so I began walking toward the nearest aisle. It was then, just as "Idgaf" ended and "Ouu Ahh" began, that I short-circuited. I had tied my light jacket around my waist upon entering the sweat-inducing food court, but it refused to maintain its knot, no matter how hard I pulled. After a few steps the knot came undone and my jacket fell to the floor, bringing the wire of my headphones with it. With a full tray in my hands I panicked and bent down haphazardly, and the ceramic plate carrying my pork bao fell crashing to the floor, shattering cacophonously in every direction. I looked up with a twisted smile on my face, apologized with the universal hands-to-the-chest-then-deflect gesture to the court, then volte-faced and repeated. I made haste to exit the mall; my time at the Westfield had come to a close.
There's this one shot in every Steven Soderbergh film where the camera rests tilted upwards on the floor in the corner of a room, pointed towards its subjects who sit across from each other at a desk or table. Like a fallen surveillance camera, this angle captures reality not from the omniscient birds-eye-view or man-on-a-perch that has become the normative mode of representing human life and all its glory in the digital age, but from the bottom up, a point-of-view that denotes stasis and stresses gravity, weight, fixity.
In London I met a distant cousin, Luca, a middle-aged Italian banker who had lived in London for most of his life. I'd never met Luca before but had heard stories about him from my grandmother. After our first meeting, Luca invited my uncle Jamie and I to dinner at the restaurant he owned. What we assumed would be dinner with Luca and his wife turned out to be dinner with Luca, his wife, and four more Italian expats. Four bottles of wine in, the conversation turned political. Trump, Brexit, whatever the fuck was going on in Italy. I largely remained silent, keeping my qualms unspoken while maintaining a light nod for the sake of familial alignment. The consensus was that the West was collectively in a strange place, but a sense of threat alluded the upper-middle class. Turning towards my uncle and I, a plump gentleman named Fredo interjected: "What about Obama? Obama was so smart, you trusted him, he had so much charisma. But why do some criticize?" I shot a look Jamie's way to let him know I got this one. "Well, to start, there were the drone bombs in the Middle East...False promises: Guantanamo..." I spoke in a staccato rhythm, trying to sound authoritative yet poetic, but full of bullshit, knowing no other way to drunkenly explain to a table full of Italians what Obama did wrong.
My third day in London was spent in the drab concourses of the Tate Modern. Exiting the tube, I walked towards the narrow tower of the former power station, which stands solemn just south of the River Thames. I entered the groundfloor and began my ascent up, up, up. Quaint rooms on "expanded painting", international surrealism, kinetic and op art, various global micro-movements. The rooms of this last variety had the seeds of intrigue, describing the political tumult that set the context for Brazilian abstraction or Chilean protest art, while providing a few exemplary works. Yet, in giving the work so little room to breathe while affording it a didactic sense of "purpose" that eluded the work of Western artists, I left each room feeling as if it were nothing more than a gesture towards inclusivity, a bandaid for institutional blindspots. Simultaneous exhibitions on Dora Maar and Dóra Maurer (as if patrons to modern art museums needed more disorientation) felt overly biographical. I trudged further up the stairs, masochistically bypassing the escalator. It's what I deserved for studying art history, I told myself. I looked out the window toward the clear London sky, considering skipping out on the upper levels. I had started to convince myself I was sick of art—or maybe I was excited about life. But a sense of duty remained, so I carried on at a hurried pace. I breezed through rooms on Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt, Marisa Merz. Through a hallway I spotted a darkened room that caught my attention—a reprieve from fluorescence. I entered the doorway and found myself surrounded by a series of large canvases. Rothkos: beautiful, revelatory. I think I'm attracted to Rothkos because they're so unphotographable. Rothko belongs in a slim category of artists whose two-dimensional work needs to be engaged in three-dimensional space to be activated.
(Dinner for schmucks - "you take mushrooms, you hold the snake" - the poet says...)
(Stuart the coke head taco truck owner who serves tacos at a weekly pop up at the natural wine store where we suspect the purchase of three tacos comes with a trip downstairs for a courtesy bump)
"We thought he was becoming too German but it turned out it was Asperger's."
There is nothing quite like the effects of THC on a developing mind.
While in Berlin I read Michel Houllebecq's The Map and the Territory, a book in which the author writes a version of himself as a supporting character. The protagonist is Jed Martin, an artist who makes a splash in the art world with his photographs of Michelin maps overlayed with photographs of the locations they represent, cleverly merging map and territory. I had been in Berlin a week and had yet to see any art, so on a Thursday evening I decided to walk to the nearest gallery opening from my Kreuzberg apartment. A gallery called Soy Capitán was showing a suite of photographs entitled Zink by an artist named Irmel Kamp. Zink indexed photographs taken by Kamp in the late 1970s of buildings with zinc facades in a town called Kelmis on the German-Belgian border, an area known for its zinc mining. I entered the small gallery and turned left to begin my clockwise assessment of the work, but found myself stuck in a state of confusion at the first image I came across: a black-and-white photograph depicting a segment of a map of the German-Belgian border, with small flags planted across the surface. Yes this map must be Michelin and yes I do live a life that isn't not a work of literature.
I felt especially attuned to the extra sensory phenomena that comes from likes and favorites and comments and retweets and pings and views and the feeling of being recognized on a plane not visible but nevertheless shared and felt.