I’m floating around in the pool on a llama floatie. It’s so large, it and it’s identical twin together take up a third of the pool. I’m constantly bumping into either the side of the pool or its mirror image, perpetually changing direction. Forever spinning slowly in the late July sun. The heat wave loosened its grip on Europe, making staying out in the sun somewhat bearable, if you’re graced by water. Which I am, twofold.
All of Europe is succumbing to the sweltering heat, becoming one with the sweat and the dust and the dirt. Swimming in canals, drinking out of bottles, baring skin. Collectively embracing texture, grit, reality. Irreversible want. Desire. I want to squeeze something until it resists, or yields, or squeezes back. Preferably with a firm grip. But then, men’s fashion week. In the middle of this heat inferno, dainty girl-men sashayed down the catwalk for Dries van Noten, dressed in see-through blouses, micro shorts, ballerina shoes. Women modeled the menswear at Amiri and Ami and Vetements. Meryll Rogge blended masculine and feminine through folded, piled, layered. Florals and poplin bloomers. Fragile, delicate, clad in pastels. While the audience panted and perspired.
If I weren’t lounging in the pool I’d be paddling around on the lake only two minutes by foot on a private trail behind our house. Surrounded by others with enough quiet insurance and unbothered leisure time to enjoy the late summer sun. Hands idle, for now.
The Durutti Column is releasing their first album in 16 years. Their music has been described as a smoke ring slowly dissolving in the air. Fleeting moments, cautiously composed. Vini Reilly is 73, has rheumatism, had a number of strokes, suffers from depression and anorexia. Fragile and delicate to the extreme, he inspires the likes of Harry Styles and Yung Lean. Harry has been experimenting with gender fluidity in his stage costumes for years now, embodying the man confident enough to wear frilly blouses, while having an affair with a newly divorced older woman without looking like a toy boy. When Durutti was first signed by Factory Records they were the odd bird out among moody post punk bands like Joy Division and OMD. Left to carefully trill on the side. Yung Lean wears vintage Durutti Column t-shirts. Battered, smoking, motionless in the chaos, wearing post-punk fragility on his body.
I’m shading my face from the glaring blue sky with a white sun hat. The only backdrop the low swoosh from brushing against the edge of the pool, and far off sounds from speed boats. Later I’ll cut up a watermelon. The sweet sticky juice will attract the wasps.
Hilma af Klint is being shown at Centre Pompidou, and Fulgur press will start shipping the reissue of Leonora Carrington’s surrealistic tarot cards later this summer. Hilma af Klint sealed her spiritual and abstract work for decades, because she didn’t believe the world was ready to see it. She claimed to be channeling higher spiritual entities, and wanted her works to eventually be shown in designated temples. After a lengthy legal battle the abstract paintings are instead on display at one of the worlds largest museums of modern art. Leonora Carrington painted her Major Arcana deck to use as a personal spiritual compass. The cards were never intended to be a commercial product or a simple fortune-telling device, they resist grasping. A macrocosmic model of the universe, more art object than divination tool. Now they are being shipped world-wide after a marketing campaign that utilised a blend of institutional prestige, scarcity tactics, and experiential tie-ins like interactive readings, multi-sensory “Magic Labyrinth” environments and custom fragrances.
My foot meets the rough stones next to the pool. Two tiny lizards scurry away like mice between the hot rocks.
It makes me think of Lennie. Of what happens when want has no master. He is grit-culture run to its logical end, touch as love that kills the thing it touched. Wanting the beauty so much he kills it. On the streets I see women with scatterings of delicate figures tattooed on their lightly clad bodies. Carving the fleeting thoughts into their flesh, trying to pin down the mirage.
I turn around on the llama, lazily offering my back to the searing sun. Nothing I grab will grab me back. It will disintegrate under my obsession.