Read Me #10: Beneath the Foam

1.
There is a fire hydrant directory, and it is beautiful.

2.
I really like the app Minutiae. Once a day it buzzes and, if you can, you take a photo of your surroundings. Once that’s done you get exactly a minute to browse the similarly-taken photos of a random stranger, somewhere in the world. At all other times the app has no function whatsoever. My correspondent yesterday was based in the Dutch city of Alkmaar. Their photographs included some people in a garden, and a brown roll with cheese in the middle. It didn’t look like a good sandwich, but I was genuinely glad to know about it. Every day it’s someone new, someone real. Something about the mode of sharing makes it feel more truthful than the big social media platforms, perhaps because there is no clout-building incentive at play.

3.
A couple of weeks ago, I received my alert while in the cafe at Paris Internationale, a satellite art fair in the orbit of Art Basel Paris. Out of politeness and fear I did not point my phone at the fashion designer Raf Simons, at the table to my left, and tried to capture the atmosphere as it presented itself on my right. Half the pleasure of the activity is imagining what Random Person X in Random Place Y would make of a scene, in this case a brightly lit concrete room filled with stainless steel tables and art world VIPs.

I also went to Frieze Art Fair, Frieze Masters, Art Basel Paris, and The Salon, the new Paris version of NADA in collaboration with The Community. Not that I’m a dealer, collector, artist or critic, but having been to one you feel like going to them all. Each contains just an overwhelming deluge of really weird, occasionally breathtaking, objects. Paintings of Daffy Duck and mutated plastic chairs at NADA. A neolithic spear and an Andy Warhol print at Frieze Masters. I first went to Frieze in 2009, and I suppose my worry — if someone put a gun to my head and said “articulate a worry” — is that nothing I see at an art fair now would have been out of place at an art fair then. But I like art fairs; when I asked a fairly functional question about some ceramics by the artist Peiyun Zhang, the gallery rep talked about the ideas of Saint Augustine and whether love and knowledge are perhaps one and the same thing.

4.
Nurturing a hankering for a pumpkin spice latte? Make sure you read this round-up by Jess White, creator of the newsletter Jess White Read Books. She’s based in Liverpool but her assessments, being mostly about global chains, are relevant to many of the densest Read Me subscriber territories.

BLACK SHEEP COFFEE
They say: “An absolute Autumn classic, done the Black Sheep Coffee way.”

Jess says: “Absolutely disgusting. The orange sauce drizzled over the cream looked radioactive and was so orange I could hear 12 July marching songs when I drank it. The latte did not taste like coffee, more like Cantonese sauce dumped out in a mug. A shame, because their pistachio lattes are very nice.”

DUNKIN’ DONUTS
They say: “Spice up the morning at your local Dunkin’ with a Pumpkin Spice Signature Latte.”

Jess says: “A curveball. So much more delicious than you would ever reasonably expect. I actually said, aloud, ‘what?’ when I took my first sip.”

BLANK STREET COFFEE
They say: “Our home-baked Pumpkin Spice Latte will transport you right back to grandma’s kitchen.”

Jess says: “A company that everyone and their mother seems to have an opinion on, but does provide a very fine pumpkin spice. A very elegant drink; just enough of all the elements to be an enjoyable experience.”

92 DEGREES
They say: “😔💅🎃”

Jess says: “Similar to the Blank Street offering in texture and spice level. Quite a comforting experience overall.” 

GREGGS
They say: “Whether you like it hot or cold, our Pumpkin Spice Latte really is Autumn in a cup.”

Jess says: “Greggs do not do a good pumpkin spice latte (maybe the wrong spices are used, or the ratio between them is slightly off) but they do sell a pumpkin spice doughnut, which is something to behold. The goop in the middle is the perfect pumpkin spice tasting experience, so much so that I could funnel it out and drink it with a straw but that would be undignified. I urge you to seek it out before it is taken off the market.”

This was an opportunistic adaptation from Jess White’s Instagram.

5.
“If you find Monet, Renoir, Degas too pretty and popular — if you think Impressionism is the artistic equivalent of a pumpkin spice latte — I want you to taste the espresso beneath the foam.” Jason Farago on why it’s OK and not basic to like Impressionism (via Lindsey Tramuta).

6.
The dictionary defines ‘phenomenon’ in three ways but unlike with, say, ‘stock’ or ‘bank’, all the definitions are pretty similar. Mostly we’re talking about ‘a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen’, though if referring to something like Hoag’s Object or the ombrinho dance craze a phenomenon can mean ‘a remarkable person or thing’.

The front section of Fantastic Man magazine, ‘Phenomenons’, comprises a range of written contributions on a single category of person or thing. That category in the current issue is the places in which a man might spend some or all of the night, for better or worse. Stories therein include Bruce LaBruce on how he inadvertently gentrified his favourite Toronto dive bar and Jason Okundaye on the bizarre late-night customer pool one finds in a London gym.

One of my favourite tasks in editing the section was speaking with the fashion designer Rick Owens about how he prepares for bedtime.

I like living where I live in Paris because it’s very austere. There are a lot of embassies so there’s almost a sinister edge, because it feels like there’s a lot of security. The families are very reserved and not so friendly, which is fine with me. We have a terrace that overlooks the garden of the Ministry of Defence, and they have security guards patrolling the garden. Everything is very quiet, but then you hear the crunch of the security guard’s feet on the gravel. It is the most delicious, secure feeling. Daddy’s here.

Owens’ home and atelier are located in the concrete former headquarters of the French Socialist Party. Our conversation was not just about his current bedtime but the bedtime he’d like to one day achieve, which is a lot inspired by Des Esseintes, the misanthropic connoisseur from Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel À Rebours.

7.
If you need some more phenomena.

8.
Feeld, the dating app famous for its popularity with the kink and poly communities (among others), has launched a new magazine. I am a contributing editor. The magazine is usually called A Fucking Magazine, but depending on who you’re talking to it can also be referred to as either A Feeld Magazine or AFM. It’s a beautiful and transgressive but also highly erudite and literary affair, edited by the brilliant Maria Dimitrova and Haley Mlotek. From a write up in The Atlantic:

It’s a healthy combination of sexy stuff, sweet stuff, and serious stuff—one photo essay of people in their homes getting ready for dates and one accompanying a guide to making your own latex.

9.
Ethos is a restaurant in Austin, Texas that doesn’t actually exist at all.

10.
Speaking of trade fairs, Bob Dylan, currently in the middle of a European tour, accidentally stayed in the same hotel as the Frankfurt Book Fair. “I didn’t know there were so many book publishers in the world,” he said. “I was trying to find Crystal Lake Publishing so I could congratulate them on publishing The Great God Pan, one of my favorite books. I thought they might be interested in some of my stories. Unfortunately it was too crowded and I never did find them.”

11.
The Great God Pan by the Welsh writer and mystic Arthur Machen was published in 1894: “We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale.”