Read Me #7: Custom Wallpaper
1. FROGLAND
There’s something exciting but also poignant about the retro stylings of this website celebrating frogs.
2. TESS’S KEY
Read Me: Is there a key that you own, and perhaps even carry around with you, that has no current practical purpose?
Tess Davidson: I have a tiny key I found under the carpet in my room from when I was a little kid that must have belonged to a diary but I can’t find that diary. As a child I loved buying little notebooks that I could write stories and daydreams in then lock away for safekeeping. Feels like it would be a betrayal of that little me to get rid of the key so I have kept it all these years. But equally under that very same carpet I also found a small diamond ring that must have belonged to someone who lived there long before us (my parents have been there over 25 years) so I like to imagine maybe it’s not even my key but someone else’s who also used to write in the same way I did when living there.
Tess Davidson is a writer, artist and sound producer.
3. WHERE TO MEET
I love NGEs, or “nearest generic establishments”, the Paris manifestation of which consists of cafes with names — Bar du Central, Cafe Metro — seemingly generated by asking the sign manufacturer to “just think of something”, plus, of course, croque monsieurs, little round tables, and lots of mirrors. So why am I, and others like me, always turning our noses up at these places in favour of those with bench seating and plain walls, per the globalised design dogma that Kyle Chayka christened Airspace? Is it only because we like the coffee?
I haven’t actually listened to my recent appearance on Lindsey Tramuta’s wonderful New Paris Podcast — the gap between my internal monologue and actual speaking voice upsets me — but as I recall it, this forms a significant part of what we discuss. I’ve been trying to coin the term NGE for a while now, without much success, partly to simplify the business of meeting up with people (“just meet me at the NGE” rather than an hour on Google Maps looking for the perfectly insouciant venue) and partly because I’ve always wanted to coin a term. Hopefully this will help.
4. AT THE GARDEN OF COSMIC SPECULATION
A guest article by Aaron Peck
Recently, my sister-in-law, M., made me an unwitting accomplice to a kind of travel I had never before considered: visiting places mentioned in works of fiction. In this case, it was from a book I have never read. Back in February, she asked my wife and I if we would like to meet her and her husband in Scotland to go to the Garden of Cosmic Speculation. Intrigued by the name, and fans in general of things north of Hadrian’s Wall, we agreed. Located outside the town of Dumfries, the garden is on the Portrack Estate, still owned by descendants of the Keswick family, and only open to the public for two days a year. Somewhat reminiscent of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, the Garden of Cosmic Speculation is a series of earthworks and sculptures that contemplate, well, the cosmos. We wandered the grounds for our allotted three hours, through a classical garden resembling the double helix of a strand of DNA, a sculpture called The Black Hole, a “Time” garden, two hills shaped like (and titled) “Buttocks,” even an area called “Nonsense,” the hilltop of which had a folly. The rhododendrons, azaleas, and blue bells were all in full bloom. Only after we had arrived in Scotland, though, did my sister-in-law explain why she wanted to visit: she had encountered the garden in the Canadian mystery writer Louise Penny’s novel The Long Way Home. What’s more, this was not the first time M. had travelled to a location that appeared in fiction: years earlier, she said, she had visited Romania to see the castle in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As we crossed a bridge shaped like a comet, I overheard another visitor with a North American accent mention the author’s name. In Penny’s novel, M. told me, the garden has sculptures of rabbits that, so the legend goes, come alive at night. Hoping to see the objects that inspired that scene in the book, she asked one of the gardeners about their location. “A lot of people ask about them,” she smiled, “but sadly no such rabbits exist.”
Aaron Peck is a critic and writer based in Paris, France and Vancouver, B.C.
5. SCAN AND DELETE
The redevelopment of Lime Street in Liverpool has won this year’s Carbuncle Cup for “the UK’s worst building”. The redevelopment, which saw several popular buildings demolished, features a series of screens depicting — celebrating? — those buildings.
6. POINT OF VIEW: BRIDGERTON
The Netflix series Bridgerton, source of this week’s header image, is fascinating for many reasons, one of which is its use of what you could call ‘add joke later’ dialogue: lines that feel like something a scriptwriter might put in at night if planning to work on the actual joke in the morning. Perhaps a group of nobles is standing around a table with some cheese on it. A character approaches and one of them asks, “how are you?” The character smiles and says, “I’ll tell you how I am. I’m very much interested in eating some of that fine-looking cheese!” to which the nobles roar with laughter.
At first, these faux-jokes made me cringe. Then, I started to look forward to them. Not that they became funny to me, but I came to appreciate the qualities they possessed in their own right. Certain foods, such as salted liquorice, seem disgusting at first before revealing, with a little persistence, a complex and new category of pleasure. Equally, the anti-jokes of Bridgerton turn out to be responsive to a connoisseurship that savours the moments where humour pretends to be but isn’t. The confidence, the awkwardness, the mirthless laughter: each arrangement is unique! “Listen to the sound of one hand clapping,” goes the famous Zen teaching. Could it be that Bridgerton — the most recent episodes of which I devoured this week — has deliberately pioneered its joke-realm equivalent?
7. KEEP GOING
Read this and never stop.
8. EXHIBITION REVIEW
Edi Rama is the Prime Minister of Albania. This week I visited an exhibition of his work at Marian Goodman Gallery, 66 rue du Temple, Paris. In the first room the walls are coated in a hypnotic custom wallpaper which has sometimes been laid over fragments of official-looking documents: while I don’t speak Albanian, terms like Ministër i Infrastrukturës suggest some connection with Rama’s day job. On a basic wooden desk in the back room are a desk light, some drawings and documents, a collection of colouring pens, and an ash tray that’s been emptied but not cleaned. Rama has been Prime Minister since 2013. I love the fact he’s still an exhibiting artist. I love the fact he also once played in the national basketball team.
9. WIRELESS EYE
The latest issue of Social Imagining, the newsletter by Matt Lloyd-Rose, grapples with Infraordinary FM:
Listening to Infraordinary FM, the background slides into the foreground; we open ourselves to the largeness of life; we feel the shock of the ordinary.
Elsewhere in the orbit of Five Radio Stations, my curatorial project with Silvia Guerra and Lab’Bel, it is possible to listen to Benedikt H. Hermannsson’s day-long radio station 24 Hours at the End of the World at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, London (you’ll find it by the Icelandic display); to Keren Cytter’s cat-related murder mystery at the Fiskars Village Art and Design Biennale in Finland; and to all the stations at various high street shops in Parma, Italy.
11. THANK YOU
Thanks for reading this newsletter experiment. You can support the project by sharing it with friends, leaving a comment or distributing print-outs at the neighbourhood market. See you next time!