Talking to strangers enriches our lives in countless ways
It's a weird start, but go with me. First encounters with strangers are, by their nature, unexpected. That's what makes them so potentially electric. I was visiting an old friend in Berlin whom I hadn't seen for many years. On my final day I wanted to do what everyone who appreciates a good dance wants to do when there: go to Berghain, the city's most beloved club. At first sight, an enormous block of imposing concrete in the old east. It was a Sunday afternoon: no queue, just sweaty sexy people drifting out through the exit to be disarmed by the sunlight.
It takes me a while to warm up to my body as a subject in motion on a dancefloor, but once that's happened, almost nothing gives me greater pleasure. Except for the smoking area. I swear these are the most beautiful places in the world. Under the canopy of smoke, every single shimmering person is held in deep amorous conversation with someone else. It shouldn't be rare, but these days it is. You could blame the alcohol or the drugs, but I blame the dancing: every movement you make in answer to the hard, heavy music strips away something from your usual reserve, and gradually you feel yourself become unlocked, opened, until you're almost infant-like in your frame of mind.
Every hour I would head back out into the smoking area to encounter strangers. I met an army veteran from Belgium who said techno helps more than anything else with his PTSD, and a Russian facing arrest back in her country for speaking out against Putin's regime. It felt like none of the conversations I had that night were disingenuous or superficial. I felt I could do this forever – back and forth between these two states: dancing, then talking to strangers; breathing in, then breathing out – but I had a flight early the next morning to catch.
We need contact. That's not my line; I pinched it from the sci-fi writer Samuel R Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), a non-fiction book comprising two extended essays that first detail the author's experience of spending time in gay pornography theatres in Times Square between the 1970s and early 1990s. His argument is that public spaces in urban environments are vital sites for interclass contact, especially those designed specifically with desire in mind. For desire and knowledge, body and mind, are often imbricated, he writes, functioning as 'mutually constitutive aspects of political and social life'.
Delany defines contact as a particular kind of social practice. It is the discussion that begins with a stranger at the bar, or the one that emerges unexpectedly in the supermarket queue, or the bus stop or the nightclub – sudden sparks out of the dull impersonal drudgery of daily life. Contact can save our lives in small ways, by reminding us in an instant that almost all the time there are good people within touching distance, or in more significant ways: say there's a fire in your building, Delany suggests, 'it may be the people who have been exchanging pleasantries with you for years who take you into their home'. Unlike networking, to which Delany relates it, contact is spontaneous, non-competitive, non-capitalistic. Contact is how we retain the souls of our cities from annihilation by the corporatisation of all public space.
Delany's book is really a eulogy because by the time of writing, almost all the porn theatres had been demolished: replaced by vacant malls and offices, 'a glass and aluminium graveyard'. From 1985 onwards, New York began closing down institutions that were deemed to promote 'high-risk sexual activity', especially those used by gay men, such as bathhouses and the porn theatres of Times Square. Ostensibly, this was all done in the name of 'safety', a response to Aids, but really it was a cynical weaponisation of that term. 'Contemporary material and economic forces' work 'to suppress contact', Delany writes. Such forces promote the idea of the Other (gay or immigrant or working class) as an object of fear. I read it immediately after the UK Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman refers only to biological women. I feel that there are obvious parallels between Delany's argument and that ruling.
In the Times Square porn theatres, Delany passed whole days, talking and fucking and hanging out, all lit by the soft glow of the cinema screen. What happened to Times Square left him 'lonely and isolated'. The freedom to be gay, he explains, is no freedom if the institutions where you might embody and enact your sexuality are shut down. The freedom to be trans is no freedom if the public spaces you can attend are gradually eroded. Freedom is something which is interdependent; none of us is truly free until everyone is.
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Public spaces are for making contact. Contact is how we survive this world together – more than survive: experience life as genuinely pleasurable and meaningful. It is the antidote to xenophobia, to all kinds of othering. That's why I'm calling this column 'Contact'. I want to treat my life more like a nightclub smoking area, if you like – to go looking for contact, because I have a feeling that it is everywhere, so long as you render yourself open to it. So, hello, stranger. Nice to meet you.
[See also: We are all Mrs Dalloway now]
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The Guardian
13 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘City of singles': cosmopolitan prewar Paris's ‘crazy years' brought to life
In 1926, James Joyce was working on his novel Finnegans Wake while living in a spacious apartment in the 7th arrondissement of Paris with his partner, Nora Barnacle, and their two adult children, Giorgio and Lucia. Joyce's neighbours in the elegant stone building at 2 Square de Robiac included a Syrian family whose three children had an English nanny called Jessie, Russian émigrés, an Egyptian industrialist, and the US writers William and Elizabeth Placida Mahl. The details are part of a new exhibition that paints a portrait of the French capital a century ago when it was a hub for artists, intellectuals and young unattached men and women during the decade that became known as les années folles (the crazy years or roaring 20s). Curators at the Musée Carnavalet have drawn on work by researchers from France's National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS) using artificial intelligence to create a database of the 8m individual handwritten entries from the censuses of 1926, 1931 and 1936. 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Times
16 hours ago
- Times
Why Moby is working with a Russian teen — Music brings us together
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Where are the drums? Where are the vocals? But, clearly, it's a beautiful piece of music, and afterwards the DJ talked about the phenomenon, and how it found this bafflingly huge audience. It's probably the only time in the history of KCRW that they have played quiet, ambient music at two in the afternoon.' Yet as lush as Snowfall is, it is pretty weird, I say, that it has reached such a global audience. That number of streams is Lady Gaga and Beyoncé territory, not that of some Russian teenager. 'But it's the idea of music as refuge,' Moby says. 'We live in a world with a constant onslaught of demanding data and information, two-minute-long songs as loud as they can be. It's almost like if you want to get people's attention, you should do the opposite. Instead of shoving it down throats, be quiet instead. Humans are stressed and scared, and need that moment of calm.' Moby says the real boon of Snowfall is that it is a hit that no algorithm could have predicted. 'Look, AI is pretty good at convention,' he says. 'At looking at pop music and deconstructing it. But the history of music is full of counterintuitive surprise and if, a couple of years ago, you'd given a prompt to some magical AI songwriting platform and said, 'OK, generate a piece of music that, in the current musical climate, is going to generate a billion streams' — well, it would not have created a delicate piece of ambient music. AI is good at taking one plus one and getting two, whereas humans take one plus one and get 15 million. The end result is so much more than the sum of its parts.' • Read more music reviews, interviews and guides on what to listen to next Volynkin was born in the small town of Kirsanov and remembers, at just six, listening to Russian rock music with his father. Then he discovered electronic music and installed software to make it on his grandfather's computer. 'I was experimenting, starting from dubstep and house,' he says. 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Time Out
5 days ago
- Time Out
Discover the secret life of objects
Art doesn't always play by the rules, as it can take any shape or form. In the case of a new exhibition called Mambo: The Object and You, it appears through everyday objects that hold meaning in our lives. Hosted by Archives Design, this showcase explores the connection between people and the objects they live with. Without the human touch, they're just things but with us, they come to life. At the heart of the show is the Loba egg box: a symbol of how certain items can transport us back to special moments. Artists have turned these Russian doll-style boxes into works of art that celebrate the stories and emotions tied to them. Highlights include Onnalin Lojanagosin's Guardianship, a delicate drawing series that explores the idea of precious time through the symbolism of eggs representing birth, care and protection. Meanwhile, Phannapast Taychamaythakool's presents a trio of hand-painted leather eggs reflecting the balance of femininity and masculinity within us all.
