logo
Talking to strangers enriches our lives in countless ways

Talking to strangers enriches our lives in countless ways

Photo by Lior Zilberstein/Millennium Images
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.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe
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]
Related
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

‘City of singles': cosmopolitan prewar Paris's ‘crazy years' brought to life
‘City of singles': cosmopolitan prewar Paris's ‘crazy years' brought to life

The Guardian

time13 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. The result is an almost comprehensive list of those recorded as living in the 80 districts of Paris's 20 arrondissements at a time when the population of the city reached 2.9 million people. Only the details of those in prisons, hospitals or religious institutions have not been released. 'It's absolutely fascinating. For the first time we can name almost every person who was registered as living in Paris during this period,' said Valérie Guillaume, the director of the Musée Carnavalet. 'From the information, we see Paris was a city of single, young adults and that there were many different nationalities. There were very few children in the city at that time.' As France recovered from the first world war, Paris attracted a cosmopolitan and global crowd of writers, artists, and musicians who mingled with people fleeing revolution, genocide and persecution, workers from France's colonies as well as young people from the countryside seeking jobs. While Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani were busy reshaping the art world, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F Scott Fitzgerald were living it up in the French capital and George Orwell was down and out. Before 1926, population counts had been carried out in Paris, but the census that year was the first to give precise details of city inhabitants including date and place of birth, dependents and profession. Until now, the public has been able to consult the censuses in the Paris archives, but this has required a manual search. 'The artificial intelligence was trained to recognise letters and numbers in the handwritten entries in the census to create a database that can be searched and consulted. Entries that were ambiguous were checked by a human,' Guillaume said. 'It's never been done before because it's an enormous job; too big to manage without digital help.' Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion The Musée Carnavalet, which is dedicated to the history of Paris, said the censuses threw up a 'mosaic of diverse life stories in a whirlwind of memories and emotions'. Aside from the famous, including the US actor and entertainer Josephine Baker, the singers Édith Piaf (born Gassion) and Charles Aznavour (born Shahnour Vaghinag Aznavourian), and the celebrated model Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), the exhibition focuses on ordinary Parisians. The data also reveals interesting comparisons between the 1920s, when the average lifespan of a Paris resident was 50-60 years, and now, when inhabitants live to aabout 80. As well as documents and photographs from the era, many of which have never been previously seen publicly, visitors to the exhibition will be able to consult the census database. 'People will be able to look for details of relatives who were living in Paris at the time or the names of people living in their building a century ago,' Guillaume said of the exhibition, which opens in October. The People of Paris 1926-1936 exhibition will also include newsreels and broadcasts from the era as well as recordings of Parisians recalling life in the city in the 1920s and 1930s made as part of a City Hall project in the 1990s. Joyce lived in Paris for 19 years, frequently moving address until the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, when the family moved to Zurich, where he died the following year. Finnegans Wake was finally published in 1939. As a matter of record, the 1926 census entry for the Joyce family is not entirely correct: the children are wrongly recorded as having been born in Ireland instead of Trieste, Italy, and Giorgio is recorded as Georges. 'This whole project is fascinating and a living thing. For the first time we can put a name to those registered as living in Paris during that decade,' Guillaume said. 'On one hand it is a very large mass of information and on the other it's personal because we are looking at individual people and their stories.'

Why Moby is working with a Russian teen — Music brings us together
Why Moby is working with a Russian teen — Music brings us together

Times

time16 hours ago

  • Times

Why Moby is working with a Russian teen — Music brings us together

Over a four-decade career in which he took ambient music and sampling to the mainstream, at one point seemingly soundtracking every advert on television, Moby has worked with the bona fide greats. 'Ridiculously well-known people, like Ozzy Osbourne, Britney Spears and Michael Jackson,' the DJ, producer, songwriter and professional vegan says — and that's without mentioning his friend David Bowie. Next up? Dmitry Volynkin. Dmitry who? Also known as Øneheart, the Russian producer has just turned 19, and already has a song, Snowfall, with 970 million Spotify streams — making it perhaps the most successful ambient track to date. The kid was born seven years after the release of Moby's behemoth album, Play. Moby is 59. They are an unlikely pairing, yet this week are releasing a single, Lagrange Point — a gorgeous swell of synth that also features a musician called Leadwave, aka Volynkin's dad. To find out how this happened I jump on a Zoom call with Moby and Volynkin. It is audio only: Moby says that, after he watched the first series of the tech thriller Mr Robot (2015), he disabled his cameras and I don't think he's joking. • Moby: 'I read The Sunday Times and wake up 15 times a night' 'It is nice meet you,' Volynkin says to Moby. 'Nice to meet you too,' Moby replies. Hang on — you have made a song together, but not met? 'No, but there are thousands of miles between us, not to mention 10 time zones,' says Moby, who lives in Los Angeles, while Volynkin is in Moscow. 'So there has just been a lot of file sharing.' Against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and tensions between Trump and Putin, it is a tricky time for a Russian to collaborate with an American. Russian artists such as the opera star Anna Netrebko have been banned from performing in the US, while its musicians have been excluded from the Eurovision Song Contest. Russian artists who oppose the war have been exiled by Putin, while Spotify has removed pro-war Russian artists from its platform. Moby is happy to explain why he is reaching out across the divide. 'I don't want to be in any way glib or dismissive,' he begins, 'but politics are not people. I have toured for years, going from Lebanon to Israel, and guess what? The people generally do the same thing. They're having meals, going to work and sleeping and stressing about their health. They don't have the time to hate. Geopolitical divisions in no way reflect the reality of most lives. 'And for the most part, politicians just make things worse. In terms of AI, looking at the current state of politics, I almost feel we'd be better off with robot politicians, especially in the United States. So Americans are not Trump, Russians are not Putin, Israelis are not Netanyahu. Politicians are not people — they are pernicious, corrupting anomalies, and music reminds people globally that we are not reflected by them.' Volynkin, understandably, is rather less vocal. After all, he lives in a country at war. 'Well, there are always some problems,' he says. 'But I prefer to think we are just all here for the music. Since I started growing a fanbase, I've been getting hate when people realise where I am from and that's really a hard topic for me to discuss. Politics is for politicians. I'm just making music.' • The best albums of 2025 so far Lagrange Point, which also features the Russian ambient artists Dean Korso and Reidenshi, came about when Volynkin and his father were fiddling about on tracks, the old man sharing his Moby vinyl collection. His son asked: 'What if we reached out to Moby?' That, in itself, is not so strange, but why did Moby say yes? 'I was in LA and the [radio] station KCRW was playing Snowfall,' he says. 'It took me aback. 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. He uses ChatGPT to help him to write Instagram posts, but when it comes to music, he stays away from the available tools. 'We've all heard of this AI band, the Velvet Sundown,' he says, 'who are growing really fast. It sounds horrible.' And how much of Volynkin's mother country seeps into his gorgeous, highly emotive soundscapes? 'In Russia, there are a lot of people who make sad songs,' he says, adding that he wants to focus on beauty. Assuming the Moby single brings Volynkin an even larger audience, who would he pick to collaborate with next? 'Charli XCX,' he says. 'I fell in love with Brat and her discography is amazing.' I wouldn't rule it out.

Discover the secret life of objects
Discover the secret life of objects

Time Out

time5 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.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store