Dreamflesh

It’s been nearly two weeks since arriving in Spain, and it’s been a blur of one madness or another. My online travel journal so far has basically consisted of progressive uploads of photos to my Flickr page, with comments here and there. In an effort to stop this one entry spiralling into a vast travelogue catch-up, I’m going to try and be short and sweet here. Having had George Orwell’s Essays sagely pressed upon me by my good friend Jim before I left, I’m currently immersed in his intelligent, frill-free assessments of Englishness and the state of the world circa World War II. Hopefully his style will influence me well here.

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Hello again! It’s taken a little longer than expected (about 4-5 months longer) to get the site back up and running. The idea was to ditch my hand-rolled ColdFusion site management system in favour of the nifty free WordPress blogging tool. WordPress has just about come along enough to manage non-blog content (basically, non-chronological pages like my essays), but… there were a whole load of tedious conversion issues that I’d like to summarily forget, now that I’m actually putting my first post up to this slightly revamped site.

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In response to a report from the Campaign to Protect Rural England that claims most real countryside in England may be lost within a generation:

‘ Many of the problems we see are the result of the countryside attracting hundreds of thousands of people moving there because of the attractive environment and high quality of life which it offers. They cannot all be wrong. – A spokesman at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs ‘

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‘That’s Katrina’s most important lesson: the time to debate whether or not to act is over. That debate’s history, like the Berlin Wall. Katrina flattened it. In the aftermath of Katrina, we can no longer scruple self-interest masked as caution, short-sightedness masked as responsibility, and lies masked as patriotism. To see the pictures and hear the stories coming out of New Orleans is to know one thing: whatever moral credibility professional environmental “skeptics” once claimed is as shredded as the Superdome roof.’

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After so many years of compromise, expedient lies and unchecked arrogance, Tony Blair seems to have utterly cracked in the wake of extremist Muslim terrorism landing, inevitably, on his doorstep. He hasn’t cracked in the theatrical way that we usually associate with going insane (that might affect his polls). But if we take a moment to feel our way into his mental processes (wearing very thick gloves of course), we can sense the frighteningly hermetic isolation of individual psyche from collective reality that speaks of schizophrenia’s catastrophic split.

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So now I’ve been back in London for over a week, and I’ve not found time to even catch up on the end of my American trip. I’ll keep it roughly chronological, but it’s worth mentioning upfront that part of the delay was due to my first experience of full-on jetlag on returning to London being infinitely compounded by the bizarre shock of finding myself in the middle of a terrorist attack on the tube back from Heathrow. I coasted through it in a daze of sleep deprivation and caffeine, and it seems like it’s still sinking further in as time goes on. More on that later.

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OK, so that was a bit of a break. I’m here now at the very end of my trip and I’ve not blogged anything about it for about two weeks. I’m determined to catch up, with myself at least, before flying home, so here comes a monster travel digest.

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Only now, breathing the (relatively) fresh air of the tree-lined streets of Palo Alto, am I digesting just how hot and hectic New York was. It’s like the pressure of the thick, stifling humidity and the legendary pace and attitude radiating out from Manhattan left little room in my psyche for reflective appreciation. I loved New York, but another visit, more time, and less heat will be necessary for me to enjoy it all fully in the moment.

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I’ve arrived in New York in the middle of an unfeasibly sticky, debilitating heatwave. Managed to get my fix of tourism from the Staten Island ferry trip; pondered the morbidly magnetic World Trade Center site; soaked up the hipster ambience of Williamsburg in Brooklyn (graffiti pictured is from there); and the thick, intoxicating vibrancy of the East Village. It’s an amazing process, gradually accumulating first-hand experiences of a cityscape so abundantly expressed in mass media, smelling and tasting the rich, often shitty loam out of which the over-familiar shoots and buds of Images and Icons have sprung. And of course, gradually seeing how a complex form of feedback is working, life on the street consuming and reflecting media representations, the withering flowers of pop culture falling to the soil and composting into fuel for ever more complex flora.OK, I’ll wind up. I’m well aware I’ve just been reading Baudrillard and drinking coffee in one of the mostly hectically mediated places on the planet, so I’ll stop before things get messy.

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Arrived in New York. No hassle at customs (apart from being fingerprinted, of course). I’m still pretty phased to be here, to be so far from the lands I’ve so far visited (i.e. Europe), to be somewhere so curiously familiar and alien. Have to say I’m loving it so far.

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