Hi J.,
Our memories from Croydon keep on coming back these days. Did I ever tell you about the time I almost got mugged, roughed up a bit by a group of boys, but I was OK? I didn’t even have a phone to give them, so lord knows what I would have done. Was shaking when I got home, dropping things in a daze and wishing to move someplace else. I didn’t tell a soul at the time. Bumped into some old classmates from primary school soon after at the bus stop round the corner from the station. It was odd. They were asking me about which of them was hot, if I fancied them, ‘You find me fit, yeh?’ I was just dumbstruck and didn’t really answer, walking home instead of taking the bus. Being introduced to the vocalisation of attraction in this assertive manner, it was all really strange. I felt pinned down and silly.
Do you ever think of an encounter as some sort of entanglement? Something you get caught up in, you know, a state of confusion, to put things into perspective. Maybe that’s why I got into heavy metal, as a sorta negation of conventional cultural expectation as a brown kid. I love big rare groove, soul and funk heads, having parties, DJing and the like. Convivial, social music. I always found it overwhelming. Metal was something else, a whole different energy with a strong well-defined iconography. Getting into the style, acquiring my leather biker jacket, skinny black jeans, white Reebok high-tops, and a myriad of band patches to sew onto a denim cut-off. It felt militant and transformative. I had a skin to go into town with, dreaming on forums and last.fm. My CD collection grew and finally I was old enough to go out to gigs, in-and-around Camden for the most part. Do you remember me sharing those Slayer CDs with you? I remember how we first connected onto that shared interest. You had a different style too, both in music and attire, but we didn’t need to be uniform. Remember going to the Underworld, drinking underage, sticky floors and the rub of leather, it was a real exciting blur. Yet there was a sense of purity and innocence floating around, even while seeing bands like Suffocation and Obituary, like we were in a bubble away from the dismal everyday and before the adult problems of bills and purpose. Something wholesome and life affirming being in and amongst the sweaty masses, making friends in the pit, and running for the last train home.
Our yearns for a social life were sublated through these misshapen assemblies across the city and abstracted iconographies abundant in the music: blood, viscera, oddities and grotesqueries. A dripping coolness. It felt subterranean and, on reflection, sexy. I was probably too naive and geeky to fully make sense of the libidinal aspects of this subculture we had entered: the intense exchange of energy, the brush and gesture of being together, the touching and holding. Now I acknowledge it as something deeply formative sensually and I’m wondering how you feel about it now.
Catch up soon,
Kash
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Hiya B.,
It’s been forever, I’m sorry we lost touch. Things got way too much in the end. You remember how it began. We were aloof and judgemental and bored at uni. We set up some social routines: watching football at the student bar, board game nights supplemented with chill beats and vodka-monster drinks. Strangely, the feeling of emptiness could not leave our bodies. I remember our legs lethargically intertwined on the couch; it was intimate and sweet. We avoided clubs, finding them laddish and boring. Christmas came and our family lives were frayed but fine. The feeling of Christmas went away.
Remember that night in the New Year? After acquiring some weed and not knowing how to roll spliffs we made hash brownies instead, eating the whole tray after the first couple of pieces did nothing. Hilarity ensued, I wrapped up in bed trying to sleep off the effects, you whispered a million jokes to rattle my paranoia, ending in us both losing our sense of reality for a couple of days.
The week after, the protest on the Sussex campus against outsourcing was planned. I got to the front as we stormed the building and you stayed back, eventually leaving early. It was a fortuitous time, one in which I was fully ready to enact the political theory I had been ingesting for the past couple of years. The odd bits of race theory, Third World history, Marxism and numerous anarchist tracts. I was up for an adventure and decided to be fully open to all who came past. I stayed in the occupation for days while we were under lockdown, forming strong bonds and meeting all sorts. We associated ourselves with the unaffiliated anarcho-types, organising direct action autonomously to the behest of the boorish bureaucrats-to-be who tried to take control. The old political forms were dying, or so it felt, and we were the newer, freer folks in town. As the weeks of the occupation trundled along, older radicals got involved in events from 2010 with links in Brighton. I knew some of them off Twitter, many of them queer and militant. I also came across radical poetics and autonomous cultural spaces. I was taking it all in with glee, slowly understanding my drive was rooted in a social desire, perhaps more akin to my parents’ parties than I would care to admit. It was weird to feel inside my skin, to take people as they came in genuine solidarity and not put up a stony front. I think it was the joy at my parents’ parties I found difficult: it came from years of collective hardship, something which I hadn’t fully experienced nor understood. Anyway, you know what happened. I fell for A. on our mad trip across Europe, returning to Brighton as a couple into the cauldron.
All was not what it seemed. Sexual assault was the order of day, tearing through our sociopolitical group. It was shocking and painful. Maybe I was naive, and it was certainly something A. opened my eyes to. Something had to be done so we caused a ruckus – open letters calling out abuse and confrontations that broke the scene – and left the town. I’m sorry our communication failed. It was all too much. My relationship to my body, to sensuality, had been broken by these violent indiscretions and my ability to maintain sociality was massively compromised. I had perceived intimacy in both the wide lens of community building and the focused snapshots of everyday activity, and I needed time to recalibrate.
This undoubtedly contributed to my retreat from my networks and the island itself, and led my initial turn towards experimental and poetic writing as a way to process, to become intimate with myself and the world again, away from the scene and its suffocating culture. I was both too soft and too wilful at the same time …
K.
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A. B., wie gehts!
How’s life in Oxford? I wanted to tell you about my life since leaving you in Brighton and my stay in Berlin. I learnt a lot, even if I didn’t do too much. I toyed with my presentation more, swapping clothes with A. and using make-up. The anonymity of the city provided the stage for a new performance of self. Something fully dissociative and therapeutic in its calming emptiness. I wore skinny jeans, zebra cowl neck, red leather jacket, second-hand shirts, designer blazers, leggings and Cossack hats. Rouged cheeks, night-blue eyeshadow, light-red lipstick, mascara and kohl. We went out, finding queer bars by accident, or intuition, listening to deconstructed club music in the ruins of the 20th century. D., a friend, says he finds it too sedate, that it lacks the rowdiness of London nightlife, but it was just what I needed. Pretty much clubbing sober and having my mind opened after brain infection. We’d contracted meningitis in Tbilisi over the summer, and recovery was long-winded. I was tall and brown, gaunt from not eating enough – depression – and hit upon by older white men. A. was short, butch and off-brown. We found it quite funny and eye-opening. It made a change from the day-to-day disdain that Berliners treated us with as
a mixed-gender nonconforming couple, not performing our Europeanness properly, not performing our brownness properly either. We were not integrating into the categories available to us, by both chance and will. Neither hard-working immigrants nor lackadaisical bohemians.
We were coming to terms with each other, our sexuality, our gender identity, our orientation to the world, and the cultural consequences of it all. I walked all over the city, not having a job, not having much to do, just wayward, inhabiting bohemian modernism and immigrant listlessness. I was writing in fragments, about weighty cultural experiences, trying to process my political disillusion of the previous year in Brighton amidst social isolation. I was having trouble picking up the language and refusing to learn properly. My brain was being retrained – a rearrangement was underway wherein the subtlety and pliability of language as culture produced fleshy results. I read profusely about the city, in the city, reading myself into the city, reinhabiting the prose, letting my body channel those stories as a repository of hidden knowledge. There were histories buried in texts, whole worlds being cemented over in the throes of our current moment. I found the edifices I spent time with exuding sexual promise and sociality, while careening along straits of mourning and insurgency, providing a grounded impetus to follow the trace.
I saw my body in context. My body lusted for encounter, interaction, experience.
More soon,
Kashif
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Dear Z.,
Really good to reconnect with you. London feels like this alienating mess. Space is so compressed. You have to consume to occupy it, and even then, it’s time restricted and uncomfortable. The pub is the only sanctuary. So no wonder alcoholism is rife and laddishness is a plague. It feels like we are living in a social crisis, as it is so difficult to find connections and maintain relationships. The club is maybe a bit better; polyglot weirdness, though it’s hard to keep up without taking drugs I gotta say.
I have been trying to take contemporary culture seriously and avoid being curmudgeonly by attending talks, looking to develop my writing practice, going to clubs and performances. I would love to pursue a PhD one day, but the scene feels so saturated and overdetermined. I feel put in my place and made into a single subject where before I felt I had decentred myself. It feels weird and ingenuine to always have economic interest at the centre of desire, as I see so many peers earnestly self-branding. It feels like our identity needs to be flattened and polished, to the point where we cannot grasp the pits and scratches of people, what makes us desirable. Don’t you have the feeling our desires are being sanitised?
I’m trying to pursue a poetic mode as a reformulation, a reconsideration of the estranging effects of urban life. I’m enjoying finding a scene undeterred by economic interest. I think we can do something really special here, amplifying and creating community. We need to make this sanitised culture dirty again, as a subterranean vanguard, creeping through the throngs making transactions, more connections and joyful contact. I always think of market and street-food culture in India, and the conviviality and web of connections that form social bonds. The dhabas that specialise on singular dishes, the repetition and virtuosity on show providing sensation, taste and comfort. I like to compare that to the new street-food craze in London, with the high overheads and start-up costs creating a mere imitation of food culture. Let’s build things, propagate seeds without professional sheen and artworld clout.
I’ve attached a short passage that might be the start of the manifesto on poetics and the avant-garde we have been discussing. It’s a little sporadic and dissolute. I can’t wait to keep on writing it together. I think we’re doing something really special.
Keep on,
Kashif
[Attachment]
In bringing back the erotic grain, our embodiment boldens as hybridised gothic beings amidst the cybernetic wastelands. The tug of association we toy with, building intimacy. We tie ourselves to neighbourhoods sedimented with meaning, saturated and malcontent. There’s a storm a-brewing and we can sail outwards together in our small gestures, our incorrigible networks. We portend the coming events. The necessary irruption. As we build the tunnels, the cultural infrastructure for imagining otherwise. Finding hapticality in the cut of hanging out. Holding each other down and railing against moguls and dinosaurs. A carnival of sensation, a resistant topography, building connections and conducting vanguardist force. Side by side, in care and confidence, balms for our parasympathetic nervous systems along the cut of low-lit rooms and lyrical evenings.