7: camila mchugh, self-chilling beverage cans, python bowl, LARPing in a polish forest
This week I feel suspended above the flood. A little agitated, a little immobilised like Gansho-Kun, or this hold my deer situation from floods in Bangladesh. I’m luxuriating in small pleasures, mostly olfactory. Bayberry, balsam fir and cedar incenses that smoke like wet wood, ‘Gozan’ and ‘Kyoto Autumn Leaves’ which smell more like woodsy undergrowth.
Herbal infusions and teas, too. My favourites include a smoky blend of lapsang souchong, kukicha, jasmine, cedar tips and nettle, and another sublime mix of balsam fir, tamarack, cedar, and labrador tea. Ghost pipe tinctures for pain, with caution. It’s not like I’ve ever spent any significant amount of time in forests, let alone the misty evergreen kinds. I hate camping. Maybe it’s nice to feel like I’m outside.
It’s nice to imagine leaving the city too, and the lives I might lead in whichever city I move to when my US visa ends. This week’s diary comes from Camila McHugh in Berlin—the current object of my strignine affections—as it begins to open up.
spiky boi
Jim Bakker’s prepper village is having the worst apocalypse ever. How to draw the coronavirus. Exam anxiety: how remote test proctoring is creeping students out. The unheroic reality of being a restaurant worker during this pandemic. Iran’s chemical weapons survivors struggle withe coronavirus—and US sanctions. Contagion or cure? A history of healing and pandemic in Qom. The US is building a contact tracer army. Return of indenture. Campus has closed, so college students are rebuilding their schools in Minecraft. What you learn when you read obituaries. How Pokémon Go is adapting for a quarantined world. The strange, smelly chores that keep natural history museums running. VIRTUAL CATTLE BATTLE. My quarantine partner is my eating disorder.
glouglou and snackchat
The peckish patient. How to feed a dictator. Thailand’s spirits have a taste for strawberry Fanta. Guy Fieri is the last unproblematic food person. Dalgona coffee—viral or vapid? How a West African woman became the ‘Pastry Queen’ of colonial Rhode Island. Restaurant thinks mannequins will make social distancing less awkward. The ‘lion-faced’ Iranian cafes of Karachi. Is the world ready for Pringles flavoured noodles? The secret history of America’s oldest tofu shop. The sacred ritual of meals with my mother. The man who’s going to save your neighbourhood grocery store. Cooking with care. Pizza Arbitrage. Zoos make birthday cakes from bugs, bamboo, melons, and more. The gulp war.
magic
Poor pay, abuse, and harassment: how the world’s biggest wizard school lost its magic. Divine intervention. Witch houses of the Hudson valley. The seductive magic of restaurant bathroom candles. Green to me. The rise of the LA art witch. Mushroom. In Papua New Guinea, witch hunts, torture and murder are reactions to the modern world. How to tell your husband you’re a witch. Ronald Reagan’s black magic men. The drug of choice for the age of kale. Is this the most magical meal on earth? The misfit. Magic eraser juice. The heady, thorny journey to decriminalise magic mushrooms. The Ghosts of the Tsunami. The magic box. Wicked! Modern art’s interest in the occult. The playboy who got away with $242m—using black magic. White witchery. The magic of estate sales. Witches of Chiloé.
☞\( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)☞ yeehaw
It’s time to take California back from Joan Didion. How to be gay and Indian. Inside Japan’s Chicano culture. The age of bathfluence. Bad Bunny in captivity. Python Bowl. “I found the roots of electronic music in a cupboard!” Sheikha Munira Abdou, Egypt’s first radio Quran reciter. Kid culture. The art collections are real. The owners are not. ICE agents fight sex trafficking by paying potential victims for hand jobs. This 66-year old is suing gay people, yes all of them. Anna Wintour is not the star of Andre Leon Talley’s new memoir. He is. A digital tale of the Nakba. What’s behind the Ertugrul craze in Pakistan? The prophecies of Q. Salamat Ali Khan. The hacker who saved the internet. Digital history and its potentials: a microsyllabus. Thirty-six thousand feet under the sea. Why a struggling Rust Belt city pinned its survival on a self-chilling beverage can. Ahmaud Arbery holds us accountable.
this week
Police state and the surveillance of Blackness in Covid w/Simone Brown (19/5) Party on the Caps: screening & conversation with Meriem Bennani. (20/5) Movement & choreographic turn in performance: Fernanda Eugénio and Gustavo Ciríaco (20/5). DirtySexyCool: a dialogue on the art and science of soil (20.5). Endings. (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals (21/5). Art history from home: Asian-American perspectives (21/5). Zooming in on veteran trees: preserving our elders. (22/5). Segue reading series: Betsy Fagin and Alan Felsenthal (23/5). The Athletics of Intimacy (24/5). Eastern Bloc Party psychadelic sundays (24/5) AMP cinema for free.
quarantine culture diary: camila mchugh
monday
I have been back in Berlin for ten days now after spending March and April in Thailand—a trip extended because of cancelled flights, postponed obligations and the magic of deciding to stay stuck for a while on an increasingly deserted island. A dull sense of loss that thrummed through the first week back has begun to lift a little. We moved in together in his flat in Prenzlauer Berg upon our return and it’s nice to have something concrete to attach to—browsing paint palettes, measuring walls for bookshelves. We wake late, it’s rainy and gray outside and I resolve to spend the day in bed.
I make coffee and return to the bed to join our Shrimp Reading Group on Zoom, so named for what C described as her “shrimp brain” inability to focus in the first weeks of shutdown. T joins the meeting from the kitchen. It feels like a long time ago when this felt weird—sitting in separate rooms to join the same Zoom room. We read a lecture from Foucault’s 1982 Technology of the Self seminar where he examines how the role of the police was defined in 18th century France and Germany in order to trace the beginnings of biopolitics. E mentions a friend who crossed the currently policed Swiss-Austrian border in a T-shirt last week. He told the officer who stopped him that he was just going to see a friend and would be back in 10 minutes. Instead he hiked a few hours to the nearest Austrian train station and boarded a train to Vienna. For lunch we eat thick slices of dark, crusty bread with canned sardines and burrata.
I get back in bed and watch Anne Carson read on Youtube for a while and Skype J during her lunch break in New York. She is flying back to California in a few weeks and some of her friends have warned she should be careful about being cancelled for flying. We talk about the state of the division between public and private and the mounting dread at the prospect of another online workout video. T speaks at a meeting on Zoom and I join as his guest with my camera off. He speaks about humility and powerlessness—this is the closest thing to a palpable energy I’ve experienced in a Zoom room. For dinner we order tofu summer rolls, veggie pho and a vermicelli noodle bowl with veggie spring rolls. The delivery arrives without the soup. When they return with it an hour later we put the soup in a big metal bowl and eat at the foot of the bed. We finish watching Wild at Heart (1990, David Lynch) and continue our romantic road crime festival with True Romance (1993, Quentin Tarantino/Tony Scott.)
tuesday
I wake up and do a Vipassana meditation led by Tara Brach. I eat yogurt with almond butter, walnuts and honey. T paces the apartment talking on the phone preparing for an exhibition opening next week and I get in the bath and play Bitsy Knox’s Something Like: Baroque podcast, which is a total joy. I’m really feeling the hypnagogic state my Chani Nicholas horoscope described for May. I eat kimchi with a fried egg then meet my German tutor on Skype. I spend the afternoon reading Anne Truitt’s Daybook (1983). She writes of her reliance on a sense of place: “This dependence on placement is ingrained in me. I pay attention to latitude and longitude. It’s as if the outside world has to match some personal horizontal and vertical axis.” I can feel myself reorienting to Berlin: an initial state of observation, keeping a kind of distance, noticing resistance. Arranging myself until this familiar place fits again. My fickle relationship with the city that has pulled me back again and again. I also like to leave it.
I’ve grown attached to our windows—a pair in the kitchen and in the bedroom, a single window in the bathroom. I download a compass app to find out they are facing northeast. The windows are a meter wide and more than twice as tall, almost reaching the ceiling. They look out on the vined facades across the hof and two towering linden trees that stretch out thin branches and a million green leaves. The windows are set within an arch and their ledge is just wide enough to nestle in. I rearrange jars, a bouquet of snapdragons and a ceramic bowl with a bundle of sage. This is an anchoring performance.
I attend Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather US book launch, hosted by the Center for Fiction on Crowdcast. It’s the biggest pandemic-era digital gathering I’ve joined and there’s this slightly stilted tone. I try to remember if the self-awareness of book launches in any different in real life. There are more than a thousand people attending, chiming in the chat with where they’re joining from. I write “Hey from Berlin,” cringing a bit but also pleased at my eager participation. The best bit of the talk is when she talks about Derek Jarman’s garden and the restorative possibilities of unruly art. T makes miso soup with grated fennel and tofu. We continue our road movie fest with Queen and Slim (2019, Melina Matsoukas), and pause halfway through (still hungry) to make spelt spaetzle with gruyere.
wednesday
Wake up and T and I do a silent 20 minute meditation together. I make us steel cut oats with a golden milk turmeric spice blend, stewed apples and walnuts. T works from the bedroom today and I do German homework for a few hours in the kitchen while listening to an ambient set from Garbicz, 2016. I interrupt him occasionally to share one of the absurdly gendered scenarios from the workbook. I repeatedly put a cashmere set from Baba in a cart and close the tab, open it later to read about their sustainable sheep shepherding in Spain and close it again. I take out the compost (first time outside in 3 days wow) then stream my online meditation training class. Berlin is opening back up and T is going back to work tomorrow. I make roasted asparagus with a hollandaiseque sauce, soft boiled eggs and seared cabbage to commemorate the last night of our two and a half months in evolving incarnations of self-isolation / quarantine together.
Instagram alerts me that a photo of me and my grandparents at Paris Bar, which has been my phone background since my grandpa passed away, was taken two years ago today. I FaceTime my grandma to tell her and she shows me the peachy yellow roses blooming in her garden in Palo Alto. Her best friend P passed away yesterday after a long illness. I read in the obituary that P selected four things with which to be cremated, all of which she found in her garden in Healdsburg and preserved in some way: a bumble bee, a baby blue bell lizard, a tiny toad and a red-breasted hummingbird. I tell T about this later in bed and ask what four things in the bedroom he would choose to be cremated with. My little toe, the white noise sound playing on his phone, all the letters I’ve written to him and a lightbulb. Mine: the blue snapdragons, a Robert Ryman postcard, his black boxers, his little toe. We laugh and I cry a bit because it feels like an ending and then we fall asleep.
thursday
Wake up with a headache and my period. Eat a nectarine and take a paracetamol. Take a bath and do a face and hair mask while reading the copy of Eileen Myles: I Must be Living Twice (2014) I gave T before we went to Marfa. I love the lilac bits (“but the purple lilacs are the most beautiful and I will always love you”) and DM a photo of the poem to Amy Sillman, who posted another quarantine lilac bouquet work in ink and acrylic yesterday. I work on a curatorial residency application and listen to Meredith Monk. I get half a dozen bagels, lox and Rachel Cusk’s Coventry (2019) delivered from a book shop and bagel store in Friedrichshain. This is a treat!
Amy Sillman, lilacs in acrylic and ink
I take a break from the application to go pick up a milk steamer from the Amazon locker at the Späti. The air is cold and still, I pass pairs sitting and strolling around Helmholtzplatz. Kids run around on the playground as their parents stand distant from each other, a group of drunks gather on the benches behind the swings. Seeing a group of ten is unsettling, also an exercise in observing how fast snap judgements are. Meet your edge and soften. Back home, I make an oat milk cappuccino with the espresso machine P lent us and the steamer. This is exciting! I do a guided meditation from my course and skim back through Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (2012). I fantasize about annotating the Fitzgerald or Elliot texts that she cites to note passages plagiarized from their wive’s letters or diaries and wonder how it’s possible to mark the texts also with the wives’ invisible labors as editor, character, caretaker etc.
T writes to say he’s going to stay late at the gallery. I roast Jerusalem artichokes with crispy brown rice and crumbled feta and a feldsalat salad with sunflower seeds. I pay ten euros to attend the Oberhausen Short Film Festival to watch the premier of a selection of one minute videos curated by Jesse Darling called EVERYTHING HAPPENED SO MUCH: archive as poem in the age of perpetual witnessing. I love this title. The videos are mostly shot on phones—body parts, karaoke, crowds, passing landscapes. Suddenly I miss the world so much it aches.
friday
Wake up with a headache. Eat a grapefruit and take a paracetamol. I take a bath and listen to Tara Brach’s most recent podcast. She discusses blame and describes some pandemic-related examples of her tool RAIN (Recognize-Allow-Investigate-Nurture) for difficult emotions. I’m feeling a bit blurry from the Zyrtec I took last night. I work on an article T and I are co-writing, changing the font of the Google doc almost hourly, a habit I picked up from him to push through that blocked feeling. I play lofi hip hop radio on YouTube which loops this animation of a girl writing, her cat in the windowsill, she looks up out the window and returns to her notebook.
I eat a toasted everything bagel with cream cheese, smoked salmon and capers again. What if I eat this for lunch everyday for the rest of my life? I have never been as hyperbole-prone as I am now. Everything I do twice feels like a habit grafting onto me and how I move through these three rooms, trying us on for size. Every repeated action is like a probing—is this how you will live? So this is who you want to be?
I meet with my German tutor on Skype—he is in São Paulo and is excited that the local sports station there will start screening German soccer games because the Bundesliga is starting back up again. I follow up with my ex about the Barbara Hammer videos he said he would send me. I call the farm that was supposed to deliver a regional veggie box today and they say there was a problem today and they’ll deliver between 3 and 5 AM tomorrow. I tell them I don’t want a delivery at that time, that we’ll be asleep. They say they’ll see what they can do, maybe the delivery person will come and just not ring the bell. I think about the delivery person all afternoon, standing outside before sunrise on the off chance the door will somehow be open. I start to feel bad and call back to tell them it’s okay to ring, I can wake up, but they don’t pick up.
T gets back a little after 8 and looks very handsome in his work clothes. We order Indian food delivery—masala dosa with sambar, chana masala, kadai paneer, parathas and rice. It’s delicious. I have a brief panic where a tightrope suddenly feels like the most apt metaphor for my life. I try to do RAIN. Is uncertainty an emotion? We go for a walk around the neighborhood. This cold, gray May has made it too easy for me not to leave the house all day—shouldn’t make a habit of this.
saturday
I wake up to a buzzer for the farm box at 6:45. We sleep a bit longer then do a 20 minute silent meditation. We take a cab to Teppichland (Carpet land!) in Moabit to look at sisal samples for the hall. I take the UBahn to the Bauhaus at Hermannplatz to get cardboard boxes and bubble wrap to pack up the things in my flat. An employee oversees a socially distant line and a hand sanitizer dispenser. M joked last week that Germans spent all of isolation either doing or talking about DIY home improvement so I’m not surprised the social distancing system is more organized here. I take the bus two stops home—it’s almost half-full and riders half-heartedly dance around each other to avoid getting too close. A big plastic sheet duct taped across the front of the bus separates the bus driver from this shuffle. I try not to whack anyone with my bubble wrap rolls. Words written in paint on sheets hang out of windows down Sonnenallee: Hanau 2020 Never Forget Never Forgive and Solidarität ist mehr als Händewaschen. Keine Grenzen! (Solidarity is more than washing your hands. No borders!)
I get a takeaway Moussabaha with pickles and flatbread and spend the afternoon packing up my things. M helps me bubble wrap vases and frames and tells me about her quarantine conquests and kurzarbeit logistics. It’s so nice to have an in real life friend! She streams a CBD yoga class in her room and I meet T at Barbara Weiss. Friederike Feldmann wall drawings transform the space and the trompe l’oeil effect to emulate sheets of paper glued to the wall looks really good. It’s so nice to see art in person! Restaurants reopened in Berlin yesterday and we walk down the canal to Zola with B and D. The tables spaced across the patio are full so we are directed to put on masks to walk inside to a table that's more than 2 meters from the next one. Once at the table we can take off our masks and we’re all a bit giddy and hesitant at first to sit in a restaurant. T and I share a pizza with anchovies and capers and one with stracciatella and mushrooms. I have a glass of dry white wine—my second glass in two and a half months. It feels good to delight in novelty.
sunday
T brings me a cappuccino in bed. This is a good way to start the day! Wake up to Whatsapps cancelling both reading groups planned for today—Foucault with the shrimp and King Lear with high school friends. Friends are off to LA vets with new pets, venturing to lakes in Zurich and park picnics in San Francisco: all good excuses to bail last minute on the Zoom room. I meditate for 20 minutes then stream a Laughing Lotus yoga class. I eat a bowl of yogurt with walnuts and almonds and walk to Neukolln. It’s bright and sunny out, though still quite cold. I walk for about an hour and a half and listen to some episodes of The Daily and Between the Covers with Hanif Abdurraqib . He discusses the poems he started writing shortly after Trump’s election when he overheard a white woman whispering to her seat partner at a reading of a black poet, “How can black people write about flowers at a time like this?”
Near Alexanderplatz I pass a wall graffitied: Covid knows no borders be like Covid. I spend the afternoon packing up the rest of my stuff, my sixth move in three years in Berlin. A and T help me load five cardboard boxes, five frames, a canvas, a houseplant and a green leather armchair into A’s big yellow DDR van. We manage to get everything up the three flights of stairs and stack the big boxes with my life packed up in a corner in the bedroom. I’m a bit daunted to sort and sieve that life into this one. It’s also exciting. I go through a mental inventory of what it is I just packed up: Whose electric kettle to keep, both copies of Malina and The White Album?, I’ll vacuum pack my winter coats and art fair clothes. We eat hummus in bed and look at Jack’s Flat exhibition, a smart riff on the online viewing room inspired by a John Baldessari painting. T invents dipping walnuts in cream cheese which is basically carrot cake and is delicious.
featured creature: peacock mantis shrimp
Photos by Roy Caldwell
Mantis shrimp can see more colors than any other animal with 16 classes of color receptors compared to a human’s four. They can also see a variety of colors in ultraviolet, which no other species can see.
They also have the fastest punch in the world so fast it momentarily superheats the water around it to a temperature nearly as hot as the surface of the sun. There’s also this weird video.