Batakliev's Bloc

O glorious Sunday! You are awake and alive. Time to put on your bestest, most ornate face covering, dash to your local cafe slash bakery and reward yourself with a nice double espresso and a chocolate croissant (maybe even a chocolate brownie to keep up your lockdown curves). You can then enjoy the treats whilst walking back home, severely avoiding any naughty early riser who happens to invade your assigned corridor. Particularly the woman barking “Jesus loves you” through a megaphone on the corner of Wyndham road (seriously gurrl, that early?) O the little things in life.

You’ve run out of your only-available-online coffee capsules, so you nip out to your local cafe, slash bakery (in a timidly gentrified Zone 2 neighbourhood). It’s Bank Holiday Sunday, technically still August, temperature-wise it feels like November. Still, you decide that you ought to acknowledge the end of the season and you throw on a pair of old shorts that really should have been binned last summer. You combine them with a Gold’s Gym T-shirt your ex boyfriend gave you years ago which, just like him, has had its time. Final touch - trainers and socks that clearly don’t work together but then again, you don’t have to put on a show for your local cafe, slash bakery. In terms of fashion sense, you feel closest to Miranda Hart or Celeste Barber. Thankfully, the cafe is empty as Britain (including timidly gentrified neighbourhoods in Zone 2) is unanimously hungover and feeling sorry for itself (I won’t mention Brexit - oops, I did!) at this moment in time. You collect your double esp

Can you breathe it (through your funky mouth covering)? Can you smell it? Can you taste it? Can you feel it (crawling underneath your skin)? The BCN night street vibe. It’s in the smile of a shadow. In the sigh of relief, the nod of camaraderie, the resonance of distant guitars and all the muffled echoes and laugher you permit yourself to hear. It’s right here, tonight.

Taking apart furniture in order to destroy it is a strange concept. Especially furniture that has been custom made for you, to fit your space and meet your needs. Like this wardrobe. One by my one, the planks surrender and collapse as the screws wiggle out of their holes betraying the construct that holds all parts together.   These same planks used to be the shelves on which my clothes rested - the clothes I’d grab swiftly in the morning before going to work or p ick carefully in the evening ahead of an exciting date. And here I am - unmaking, freeing space, letting go in a home that will be “mine” for four more days. The new owner will reclaim this territory and make it their own. Soon another wardrobe will grace this space. Its dimensions, colour, facade, posture, gaze and spirit will be different but they will feel just right...to the new owner.

In this upside-down or downside up, we are together apart. Our heart-to-hearts morph into slapsticks as you lie on your living room floor for hours on end, surrendered to the camera eye. There is joy and bliss in our clumsy witless slo-mo banter and even your carpet is smiling at me. We switch between languages and time zones, mixing memories with daydreams. “This train is being held to regulate the service”, we are told and hence we wait together...apart. Cause upside-down or downside-up, we are friends. For life.

Let's go to New York City tonight. Let's have sushi in the Meatpacking District. The tunes will be dreamy. The girls will be wearing halter tops and big, big sunglasses. The boys will be hatted. And handsome. The music will be spreading itself thin across the rooftops. There will be magnetism and chemistry and tears and break-ups and every...thing in-between. Just imagine.

“You can only be a Godstar when you’ve passed on” Genesis P-Orridge has left us. Genesis - the wrecker of civilisation, the parent of industrial music, the new social order priest/ess, the singer, the artist, the poet, the philosopher. Someone who literally cut himself up, William Burroughs-style, to live their life as an art experiment and prove unconditional love. Categories, styles or pronouns couldn’t define h/er/them. The sound of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic tv (two of their most significant musical projects) was often intentionally unlistenable and Gen’s musical legacy will likely remain dear to his devoted order of followers only. But it is when they spoke that the magic happened and it was convincing and accessible to many. H/er interviews were like sermons, articulate, relevant and educational, which told the story of a non-binary, non-exploitative, infinitely free better world. A world based on love, trust and (comm)unity. "It is courage, courage, courage, that rai

Is it an iris or a peacock feather? Or the iris of a peacock feather? Is the concoction of memories, aspirations, traumas and biases that enables my vision connected? Are my volumes of life experience by my side to guide and mentor me or in the way to obstruct me from discovering the world uninhibitedly? Let’s see beyond the tunnel vision.