adventure

What to do in an artist’s studio in Hackney Wick

/ erinroseward / Leave a comment

You fiddle with the locks for 8 minutes before you pause and take a breath, exasperated. You wonder if anyone will walk by and question that you should be doing what your doing. It is 10:30 pm and though dark alleys with graffiti walls are familiar to you, there’s always that girl in the horror flick who the audience knows will be offed before she does.

You finally figure out that her key needs to be horizontal and turned at the same time you press enter on the coded key pad. You wonder why the security is so high for a warehouse building. You’d prefer not to look behind you as you close the first door quickly after entering. There’s a long hallway in front of you and you remember her directions not to go down it. If you did, is that the part in the horror film where you’d be offed?

The lights come on as you walk forward and it makes your heart jump. The bag on your back and the one on your arm are screaming at you. Your spirit animal is definitely not a turtle. You think about the boy who’s spirit animal is a snail and wonder if you should have slept with him and if he wanted to. You think about how many other people are in this warehouse of artist’s studios and if any of the are having sex right now. Like the scene in Amelie, your favorite film, obviously.

You walk to the left and up the stairs and through two fire doors until you come to number 13. You’ve already  used the blue and the green key so there is only one left and it has to be it. There is no handle on the door and you don’t feel it moving so you dip your shoulder into it and push hard. The door gives way and you have to catch yourself with the house on your back before being squashed beneath its weight and never making it to Oz.

She had warned you there are only lamps and your phone has died so you fumble in the dark to find a switch. You’re startled by your reflection in the floor to ceiling mirror. Your eyes are so black and your jaw looks square. There’s nothing nice to say right then so you turn away.

There is a desk with a computer, scattered papers, a mug of gone-cold tea and artistic tools from paint brushes to film canisters. There are piles of clothes in seemingly intentionally placed piles around the floor. You remember she conducts film shoots here and wonder if she’d ever like to photograph you. Maybe you and her together.

You throw your bag down as if it was your childhood house and you’ve just come from school, exasperated by a full day of nuns acting as teachers with little patience for elaborate story-telling. There is a full bed on the floor guarded on three sides by giant foam panels. She’s constructed a light blocking cage to sleep inside. You think about her here by herself, her lithe arms piecing her fortress together. She’s drawn an image of two cartoon transvestites on the inside of one wall. Think maybe you love her because she’s as unexplainable as your sister.

You look in the fridge because she told you you could and find something she’s made from who knows how long ago. You dip a spoon into it and feel the addictive rush of doing something your not suppose to when no one is looking. Remember that quote by someone about character then brush it aside. Cold lentils and potatoes and you wonder if she’ll be upset if you eat it all. You wonder if he made it with her, this him that belonged to the voice from the bedroom on the second floor. He had made her tea and soup and stroked her forehead when she was ill that day. You wonder how many times they have slept together in the middle of the afternoon on a school day because they are unattached to conformity and regular schedules. You picture him tall and dark to match her lightness. You keep eating her cold stew.

There are spices in old jam jars labeled with scribbles on scotch tape next to small bags of organic beans. You notice there are more chopsticks than utensils and wonder if she enjoys eating with them or if it is a way to keep thin.

You get naked and stare at the canal and smile when you think of someone sleeping in the tug boat below looking up to see you there in the window, backlit by her lamps. You think about living there by yourself, imagining making coffee in the morning, enough space to do yoga by yourself and later give a class to your friends. You would put a desk by these big back windows that face the sun so that you could write there. Maybe. You put on your music and dance around naked until you shiver from the cold despite starting to sweat.

You look at the time, it is almost midnight. Maybe you should go out and explore. Maybe you should put clothes on first. Maybe you’ll meet that bearded guy drinking British ale in the cafe who is as aimless as you. You can pass the time by talking about anything other than the temporal and keep drinking until you feel a bit dizzy and wonder if you’ll find your way home. Maybe he’ll invite you for scrambled eggs and smoked salmon on toast. You’ll eat it on the floor of his studio at 2 am and tell stories about how your parents met and whether or not you believe in things like marriage and universal healthcare. Maybe he’ll tell you he has money saved and wants to travel. Then he’ll unfold a large map he keeps by his bed. He’ll tell you to close your eyes and pick.You let your finger land (restricting it to Europe to be pragmatic) and when you you giggle he opens his laptop to buy two tickets. You’ll go together to the tip of your index finger. Maybe that’s when he’ll kiss you and his beard will tickle your chin. For a moment, maybe, a montage of bearded men you’ve kissed will run through your mind. You’ll kiss him harder to forget all that and the taste of scrambled eggs will make you happy in for a reason you know too well. Maybe this will be the start of it all and it’s so close, now.

You decide not to go out mainly because you don’t feel sexy enough after all of the legumes. You put on a t-shirt and underwear as to not be rude and sleep naked in her bed. Also it’s cold, but that is secondary. You wind your way back down the stairs, getting lost in one of the divergent hallways and mentally kick yourself for not putting on pants. You find the bathroom eventually and wonder if this is the part of the movie where you get offed in the fluorescent bathroom. Someone has left a few tissues for toilet paper. Whisper a silent prayer and feel like the universe is on your side after all.

Go to sleep wondering if you’re a failure for not going out or not having an artist’s studio in the up and coming part of London, and make a plan to focus on one thing for a while and see where it takes you. Start to recite a mantra in your head until you fall asleep. When you wake up, this will all be over and there will light flooding into the white studio through the back windows. It will take you a bit longer to see it because of the wall she has put up there to darken the room and obstruct the light. When you wake up, the first thing you’ll think of is her, and you’ll wonder whether she would put pants on to make herself tea.

The nicest people on the planet

/ erinroseward / Leave a comment

“You see there, theres been many a bloke who’s offed himself from up there.”

After two hours with him I was starting to be able to understand Tim the first time around. He had a heavy Welsh accent, having been born and bred in Swansea to take on his family shop in the center of town. He was pointing to a large protruding rock in the sea, what the vikings deemed Worm’s Head. From where we stood on the edge of the cliff it was rough waters bordered by lush greens as far as we could see. The beaches down below stretched for miles, and during the summer were said to be swarming with European vacationers flocking to see the second most beautiful place in the world.

I could see dots of white on the Worm’s Head and wondered how those sheep so aptly roamed around without falling off. I’d write to a friend later that I found them much more competent than humans. I certainly would have toppled off.

Tim and Cheryl told me about the walks they’d taken around the coast, explaining the path that runs the length of Wales. One can camp out along various points and cover the entire country. I’d like to do that one day, I said over and over again.
I couldn’t help think about him as I saw the green blurs of his hometown, the places I’d heard about in his myth, as distant and magical as the dragons on his flag. The only country with a dragon on it, I remembered.
We went for coffee and then to the marina for an Italian style dinner. We were the only three in the restaurant and I was tired and hung over, aware of my recent acne breakout and the dreading of my hair. But there was so much love shared over shark (“it’s delicious here!”) and garlic bread that I let go of all of it for a moment in favor of hearing their travel plans and answering questions about New York, my family, and feelings about American healthcare.

After dinner I wrapped my arm around Cheryl’s waist and we walked home. So familiar she felt as our hips kept sync, I felt like she was my aunt who had once cooed over my chubby baby ankles. How do some people touch your heart so deeply, so suddenly? It’s a spell to fall under and never be released, I hope. We made peppermint tea when we got home and watched Youtube videos of the Welsh national anthem and the tourism video for Nantucket, the latter I had told them to see during one of their upcoming travels.
I felt myself in a cradle and wondered what it would mean to cancel the next leg of my trip and stay a while there, drinking Tim’s fresh beetroot and peach juices and buying fresh flowers for Cheryl. It hit me that I missed my family, and I’m not quite ready to mother myself completely.

In Swansea I slept as if Cheryl had rocked me to sleep, perhaps tickled my back and read me a story about happily ever afters because I dreamt of the Welsh dragons and that once fairy tale love. I woke up thinking I had been whisked away and there was nothing left to do but keep falling.

Wales is known for its wet cold and wind and I woke to the sounds of wind blowing over the sea of two-story flats and small trees. Not much to uproot nor blow over, but I wondered about all the little cars and if they would tumble like I imagined one or two dopey sheep had before. I found a yoga studio where I met Rachel, Tim’s niece, who had never before met an American. I wonder what she thought, but I think we hit it off. We stopped at the market on the way home and I bought a bouquet and a grapefruit and she told me of her oldest son’s recent Rugby injury. I told her to come to New York and visit. She smiled and looked down in the way that tells the thought had crossed her mind many times before meeting me, but was growing further away, the way a baby seems to become a little human overnight. The idea was a memory one can’t go back to. I gave her a hug and promised to see her if I was in Wales again. What a strange feeling, not knowing if you’ll ever see this person again. Moments strung together like pearls. You wear them for a while but then one day you put them in a drawer because they’ve gone and tangled themselves together and you can’t be bothered.

Tim made us breakfast of poached eggs, baked beans, and toast. He couldn’t share the grapefruit as he’s diabetic and I realized after I had eaten it that it might have been rude of me to enjoy what he couldn’t. But there is so much of that going on during a self-powered European trip, it was a drop in a bucket almost full.

When he drove me to the station he told me how recently more people have moved into the neighborhood. He wouldn’t mind, but they refuse to integrate. Instead casting judgement on the Welsh, he said. It was the first time I’d heard the intensity come out in his voice. I’m sure the twinkle in his eye wouldn’t have been there just then, and I didn’t want to see him without it, as I was leaving so soon.
When we said good-bye I started to tear up. Less than 24 hours in Swansea with him and Cheryl and I didn’t want to get on the bus. Be careful, keep your head down. He shifted his eyes and the father in him looked worried. He turned to leave and then thought better of it and gave me a kiss on the cheek.  Let us know when you arrive in Cardiff. Then he turned to leave to head to work at the shop that had been in his family for over 85 years.

Before I had gone to bed the night before, Cheryl knocked on my door to say goodnight. She hugged me, the best hugger I’ve ever met, the way I’d like to hug every person I love. I feel like I’ve known you forever, she said.

Me too, though thinking about it, and knowing me, if I had had the chance I would have eaten two grapefruits. I think that’s what traveling alone does to you sometimes.

The Madonna in Milano

/ erinroseward / Leave a comment

“What defines art?”

One of those glorious 2 am questions that energizes the body as the mind starts to churn.Rion, my Milan host who I know from Brooklyn, posed the question as we walked back with his girlfriend Francesca to their Milan apartment. It was the second time that night we three had walked down their block with the intention of going home. The first was abandoned after we passed 3 strangers who’s eyes betrayed what they were doing, and we wanted to be a part of it.

I used one of the three words in Italian I knew to say hello and ask how they were. The leader of the pack, Mike, looked confused and watched my lips with half closed lids as I repeated in English. He asked where I was from and then what I did. Rion started talking to his friends as we stood in a skewed mid-sidewalk circle. Mike had an LA Clippers hat on and the other two wore hoodies and matching sneakers with the velcro strap undone.  I told him I was a writer and drew a fake cursive word, with extra flourish, in the air.  Me same! he said and his eyes opened wider.

Yes, I felt it. An instantaneous connection. A bond over words. I suspected he was a poet, perhaps a spoken word artist. I started to think of my friends back in New York who are involved in the slam poetry scene and with whom I’d want to connect him with if it turns out his stuff was good. He seemed like he would do well in a battle. Impassioned Italian man spittin’ verses, driving the words home with dramatic arm movements and inflection that demands ears.

I asked if he wrote fiction or journalism or poetry, but the language proved a problem. He asked Francesca in Italian if we wanted to walk to the little park between the church and the McDonald’s for a drink and a smoke. His friends looked bored by the idea of 3 new additions and split off to go buy beer.

As we were walking Mike turned to me and said he wanted to show me his writing. That if I came to the park tomorrow during the day, we could create something together. Imagine! A beautiful afternoon in Milan spent sipping a spritz while creating a bilingual piece, maybe one that we could practice and perform! I thought of Mike and I in Rion’s living room with a few of their friends gathered to hear us share our art. I didn’t think he was attractive or all that exciting, but I was in love with the thought of it all and smiled a little brighter. We agreed in a few words: tomorrow, some park he named, creation time.

Francesca was walking behind us, and I paused to take step with her, not wanting her to feel left out. Isn’t it cool, I said, he’s a writer too! What are the chances of meeting another writer so randomly?

Mike turned around, I’ll show you good and bad, he said and pointed towards a wall.

I think he mean’s street writer, like what’s the word in English?

Graffiti, Rion said, he’s a graffiti artist.

Heart sunk. Supposed connection severed. He had thought I meant I was a graffiti artist from New York City. No, definitely not as cool nor as elusive as that.

He stopped in front of a gate of a closed shop, where someone had painted a mural of a mom and a child holding hands. It was vey well done in my opinion and must have taken the artist a long time to do it with spray paint.

He hates it, Francesca translated. Not art, Mike said. He says the artists are, what’s the word-

Selling out? Rion was standing closest to the gate, nose an inch away, looking at the strokes and lines.

He says the companies pay the artists to paint these and this is all they do. They cover the art that is already there.

We turned a corner down a quieter street. Mike stopped again and pointed at the wall. Artist tags ran up and down it, some more easily read than others. Most were composed of single swooping strokes. A few of them were scribbled symbols. This is real, said Mike.

This is great, Rion said, stepping back to take in the length of the wall. Are you on here? Mike shook his head. He made a waving motion with his hand and said in Italian that it was covered up by another artist. He’d come back and cover someone else’s and leave his name. So it went.

I was trying to figure out if Rion was serious or just being friendly to the guys who had just smoked us up. I had seen and been involved in works of art that Rion created, and considered him a talented artist with a unique perspective. I had posed topless for him for an art piece and it was the first time I hadn’t felt shame being exposed. He had a way about him like that, I thought. I was always ready to hear his opinion and I had assumed that he would have denounced the wall as what it was: vandalism charading as art. He touched the wall and traced a name with his finger.

Can we go see the lady? I want to show Erin. Mike didn’t seem to understand but started to follow as Rion turned and with his daddy long leg strides led the way down the main street. 2 am on a Saturday night in Milan looks a lot like 2 am in NYC. Except in Milan you can drink on the street. People, younger than our party, were strewn about on benches, outside of late night eateries, laughing and talking loudly. It was one big playground and I wondered who were the king and queen and what the rules were. There were a lot of short skirts and bright lips, dark hair with darker-lined eyes and leather, leather, leather. I wondered if they could smell the American on us.

After another 5 minutes, the effects having worn off and given way to that shrill November bone-cold, we paused in a walkway behind the chain railing that divided it from the street. Across the skinny road was a large black door with an oval arch that seemed characteristic of the area. On the door, someone had painted the image of a face reminiscent of the angels I had seen in the church frescos. Cherubim cheeks and round features, soft and inviting. Except, there was hell in the divine. Something empty and eery stared back at us. Black relief spaces fore the eyes and mouth. If I put my hand through her eyes, it might go all the way through. I wondered what eyes like that had seen, what they held as they took in the street. She couldn’t tell us, she was forbidden.

The artist had used feathered strokes, intentionally asking the eyes to swoop upward towards the top of the arch. Begin staring into the black mouth, where searing nothingness gaped. Continue up to crater eyes, sunk deep into the door yet even blacker still. Find the tip of the forehead where her hair has been parted and wind-blown. She’s stunning, Rion whispered, my favorite piece. It’s like we’re at a museum, he said as he stepped over the low chain rail.
He took out the YES stickers in his pocket. The same campaign he had started in Brooklyn, decorating everything from curbs to traffic signs, going so far as to make large scale prints to wheat paste on building facades, he was continuing internationally. Fearless in his disregard for propriety, his artistry flowed out two middle fingers stuck up to the world. Any moment there could be a confrontation. I could feel it just below our breathing: how much we all wished for the polizia to join us hand guns un-holstered, coming from down the block at a sprint as they shouted in Italian. Even Rion knew it was the thrill of the act rather than the result. For the artist and the audience there is knowledge of the illicit whenever they see what shouldn’t be there. It’s not what it is but how it got there that excites the imagination. Someone got away with something they shouldn’t have done, and in that way we share a secret we’ve been holding all alone.

How we wanted him to be confronted, and cuffed. Once they found out he was American they’d take extra pleasure in a jab to the ribs, eyes flashing a well-groomed distrust and disliking. A little adventure that night, that’s what we all craved. You could smell the desire, hot and damp like sex in a bar bathroom. It stretched along the alleyways and wrapped itself around street lights and cigarette butts.

About 8 stickers later Rion rejoined his audience on the other side of the railing to view his work. In the black hole of the Madonna’s mouth he had made a tongue out of YES’s. The screeching night-people walked back and forth down the street as we stood and looked at defamation called art. The act having been committed, there was a sadness to the scene. Had the Madonna said yes or had someone spoken for her, I wondered. I thought of my mother. Physically altered by his hands, the sticking and the smoothing and he hadn’t even been caught. No one had said anything. We didn’t even get a show out of it and now the world saw there Madonna, sticking out her tongue in fevered defiance.

He’d made her go mad for the world to see.

At the Union March in Rome

/ erinroseward / Leave a comment

I stumbled upon a protest in the  middle of Rome, after making the decision to get lost in the center of Rome. Rachel lives in Monti, the Williamsburg of Rome for associations sake. I ran to the Coliseum, and it being a Saturday found the crowd overwhelming. Turning left I wound along with the traffic a bit higher. A woman sat on the sidewalk giving out pieces of sandwich to her five children. I imagine they were hers, and when I went running by they all stooped to look at me. One of the girls, standing closest to me, had wide gray eyes like a cartoon of a child. Her hair was stuck to her face. I felt her looking right through me, seeing my American idiosyncrasies swimming inside of me. I am exactly what she saw, whatever it was.

Protests here are causes for celebrations. Like a birthday or holiday party, you can be sure to see all of your friends. It is an excuse for an early pre-game, a meet-up at which you can have a march and a shout in costume and face paint, perhaps don an emblematic banner as a cape, and join in a just cause. The particular march I attended circumvented the better part of the city and was in support of unions and their benefits for workers. The colors are red and yellow and it seems all ages showed up for the event. I felt like a party crasher, but wonder if I would have been invited if I had only asked.

Sky on Fire

/ erinroseward / Leave a comment

The sky is on fire right now. The Belgian gray has given way to the ambre of color. Pink turns to yellow turns to orange and somewhere  in the palette cornflower has leaked in. I sit at the large bay windows in Jean’s living room. The lights are turned off because I’d like to give the color and attention to the sky right now. There are 3 ponies playing in a small field across the narrow road. They drink water from a bath top and spontaneously take up chasing one another. What do they think about all day, these 3 friends? The smallest, patterned auburn and white, seems to be the most rowdy of the bunch. They seem not to notice the sunset. Perhaps they have seen one too many to get excited.

I ran around Jean’s little town, Vedrin, today. It is my favorite way to see a place, I’ve discovered, is to let my foot falls grow excited, to taste as much of the black top and the new place as possible. Let my feet be greedy until they can’t take it anymore. And of course,, as it happens, I got very lost along the winding streets. I place a lot of trust in my internal compass, that it will remember how to retrace the steps leading to home. Well, I was wrong, and ended up seeing much more of Vedrin and neighboring Namur then I had planned.

There is something so beautiful about solitude. Perhaps I am at heart an introvert, as I was very much content to be alone today. I had time to move at my pace, to be with myself, to be quiet when I wanted to dance when I needed to (to Stromae’s Papaoutai of course). It is something I always knew but has been made apparent while traveling and spending so much time with other people: space very much matters to me. I am so thankful to be here with one of the best human beings I know, my dear friend Jean, but even so I welcome this moment when the door is closed and I sit alone in the peace of a Belgian nighttime.

I can’t help but think of the ghost companion. How lovely it would be to be share this moment with him. To have him sit next to me as a lover and adventure companion. To be each alone as we enjoy the quiet together.