SHOREDITCH RULES

Next Play, in effort to be responsible to You, the only reader, presents an abridged travel companion format, less edited even than the usual mess.

It is from London, so you get half as much for twice the $$. (Sad emoji is extra).

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Shoreditch. Should tell you everything.

After the street art tour my attorney wants salad from the Turkish supermarket. We eat on the low wall of a depressing park with no benches.

Shoreditch is situated in the east end of London, England, a former colonial behemoth near Europe, or, you know, the idea of Europe, and manifestly and aggressively not part of the economic union signed to ease the flows of capital and humanity, so then Brexit, to lessen the flows of capital and humanity.

Shoreditch was once a hotbed (no bed hotter really) of revolutionary activities both political and artistic, and probably revolutionary sex but there’s no walking tour (the hot beds of Shoreditch) listed on the Bright Web (happy sister to morose brother Dark Web).

Today, Shoreditch is a sexy flow of capital and humanity, flogging perfect cortados and proffering lectures on Marx that are cancelled when all the usuals show up.

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This east end bar/café is a hotbed of cool bourgeois consumption. We are surrounded by a population so effortlessly with it they define and collapse the zeitgeist with one withering long-eyelash glance. Welcome to London Cool, surely the coolest cool on the burning planet and thereby in the known universe. The music, now louder, was recorded twenty minutes ago and is already streaming from a corrupt Stockholm Napster byproduct into every glowing apple. The impossibly dressed have yet to discover and jettison this tourist from their culturally curated moment.

I barely notice. This lemon curd doughnut & pale ale combo is overwhelming.

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Writing this on my low glow iphone, an activity listed by the Geneva Convention (New Edition) as inhumane but inevitable, is limited to the battery life which has about as much time left as the global socialist project.

Just a short while ago, my attorney and I were besieged by all manner of spectacular street art, which is exactly what it says it is (and wait, I think the music in here is now some kind of bolero, sexy!). It is art ephemeral by design and pugilistic in attitude. It exists where you are, not where you are reading. You can share the moment. It is necessarily about where it is, even if it is about Trump/Musk/Putin/Netanyahu/Cute animals.

It is endearingly punk. And the young punks show up and deface the old masters. And the old masters shake their heads and come with cloth and paint, to reclaim and preserve Shoreditch.

 

EXCHANGE RATES

·      This Microsoft Word app keeps asking if I want its AI, copilot, to make suggestions.

·      Yes, copilot: Tell me how to fly this plane into the building with you in it.

·      Cartman voice: I saw a real Banksy today. Did you? Oh.

·      SXSW has migrated and somehow manifested here, to which there are only two reasonable reactions:

1.         What’s a SX… thing.

2.        Who cares.

CANADA

·      Craft beer culture is killing it in London…

·      But that crown still belongs to Toronto (sunglasses emoji - free).

·      G’Oilers!