London sprawls for an old city. Most European capitals are pretty compact, but London, being an amalgamation of former villages, has many centers, and activities can take place miles apart from one another. As a result there can be some long and strenuous pedals. These don’t necessarily result in making a trip longer than it would be on the tube, but I sometimes arrive a little shiny.

I’ve learned after many years not to fill my travel days exclusively with work, but to give myself some free time, some breathing space, so I can manage to retain my sanity despite the feeling of dislocation that comes with the traveling. Random wandering clears the head of the worries and the concerns that might be lurking, and sometimes it’s even inspiring. I lean toward contemporary art shows, as that’s an area I’m involved in, but medical museums, industrial museums, and the National Museum of Roller Skating in Lincoln, Nebraska, were all equally exciting and served as destinations—though often what I passed along the way was even more interesting.

In many cities these landmarks are famous buildings, bridges, and monuments. A triumphal arch, an old train station, or a plaza with a tower or church on it are common markers. In many towns these were all made during one prosperous era, which leads me to wonder if the steel and glass towers that are springing up everywhere now—some of them in wacky shapes like pickles and sharp-edged triangles—ever will be looked at by some future generation as the charming markers that give a city its identity. Will some funny-shaped steel and mirror-glass monolith function, in the future, in the same way the Eiffel Tower, the Zocalo, or Marble Arch do?

My route takes me by Hyde Park, Marble Arch, Bucking-ham Palace, Piccadilly Circus, the theater district, and Spit alfields Market. Not the most direct route to Whitechapel, but hopscotching from one marker to another feels like participating in a giant board game—it is immensely satisfying. Each marker is almost within sight of the next one, so progress toward my objective proceeds via a series of giant steps.

After I arrive we talk over tea and Iwona mentions that she was recently in Iran to visit some of the artists currently working there. She says most of them are regularly subjected to beatings by the government, and they incorporate that into their lives and dress, wearing six pairs of pants for their beating appointments.

The talk turns from there, unsurprisingly, to male-dominated societies, and she volunteers that societies that separate the sexes sometimes do so in order to encourage violence and aggression: to be more warlike.

At one point, as an example of her idea that oppressed people become oppressors, she mentions Israel’s dominance over the Palestinians, and the aggressive behavior of the Israelis, as if this were a well-known fact. I don’t altogether disagree, but I am surprised to hear it voiced so openly. In America, and especially in New York, there is a hidden level of not-so-subtle censorship of such statements. They are just never heard, or if they are, the speaker is often given a nasty look or accused of anti-Semitism.

I wonder how many other aspects of North American thought might be self-censored. Quite a few, I would imagine. Every culture must have its no-speak/no-tell zones. The “policeman inside,” as William Burroughs called it. Though we might espouse free speech as an absolute virtue, some self-censorship might be excusable. There are plenty of times when we have nasty revenge fantasies about drivers who cut us off and what we would do to the people on the other end of rude phone conversations, but we don’t always voice those feelings. Well, not seriously. Likewise, salacious thoughts about strangers might be voiced by louts, but “refined” folks, though they too might be turned on by an attractive woman’s legs or a man’s crotch, keep those thoughts to themselves. It’s part of the social contract. It’s how we get along. Self-censorship is part of being a social animal, and in that sense it’s not always a bad thing.

We refrain, most of the time, from insulting or attacking our friends’ religious beliefs. In fact the very subject of what religious beliefs might be held by an individual is often considered out of bounds in polite conversation. Likewise, we don’t usually make fun of other people’s families in front of them—their parents, children, or siblings. Only they are allowed to do that. And most of us refrain from direct criticism of people’s personal appearance. We don’t inform people that they are overweight, broken out, or having a bad-hair day.

But what Burroughs was referring to was more than that. He, I think rightly, realized that eventually we reach a point where the self-censorship of some ideas, not just what we might refer to as rude comments, can become internalized. At some point “bad,” inappropriate, politically incorrect, or unconventional thoughts may not even arise or occur to us. If they do they are suppressed so quickly, unconsciously, that it’s as though we’d never had them. Soon they appear to never arise at all. Freud noticed this and presumed that these forbidden thoughts accumulate and fester somewhere: the trash can never truly be emptied by intellectually or consciously throwing it out, according to him. For Burroughs this censorship is evidence of a kind of mind control—an instance of society limiting not just what we do and say, but what we allow ourselves to think. For him it is an example of the religious police or homeland security finally getting inside your head and installing their little cop in there. And that kind of censorship is perfect—once you self-censor certain ideas you don’t need an outside agency as a monitor.

When that level of self-censorship kicks in you are unaware that it is happening. At that point, it seems to you that there is no censorship at all; it appears to you that your thoughts are actually unfettered and free. In all likelihood the outside instigator or legislator of your thoughts—the government, the media, your friends, your parents—have also convinced themselves that those thoughts are not even happening, that they don’t exist. Eventually there is no more outside-the-box thinking as far as some kinds of thoughts go. Everything, even the maker of the box, is inside the box.

I pass by what I assume is an upper-class matron and her kids. She is in full regalia—a green hunting jacket, beige trousers, and Wellington boots. Is she planning on off-roading it? Finding a particularly soft bit of ground here in Hyde Park and wallowing in her Wellies? Shooting a few of the local ducks or swans? (The colors she’s wearing will help her blend in perfectly.) Her kids are likewise dressed for “country life.” Miniature versions of Mum. Wonderful that though they’re in the middle of one of the world’s great cities they can pretend to themselves that they are in the Highlands. Well, not really—we know that here costume is, more than in most places, a signifier of what class you belong to.

After lunch at the hotel I go off again, this time along the promenade that borders the north side of the river until I reach Tower Bridge, crawling with tourists, and then I head south across the bridge to a small side street and the Design Museum. Tom Heatherwick curated what is called the Conran Foundation Collection show, which was beautifully installed, hilarious, and moving. The exhibit consists of thirty thousand pounds’—the show’s financial budget—worth of his favorite oddball stuff, some of it examples of high design but most of it not. Interesting that this show has nothing to do with Conran’s, the store, except that Sir Conran is on the board of the museum and funds this particular design show. Of course far from being high design, many of the objects that Heatherwick has chosen are things we might easily have at home. By putting each thing in its own modular wooden vitrine, his installation allows you to consider the objects, whether high or low, one interesting item at a time: toothpaste dispensers, stylish high-tech design gadgets, plastic combs, and Cup Noodles packages.

Once upon a time it was considered radical to even show mass-produced objects in the same place as fine art—in museums with flattering lighting and little labels. Now, by implication and extension, Cup Noodles containers presented next to more expensive design objects become equals. We’re being asked to see the elegance or at least innovation and cleverness in banal everyday crap that for the most part is never given a second look. Living with this kind of stuff every day, day after day, we often don’t even notice it anymore. We assume it just is—unremarkable, undistinguished—and we forget that it was at some point designed by someone and may in fact be elegant, efficiently made, and even beautiful.

After viewing the show I have tea with the (now ex-) director of the Design Museum, Alice Rawsthorn, who can jump into a serious philosophical discussion faster than anyone I’ve ever met. She immediately asks if any of the journalists who’ve interviewed me lately were actually stimulating to talk to. I respond by mentioning a thought that had occurred to me regarding the perception of people who create things, especially performers like me. People tend to think that creative work is an expression of a preexisting desire or passion, a feeling made manifest, and in a way it is. As if an overwhelming anger, love, pain, or longing fills the artist or composer, as it might with any of us—the difference being that the creative artist then has no choice but to express those feelings through his or her given creative medium. I proposed that more often the work is a kind of tool that discovers and brings to light that emotional muck. Singers (and possibly listeners of music too) when they write or perform a song don’t so much bring to the work already formed emotions, ideas, and feelings as much as they use the act of singing as a device that reproduces and dredges them up. The song remakes the emotion—the emotion doesn’t produce the song. Well, the emotion has to have been there at some time in one’s life for there to be something from which to draw. But it seems to me that a creative device—if a work can be considered a device—evokes that passion, melancholy, loneliness, or euphoria but is not itself an expression, an example, a fruit of that passion. Creative work is more accurately a machine that digs down and finds stuff, emotional stuff that will someday be raw material that can be used to produce more stuff, stuff like itself—clay to be available for future use.

The objects in the Wunderkammer—preserved creatures, odd books and treatises, antique carvings, sacred objects from foreign lands—were often grouped, by Sir John Soane and other collectors of that period, by whatever criteria seemed appropriate, be it shape, material, or color. There would be, for example, a mass of bulbous objects from various parts of the world and then some sharp, pointy ones grouped together. Many of these objects had nothing to do with one another except for having similar shapes. Hardly what one would think of as a rigorous, enlightened scientific method of categorization. But thinking back on it, I would suggest that, yes, in a truly enlightened world all green objects are in a way related somehow, more than by just being green, and maybe they are related in a way we don’t understand yet, just as all hexagonal objects might share a common trait as well. These crazy groupings might someday be seen as not completely arbitrary.

Any kind of taxonomy might be as good or valid as any other, though we might not know for sure until some time in the future when a scientific paper “discovers” that hexagonal or bulbous shapes, or similar colors or textures are functions that in some way determine content, in the way that the form of a DNA molecule defines and is its function. Form doesn’t follow function in that case—form is function. I wonder to myself if genetics might be on the verge of some such wider revelation, beyond our understanding of DNA, based on molecular structures that are common across life-forms and species. Temple Grandin, in her book Animals in Translation, proposes that all animals with a white patch of fur on their bodies are less likely to be shy than their cousins. On the surface such an idea might seem completely irrational. As if my hair color could be an indication or even a determinant of my personality. But if such ideas can be proven then we’re not that far from pointy things and bulbous things as legitimate classifications.

It’s a bit like sympathetic magic in a way: the usual Western presumption that “primitive” rituals mimic what they desire to achieve—that phallic objects might be believed to increase male potency and playacting rainfall might somehow bring it about. I am suspicious of such obvious connections and I suspect that the connections among things, people, and processes can be equally irrational. I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe—but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn’t be surprised if poetry—poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs—is how the world works. The world isn’t logical, it’s a song.

I head back along Oxford Street, which is a handful to navigate with all its double-decker buses and cabs, and then south through the little grid of Soho. I pause to watch a big Muslim demonstration in Trafalgar Square with signs urging everyone (everyone meaning Muslims and Christians) to get along and to have some mutual understanding and respect. Lots of praying and chanting. I wonder if “respect” in this case isn’t really a code word for “enough with the nasty Danish cartoons”? Those recent cartoons must simply confirm what Muslims already suspect the infidels think about Islam. The subtext—that the West thinks Muslims are mainly dirty, conniving bearded terrorists or arms dealers—can be read and inferred in so many newspaper articles, action movies, the reporting and punditry on Fox News, and in Western political speeches. It’s not that those programs and action movies come out and say these things, but it’s easy enough to read the implied message.

Back at my hotel I look around the sleek lobby. The staff seems mainly to be young Russians and Italians dressed in black. Two African businessmen in suits sit on a nearby sofa and leaf through newspapers. Waiting. A young Japanese man calls for a taxi. A few couples emerge from the elevators. Some of the couples are almost my age. (I’m in my midfifties.) They appear to be from the provinces and don’t seem like lovers here for a tryst or businesspeople. What brought them here? The piped-in music from the adjoining bar and lounge is revving up to full disco level now that evening is approaching, and the lobby, all dark and moody, has transformed into something more like a club than a hotel. The couples and tourists now seem pretty out of place, as if what they thought in the afternoon was a hotel lobby had sneakily morphed into a dark nightclub while they were out sightseeing.

Based on this evidence Grossman wrote a book called On Killing and has since become a critic of the impact of commercial video games, claiming that they are in effect training young players to be killing machines. He believes that shooter video games teach adolescents (and frustrated nerds) to have the killing instinct, to quicken their reactions, and to lower their inhibitions. He has a Web site: killology.com.

This sounds awfully close to the complaints of shocked liberals when they observe their kids playing a round of Grand Theft Auto. Playing war games and mowing down zombies is pretty ubiquitous among adolescent boys, and most usually grow out of it and realize that it is playacting. But Grossman, an insider if ever there was one, seems to be claiming that some line gets crossed.

Similarly the recently deceased professor of communication George Gerbner claimed that when consumed in sufficient quantities, modern media, like television, substitute their realities for the reality out in the streets, “on the ground.” He claimed that people who watch a lot of TV begin to live their lives as if the TV reality were an accurate reflection of the world outside. After a while the TV reality takes precedence over the “real” world. Given what’s on TV, this televised version of reality paints a picture of the world as a dangerous place, full of crime, suspicious characters, and double-dealing—and with an inordinate portion of the population devoted to law enforcement. Cities as portrayed on TV are filled with blatantly sexy men and women, stereotypically oddball characters and disreputable agents, and the cops who are there to deal with all of them. The world is divided up into beautiful party people, lawbreakers, and enforc ers. To some extent this skewed picture of the world, according to Gerbner, eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the TV-saturated public begins to act as if the TV reality is real and behaves accordingly—reacting fearfully and suspiciously to a world perceived as being primarily populated with drug dealers and con men, according to Gerbner’s scenario—then eventually the real world begins to adjust itself to match the fiction. The fact is there are such things as cops, drug dealers, sleazy bitches, and attractive folks with ready banter and clever quips. These stereotypes are not entirely made up. Their existence can be confirmed, just not in the proportions seen in TV land. But as any marketing or advertising person will tell you, perception is all.

I wonder if this view of Gerbner’s isn’t too alarmist. Part of the reason there are so many gunslingers and cops on TV might be because that is the contemporary dramatic narrative context of the age-old story of the brave and questing hero. It’s a conveniently available, semibelievable, and plausible setting in which to place these eternally recurring myths. Life-changing stories don’t usually take place at an office desk or a computer terminal—and those banal workaday locations are not very conducive to visual media anyway. When I was growing up, TV was all westerns and cowboys. Then, a few years later, TV shows were all about spies. The cowboys had vanished. But I knew—or I think I did—that the world wasn’t really ever filled with that many cowboys west of the Mississippi, or that half the men I saw in suits weren’t in fact glamorous spies. The images and the emotional buttons they triggered still enthralled me, though.

Now, if we were to take what we are presented literally, the world would be made of smart-asses, cops, sexy bitches, and gangsters. But maybe they are all just a vehicle for the same old stories, stories we love and need, but don’t really take seriously as a mirror of reality. No one seriously thinks that because Shakespeare mainly wrote about royalty that people thought the world was all upper class, a universe made up entirely of tragic kings and princes. The bubble universe of the royals, and that of the aristocracy, is by nature more artificial and more theatrical, and therefore easier to view as an allegory. That makes it a better setting for storytelling. Likewise cops, robbers, and sexy bitches. Maybe all those exaggerated characters always simply mirror a different kind of reality—the one inside.

What we call history could be viewed as a record of how basic social forms have distorted or morphed. It simply changes shape, but the underlying patterns and behaviors are always there, under the surface—as they are in biological forms. Aspects, organs, limbs, and appendages swell and others contract to the point of atrophy in order to accommodate current evolutionary needs and contingencies, but they could just as well flow and shrink in the other direction, should specific needs and surroundings change. History might behave in the same way—the names and numbers change, but the underlying patterns remain.

Morning, I wake up and it’s sunny! I cycle back along the South Bank promenade until I reach the Tate Modern. There, tucked away inside another exhibition, is a single room of spreads from a Russian magazine published in the 1930s called USSR in Construction, which was often designed by Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and other fairly radical artists of the time. The layouts are beautiful—obviously intended as propaganda (the magazine was printed in a few languages)—sometimes corny as hell, but gorgeous.

If one didn’t know anything else about the Soviet Union, one might look at these beautiful and radically innovative graphic layouts and think, Wow, what a cool place, what a hip scene it must be, and what an enlightened government they must have to produce and sponsor such an amazing magazine. (One might have said the same thing decades later about the U.S.-sponsored international shows of abstract art and state-sponsored jazz tours—which was indeed the intention.)

Here are some spreads by Rodchenko:

Here is a layout featuring “illuminations” added to a tractor factory for the enjoyment and excitement of the workers—sort of workplace as pleasure palace/theme park. Google, the current hip place to work, where the workplace is hyped as a cool campus, has some catching up to do.

Other images in this magazine feature elaborate foldouts, duotones of smiling peasants posed next to Stalin, and one incredible spread of a paratrooper—the top of the page can be unfolded to become a duotone of a parachute sail. Glorious and unsubtle propaganda. I guess all these artists were buying the party line at that point or hoping they might change things from the inside.

It’s an odd sensation looking at these—both chilling and thrilling. One knows, with hindsight, what horrors Stalin would perpetrate, yet one wants to separate the innovative graphic work from the perverted version of the ideology that it was selling. It’s an old question: how cool and detached can we be in appreciating design and formal innovation? It’s not too hard to admire the occasionally innovative contemporary TV commercial for junk food or overpriced jeans, but lots of folks have issues with the formal and technical innovations of Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl.

What is often referred to as socialist realism was not exclusively a Russian movement. Propaganda murals extolling workers and industry were produced in New York and elsewhere. Bas-relief sculptures were carved on buildings in lower Manhattan depicting the press workers who labored inside. In my neighborhood there is a large bronze statue on the sidewalk of a man sitting at a machine, bent over, sewing, and another sculpture of a giant needle and button. Glorious sweatshop workers! But the cult of the living great leader didn’t seem to take root here as much as it did in the East.

I head directly across the river via the pedestrian bridge to St. Paul’s Cathedral (very spooky organ music is playing inside—big, ominous chords). The revolving entrance door has these words on it:

The gallerists ask me what I’m up to in a way that says “have you done anything since Talking Heads?” It’s always a little weird when people obviously think I haven’t done much since the hit records they remember from their childhood. The subject turns to live music we’ve seen or heard lately and the German man says he’s only been to about five live shows in his entire life; he grew up on techno and electronic dance music and that’s pretty much all he listens to—DJs. I ask what time those “shows” begin and he tells me that the big-name DJs usually don’t go on before one. I feel a little old-fashioned—I’m usually in bed by then.

The Englishman comments to me that Germans are obsessed with techno, which gets a slightly puzzled and possibly annoyed look from his associate. I think to myself how very different our concepts and uses of music are, how varied they can be. I assume that for the German gentleman music is a sort of machine, a tool that facilitates dancing and some kind of release. Its function is therefore simple, clear-cut, and it either does its job or it doesn’t. I imagine it’s pretty context dependent too. Not too many offices have booming techno bouncing off the walls. Music, for him, will be associated with a specific place and time of day, like going to a gym or an art museum—it’s not necessarily something one experiences at home. Maybe there is some social interaction at those techno clubs as well, so the music helps provide a way for that to happen too. Music, in this view, is definitely not about the words, that much is obvious.

What is music for in my case? Well, I like dancing to music too, though I find that more syncopated rhythms—funk, Latin, hip-hop, etc.—get me moving more often than the repetitive metronomic thump of house or techno. I suspect that syncopated rhythms simultaneously “activate” a variety of parts of the body (and mind) in different ways, and that the pleasure derived from this palimpsest of rhythms acts like a biological metaphor—a metaphor and mirror of social and organic rhythms and processes that we find enjoyable. I don’t find this music to be context specific. I’ll bop around my loft or sway to an iPod on the subway. Most often when listening and not dancing I choose music with singing as I find that the arc of a melody, combined with harmonies and a rhythmic pulse, can be incredibly emotionally involving. We call these songs. Sometimes the words help too, but I’ll often put up with lame lyrics if the rest of it works.

So that’s two “uses” I have for music. I also sometimes listen to sound tracks, contemporary classical music, and vaguely experimental music—usually as a background, a mood enhancer, or for atmosphere. We get doses of music this way in films and TV all the time. This is music as air-conditioning. Damn, I forgot to mention to the German gallerist my recent collaboration with Paul van Dyk, the techno master—I would have scored some points and cred if I had.

I remark that the waiter seems to be wearing eyeliner, which prompts a change in subject to the local Abercrombie & Fitch store, where I am told all the shop assistants must be (or must at least appear to be) models in order to be hired. This former bastion of WASP outdoor wear—which intentionally used to be about as sexy as the boxy Brooks Brothers look—has remade itself as a kind of homoerotic Fascist-chic outpost. Talk about a makeover! Is there a Tom of Finland lurking behind or within every buttoned-down square? Two male models stand at the entrance of the shop in hot pants, and the walls inside are plastered with photos and paintings (paintings!) of shirtless male models. The ploy has paid off handsomely; youths of all types fill the place daily. It sounds like a wonderful kitsch theme park, like a Leni Riefenstahl film or toga epic come to life. But what does it mean that gay kitsch sells clothes to straight youth? Calvin Klein has been doing it for decades. His black-and-white ads look like images from soft-core gay mags from the 1950s or ’60s. Surely using this sales tool is intentional and is not just an excuse for him to meet the models. Do the straight kids who shop there, many of whom would never knowingly be associated with anything gay, think, Oh, they’re just cute guys?

It’s still gorgeous and sunny, so I’m off again, south, across the river, now to the Imperial War Museum, where there is a great show of camouflage that includes two of the outfits used in my film True Stories! Here’s a ship in what was called “dazzle” camouflage:

As my friend C says, “Where would that be camouflage? In a circus?” We think of camouflage as the ubiquitous blobby patterns that the military love to sport, whether it’s practical or not, but it seems when camouflage was invented it had a wider scope. It wasn’t just to blend in with the forest or desert. It was also, as it is with many insects, used to confuse front and back, shape (and therefore purpose), and size. There were examples of lovely pop-up tanks and trucks intended to increase the apparent size of convoys and regiments. Potemkin tanks and artillery, which could be collapsed and folded up. A small detachment would carry fake additional vehicles and hope that the enemy, seeing the apparent size of the opposing force, would think better of attacking.

I emerge from the side streets onto big thoroughfares like Regent Street and Piccadilly, which are pretty hairy to ride on with those giant red buses and no bike lanes, but overall I’ve been lucky with the weather and riding.

I have drinks with Verity McArthur from the Roundhouse, a local venue recently renovated, and Matthew Byam Shaw, a producer of the play Frost/Nixon, among others. I meet them at a private club in Covent Garden called the Hospital, apparently thrown up recently by Dave Stewart (Eurythmics) in a former, well, hospital. Almost all the patrons have their laptops out at the lounge tables. They’re socializing, e-mailing and instant messaging (I guess), and drinking, all at the same time. Maybe they’re all frantically busy with social networking—trying to figure out what to do later in the evening? Or maybe interaction with live people just isn’t quite stimulating enough?

The folks here love their private clubs, and they’ve only admitted women to some of them since the 1980s, or so I am told. The clubs must be a legacy of the class system, which lingers obstinately in so many forms. In this classist view one must separate oneself from the hoi polloi if possible—in speech, in dress, and of course where one drinks. Even if you’re not upper class, you need to wall yourself off from those slightly beneath you or even those alongside you who are different in some way. Hipsters need their clubs and workingmen need theirs. Once everyone is in their place—in their appropriate drinking establishment in this case—there is order and peace in the world.

Another remnant of class and caste is the notion that everyone should stay in their place and station. To get involved in areas, jobs, and even (or especially) ideas beyond your station is bad form and is frowned upon. It is viewed as pretentious (if you’re going from low to high) and inauthentic (if you’re going from high to low). A film on the life of the late Joe Strummer brings out his diplomatic and vaguely upper-class upbringing and how he did a perfect job of hiding it—or at least of keeping it quiet—as it would not have sat well with the image of the anarchic justice-seeking punk hero he was to become. I always found that pure-rogue pose a little suspect regardless of anyone’s upbringing, but in later years Strummer and his collaborators ventured into other musical areas that didn’t require him to carry the burden of that image of a working-class hero. He seemed liberated in a way. Similarly, Prince Charles gets roasted every time he speaks out about organic farming or the evils of modern architecture and urban planning. The criticism leveled at poor Charles is usually along the lines of “royals should be seen and not heard” more than anything substantive. What difference does it make anyway where you come from? Can’t you be judged by what you do, make, and say, and not by what caste you were born into?

It is a pretty spectacular place, this gallery—floor after floor of exhibition spaces in an industrial zone in funky Hackney, topped by a large room with one glass wall leading to a balcony that looks out over the skyline. Young women with trays offer glasses of champagne. The current show is of paintings by the late Alice Neel, a portrait painter who worked in New York for many decades. She was scorned for her old-fashioned and conservative style—painted portraits—and then, near the end of her life, she experienced a short burst of acceptance. Now, decades later, there is a new appreciation welling up again. Maybe the work looks prescient? Maybe it looks prescient every decade or so, whenever a slew of younger artists do work that is vaguely similar to hers? In that way maybe she’s being used to validate the present, and in turn the present is being used to validate the past?

I am introduced to Grayson Perry, the transvestite potter who won the Turner Prize a few years ago. “It’s about time a transvestite potter got this prize!” he said when he won. He also said that it was more significant that a potter got the prize than a transvestite. He’s right. I have one of his pots. He covers them with images and often with rude texts. Here’s one called Boring Cool People:

He is in full Victorian baby-doll little-girl drag tonight, looking like Alice in Wonderland when she suddenly got big. A blond wig, a floral pinafore frock, and bare legs ending in little pink socks with ruffles and white patent leather Mary Janes. (Where does he get this stuff in his size? Someone must make them by hand. Yes, he confirmed, and they’re not cheap.)

He knows that I have one of his pieces, and he was thrilled when he heard that news years ago. I am thrilled to meet him. He is married and has a daughter—I saved a family picture that was in the UK papers when he won the Turner Prize. In the picture, he stands in his dress alongside his attractive and seemingly ordinary wife (she’s a shrink!), she giving a full-on laugh, and in front is their daughter, beaming a huge smile, obviously happy that Dad has won the most prestigious art prize in the land. Dad puts on an expression of mock horror at all the fuss, but clearly it’s all in fun. If this family can be happy—if this family can even exist—then thank God for the English toleration of eccentrics. In another place this lot might be miserable, oppressed, and sequestered. Not all cultural stereotypes—such as the English eccentric—are completely inaccurate or harmful.

We chat casually for a bit and then C suddenly unleashes a volley of what I think of as pretty probing questions: “Do you do a bunch of different characters?” (Yes. The little-girl character is called Claire.) “When did you first start dressing up?” (He was thirteen and he tried on his sister’s ballet outfit.)

The restaurant has doormen dressed in traditional English tails, as does our hotel. I love the juxtaposition between the two opposing poles of dress and manner: the reserved, polite, perfect, and solicitous staff in contrast with the world of theatrical shock, horror, and gross-out represented by Chapman Bros., Damien Hirst, Amy Winehouse, chavs, and football hooligans. It all has to come out, I guess—the bigger the front the bigger the back. You can’t have one without the other. I’m reminded of the ads that plaster the phone booths offering spankings and humiliation. One assumes that for an upper-class type especially, keeping it all in and maintaining that reserve can get to be a bit much sometimes, so one needs to be put in one’s place artificially and theatrically to somewhat redress the balance of power. I’m jumping to national stereotypes myself here.

In Venezuela there are chains of coffee shops where the clientele, almost exclusively male, is waited on by attractive women in tight outfits. The twist—what separates this chain from ordinary coffee shops—is that the interior architecture allows the female waitstaff to tower over the men. The women are positioned behind the counter on a slightly elevated platform. This means the typical Latin macho man is either being put in his place, and enjoying it, or that he is being transported back to his childhood, where his primary view is of his mother’s breasts looming conveniently above him.

The yobs push farther into the restaurant and toss out a few more choice insults toward the worried diners. (The restaurant is next door to the Ivy, a scenester hangout. Maybe the anarchist louts got the address wrong?)

Nothing happens, and the pair wanders out. I smile at one, but he murmurs something about “yer all gonna get it,” which seems bad manners, to say the least. No policeman inside these fellows.

They’re gone, and the maître d’ apologizes to the customers and then disappears and we never see him again.

British class antagonism lives on. It keeps the yobs in their place and makes the toffs nervously squirm in theirs. No wonder they like private clubs!

Later in the evening I dismantle my bike in the hotel room. The seat, handlebars, and wheels pop off and then it folds into a large suitcase. Time to go home to New York. Sometimes the hotel staff doesn’t like me bringing a bike inside, but often it arrives hidden in its big suitcase so they haven’t a clue that I’m up in the room with an Allen wrench and rubber gloves to keep the grease off my hands, assembling—or in this case, disassembling—my means of transport.

I pick up a copy of Newsweek on the plane and immediately notice how biased, slanted, and opinionated all the U.S. news-magazine articles are. Not that the Euro and British press aren’t biased as well—they certainly are—but living in the United States we are led to believe, and are constantly reminded, that our press is fair and free of bias. After such a short time away, I am shocked at how obviously and blatantly this lie is revealed—there is the “reporting” that is essentially parroting what the White House press secretary announces; the myriad built-in assumptions that one ceases to register after being somewhere else for a while. The myth of neutrality is an effective blanket for a host of biases.

On arriving in New York one immediately sees that the labor and service jobs are almost all being done by African Americans and recent immigrants. The first things you notice in the airport corridors are ads and banks of TVs on which CNN or Fox News is running constantly. The propaganda blast starts the minute one steps off the plane—there’s no option except to be inundated.

There is, however, the almost welcome third-world aspect of New York that mitigates this obnoxious propaganda just a little bit—the clunky lopsided baggage carts you have to pay for, (despite most people not having dollars yet), the touts offering rides, and the generally aggressive chaotic hubbub—cursing, shouting, pushing, and shoving—as the exhausted foreign traveler wonders how in the world he or she is going to get home. This anarchic arrival must be frightening to a foreigner, but to me it’s almost a welcome relief. It’s honest, crude—the whole city as one big souk.