Last winter Samara and I went to Turkey on vacation. We spent a lot of time recording video footage and talking to different people we met. One of the first men we talked to was very friendly and accomodating. He let us film him in his store, told us to come back and said he would show us some bars and clubs. To his surprise, we came back a couple days later. He expected our exchange to be like those he had with most other tourists; we would all pretend to stay in touch but never see each other again. In retrospect, our return must have seemed full of ambiguity. We clearly didn’t want to buy anything from him and we already had the footage we needed. We didn’t exhibit signs of any other ulterior motives.

He welcomed us back and waited for the right moment to start talking about the German couples he claimed had come to him wanting to have threesomes, or one couple where the man wanted to watch while he fucked his wife. He talked about his penis implant in graphic detail. When we asked what that was, he used his jeans to demonstrate how his foreskin had been pulled up and incised to make room for the small pellet. Initially he had had a ceramic bead inserted but once when he was in the sauna it got so hot he thought his penis would burn off. So he had it replaced with plexiglas and now it was fine. He could make a girl orgasm in five minutes.

We thanked him, and this time did what most tourists would have done the first time. We said we’d be in touch and disappeared. For several weeks, long after we had left Turkey, he kept sending Samara Whatsapp messages.

A couple of months later we flew to Canada from Berlin. Arriving after the long flight, I was tired from not having slept at all. We had to separate in customs, Samara a Canadian national, myself a foreigner. The line for foreigners was much longer and it took ages for me to reach the officer. When I arrived, the officer started asking me routine questions: How long was I staying? What was the purpose of my visit? If my girlfriend was Canadian what was to prevent me from staying? How much money did I have with me? Did I really think that was enough for three weeks? Did I have access to more money when that small amount inevitably ran out? He then asked me what I did. I said I was an artist. He asked what kind of art. I said I made videos and wrote, the fog of the sleepless flight plunging me into an existential space not appropriate for this type of interaction. He asked what kind of videos. I said I didn’t exactly know how to explain. Like art videos. He said: What kind of genre? Pronouncing it: Jean. I couldn’t hold back a little laugh at the pronunciation and responded: It’s like art. He ­said sharply: Porn? I said no. This came as a complete surprise, but immediately I realized that he had been thinking this all along, that all his questions had been leading up to that presumption. All my hesitations and uncertainties had seemed to him like incriminating evidence. He let me go through.

These two interactions became deeply intertwined in my thoughts. They happened on different continents, in completely different conditions with two men who have radically different functions in different societies. The one man sells counterfeit clothes in a cheap bazaar in a tourist trap in Turkey. His entire demeanor seemed to say: I’m down for whatever. I know how to do things underneath the gaze of the law. I can show you how it’s done. W​ink​. The other was the official

law enforcing face of national security. He represents the law. His demeanor said: I will find out every secret you might be hiding. I will obey and enforce the most rigid of legal codes. Your wink​will be held against you as evidence. And yet both these figures, in separate but equally surprising twists in the course of interactions chose to understand me as covertly offering or harboring porn. It’s hard for me to understand the reason for this being something I embody, something that singles me out among countless others. I can only understand the leap in their projection and expression to be a result of my having shown ambiguity in the way I represented myself.

So in these cases, ambiguity ­ any hesitation towards precisely classifying myself and my intentions ­ meant porn. When I think about the framework for these projections it seems like this way of thinking is a product of the internet. Maybe it comes from a gradual development of pre­internet media and information, but in these particular details it comes across as the unmistakable product of this saturated form of networked information. The beginning presumption on the part of both these men is that they know everything. Of course they are aware that they don’t know every single thing but they have the arrogant confidence of someone who, despite not having the world’s information stored in their minds, has access to any piece of information at any time. It is the abstract notion of that access that builds the confidence, or rather, projection of knowing, however flimsy.

The legibility of surfaces of strangers encountered at face value gradually mirrors a google search with the filters on. People present themselves as presentable, as morally upright, law abiding, not perverted. Those moral boundaries are often pushed playfully, and even with the filters on, we find little winks that allude to some borderline mischief personalities may be prone to given the right circumstances. Most of us recognize that wink. Many of us, like the Turkish man, take pride in our literacy of subtle codes, often over­eager in presuming the person standing in front of us is fully legible. But that legibility, more often than not, is desire projecting itself on to the un/knowing other. Was the customs officer, bored in his little booth, day dreaming? Would assuming that I was a porn director spark his fantasies for that brief moment? Does he see his job as an impossible tedium, each minute a minute lost masturbating?

The average person recognizes filters and preempts their illusory surface. That person is well trained in detecting the human/search engine filters of etiquette and assumes to see past the social codes they believe must hide some form of perversion. Everyone has at some point heard some statistic about how much porn occupies the internet. But the issue is not so much the quantities of data. The issue is rather how this collected information, both filtered and unfiltered, realigns collective perception and reconstructs its ability to comprehend and map an environment together with the characters that perform within it. Here is an accumulated moral code without source or author, more absolute than Catholicism. Everyone is a sinner. Everyone lives a duplicitous life, hidden by a thin shell of penance. But here, the average person is both priest (the confessional is public and accessible to all) and sinner (recognizes the sodomy hanging thick in the wireless airwaves). Ambiguity is squeezed out of that consciousness as something code can’t handle. What’s left is a space of confusion somewhere between the

arrogance of presumptions and the misfired projections of stifled desires.

I was once interrogated by Israeli customs officers on my way to Tel­Aviv via Zürich. It felt extreme that they were stationed in Zürich, but then it wasn’t that surprising. They pressed me with all kinds of very personal questions. Their manner and tone made it feel like they already knew everything there could possibly be to know about me. During the interrogation I kept reminding myself that there was no way they could ever know as much as they made it seem. But still, their theatrics were effective. I chose every word carefully. I exposed myself so as not to come across as suspicious. I felt like I had already broken laws I had never considered before. I turned possibilities into factual statements, creating half­truths to replace the truth of ambiguity.

The symbolic presence of the police is synced with the civilian recognition, developed at the same speed as consciousness, that articulation, whether verbal or in physical gesture must drop any sense of ambiguity. The forcefulness of that demand creates narratives in the mind that then become hard to distinguish from the truly fragmented plot, full of inconsistencies, that the new narrative replaces. A lie told over and over can convince its creator as much as the recipient. Subjecting oneself to that process of translation into factual half­truths gradually creates the demand that the same subjugation be enforced on the rest of the environment.

This type of mentality, formerly reserved for trained representatives of the law, seems to have lodged itself permanently into the collective code of conduct. Maybe as the internet and digital media have progressively deskilled the majority of labour practices, it has done the same with law enforcement. Whereas the police once represented the moral, psychological, and physical laws of a social system, they might increasingly only be there to enforce the actions of physical bodies in space. If most people, both those representing the law as well as those representing its evasion, gradually develop towards understanding ambiguity as perversion, the theoretical enforcement of the law becomes becomes the guiding principle of social interaction.

I remember the early stages of my interactions with social media, when I had just created my first email account and chatted with strangers and friends on icq and msn messenger. Even at that young age it was understood among the friends I communicated with, that this mode of interaction created difficulties in determining the tone someone was using. The ambiguities expressed in person, or even on the phone, the facial and tonal nuances that both add to and soothe the uncertainties of interaction were often lost in a line of text. Friction and misunderstanding arose much quicker because of not being able to determine whether certain messages had angry or sarcastic undertones. The ubiquity of this mode of communication, together with emoticons and hi res images used to add affect have gradually shifted the focus away from the conversation over that loss of ambiguity. It seems that most people accept that either the half­truth of factual statements broadcast at high volume correspond to reality, or are resigned to their voice, with all its nuances, remaining unheard.

The Spiral of Silence is a term coined in the 1970s by political scientist Elisabeth

Noelle­Neumann. It is meant to describe the tendency in people to remain silent when they sense that their views in relation to a particular topic are not shared by the majority. The term has gained attention and significance regarding communication through social media. It has been used to describe an array of reactions to social issues ranging from racism to gay marriage rights, from war and climate change. An image emerges in which one of the greatest effects of the freedom of speech enabled by social media is an infinite and, outside of the broad use of a sociological term, undocumentable layer of silence lurking beneath the surface of the acceptable terms of communication. But I would argue that the term itself also adds to the issue it attempts to understand and perhaps reconcile. The application of this term suggests that opinions are solid and fully formed, whether articulated or not. It denies the uncertainties of forming an opinion regarding something as complex as climate change or the role of religion in political and social systems. In short, the term gains traction and relevance at a moment in which space for the acceptance and understanding of ambiguity has already been eradicated. Might it be possible that the silence spiral is not the deliberate hiding of an unpopular opinion, but simply the resistance towards translating uncertainty into factual half­truths?

Over the last weeks I have been captivated by the growing presence of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. My attention was probably activated the moment he self­authored what, by most standards of communication existing on the surface, would have been a public relations death­blow ­ when he referred to Mexicans as rapists and murderers. The momentum he has gained since, a seeming inversion of free speech values, has not been altogether surprising. Trump’s persona, almost consciously satirical, collapses the distinctions that divide social standing and political affiliations. He is an implosion of high and low, belonging to the 0.001% while using a rhetoric of ignorant dismissal by calling people stupid, deflecting incriminating charges as “nonsense”, and appealing to the no­bullshit type of expression seemingly prefered by the average American in times of severe political alienation.

The perversity of the legal code allows him to play all sides. A recent CNN debate hosted a Cuban American woman who won the first season on his show “The Apprentice”. She denied suggestions that she might be on the losing side of his political motivations and implicit racism by making it clear that her parents, while Cuban, had immigrated ​legally.​Trump can deny his racist inclinations by claiming that he does love Mexico and Mexicans and “their spirit”, because of their entrepreneurial cunning. He admires the fact that they can steal from America, which is simultaneously the precise problem he wants to solve for Americans. He enjoys selling them condos in the Trump Towers, which shows exactly what’s wrong politically ­ Mexicans shouldn’t be rich enough to afford that kind of real­estate. The same woman who had won “The Apprentice” defended him as a bastion of free speech. His delivery may be unpolished, but he says what’s on his mind. That his brand of free speech links so well to the minds of a large section of the American public shows exactly how much is omitted from a poorly applied notion of free, democratic expression.

To return to the loss of ambiguity, Trump is both the Turkish man in the bazaar, and the Canadian customs officer. Trump can use the ​wink​as an invitation to use the law as cunning

deviation and simultaneously use it as incriminating evidence. He appeals to the person who knows better than to trust the surfaces of expression because he articulates both sides of the search engine, the glossy, morally upright, and the perverse, but more seductive and entertaining side everyone knows to be there at all times. Trump conjures up the silence spiral from its hiding place and embodies a caricature of the voices lost in the space between opinionated half­truths, keyboard and screen, for those who silently watch social media but do not feel their voices represented in it.

But Trump’s popularity (and equally its fierce opposition) is a testament to the collective absence of ambiguity in the formation of opinions and their reflection in the world. He implodes what seem to be contradictory binaries in his own person. He takes what appears to be hypocritical in the mediation of information and reconfigures it into a single whole. Rather than following one side of the law, he enacts the contradictions between racism and law enforcement, corruption and entrepreneurial spirit. His brand of free speech might not be as ludicrous as it may come across at first glance. In a system that denies the possibility for any individual to act according to her or his own conviction, in which every individual expression or gesture is absorbed as commodity, Trump is big enough to represent that system in his own self. He is one of a handful of individuals in a vast minority who can thrive under the current system. His mode of free speech exists in combining the hypocrisies of half­true opinions into a solid mass.

Free speech cannot exist in a system in which modes of expression are reduced either to the surfaces of a thin, implausible morality or the sinkholes of hatred and violence. Free speech requires the freedom to describe the contours of ambiguities with a level of awe towards the unknown both within oneself and in the environment one inhabits and observes. Free speech would allow me to say I’m not quite sure what it is I do without that being understood as perversion, where a ​wink ​could be the invitation to enter the unknown.

A couple days ago, I read a passage (from Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris) that describes the sensation of stepping into a new house. It captures, better than anything I’ve read before, the disarming feeling of encountering a space that you know will become familiar, when it is still strange:
It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside you gathers up defensively; something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be quite the same again. These new unsmiling lights, reflections and objects are to become your memories riveted to you closer than friends or lovers, going with you, even, into the grave: worse, they may become dear and fasten like so many leeches on your heart. By having come, you already begin to store up the pains of going away. From what you see, there is to be no escape. Untrodden rocky canyons or virgin forests cannot be more entrapping than the inside of a house, which shows you what life is. To come in is as alarming as to be born conscious would be, knowing you are to feel; to look round is like being, still conscious, dead: you see a world without yourself…. Through looped white muslin curtains the unsunny sea daylight fell on French blue or sage-green wallpapers with paler scrolls on them, and watercolors of places that never were. The rooms smelt of Indian rugs, spirit-lamps, hyacinths. In the drawing room, Aunt Violet’s music was stacked on the rosewood piano; a fringed shawl embroidered with Indian flowers was folded across the foot of the couch; the writing table was crowded with brass things. In a pan-shaped basket by the sofa were balls of white knitting wool. Aunt Violet seemed to have lived here always. The fire was laid but not lit. Each room vibrated with a metallic titter, for Uncle Bill kept going a number of small clocks. Out of these high-up windows you saw nothing but sky. The rooms looked not so much empty as at a sacred standstill; Karen could almost hear Uncle Bill saying: “I have touched nothing since my dear wife’s death.”
The stunning confidence of this paragraph lies in Bowen’s decision to describe the protagonist (Karen’s) first impression of a place, not as a listing of details about the place (which comes at the paragraph’s close), but by the blankness and vague horror of newness, of not knowing yourself or your place in the place. (“To come in is as alarming as to be born conscious would be, knowing you are to feel; to look round is like being, still conscious, dead: you see a world without yourself.”) But what does the house look like? the reader wants to know. I’ll get to that, Bowen seems to say, but first, let’s register the blindness of newness, then the slow seeing, which will fade, within days, into another kind of blindness: that of familiarity.
Eudora Welty, another fiction writer, and a friend of Bowen’s, wrote an essay about place in fiction (i.e. setting) that I love. In it, she writes:
It is by the nature of itself that fiction is all bound up in the local. The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place. The human mind is a mass of associations- associations more poetic even than actual. … The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of “What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?” -and that is the heart’s field.
Fiction writers love setting because it is effortless symbolism: encountering place, a character either feels in harmony or in vexing dissonance to it. Stepping into a sunny garden is either an embodiment of the character’s new love or else the wilting tiger lilies, the too-close sounds of traffic, the unrelenting sun, are just another horrible aspect of a horrible day, and the character hurries back inside.
Place is necessarily what is outside of us but the trap of consciousness all too often means that our perspective on place, our literal view, is bound by what is occurring inside, that invisible inner landscape that gets writ large on what we see: the streets, the sea, the shop windows.
Writers often say that they can only write about a place once they’ve left it. I am the same: somehow staring at one place helps me evoke another. I think I need the solidity of a setting I can see; it anchors me enough to write a firm elsewhere.
In Berlin this spring and summer, I traveled nearly an hour almost every day to Krumme Lanke or Schlachtensee. I never tired of staring at those lakes, and I often took the same photographs, each day, of the same scene. There are places that are restive, that call forth other places without eliding the scenery before us. I don’t know yet where that place will be for me in Austin, and I wonder if I will recognize it when I see it.

1. Screenshot of a computer

The screen is blank. After a while a link appears:

http://dismagazine.com/

A computer cursor appears and clicks on the link. The homepage of DIS magazine pops up the screen. The cursor continues to scroll over the page and to click through the different columns of the page, clicking on pictures, videos, texts, music etc.

During this one is hearing the voice over of Marco Roso and Lauren Boyle (members of the DIS collective) explaining what DIS is and what DIS does.

Exposition scene

1. A BAR IN VIENNA – NIGHT

The bar Anzensgruber (known to be a gathering point for artists and art afiliados) is crowded with people staring at a flat screen installed above the entrance. Austria is playing against Sweden, the score is 2:0.

Around a table a group of people gathered together, a gallery assistant, a curator, a few artists. an Austrian guy and a French woman. They aren’t very interested in the game, except the Austrian.

FRENCH WOMAN

So you just arrived today?

(to everyone in the group)

She looks at the group of people, sitting with her back to the flat screen, noticing that some luggage is placed under the table.

CURATOR

Yeah, we arrived this morning from the Triennial in Vilnius

and started straight away to install the show.

He looks at the two artists sitting across him. His gaze keeps moving from the two to the flat screen and back again.

The gallery assistant sitting besides him giggles. She nods to some people she knows entering the bar.

GALLERY ASSISTANT

Yeah, we started installing the artworks today, but we gonna make it on time.

I mean, we have two full days left, where is the problem, right?

Suddenly the crowd in the bar exclaims a unified happy scream turning almost immediately into a scream of disappointment. Everyone at the table turn their heads to the flat screen.

AUSTRIAN

This wasn’t a real offside! It was a passive offside!

FRENCH WOMAN

Oh, so there is a difference between a passive and an active offside?

AUSTRIAN

Of course!

FRENCH WOMAN

(to the curator)

Are you into soccer?

CURATOR

No, actually not, but since I moved to Europe I kind of get the enthusiasm for the game.

FRENCH WOMAN

(to one of the artist)

And you also arrived today from Vilnius?

ARTIST

No, I arrived from Warsaw.

I had an opening there last night and now I’m in Vienna.

FRENCH WOMAN

Well that seems to be a tight schedule.

Again the crowd explodes in cheering screams. Everyone looks to the flat screen. Austria scores a goal and the crowd is ecstatic.

GALLERY ASSISTANT

No one understands what’s going on, usually Austria keeps loosing all the time and now

they win. It’s kind of funny.

FRENCH WOMAN

(to the gallery assistant)

I’m very much looking forward to the show!

GALLERY ASSISTANT

(laughing)

Yeah, me too! Which means that

AUSTRIAN

(to the gallery assistant and the French women)

What?

The game is over. Austria won. The crowd is cheering and clapping. Everyone seems to be very happy.

GALLERY ASSISTANT

Oh nothing, we just talked about the show.

Everyone in the bar is now commentating the game, the TV is still running and one can hear the commentator of the game saying, “We just witness football history”.

FRENCH WOMAN

(to one of the artists)

Wow, did you hear that, we just happened to witness history in it’s making.

ARTIST

What?

AUSTRIAN

Well it’s history because Austria never qualified before.

FRENCH WOMAN

Yeah but what I like is this idea to be a witness of history itself.

ARTIST

And thinking that this morning I was still in Warsaw, then I worked the whole day installing, had a Schnitzel, and now I’m being a witness of history.

AUSTRIAN

People are surely gonna ask you where you have been on that memorable night.

That’s how history works.

I spent this past weekend in Sky Valley, Georgia, a small retirement community in the Smoky Mountains, where I spent most of my summers as a kid after my family moved to Asia. It’s also where my mother’s family, originally from Mississippi, now mostly in Tennessee, gathers on holidays. We were gathered, this weekend, for Labor Day.
It felt surreal to board a two-hour flight for Atlanta, a flight that has been at least a twelve-hour journey for the past seven years, and for most of my life. Summers in Sky Valley were always distinguished by their ghostly, vanishing quality: something common to summers for every kid, but for us summers were a brief Persephonic spell away from foreignness: back in belonging, or something approximating it (if you can call two months surrounded by geriatrics in golf carts “belonging.”) I didn’t mind not being around kids my age, aside from my sister; the retirees were friendly enough, and waved wildly from their Buicks, you didn’t have to worry about wearing the right outfit for them.
When Dorothy steps into Oz, the landscape bursts into Technicolor. This is often said of travel, or of life abroad: that it’s more thrilling, that you feel, by extension, more alive. I don’t feel that I’ve stepped back into a black-and-white color scheme, by returning to the United States, but I do have the unnerving sensation of stepping into something like 3-D: life feels, in a strange way, more real, more deeply dimensional, and also more bewildering. I’m not sure how certain things are done, after so much time away, while I understand, much more implicitly, what’s going on.
My house is missing most of its furniture, and I find this to be a relief. Moving through Austin, I feel the pressure to approximate familiarity, or at least remember how to exit the highway without having a wreck. In my small house, I am slowly settling in, not yet angekommen, as the living room, which looks like the inside of a mosque, with its single carpet, and no sofa or chairs, confirms.
And what about the millions of refugees streaming through Europe? What metaphors would they choose for their shifts, for their deprivations, for their wavering identities, in the eyes of European authorities? Will they ever be able to repatriate? There are many words for the body’s rejection of moving too quickly through air or water: motion sickness, sea sickness, getting the bends. What is the word for the nausea, the paralysis, of moving too quickly from one home to an imagined new one, that hasn’t been guaranteed yet? Of sitting in a camp waiting on papers? In transit but not in motion?
In his essay “Refugees,” Charles Simic, a poet whose family fled Belgrade in 1945, writes:
Immigration, exile, being uprooted and made a pariah may be the single most effective way yet devised to impress on an individual the arbitrary nature of his or her own experience.  Who needed a shrink or a guru when everyone we met asked us who we were the moment we opened our mouths and they heard the accent?
The truth is, we had no simple answers. Being rattled around in freight trains, open trucks, and ratty ocean-liners, we ended up being a puzzle even to ourselves. At first, that was hard to take, then we got used to the idea. We began to savor it, to enjoy it. Being nobody struck me personally as being far more interesting than being somebody. The streets were full of these “somebodys” putting on confident airs. Half the time I envied them; half the time I looked down on them with pity. I knew something they didn’t, something hard to come by unless history gives you a good kick in the ass: how superfluous and insignificant in any grand scheme mere individuals are. And how pitiless are those who have no understanding that this could be their fate, too.

Probably the most fascinating thing somebody told me in the last two days here in Cairo, the thing with the most far reaching implications, spanning the private and the political, the family and the state, regression and aggression and an overall unease with the way men are, was Nora who said that Egyptian men are so spoiled by their mothers, so doted upon, so smothered with love that they go through life expecting this to never end. They have wives whom they expect to behave like their mothers, they think of themselves as strong men but are still the little sons they were thirty, fourty years ago. I don`t know if this explains everything, I don`t even know if it is true. But it totally makes sense, in the way that Freud without Freud always makes sense. Would the Middle East be a different place without these men? Probably. Is there a chance of that happening? Probably not. Do they care? No. Do they know? I guess not. But I trust Nora somehow on this as she is as smart and sharp as an Amazon Warrior has to be. This is what someone at the workshop called her. At least this is what I thought. It turned out that I did not hear correctly. But there still is some truth to this name, Nora said, and laughed.

I have up and repatriated. In other words, shifted from an expatriate to a repatriate. Or, from an ex-patriot to a re-patriot, even if I don’t feel very patriotic. I am in Texas, where the heat coming off the concrete and the smiles at furniture stores are stunning in the white glare of the afternoon, and can give you a headache if you stay in them too long.
I’ve witnessed a wide spectrum of American service sector smiles in the past week. There’s the losing-it smile, a brittle, bright smile that barely conceals a volcano’s worth of resentment. In Germany, where I lived for the past seven years, no waitress or postal worker would find it necessary to mask their anger with a smile. They have no problem regarding you and your order with raw rage. Here, the lady at Pottery Barn is smiling, but there is no question that she wants to throttle you and stuff your corpse under the sofa cushions. It’s a confusing, depressing combination of facial expressions, like a dog wearing a sweater or wintery weather in June.
Then there’s the Southern smile. This is usually paired with heavily teased hair, in the direction of Dolly Parton’s ’dos. I don’t mind this smile. I’ve known it since visits to Mississippi as a child. This smile has an element of “Bless her heart,” in it, a vaguely pitying (read: Besserwisser) tug at the corners of the mouth (as in “Bless her heart, the poor child doesn’t know how to work a tape measure”). There is a nihilistic serenity behind this smile, which is also a little frightening, but not if you don’t think too much about it: just measure your goddamn lamp, smile back, and get in the car as fast as you can.
Thirdly, there’s the “Hey, man!” smile, which I am beginning to think is distinctly Austinian. After ordering coffee and iced tea at a food truck, I received this smile and stream-of-consciousness speech from the kid manning the truck: “Hey, man, our coffee sucks, so I’d go somewhere else, but sure, I’d be glad to get you an iced tea. How’s your day going? Yeah? Nice. Mine is good, last night I hung out with some friends, no big deal, just a few of us, and we all watched the sun go down. It was beautiful. It was just a really chill night. It put me in a good mood and I’m still feeling happy about it. You know what I mean? Here you go. And just take this iced tea, my manager’s not here. Yeah man, it’s on the house. Sure, no problem. See you.”
The fourth smile, which I witnessed at a distance in Starbucks, is an entreating, I’m going-to-call-you-on-your-smile smile. This smile says, Okay, you’re going to smile all friendly? Let’s see if you mean it, bitch. The bearer of this smile was a Starbucks barista who was having a terrible day, as he informed his co-barista: his roommate sucked, she had given him hell for getting a dog without telling her. This story was repeated, with added flourishes and roommate insults, to every customer that approached the counter and asked how he was doing, after he asked how they were doing. And there was nothing for the customer to do but listen for ten minutes to the ins and outs of this man’s domestic drama, because they had smiled and asked, after all, how he was doing.
The Starbucks employee’s strategy breaks an unspoken rule of American friendliness: you’re not supposed to betray how you’re actually doing, at least not for a ten-minute monologue. The only customers with the power to deflect such oversharing, I would guess, are foreigners, who are not held to the same social expectations. I miss that Auslaender-get-out-of-jail- free card, which always came in handy in Berlin with telemarketers and people you didn’t want to talk to at a party.
Did I mention that I live on a property with miniature donkeys? I haven’t figured out what the donkey smile etiquette is yet. So far, we just regard each other warily, until I summon the courage to scratch their ears, and they summon the courage to let their ears be scratched. Which is its own kind of honesty, and its own kind of straight-faced relief.  

We were walking along July 26th Street, Murat and me, carefully avoiding the sun, trying to stay in the shade, when it dawned upon me that yes, today was the second birthday of this very site, 60pages. We were on our way to the Townhouse Gallery which Murat had a little trouble finding. We had both arrived in Cairo the evening before, and Murat had been at the Townhouse for a few hours, preparing everything for the workshop, but somehow the impression of this city which so much reminded him of the Istanbul he remembered from the months he spent there as a child confused him a little bit and he was taken back all those years while forgetting on the way the path, the indeed tricky path to Townhouse. You turn right a little past the very good pastry bakery, it is a street full of little stores selling car parts, something, Murat said, the Armenians used to do in his childhood memory of Istanbul. Then you turn left, try not to fall over the plastic chairs that substitute for a cafe, turn left again, and there you are. Sarah was already there, it turns out it was also her birthday, the 25th. Happy birthday, Sarah! And thank you for putting together this fabulous group of people, writers, journalists, activists, all there to discuss the beauty and necessity of longform writing. It was hot, it was long, but what a great conversation we had. Among the many beautiful and memorable things being said was Wael`s statement, the big bearded Wael, the poet who said that journalism should be considered as a form of art and not as the 4th estate of a democracy that is bound to a nationstate that Wael believes is about to fall. Not today, not tomorrow, not in Egypt specifically, but more generally, a brief and bloody episode in human history which is going to end soon. Wael looked not mad as he said this, rather benign. So what could this journalism be that is more than another accessory of the nationstate? Maybe just the same, only better? Lina of Mada Masr made her argument for longer and better writing, something we here want too, and she mentioned Walter Benjamin as a storyteller, going back from the early 21st to the early 20th century while still going forward. A very inspiring exercise in time travel. Alia also of Mada Masr was also for time travel, she proposed to talk about migration at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, among the migrants Italians coming to Egypt to build the Suez canal. History is strangely curved, it turns out. And that time is not linear is something we had always suspected, no? July 26th, by the way, was the day that Farouq, the son of Kind Fuad, was forced to abdicate in 1952. In 2013, General Sisi called on the population to demonstrate against the Muslim Brotherhood. This is what our new friends at Mada Masr wrote back in 2013. They are lovely people. As are most of the Egyptians we talked to today. What a very nice birthday. Happy 60pages.

This is an experiment. We are going to Cairo for a workshop on the art of longform writing, with the generous support of MiCT and at a time of new tensions between the government and the press. The workshop will be hosted by Townhouse Gallery, not far from Tahrir Square. Sep 1 till 3, morning, afternoon, dinner, tea and talk in between. We expect 20 to 25 people, writers, activists, journalists. We want to talk about what stories need to be told and commission five to eight of them and publish them here, at 60pages. We also want to expand our network of people trying to figure out the present.

We always believed that part of today’s problems, both politically and journalistically, was a limitation of scope and perspective. What Pankaj Mishra called “the West and the rest” turns into a true liability if it comes to describing this world and how it changes. The West looks at Egypt and sees – what: first an uprising, violence, a revolution; then change, the end of the old, the beginning of something; democracy? The election turns out differently. The Muslim Brotherhood is not what the West bargained for. So when Sisi took over, there was a very loud silence from the part of Western governments.

It has been a rollercoaster ride. We don’t pretend to understand it. This is why we come. To listen and learn. We plan more of these – what should we call them: workshops, pop-up editorial sessions, voyages? Let`s call them voyages, because the goal in a voyage is exactly that, learn, listen, change. This we want to share with you, here and now. So join us.