Paris has a byline. It has been in use since the 1300s, variously carved or tiled into buildings in characters now weathered and indistinct. From Latin, it means "tossed but not sunk” in the sense of a boat being slapped sideways in rough water. It had fallen out of fashion, mostly because it’s a little obtuse, a little nautical, and it's hard to get behind a dorky boat the local government clip-arts to the bottom of press releases.

But then four young men opened fire on a crowd of university students in a sold-out concert hall. The day after, someone took those words and superimposed them over a photo of the tower and threw it on insta. The timing was right, the message was unequivocal and now it is everywhere, on social media feeds and posters, pasted in alleys and scribbled in toilets.

Here, now, it is written in giant white letters over a wall that has been painted entirely black. The letter forms are elegant serifs rendered a metre high and, although the building is edged with all the pageantry of the Belle Époque, this blocking of solid black renders one face crisp and essential. Fluctuat nec mergitur. A giant chalkboard with intent.

The last time I stood here, an old man stopped in front of me, set down his bag of groceries, and stared at the wall, hands on hips. It was then covered by a well-rendered piece of street art - a girl with flaming red hair, floating gently above the ground. He stood quietly for a moment, then stooped to gather his groceries. Today it is just me, the rain, and the giant letters. I look across the road at the bar I know lies behind an anonymous green door.

“We went there every week. Religiously. It was the closest I think any of us had to a living room. Friends, not customers. I know that’s a stereotype, but that’s what it was. And then the shooting started and everyone’s phone went off all at once. We locked the doors and went down to the basement. Stayed there refreshing facebook while our batteries ran out. The sound of gunshots and sirens outside. It was the most scared I’ve ever been.”

It seems they’ve drained the Canal Saint Martin and the surrounding area has a lingering funk. At the bottom of the canal, mud-encrusted shapes are like the outlines of buried treasures in the formative stages of an archaeological dig. Here the shape of a scooter, a shopping trolley, a bicycle with its edges smoothed by heaped empty bottles pebbled like dinosaur skin in the mud, ready to emerge from hibernation. Tossed but not sunk.

Pathways

One

One of the first genuinely striking uses of VR I saw was a short film the New York Times produced using footage from candlelight vigils at the Place de la République. "Using this medium, we aimed to create a more textured experience — the streets of Paris distilled to voices and spaces."

Paris is a city that lends itself to this kind of storytelling, to texture and space. I think it's also why the giant type treatment worked so well, it stripped texture, the flat forms in stark contrast to those carved almost directly opposite.

Two

I often wonder when the backlash against minimalist logotype will come. I expect it will be soon. In this grimdark era of design austerity where companies fall over each other in the race to pare back their logos to the point we are left squinting at a sea of chiselled black-on-white slab serifs, I think we are due a touch of the ornate.

This time, I hope the skeumorphic tends toward the heraldic. I want giant shields emblazoned with garish colours and leering pictographs. I want overwrought drop caps and outlandish ligatures. I want a border of carefully lettered greenery around every illustration and I want those illustrations to put the Pre-Raphaelites to shame.

I want the dorky boats.

It's not just Paris, all of France does this well. Every city or village has a coat of arms, a blason, and there are hundreds of websites cataloguing the many thousands of beautiful and bizarre things the designers of yore have felt significant enough to whack on a shield. Take the Bas Rhin region for example, where there are more than five hundred different coats of arms for an area about the size of the ACT.

These range from the simple (a sash of yellow across a shield of red) to the complex (a strutting rooster launches itself off a mountain in front of a black sky); and the banal (a pair of black tongs on a silver shield) to the inscrutable (some bloke has draped himself inside the spokes of a golden wheel and is either grinning or grimacing, it's kind of hard to tell).

My favourite is that of Uttwiller, a commune of about 180 people in the far north east of France, right on the German border. Their coat of arms is simply and inexplicably a red felt hat with little dangly bits to cover the ears.

Three

Texture informs the city and the shape of the city itself is textural. When you map the orientation of city streets, you can see immediately which cities have been built in the era of the grid and which have grown over centuries into their own spaces. You can abstract this, take the shape of the streets and form it into a visual representation of the city's DNA. Or you can could study the spaces that are a blank canvas.

Postscript

That was... more than a fortnight. Maybe once every six months is a better time frame, or maybe there's a way to pare this down. Whatever happens, I think we'll look at agave next.

In the mean time, designers, a plea for less san-serif and more sandy fishes carrying rings of gold (Plaine). More gothic helmets that are shaped like angry swans (Westhofe). And perhaps a red hat or two.

Fat globs of rain slap against the multi-coloured fishing boats at rest in the tiny harbour. They don’t catch much fish here, it is either flown from Santiago, or frozen and shipped on the boat that arrives once a fortnight, the day the stores have stock on their shelves, rather than optimistic space for bread and corn, tomatoes and eggs.

It is early, the morning after a national holiday, and the empty ramada flaps white plastic, abandoned a few hours ago as the sun scratched the caldera, the drums fell silent, and there was only the wind. It is a constant. Howling off the Pacific, in conversation with the moai that face away, squat, sulky children with stony expressions, backs turned.

The rain is somewhat less consistent. It has a monsoonal quality, in that binary sense of nothing between clear and torrential, on or off. A reminder of the power of nature, as if you could forget in a place where climbing the hill at the end of the street grants you a view of the crossroads, the pier, and then endless ocean in every direction.

A gust pushes the rain sideways and sends me ducking between the awnings of a series of half-finished concrete block storefronts. This is a one-town island and the architecture is uncertain, tentative. A dominant style has yet to take hold, so local entrepreneurs experiment with concrete slabs in tumbles of proto-brutalism.

A Kings of Convenience song of a few years past issues from a tinny speaker wired to the roof by a long, frayed cable that stretches under the door of a shuttered cafe. Under the awning a guy with a neatly trimmed beard ineffectually leans on a broom, the only thing moving along the whole street.

I stare at him and then at the speaker, disoriented. “It’s a good song, no?” he says. “It is! How do you know them?” I ask. “Oh, I lived in Spain, a share house, my roommate was just crazy about them.” “But you were born here?” “Yes. Like everyone I left. Like everyone, I came back. Where are you staying?” “Just next door. The blue gate.” “With Matias? Has he told you about the film?”

Pathways

One

The film in question is the 1994 Kevin Reyonds epic Rapa Nui, which bought a giant Hollywood production to an economy and community poorly equipped to deal with it. Not five minutes after I met him, Matias had launched into vivid stories of the various scandals and multi-generational feuds the movie had spawned on the island.

Despite the drama off screen, the film presents a (broadly) historically accurate portrayal of how deforestation lead to a complete societal collapse on the island. This brings us to two perfect pieces of NYT content with 24 long years between them.

The first, Janet Masin's wonderful review of Rapa Nui, includes the line "the dives are dramatic and perilous, the vistas genuinely lovely, and the egg-smashing pratfalls at a relative minimum."

The second is an astounding piece of contemporary news design, Easter Island is Eroding, which pulls no punches in its portrayal of the dire thread climate change poses to both the people and the archaeological heritage on the island.

Two

To this little guy 🗿 and the rather curly issue of context drift and emoji interpretation. While our friend the Moai wasn't in the initial set of 176 emoji developed for Docomo by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999, it followed shortly after on all the major Japanese carriers.

You might wonder why a designer would attempt to convey a giant rock head in a extremely memory limited context. Well, mostly because old mate Moai is actually Moyai, the creepy giant stone head on the uncool side of Shibuya station. A single emoji answer to "Where should we meet?" when you are trying to avoid the thronging hachiko masses was as convenient in 2001 as it is now.

Unfortunately someone missed the message and by 2002 there was thematic divergence as to what the Moai was supposed to represent, with au heading straight for the rapa nui special (see #794). By the time unicode 6.0 rolled around in 2010 it was anyone's guess with every vendor taking a stab at island or urban.

Three

A cool thing about the Moyai statue is it's made from a very particular kind of rock, koukaseki, which is quarried on one of Tokyo's rather more outlying suburbs, the island of Nijima. In English it's a xenolith, a rock formed of inside other rocks. Check this insanely badass sentence from wikipedia: "xenoliths can be non-uniform within individual locations, even in areas which are spatially limited, e.g. rhyolite-dominated lava of Niijima volcano contains two types of gabbroic xenoliths." Oh, and in local dialect, Moyai means "work together." Nice, nice. 🗿🗿

Postscript

And that's it for the first episode (stop me before I get to Rongo Rongo). Next one in a fortnight where we'll be digging deep into shop basements and share bicycles. Let me know what you think of the format / feels by replying to this email.

places look the same, and we're the only difference

First, a heave as the right wing dips and the intercom dings, "there's a little weather over Canberra, so we've been put in a holding pattern," and we do lazy loops in the clear blue sky before plunging down into the grey, a great wave of dark, lightning flickering off the wingtips, and are spat out right above Lake George, turbines fast but never in sync, and then we're back on hold, wing pointed to the ground and the cabin midnight or golden depending on which way we're facing, lower now, below the clouds, with the Brindies obscured by the distance, islands set against the blue, Canberra electric in front of them.

Let's go get a burrito and debate
our favorite pasta shapes
as the crenelated bank
across the way catches the sun.
the late sun, the one that
holds hands with the older trees.
We're not the kind
to exclaim at beauty, so we don't
do anything but notice,
and noticing, shift our conversation
accordingly, to the color
of the capes the Romantics
wore when they flew.
It used to be a walk along the Thames
and boom - pixies frolicking.
Now we walk the strip mall
and attribute strip mall
corner cyclones to...to whom?

-Dan Chelotti, X

This has been a good week for those that love to talk about sci-fi. Yes, dear readers, we are indeed going there. Let’s talk Star Wars.

The past couple of months have been a fascinating experiment in merchandising taken to its logical extreme. I posit that everything it is even tangentially possible to attach the Star Wars brand to has had that done to it. Every convenience store here has been done over with Leia-ed popcorn and Han Solo-ed cup ramen. There’s the ANA plane they painted like R2. There are oranges with that little robot on them. Oranges! Think on that for a minute.

The social media guy at that company that you kind of hate but has great service, and his counterpart at the government department whose mandate is so boring you almost died the last time you went to their web site, well, they’ve both spent the previous six months preparing for this moment. They are damn well going to find a way to hook their thing to the Star Wars train, no matter how forced. There was a hashtag about this. It’s a train wreck of terrible ideas.

The film itself is not a train wreck of terrible ideas. It’s really quite good. People are saying it redeems the prequels, but I’m not sure that matters so much. The Disney behemoth has grumbled into life and reduced the staggeringly complex process of producing a Star Wars movie into something that will now happen every year until we are all dead. The prequels are ancient history.

Which is funny, because at the time of their release I was way more invested in them than I’ve ever been the original trilogy. Or more specifically, with the first prequel. With the red face guy and Liam Neeson’s hair. I bought into the hype. Saw it twice in the theatres. Played the pod racing game (which was great, btw).

I have no idea if I even saw the second film. I must have at some stage, because I remember seeing the third at the tiny theatre in Ako with every other foreigner in town. Afterward, we piled into the one bar in town still open and reminisced over brandy alexanders while the snow piled up outside the door.

I have no memory of when or where I first saw the original series. They had no formative effect on my childhood. There are no piles of Star Wars toys locked somewhere in an attic, no VHS tape gone bad from multiple watchings. I must have seen them somewhere before they released the version with all the horrible CGI, but I was not a child that grew up with a lightsaber.

The closest I got was an vaguely triangular Lego space ship which I showed to my mother. “It looks like one of those ships from the start of Star Wars,” she said, and proceeded to give me a plot summary. I guess I didn’t internalise it too well, because I took the model to show-and-tell and proudly announced it was the “Darth Vader.” My teacher told me that that was a person not a ship. I told her she was wrong. I learned several important life lessons. Big day.

I’ll go and see the new one again this week, but I can’t exactly articulate why. It has some mystic holding power, this universe, and I'm always willing to pay for admission.

Anyway, what I’d actually like to talk about today is The Expanse.

The Expanse as it currently stands is an adaptation of Leviathan Wakes, the first book of the Expanse series and, look, don't we all know the Game of Thrones model by now? This is that, but in space. It’s got political drama, exploding things, impenetrable accents, but instead of ice and fire, you get ice and railguns.

I came into possession of Leviathan through a book swap with a German guy in El Salvador. The thing is, I’d been hearing the major plot points in summary every morning for the previous two weeks, so already had a mental picture of what was going on. Darth Vader is a spaceship, yeah?

Once I hit the first page, I realised I’d picked it up and thumbed through it in the Gleebooks discount bin a couple of years prior. I had ended up grabbing of Dan Simmons Hyperion instead, which at several kilograms of paper, seemed a better investment to me. It probably wasn’t.

Leviathan is one of those books you pick up to start and then realise it’s suddenly six am and light outside. And then you keep reading. The pacing is bang on, the universe is well realised, and the characters feel pretty much like people. That is, there are a lot of very broken, deeply flawed people floating about the expanse.

The show seems to have largely taken this and run with it. The dialogue is good, the casting is good, the special effects are good enough to ignore. The world they have built grows with every episode. You can grab the first four episodes on SyFy if you're in the US and somewhere else if you're not.

But honestly, the best thing about the show is, like Game of Thrones, there’s several books worth of material to riff off. You know that if they adapt it well, there’s plenty of story in there. It’s not going to do a Battlestar and veer off the road in the first season, plough into a ditch in the second season, burst into flames in the third season, discover the ditch is filled with hydrogen gas in the... you get the picture.

I think I'm just happy to have a weekly show until GoT storms back into my life next year. Next time, can we talk about how all our visions of the future suddenly have drones in them?

“Let me tell you a story,” she says, “about work. About the shape of work.” She is tall, glasses too big for her thin face, although he doesn't think this is A Fashion Thing. “What shape is work?” he asks. “Well, it’s not consistent. It changes depending on its mood. Whether it is hungry. Whether it has been fed.” A nod to a neon sign, and to stairs disappearing down into darkness.

The sign hums, a sound straight from a kickstarted noir film. “That was work once. Six months. When I was a kid I used to go there every Tuesday after school, they had a special if you had your state ID. But then we moved away.” A pause. “And then I moved back.” They walk in silence for a moment, forced into single file by bollards and slush. A trio of bicycles roll past, the gender of riders indistinguishable under winter layers and tightly wound scarves.

“I moved back and everything had changed. The shape of things was the same, but the contents were different,” her eyes fixed on the middle distance of an imagined horizon. “What do you mean, about the contents?” he asks. She stares pointedly at a patrol car waiting at the lights. “A city is a city, right? You fiddle with the surface textures but it’s the same inside. You know which way to turn, which way to look. You know who to ignore. You know the rules, you’re taught them, or they come to you in time.”

There is a skip bin wedged between two parking signs, taped over with blue tape, and a permit that bestows exactly twelve hours of parking privileges on the tub of steel. It is filled with cracked plasterboard and old fixtures, barely recognisable as things extracted from a house. A man, moving quickly in the cold, unloads a wheelbarrow into the bin. A cloud of white dust mingles with steam from the kerbside grate.

“So, I moved back, and got my first tattoo. Shaved my head. Quit my church. Got disowned for a while. Learned about the shape of work,” she thumbs back at the neon. The slush here is black, thawed and refrozen a hundred times. “I served the same kids from the same school I used to go, except none of them looked like me any more. And I’d changed, sure, but they’d changed too.”

“My family couldn't afford to live here now. I share a fucking shoebox with two others. I mean, look at this shit,” she points at a nearby wall. The wall is covered in a mural for Girls, that show on one of the larger pay networks, maybe HBO, and the paint is still fresh. In fact, fresh enough that the posters that have been torn down so it can be painted are still sitting in the bin below it. No ambitious poster monkey, chasing quota, has yet seen fit to paste over the carefully blocked serifs of the title.

It’s been hand painted and the artist is good. The girls in question cluster around a table, ashtray in the centre, green velour couch behind. Their body language is individual and distinctive. Hunched shoulders, flick of hair. Collarbones and camisole. However, when you paint on brick, it is very hard to pull off realistic eyes, and the characters grimace down, wide-eyed and manic, glaring daggers at the shell of a Thai restaurant and a rusty fire escape opposite.

This is expensive advertising. Old school, really, to apply so much of one person’s time to something so ephemeral. Like carving something in wood, painting something on glass. Maybe there is a guild involved. He rolls this thought over for a while, imagines the uniforms of the sign-painters guild, then realises it’s more likely to be cells C1:13 of LES-adspendjuly.xls. Someone in an office uptown, probably unconcerned with the shape of work, has looked at their numbers, assessed risk and reward, and decided it was worth it, so here we are.

He we are. The snow crunches underfoot and the sky above is murderous. They got the salt down this time, before the second front swept in and buried everything in three feet of snow. You can see this in the pattern of melting. Who was diligent in their application and who was lazy.

Perhaps there is hope that competitors for such attractive vertical acreage will stay away for an extra week, maybe two, before someone draws a moustache on Lena. "Broken windows, right?" he says. "The fuck?" she returns. "Sorry, I mean, even though this here is gentrifying, has gentrified, that's got to have at least a little while before it gets done, right? Before she gets a beard. Before the first window is broken."

She turns back to consider the prospect. "You know, I can't say for sure. Might not happen at all. Might happen tonight. Depends how our resident vandals are feeling." Judging by the careful tagging on every level of the fire escape opposite, fairly studious. Diligent, even.

"C'mon," she says, "work is hungry."

This morning I clocked a thirteen km run as part of my goal to see if I can run 150 km in a month. This is absurd to me. I'm not a runner, I've never been a runner and, prior to six months ago, the thought of running more than a kilometre in a single hit was to be laughed at. What changed?

A couple of things. I read a Chris Guillebeau piece on running around the world that condensed a lot of my own thinking around travel and exercise. This was at the same time I was travelling alone in conditions conducive to running. I've always walked a tonne when I travel and it seemed a natural transition to see more of the places I visited.

Getting from a point of being enthusiastic about running to actually having the fitness to do so was the first hurdle. I can't overstate how huge a help mobile apps are in this process, both for gaining fitness but also for retaining it. For me, two have been particularly good: Runkeeper and Zombies, Run. They're both available on iOS and Android.

I won't talk much about Runkeeper because it's straightforward: log your runs, keep stats and improve your time over the same course. The real value in the service is getting a couple of friends on the same service. Getting a ping whenever a friend finishes a run is a good mental kick in the pants to get out there yourself. Especially when said friend is killing it: if they've just done 20ks, surely one or two of your own won't hurt.

Zombies, Run is a little different in that it's a great motivator to get from not running at all to being able to put away a 5k without too much trouble. In fact, that have a sub app specifically for that purpose. The beauty of ZR is that thanks to its story-based missions of a fixed length, you're pretty much committed to exercising for at least half an hour each time you head out the door.

The other half of the puzzle is finding music that works for you, either stand alone with RK or to fill the gaps between story content in ZR. Initially, I fiddled with custom playlists of what I considered epic running music, but I found updating them when I got bored of the songs tedious. Like most repeatable tasks, lower friction is better.

In the end I found the fabriclive series of mixes are pretty solid. I've got a Google Play subscription and they're on that, I assume the other streaming services are the same. The series is up to issue 81 now, so it's easy to switch in a new one when you get bored of that particular brand of doof doof.

In the end though, it's about figuring out what works for you. Once you crack though the five km barrier and get comfortable with longer runs you can see some wonderful stuff. A month or so back, I had a beautiful sunset jog around the bridges course in Perth, lake BG in Canberra is consistently good (when it's not freezing) and wheezing up hills in San Francisco is something else.

However, it's going to be hard to beat the Long Beach Challenge course in the Pacific Rim National Park for sheer beauty. Smashing it along the grey sand with no-one else in sight and the ocean roaring beside you is something I'll never forever.

Get out there, get running. It's worth it.

I threw out my shoes today. This was not an easy decision, nor one rendered simple through the enforced time pressures that come with the intersection of an end of lease and the start of transcontinental wanderings. Skipped over in the flurry of labelling, stay, or, go, with red and green post-its and the song playing in the background. Siempre - coqueteando y engañando.

I loved those shoes. They came into my possession through a campaign to encourage under-thirties to sign up to private health insurance, before we were stung by the looming spectre of an increasing year-by-year loading that I didn’t really understand, but about which I always received raised eyebrows and tutted tuts whenever I (sporadically) did my tax. When and why it became a good idea make healthcare decisions based on a tax status, I don’t know, but I guess it seems more responsible than doing the same based on free shoes.

They were very nice shoes, however. Shiny, pearlescent black, with the texture and colour of mood rings that gradually shifted through that very narrow band of colours reserved for science textbooks and weather maps. An isobarometric front cresting across my arches toward the heel. Of course, this effect lasted for approximately a week until I jumped in a puddle and they settled on their default: a bluish tinged black.

But they were comfortable, and they travelled well, and by the time the first soles had worn down they stomped through ten countries. I gave them to a cobbler in Shanghai and he glued new soles right on top of the old ones. This allowed me to wobble through another year or so until the tops came apart, a minor defect that was quickly rectified by an old man with needle and thread on a station platform in Jodhpur.

The third soles came from the woman who sat on Sathorn road, just next to the Embassy of the Holy See in Bangkok, who carried with her a bewildering array of shoe-mending products and spread them in scrupulously arranged piles across a torn blue tarpaulin. She called my shoes filthy, but mended them anyway, and by the time I got them back they’d traveled to more than twenty countries.

Now they’re on their final adventure, in a green bin stuffed with food scraps and garden waste, and I’ve got some new kicks. These ones glow in the dark and are every bit as ridiculous as the ones that came before. Long may they reign, or at least until I find my first puddle.

The counter is massive. Its scarred face gleams in the soft yellow light of the chandelier above. A fireplace, set in the same marble as the counter, dominates the back of the room and the hundreds of bottles clustered on it and around it glitter in the semi-darkness. Above, stretching to the high ceiling, two pilasters of repeated heraldry wind upward in tight organic patterns before they fade into the gloom.

The roof is lost to me. The room hums. It is a Friday, almost Christmas, and there is a storm coming. I sit at the last seat on the counter and read. What little light put out by the antique globes reflects off the windows at the front, making it difficult to see the darkening world beyond the glass. You can just make out the brusque, crisp movements of those outside, in weather it is better not to be outside in. You can see the grey and brittle snow clumped under parked cars. You can see the skeleton fingers of bared street trees, leafless for winter. People move around me in the flat and tidal surges of a Friday evening.

This is Baltimore. Before the end of 2014, when half of America felt like it was holding its breath. Waiting for the next last straw, the next never again, the next horror that the media breathlessly reported for a week, before losing interest and repurposing the talking heads to be deployed at fresh Human Interest. A Baltimore of unpainted canvas, unfurled flag, over easy and underdone. A different Baltimore to the one held in my head.

I suspect this problem is not unique to me. Like many of my peers, that Baltimore, the Baltimore in my head, was that of The Wire; towers and re-ups, claustrophobic ceiling-tiled offices lit by a thousand fluorescent tubes, patchy suits, the savagery of addiction and the grinding everywhereness of politics. The straight legged, straight jawed Daniels plowing his way through every painful meeting word by painstaking word. Rollers. Product. Row houses and strip joints. A whole other vocabulary.

Instead, this is a Baltimore of marble bars, alabaster fixtures and chandeliers casting light everywhere but up. A Baltimore of Washington on a pillar of marble, a hundred feet up, cock-arm pointing South, toward the harbour, locust point, and the cobbled together stars of M’Henry. Not D’Angelo lit by blue neon under a flickering red sign that reads, “Chicken.” Not West or East or any side that matters. A place dislocated from recent history, but tied to it all the same.

Two gentlemen sit at the counter next to me. They are bulky and squat, with ruddy complexions that seem out of place amongst the suits, ties and shoes with that briefest flash of red. John, who has swept his cap from his head and made a complex and specific beer order, launches straight into it. He notes that, “New Jersey has the lowest productivity of these States of the Union. Didn’t always be like that. Used to be different.” Their beers come, and they are exactly as specific as anticipated.

“I got me one of these new mp3 player things. Fucking amazing, man. You have to load the songs onto it. You know, from your computer first and then put it on the player. I put in this CD, my favourite CD, the first Pearl Jam album I bought back in ‘92, ‘93, and I expected, you know, you’d have to type in the names of the songs so they’d show on your screen in your car but the internet, man, it just connected when I put it in and bam, each song had a name and a picture. It’s amazing to think that back in ‘93 they were preparing for these things, putting the information in there.”

The second man, the one who is not John, has a specific whiskey next to his specific beer. It is very clearly not his first for the evening. “Yeah man, that’s, fucking, that’s what people like me were doing, fucking ten years ago. Y’know. Typing in the data. Fucking meticulous. Pearl Jam, Metallica. I can’t even count how many songs I put in,” he pauses for a second, as if exhausted by this revelation. “My arm hurts man. I mean it’s okay. It’s okay. But it hurts. Tomorrow, I need to be drunk. With my disability, it’s hard. People expect things.” He downs the specific whiskey and raises a single finger from the rim of the glass to the young man behind the bar. His glass is filled.

I’m reading a series of essays called How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon, a professor at Vassar College in upstate New York. He writes well, and his proud, brittle words leap off the page and burn and ferment and demand the kind of reading where each page becomes three. Top, bottom, and top again. I gradually lose the conversation next to me. Lose the whole glittering facade to a house in rural Louisiana, Kiese’s lying not quite grandfather and his drunken not quite opinions on one Kanye West.

When I click back in, John’s ranting about legislation and liberals and not John is painstakingly laying out the detail of his welfare fraud, his lack of success with “fat goth chicks,” and the golden era of grunge in America. The suit directly behind me has started bagging out the per diems allocated to A-100s and from that I surmise that he’s young and he’s at State and also that it’s time to leave. I pay for my non-specific beers and leave a tip on the scarred and giant marble. John and not John ignore me.

It is bitterly cold outside. I pull up my hood and walk round the corner, where a man who has been sitting launches himself to his feet and careens toward me. He is looking around me, through me, and rubs his hands on his chest.
“Hey man, my name is Michael and I’ve been in prison since I was fourteen. Got out, don’t want nothing to do with drugs man, I just want some food, some coffee, some cigarettes. Bless the lord man, can you help me?”

“Well, is there a Dunkin around here? Let’s get a coffee.”

“Please man, I just want some cigarettes.”

“You want some food? Coffee? Let’s go.”

“Spare some change man. Bless the lord,” and the wind whips around. Michael sits back down. Rubs his hands on the front of his stained hoodie. Doesn’t look at me. When I look back, he’s not there.

I walk back through the historical district, Washington above, looking down. There is a church on every corner and the hostel I am heading for has soaring ceilings, gilded chandeliers and twelve rusty IKEA bunk beds in every room. As I buzz into the building, there is a sharp blast of siren and a police cruiser stops two blocks up. Two white cops jump out and push a man to the ground. It’s too far away to be sure, but it looks like Michael.

The wind whips around. The door buzzes, clicks, and I am inside.

The leaves have done falling. The drips from under the eaves freeze into an icy crust on the hardened dirt. Once more the north spins, off, into the dark.

As a kid, I was convinced it was the white brick that did it. This was a carefully reasoned deduction that went as follows: walking directly past the house yielded no response; nor did skipping, jumping, or running; but touching that sole white brick, even for a second, would result in a bright light flicking on, pentagonal shadows of frangipani cascading down the porch steps and onto the ever present mountain of construction rubble out the front.

I never thought to test my theory further, perhaps by running up the path or by waving my hands near the letterbox. For me, the one brick painted white, and the light that came when I stuck my hand on top of it, was proof enough. That little fence has gone now, and there’s a huge wall that I can’t see over, even with the disparity in height between me, now, and my childhood self. Running past the wall, I wonder if there’s still a security light, inside.

Frangipani shadows on stucco, now.

I walk through the doors and into Fresh Provisions, and notice that the university crowd have just burst from the Velvet Lounge and are scoping for bargains in the bakery aisle. The discount cake section will, late at night, offer delicious bounty to the seasoned patron of the Lounge. Even the most profound beer munchies are sated by a fist-sized chunk of cheesecake. Three dollars. A bargain.

Not now though, my body screams for vegetables.

I buy a container of tuscan salad and retreat to the carpark. I don’t have any cutlery, so I dig in with my fingers. Marinated capsicum has the texture of clammy seaweed, and my fingers are slick and shiny with olive oil. I stand under my tree and watch people disperse, probably to Amplifier, maybe home.

I did this for years.

As I begin the run home, it starts to sprinkle, and my shuffle clicks onto the next song. Casino. The pitter-patter and the mournful horns. She pants in my ears, and the scent of frangipani lingers in the air, brought on by the rain.

I still want the idea of that white brick. The belief in it. I want cause and effect, even it’s the wrong cause, the wrong effect.

He will win the next hand. I know this because from where I stand, under the soft blue glow of four enormous Chinese characters, set in neon, I can see his cards, both of their cards. There are two others here, standing in this crisp Shanghai evening, and they are watching too. They stand apart from me, in avocado-green uniforms, leaning against identical mops, and stare as the players reveal their secrets.

From the outside, it is hard to get a sense of the interior’s scale. The room, benches pressed against the windows, is a cavernous excavation at the centre of the red-ochre castle that is the Australia pavilion here. The ceiling is draped in huge ribbons of lime, aqua and hot pink: streaks of painted colour suspended in the air. I take a final slug from the longneck, and reach up to loosen my tie. It has been a long day.

He wins the next hand.

I toss my empty beer, leave my green-suited companions to their furtive cigarettes, and walk back inside. In the corner, atop a tiny stage, the Sneaky Sound System are playing to crowd of a hundred Chinese, who stand and look confused, clutching souvenir bags, stuffed toy koalas and assorted ephemera. Connie Mitchell is dressed in an outfit that approximates a space suit designed in consultation with David Bowie, and dances in short, abrupt movements as she plunges into the next song.

There is a neat division, then, between the Australians, most kitted out in Australia Pavilion staff gear, going nuts, and the Chinese crowd, grinning nervously and snapping photos of the flailing white people. The pavilion staff do their best: wheeling and spinning through the spectators, as they try to get people on their feet, but the crowd are having none of it. They form a neat semicircle in front of the dancing Australians, and hold their cameras aloft.

The guy next to me, tall, with a wild mop of reddish brown hair, leans in, “We’re playing outside, after this. Tell the bar you’re staff, and they’ll kick a couple of bucks off the beers.”

So we do, and an hour later are nursing a small collection of empty Coopers bottles, as the house band launch into an acoustic cover of Land Down Under, the flute part energetically recreated, but noticeably lacking men from Brussels, sandwiches, or a Koala on a leash. We can see the pavilion’s freight exit, tucked neatly behind a stall, now closed, advertising meat pies and ‘authentic’ cookies. A trickle of staff begin to emerge from the door behind the loading dock, in groups of twos and threes, and then the Sneakys appear, and Tim jogs over to grab a photo, and I hold the fort.

Today has been the quietest day of the entire expo, but there’s still a decent crowd here, sat in the rapidly cooling Shanghai evening, as floodlights begin to be switched off and people crowd into huge pedestrian snakes that wind their way toward the subway. “So, apparently there’s a party at the Latvian pavilion,” Tim announces as he returns, “Shall we wander over?”

I lean back and look at the pillars supporting the huge bridge directly behind me. The sound of the flute seems oddly out of place here, in this concrete playground where just a few years ago there was nothing but mud, and grass, and the lapping wakes from the steel ships headed upriver.

“Thanks all, we’ll be here all month.”

The citizens of Latvia seem to have decided that their national identity can be represented by two elements, notable above all others. These are extreme sport, and also flowers. To this end, the room’s walls are covered in huge murals showcasing the floral biodiversity of the country, and in the middle of the space is a giant glass tube, enclosing an enormous fan.

This on-demand wind tunnel is the centrepiece of Latvia’s themed self-expression. As we enter, a man in a white jumpsuit and helmet is doing lazy back flips, floating in apparent zero-gravity. He extends his arms and is tugged upwards, soaring toward the roof some twenty metres above. At the base of the tunnel, away from the push of the whirling turbines, two men struggle into person-size hot-dog suits, and then sprint in opposite directions around the glass.

As they reach the same point on the far side of the room they careen into each other and the smaller one crashes to the floor, legs kicking frantically against the plush red sausage, as he attempts to regain his balance and stand up. Above, the white suited gentleman in the wind tunnel is fist pumping to the thumping euro-house, suspended six metres above the ground, perfectly upside down.

It is a moment of such utter surrealism that I am, for a moment, struck dumb. I stand at the entrance and gape. Tim stops beside me, “Cor. That’s cool,” and he pushes forward toward the beer tap in the corner. A crew of five Chinese split from the crowd members who are staring transfixed at the man inside the tunnel and break into a synchronised dance to the song that is blaring from the speakers. Everything is lit in a light pastel green, shot through with red lasers that pick up details on the flower-covered walls.

I feel like a mediaeval peasant who’s been catapulted through time, to land in the middle of Times Square. A bearded and bedraggled wastrel, taking in the gleaming neon with a horrified, open-eyed stare, before he sinks to his knees, head in hands, and weeps. There is too much happening here, too much newness, and nothing to anchor it against. I turn around and step outside.

On the stairs that curl downward and out of sight, are a collection of beautiful twenty-somethings, all with matching lanyards announcing that they are staff. A group of girls are parked on the steps, passing a cigarette lazily to each other. I collapse next to them, and turn to look behind me, at the massed crowd.

“What is that?” I ask, “What was Latvia thinking?”

“You should see Spain. There is a giant baby. Like a car, some small car, that big. It has eyes and they are dead,” says the one closest to me, as she passes the cigarette back to her friend.

“Dead?”

“I do not know if this is how you say in English, but it is like real, but not. Because it looks real, but not so real to be the exact, it is more, uh, dead.”
“Right, uncanny valley.”

“Valley?”

“When something is almost real, but not quite real enough. And because it’s almost real, it makes you feel uncomfortable. Like, I don’t know. Like robots that move like people do or, or movies. Like animated movies where the characters look almost real.”

“This is a valley? Like a space between hill?” and she makes a gesture with her hands approximating a vee.

“It’s called uncanny valley. I don’t know why.”

“Well, the baby is in the valley, and the Latvia is crazy.”

“That is the most sense anyone has made to me tonight.”

It turns out that they are the staff from the Estonian pavilion, and they have just found out that there is a competing party at the Angolan pavilion, at the other end of the expo grounds. They are debating whether it is worth walking the significant distance required to go and check it out. Apparently party stands-offs like this are common, and it is a mark of status if you can throw the party that manages to attract everyone, all the staff from the rapidly assembled tower apartment blocks that surround the grounds here, sucking the punters from the far reaches until it is dawn and the army of cleaners shuffle in to hit the reset switch.

We are going to Angola.

Distance is screwy here. As with so much in China, what is represented as adjacent squares of colour on a neatly labelled turns out to be a thirty minute slog through the darkness, the hulking polygonal shapes of unlit modern architecture looming like fragments of a half-remembered nightmare.

We forge past the still traditional shapes of the Asian and Pacific pavilions, which recall temples and monuments, gaudy and ostentatious, and head toward the more theoretical geometry of the European pavilions. Further still, and the African buildings are smaller, squarer and considerably less refined. It is quite clear that there is a party happening at the Angolan building.

Tall, well-dressed, Africans cluster around the entrance, and an impossibly skinny model, microphone in hand, interviews a man that appears to be wearing a barely contained bag of railway spikes, wrapped in a tea towel on his head. Inside, it is madness. A black, barely-lit square, people everywhere and the Chinese dancers from Latvia in a corner, having taken up residency.

I talk to someone who claims to be royalty, and someone else who claims he is full of shit. I dance. I sweat. I realise that my quota for the bizarre has long been exceeded and that all the strangeness is beginning to press at the seams, threatening to spill out in a stream of brightly-lit capsules, rendered on architect’s foolscap and then made massive. I push my way back into the cold and begin the walk home.

Outside, away from the huddled crowds, I pause for a moment to get my bearings. I feel a hand on my back, and a smiling Filipino introduces himself and points me in the right direction. He’s a musician, playing in the stage show, but wants to be an architect. He talks about Gehry, and the tensile strength of steel plating, and the place of deconstructivism in these temporary structures, and this all seems very relevant as we stride through the darkened architectural canyons of this pre-dawn space.

The final building I remember seeing is that of Finland, and it looks like an iceberg, shining and adrift on a sea of concrete, alone in the dark.

Outside, there is an apple orchard on a cracked hillock of sunburnt clay. The trees are loosely arranged, bent sideways from the salty winds that blow across the peninsula each afternoon. The fruit on these trees is small, and is distributed sparsely amidst the splintered branches. There is nothing on the ground, nothing rotting in the trees. A perfect binary of food/no food in the white light and mid-afternoon heat.

At the base of the hill a man in tattered black shorts leans, as if against a wall, on a cow that is tethered to one of these trees. He mends something, maybe a net, with precise movements of his hands. The cow stares disinterestedly at the dirt. Our bus lurches into a deceptively large pothole and loses traction in the front wheels. The engine groans. The driver swears. The passengers ride the wave of sideways motion, hands clasped to the steel bars of the seats in front.

Still swearing, the driver mops his brow with the back of a hand. There is a sign above his head that reads, “For your safety this vehicle is under continuous video surveillance,” next to the arrangement of screw holes where a camera would have been mounted, in some former life, before the bus was stripped and began the long trip southward. For our safety, there is no camera, just a worn machete hanging loosely behind the driver’s seat.

He slams the gear stick forward and down. The elephant skin creak of tyres against gravel. We are in motion. As we scrape out of the pothole, the front wheel ejects a fist-sized rock with a pop and a whip-crack. The man mending the net looks up, as disinterestedly as the cow, and then returns to his work. Neither of them stand in shade. Both cast long, straight-edged shadows that stretch up the hill, textured by the cracking clay.

Inside, the packed rows of seats are filled with school children in starched white uniforms. They sit as Tetris pieces, stacked three to a seat. Their voices echo off the walls and windows of this wheeled sardine tin that is so covered with stickers of benediction and exhortations of belief it almost feels held together by faith. Todo lo puedo en Christo.

The boys and the girls are neatly separated, girls on the left, boys on the right, not by rule but by self-selection. They throw quips back and forth across the aisle, past the old men in worn ten gallon hats, over the heads of abuelitas clutching shopping bags of onions, and past me, legs jammed into the insufficient space between the seats. We jerk suddenly to the right, and pull to a stop on the side of the road to exchange passengers. A clutch of new students pull themselves aboard.

As they slide sideways down the aisle they are greeted with a shout here, a whistle there, and the Tetris board is cleared and reset. New data demands new configurations, and these are sought amongst the unstated pressures of gender and social status universal to every school that exists on this blue and brown planet. Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right. And here I am. Sweating, and stuck in the middle. No you.

“Sorry, is all that you can’t say?”

The soundtrack is an uneasy mix of thumping Latin dance, excerpts from an album speculatively titled “Arrangements for Air Horn” and Western classics, the fodder of soft-rock stations the world over. But there are interesting diversions. The aforementioned Stealers Wheels, for example, and their paen on centrality that is now intrinsically linked to imagery of suits, pencil-thin ties, and gruesome torture (for which, thanks, Tarantino).

So, when, after a longer than I would have thought necessary triple blast of air horn, the opening chords of a Tracy Chapman song sound, I am less surprised than I would have been ten minutes previously. Or the ten minutes previous to that. Each minute spent on this rattling silver-green contraption of starched fabric and stickered belief shifts the line of expectation lower into the humid and sweaty fuzz reserved for the tropics.

This song was on the compilation tape my parents brought on road trips. We listened to these songs so many times the hand-written track titles on the tape had been smudged into illegibility. Like many of those memories of childhood containing repetition (dinosaur name cards, what does that very hungry caterpillar eat next?) the correct order of things is burnt into my subconscious. Each time I hear a song contained on the tape, I still half expect the next to follow, and experience a tiny pang of regret when it doesn’t.

This song is entitled, “Baby, Can I Hold You” and it came after Joan Armatrading’s Drop the Pilot, but before Paul Simon’s Graceland. Ostensibly, it is about making mistakes. Practically, it feels as out of place here as I do.

“Years gone by and still. Words don’t come easily.”

Do you remember the rapid repetitive clicking sound that car tape decks made as they reversed direction? The slight change in pitch as the tape’s slack was taken up and the second side began to play. The difficulty in working out which of the fast forward or rewind buttons would work in this direction at this time? These tactile memories are useless now, confined to the same memory hole as the sound floppy disks make as you spun them idly on the end of a pencil, centrifugal force applied to the neat black circle of magnetic tape.

But there are other memories that still hold relevance to this rapidly changing world. The pot stacked with molinillos that sits by the window of my parents’ kitchen as they quietly gather dust. This morning, when I ordered a hot chocolate, the women in the market whipped out one similar and used it to whisk the liquid to a frothy head. The smells of childhood issue from that pot on the flames, and memories dance along the boundary of remembrance.

The blue jeep we drove through Costa Rica had a tape deck that made that clicking sound. A chu-chu-chu-chu-chucking of insectoid magnitude. It also had a ragged canvas back, and I held the steel cross bar tightly as we bumped through the jungle. My mother held me tight, and there is a picture of a tiny red man, leaping from a sea-side cliff, that moves across my father’s chest as he changes gears. Everything smelled of bananas, and dirt, and sweat, and the light is golden against the deep green of the canopy.

“Maybe if I told you the right words, at the right time.”

Outside, there is an apple orchard on a cracked hillock of sunburnt clay. Everywhere the bougainvilleas hang over the fences in heaped piles, purple and orange flowers in clumped disarray. The students practice the all on and the all off, their uniforms luminescent in the dimly lit bus. The front dash is covered in rectangular mirrors and as we rattle and jolt onward, they glitter like spiders eyes in the dark. Everything smells of bananas, and dirt, and sweat, but this time the light is white, and bright. I practice memory for some specific time in the future, when perhaps I will need these things again.

“Please stand back from the edge. Please be mindful of the yellow line. Please form a queue. Please be patient. Please stand back from the edge. Please…”

The station is chaos. Somewhere upstream someone has either fallen or thrown themselves on the tracks, the official language is notoriously obtuse in these circumstances, and we ride the trickle-down as the cascading delays break neatly onto subsidiary lines, a crashing wave of green signs turned amber and then red. “Please stand away from the edge. Please be mindful of the yellow line.”

The novel I am reading is a hefty tome, kilograms of dead tree barely held together by a fraying spine and a ragged cover. I haven’t yet had a chance to get stuck into it — I get my weight training carrying shopping bags up my mountain, thank you very much — but faced with a lengthy train ride, I threw it in my bag. I’m glad I did. This will be a long commute.

A train arrives. It is not going where I need to be, but it is going somewhere and that is enough. I wedge myself in a corner seat and pull out my book. This is a tactile thing, a real thing, and I immerse myself in a way that is still only possible for me with these kinds of physical objects. I am tangentially aware of lengthy stops between stations and the intermittent hum of clusters of humans late for somewhere they need to be but with no way to get there. Some time later, I notice that the carriage has gone unusually quiet. I look up.

Across the aisle, an enormous man has just sat down. He is dressed in an austere blue kimono, hair tied neatly behind his head in a simple top-knot, and carries a small bag made of a twisted square of beautifully patterned cloth, a furoshiki bag. The man is arranging his limbs as he settles in his seat. Seats. Somehow he has managed to negotiate two consecutive seats, a miracle in the oppressive squeeze of rush-hour delays. He shuffles gently sideways, his enormous bulk requiring that he spread himself across the entire bench with legs splayed.

This is a sumo wrestler and, judging from the now complete silence in the train carriage, quite a famous one. The man’s massive thighs quiver beneath the fabric of the kimono as he settles himself. He sighs deeply, a brusque sharp exhalation of air that cuts against the silence of the carriage. The business man across from me whispers something to his colleague and they both pause, heft their newspapers, then lower them slowly in order to sneak a poorly concealed look in the manner of a middle-school spy manual.

The man-mountain pulls a small package from the furoshiki and lays it on his lap. It’s about the size of a tissue box and wrapped in beautiful patterned cloth, the same way grandparents wrap packed lunches, no folds and no visible fastening. The thickness of the fabric and the simplicity of the design betray the quality of the cloth. This is an expensive item or, at least, is wrapped expensively.

He fumbles briefly with the package and removes something before smoothing the cloth with remarkable dexterity for someone whose fingers resemble thick, meaty sausages. For a while I can’t see what he’s doing. I don’t want to stare, or to be rude, but I’m intensely curious as to what he’s playing with. I pretend to read my book and steal glances by looking at his reflection in the window next to me. This is chapter two of the middle-school spy manual. The next chapter details how to put a stone in your shoe so you don’t forget what leg you’re fake limping on.

There is a muffled and distant cough, and the conductor gives a short and garbled message indicating that if I want to have any hope of getting home, I should probably get off here and walk. The train stops. I snap my book closed and grab my bag from the floor. As I push past salarymen on the way to the exit, I glance down at the Sumo. Cradled in his hands is a tiny, latest model mobile phone, shiny and sapphire blue. It looks like a toy in hands. A little blue pillbox. He taps at the keypad with a single finger and I can see emoticons sprinkled throughout his text, animating in frenetic yellow loops.

As I step onto the platform, I hear the two young women disembarking in front of me conjecturing as to who he was, before concluding that he “certainly looked like somebody famous.” The sign above the closing doors scrolls a line of amber text noting a delay due to “human accident” and asks for understanding. We form a line, and neatly exit the station.

You notice the billboards first. They cluster around highway exits, illuminated in silver-grey floodlight, thrust hundreds of feet above this flat, wet country. The journey toward the Panhandle is marked by photographs of gleaming seniors, their full-service retirement villages and their for-profit hospitals, and by the slow transition as the billboards topic-shift from silver tide to counselling for unwanted pregnancy. “Pregnant and alone? Find out your options.” The people on these billboards, clipped from endless libraries of low-budget stock photography, are usually in black and white, inevitably caucasian, and always smiling.

As you proceed northward there is another shift. Now, there is less pregnancy and more pointed reminders of the sanctity of life. “My heart starts beating 14 days after conception.” “God Made Me Perfect.” And then the smiling faces in closed-focus stock photography are suddenly gone, replaced with brash typography, the pointed slogans taking up more and more space until there is nothing but a sign and 10 foot letters, towering over the turnpike. “Abortion Kills.” “America. Love it or Leave.” There are no phone numbers with these messages, no follow up. The service they provide is contained within. Self sufficient.

Back on the ground, churches act as physical markers for this transition. They get bigger, whiter, and their names more expressive. These Upworthy-titled places of worship throng along the roadside, pushing aside the rotting corpses of industrial buildings and roadside motels. I drive past Apostle RW Williams’ Miracle Factory and the Knights of the Holy Eucharist. You will not believe what happens next.

What happens next is more churches and more chain restaurants, blooming together against the background of urban decay. These are concept art drawn from a post-apocalyptic video game. Albums of beautifully crafted, individualistic hotel signs, gradually sinking into the mud. Shuttered motels and restaurants reclaimed by the swamp, the ghostly outlines of outbuildings shrouded in moss and the hard lines turned soft, as gravity and rot crush them inward. All this in stark contrast to the hard, sharp white lines of the church that inevitably sits next door, lit softly by the dim yellow refraction from the chain across the street. “In 2014, put your life in God’s hands.”

At dusk, I cross the Causeway into New Orleans. 39 kilometres of dead-straight concrete grey top that neatly divides Lake Pontchartrain in two. This is a long bridge, the longest bridge, and a bridge that is difficult to understand in the context of New Orleans. The sun is setting as I join the stream of pickups leaving the port and head toward the centre, single laned byways swooping over and across the dock train tracks like fingers through hair. The roads in the outer suburbs of New Orleans are the worst I have ever seen in a major city.

When I ask, later, whether this is a Katrina Thing, I am told that, mostly, it isn’t. That’s how the roads have always been. Priorities shift, and bridges need to be fixed first. Then there are other suburbs, the ones closer in. Their roads are okay, mostly. So, not a Katrina Thing. But the signs of Katrina are still evident, in the skeletal and hollowed-out buildings, tagged with flood damage indicators and hairy with weeds.

I drive past a burnt out maintenance depot with a stripped ambulance driven against the front window and abandoned. The ambulance is a new model, less than five years old. This is a scene from the set of a war movie, something you’d see in LA, under lights, with thronging crowds of people with walkie talkies prodding and adjusting. But not here. Here it sits, nose partially through a door, silent. There are seven destroyed police cars, new, and a blackened school bus, old, in the parking lot out the back.

The next day, I ask a woman sitting on one of the few undestroyed park benches in the city park about the roads. “How much do you know about Louisiana politics?” she asks.
“Nothing.”

“Things work different here. Slower. The priorities are skewed.”

“It shocked me how evident the Katrina damage still is,” I say.

“Sure, well, that’s part of it. It takes a long time for us to make decisions. We do like to ruminate.”

“Don’t people get frustrated? If you can’t see progress?”

She clicks her teeth and shrugs, “It is what it is. There is a house on my block that needs to be torn down. I call them every week. Have done for two years. Every week. And it’s happening, but real slow. That’s just how we do.”

I hear this a few times over the next week, “That’s how we do.” And it seems that, for the most part, things are less Katrina Things and more How We Do. I’m staying in the Bywater, an eclectic and demographically diverse suburb east of the French Quarter. There is a coffee shop in the basement that pours the best espresso I have ever had. The espresso machine sits on a reclaimed bench, surrounded by reclaimed furniture, in a house that has been loving cajoled back to life by the owners, who bought it several years ago, waterlogged and broken, and have worked tirelessly on it since.

Each morning I sit in the corner with my three-dollar coffee and my two-dollar toast and listen to locals that stream through the door. This is a particular demographic, and their talk is inevitably about projects, about the big next thing, and how to build it. And you can see these projects scattered around the neighbourhood, easily visible as freshly painted and shored up buildings, the doors flung open and inviting, next to the skeletons of broken houses, shuttered factories, and white churches, their boundaries defined by pot-holed roads.

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