Unicorn Scales and Dog Shit on Torstraße
Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s Pon Pon Pon was the first video I ever watched that made me feel like my brain had been emptied out and refilled with something sweet and wrong and fluorescent. Before you play it, I recommend assembling the following: strawberry sauce, LSD, ice cream, Smarties, bath salts, pure caffeine, and a pinch of unicorn scales. Mix them in a sand mold, put it in your mouth, smoke it, sit on it—your choice. After four minutes neither you nor anyone who knows you will be quite the same. That’s not hyperbole. That’s the contract Kyary Pamyu Pamyu offers and then delivers on completely.
Daisy Lowe shot for Playboy that year, and for once the magazine remembered what it was supposed to be. She was twenty-two, daughter of Pearl Lowe and Gavin Rossdale, and the pool photos were the kind of thing you save to your hard drive and then feel slightly embarrassed about—except you don’t, not really, because they’re actually beautiful. The German edition of Playboy had spent years stripping has-been celebrities and soap opera nobodies, so when they got something genuinely gorgeous it felt like stumbling onto a good meal in a bad neighborhood.
The Berlin piece is the one that stays with me. It opens with rage: ten degrees colder than anywhere else, wind in your face, dog shit underfoot, bag strap broken, cab driver won’t shut up, favorite graffiti buffed off the wall on Torstraße. Five months in tropical heat at forty degrees and then straight back into the worst European winter, which in Berlin is a very specific kind of worst. You’re back in the place you love and it’s actively attacking you and you’re screaming FUCK DIS SHIT ALTER into the street at nobody. And then you’re home. It’s a love letter because it has to be—the city is so much itself that even when it’s ruining your day it’s still the only place that feels right.
Solitude I’ve thought about differently at different points in my life. The distinction that keeps coming back: alone isn’t the same as lonely, even when they overlap in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. There are people who move through the world naturally solo and people who need to be surrounded, and both are fine, and the extremes of both are disasters. I’ve never fully resolved where I sit on that axis.
Emily Scarlett Romain was twenty-three and photographing everything on 35mm—night adventures in strangers’ apartments, a trip to Berlin, a fat stupid-looking cat. The prints were showing in London galleries. What gets me about that kind of work is the way she made the ordinary look like something she was going to miss before she even left the room. You recognize that feeling immediately. You know exactly what it costs.