LIFESTYLE

^Image by Ilona Dorota Sagar

Below is the text for a video collaboration with Ilona Sagar currently showing as part of the Visionary Trading Project in Hackney. The film weaves a quiet montage of constructed and documentary scenes from around London Fields and Broadway Market, together with a voiceover that tells a tale spoken through a collage of buzzwords taken from advertising material for new housing developments in the area.

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I

This is our stage; We are the set; It’s nothing without us.

It’s vibrant when we’re here, and when we’re here we’re buzzing.

We look distinctly contemporary, and each look we get is spectacularly new.

We are dynamic creatives, well-adjusted living, clean, modern, simplicity.

II

We shine, clean and new, breath-taking flagships-of-ourselves,

The bespoke measure of our many, fashionable attributes,

bustling with world-class, real friction.

III

Nostalgic-chic is the vintage-new, and we want unique,

Disconnect of brushed-steel, 24-hour, red-brick- heritage. Plucked and fragrant.

A pure and natural, home-baked-innocence, 

With graceful proportions, and superb specifications.

IV

We have distinctly-dramatic, spectacular- tranquillity,

Superbly packaged identity-specifications, and lush-green dramatic-schemes.

Pioneering bespoke-culture of bright-young- things,

With our bucolic, cosmopolitan-chic. Watch us, watch you.

V

We are energized products of renowned, home-made, elegant cafes,

and i-phone-footage catwalk-parades, in understated, state-of-the-art.

It’s more than a feeling.

VI

We glide dynamically, into edgily-packaged, genuine, cosmopolitan-debt,

featured in urban-village-galleries and ethnic-sweatshop-global-magazines,

from the unrivalled-creative-glamour of emptied traditions.

VII

We are the newly-arcadian-creatives, buzzing with world-class pastoral-technology-specifications, many fashionably homemade café-utopias, radical cosmopolitan-innocence, spectacularly-tranquil avant-garde delights, and brand-new flagship-heritage.

We are quick with the seductive anxiety of non-stop 24-hour-reinvention, and vibrant-contrasting exhaustion, running, endlessly-perfect bright-young-things with the burden of internationally-renowned-bodies, wearing breath-taking, cutting-edge, and distinctly-urban-culture.

We are acting the bespoke-measure of our many trend-setting spontaneous-designer-initiatives, and watching the buzz in urban-village-galleries that multiply our organic-corner-shop bike-repair-innocence, until the dynamic-creative-mechanism is too anxiously-energized with chic lifestyles and each look we get is exhausting and we feel, genuinely feel, spectacularly, really spectacularly, breathtakingly, dramatically   – a u t h e n t I c

RESTLESSNESS

^source

22 August

It is quite disastrous, Wilhelm: all my active energies have been cast down into restless listlessness, and I can neither be idle nor accomplish anything. My imagination has deserted me, my feeling for nature gone, and books nauseate me. Once we are lost unto ourselves, everything else is lost to us. I swear there are times when I wish I could be a day labourer, simply in order to have something to look forward to in the day ahead, a sense of purpose, hope. I often envy Albert when I see him up to his ears in paperwork, and I fancy I should be content if I were in his position! I have repeatedly been on the point of writing to you and the minister, applying for the embassy appointment which you assure me I would obtain. I too believe I would do so; the minister has a long-standing regard for me, and has often urged me to devote myself to some business; and for one brief hour I am on the brink of going ahead. But then, when I consider it anew, and the story of the horse that grew weary of freedom, had itself saddled and bridled, and was ridden into the ground occurs to me –I do not know what to do. What is more, dear friend! May not my yearning for change be a restless impatience within me, which will pursue me everywhere?

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Diary extract from the Penguin Classics edition of Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther"