Cascadia Calling, 2025.06.23

"wish I could misbehave, that's all I fucking crave"

I’m in London this week. The trip is nominally for work but I’m over a few days early, as is my habit. I’m not about to waste the chance of someone else paying for a transatlantic plane ticket.

It was sweltering over the weekend. There’s something sinister about intense heat in Britain. This isn’t just a culture or infrastructure problem, or even just a mismatch between climate and the pastiness of many Brits. It’s an ontological mismatch. The island itself wasn’t meant for heatwaves. The spirit of the cities and towns themselves can’t seem to bear it. In London, even the buildings look wrong when it’s approaching 90 and muggy. Like they might wither and collapse in on themselves.

I woke up at 4:30 the first morning morning, convinced I’d slept in until noon at least. In Pattern Recognition, William Gibson talks about soul delay. The notion that jet lag is not just circadian mismatches brought on by spacial motion, but an effect of one’s mortal soul playing catch up. In the words of the protagonist, Cayce Pollard: “her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.”

I spent the early morning hours listening to pounding rock music and listlessly wandering. I worked out in the spotless gym buried deep in the bowels of the third floor of my hotel. I drank shitty pod coffee because none of the coffee shops around were open yet. I think my desire for loud, angry, driving music was to somehow spur my soul to move its spectral ass across the ocean more quickly.

I don’t know if the Witch Fever helped in that regard, but it never hurts. They’re one of the best contemporary bands catering to products of the “Catholic to Goth” pipeline, myself included.

Last time I was in London was in November. The Christmas markets were on and all the department stores were wrapped like presents. My partner and I walked for endless miles. This time, alone, with a few days free when I’d normally walk half way across the city, I found myself shuttering in air conditioned cafes and slowly floating through galleries. I went to the Yashitomo Nara exhibit at the Hayward Gallery. I wandered through it listening to New Order, getting stared at by wide-eyed ghosts. Sometimes I worry that I listen to music too much when I’m out in the world. In the brutalist cavern of the Hayward, I couldn’t bring myself to feel guilty about it. I slowly walked around “Fountain of Life” for almost the length of New Order’s “Temptation”.

New Order’s music has always been a bit of a cipher for me. I enjoy it, but it has never obsessed me the way Joy Division has at times. The only exceptions are two singles: “Temptation” and “60 Miles an Hour”. Both uplifting in different ways, the former jangly and rambling, the other soaring and driving. I’ve more or less bounced off the rest of New Order’s discography and I’ve had even less luck with Peter Hook’s solo project, Peter Hook and the Light or any of the other bands that fragmented off helmed by various members.

Still, in the giant chaos pile of my default playlist, Temptation often catches me in a single-track repeat cycle, especially when I’m out just following my nose.

The Vandals are masters of the joy of punk nihilism. There’s a pleasure in saying “it’s all shit so fuck it”. (The central question of every punk band is “everything is terrible, so what now?”) “Flowers Are Pretty” has a way of disarming the menaced sensations I get sometimes. I’ve always been a inclined towards optimism and friendliness (two necessary qualities for any good anarchist), but sometimes I feel like I’ve been transported into a Hunter S Thompson essay, but without his gift for chaos. This week, with its events (written about despairingly elsewhere) has been prime for it. To be honest, it’s been hard to enjoy my few days at liberty. Walking along Southbank feeling like the end of the world, Vandals’ life-affirming nihilism actually did me quite a bit of good. Hopefully it will do the same for you.