america

I would actually have really liked to go to New York. Chicago strikes me as too cold – I don’t feel a pull. Boston might have been nice – I have friends there, one now working at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and I could have met up again with the lovely Ida Meister from Cafleurebon along with the fabulous John Biebel from Fragrantica – and chewed various cuds. Baltimore has an inexplicable appeal – perhaps because of Nina Simone, John Waters, The Wire. I think I would be weirdly fascinated by Las Vegas. Would like to see the light in Alberqueque.I have never felt the slightest inclination for Washington and its Grecian sterility; its ugly suits and red and blue ties. Seattle- I am sure it is perfectly nice and the rain trope may or may not be true but for some reason I can’t entirely be bothered. The same goes for anything or anywhere Ralph Laurenesque – apologies to Massachusetts – I am sure the conifers are lovely – but I can find no appeal. I am not massively drawn to gargantuan open spaces, nor arid terracottas and ochres or any similarly dun colours and have no interest whatsoever in the Grand Canyon – or anywhere similar. I would like to go to the South to hear the accents, feel the charm. Memphis; Graceland. Georgia peaches. To live inside a road movie, like Wild At Heart or Thelma And Louise. But then there are all the guns. Oh dear. Not a fan. We saw a documentary the other day on Timothy Mcveigh and his bombing of Oklahoma – and all the pointless, pointless, carnage it wreaked; I hadn’t realized until this week that the main motivation for the attack was to start a war with the government over the ‘right to bear arms’.

The Wilderness and the National Parks are all very well – but I like my nature on a more intimate scale. I can’t see myself in Alaska. White water rapids don’t thrill me. I like a dangling stream, a brook with weeping willows, bluebells. I can imagine Atlanta having a buzz but don’t like the architecture. That would probably also go for many a city. I didn’t really take to San Diego. It’s all probably immaterial now in any case.

I have been to American three times (if Hawaii counts – hated Waikiki but loved the deeper parts of Honolulu), and I found all those trips eye-opening, exhilarating. I despised the theme parks – , the sickeningly sized junk food, the bucket sized sodas, the grinning plastic mascots sucking up money; the traipsing flip flops, sagging white t-shirts and shorts, but did love the general friendliness and courtesy – that warm coziness you don’t always get in England or Nippon – and I pray all that won’t go to hell with all the strife of the current Dictatorship because that was always the US’s ‘superpower’ – that optimism; that unbridled sense of possibility- though I realize, of course, that all this is fast becoming a sorrowfully, curdling cliché.

I adored New Orleans. Hove Perfumery. The mysteries of Louisiana; the swampish wet heat; the crocodiles and tree moss. The Lana Del Reyness of it all. I dream of an entire summer there. Miami felt dangerous, threatening — but thrilling. We had some very beautiful Joni Mitchell moments in San Francisco, another city that entered my bloodstream and memories for all of time. Los Angeles felt like a shimmering drug: dark; spellbinding.

New York. Sigh. We have some very close friends in Manhattan and they have an extra apartment in which we could stay. I would have loved to. For a few weeks – to just stroll around all the familiar unfamiliarity; the bridges, the brownstones; breathe it all in. ‘Hang out’. To have absorbed the legendary energy: all those films I have been watching for half a century with the city as their main protagonist- I feel as if I have been there already. But that scripted, selectivized unreality might now have to suffice. For me, actually going there right now would be impossible. Another friend from the big city who was back in Tokyo recently for cherry blossom season also sent me an obliviously cheery invite on Messenger the other telling me to ‘come stay in Brooklyn sometime soon.’

Yeah right.

This isn’t about ideological objections. Or anti-American sentiment. I honestly think the world would be boring without US culture: I feast on so much of music, the films, the TV shows and always have. I socialize with a lot of Americans. Most of my readers on The Black Narcissus are American. We have been friends and mutual, meaningful confidants for years.

No, this is primarily about personal safety. Put simply, I am not the kind of person who would survive a detention center. Travel in the US was bad enough as it was. Rude, callous airport staff prodding you along like cattle; intentionally hellish, smirkingly inducing agonizing waits at immigration in Dallas waiting for a transfer flight into Orlando; snappishly overtired and impolite airline staff ; helter skelter boarding procedures that left you running and breathless; the indignation and suppressed fury at all the unnecessary, blunt and uncouth maltreatment of a traveller that could easily ruin any good times you had just had in the country – and want to practically kiss the tarmac at Haneda or Narita – or even my detested Heathrow – Airport on your eventual return.

With the new restrictions on ‘aliens’ – (why does the ever constipated Orange Torpedo hate foreigners so much ?…how can this ultimately benefit American society? ), entry into the US has become a very fearful minefield. Yesterday I read that Japanese applicants for even the most simple of visas – the fabled ESTA – have to submit five years worth of social media to the ‘authorities’ for inspection prior to entry just to make sure there isn’t anything ‘contentious’ in their daily posts (I believe this is a neo Mao-esque Cultural Revolution of potentially disastrous proportions) —- or else risk being detained or imprisoned, put in shackles like countless other well meaning, dollar spending tourists from all around the world just wanting to have a good time in the good ol’ US but who then disappear for days, weeks, at a time in cold cells in total despair for no reason other than xenophobia and state-sanctioned sadism, insulted and humiliated for simply wanting to have a ‘holiday’ in the country………No. there is no way in HELL I would even consider, for a moment, trying to go to the so-called ‘Land Of The Free’ in the near future — —- and possibly ever again. You can stick it.

I have been writing about The Creature for eight years. Though ostensibly – and actually – a perfume forum, this was unavoidable. To have said nothing would have been like a slow death of asphyxiation with inner cyanide. I had to. But if I were to foolishly attempt to tiptoe into the States, I would, now, like so many other people with brains, be an immediately apprehendable target for the screen-surveilling, arrogant and ego-sapped Men And Women With Earpieces that pervade all points of overly zealous US entry. Like so many others, I felt the menace the very first second I laid eyes on The Basilisk – and heard it speak. I knew everything. I felt it viscerally, profoundly. People said I was overreacting. I was not. The only impulses – all monstrous – are destructive; this is nothing but a raging vortex of negativity. An ogre, overbrimming with the dark contaminations of personal childhood insecurity; daddy’s little victim. And I could sense this. I could feel it in my nervous system. I still can; but try, my best, on a daily basis, to selectively view. A friend of mine said on the phone last Saturday that he has decided to put up his own tariffs – purely for psychological self-protection. To try and keep all the infernal tides at bay.

It is all a living nightmare. Even if, in some crazy hypothetical scenario, I were paid to travel to America, as I was two years ago in Hawaii, I would now unhesitatingly reject the offer within a split second. I wouldn’t even entertain the idea of travelling in that physical direction. His plans for a Third Term are not a joke. They are real. He could straddle the country for many years. Take it down with him. Democracy is going down the tubes. That is precisely the goal. The dismantling of everything, just for the sake of dismantling it. To vaunt power. To smash things like jealous toys. Fists raining down with puce-faced apoplexy. With virtual impunity. And yet I am still hoping, in the more optimistic vaults that still lie within my internal reaches, that all the shellshocked Americans who are surely not this stupid as to accept what is going on right in front of their faces and are just quivering in their condos will in fact, start to wake up at some point in the very near future and actually do something. To fight back in some meaningful way. But is this really possible at the current moment? the stranglehold that this enraged, boot-polish-faced, stomping geriatric toddler has on everybody around him is so all consuming and irresistible, it is like a enravened python gnawing rabidly on its own tail; eyes bulging; poison spreading; the hatred and vindictiveness and sheer evil and cruelty of the regime so addictive for all those with their own furious lacks and lonely inadequacies that they lap it up like famished coyotes. Musk with his chainsaw, his Nazi salutes; Eyeliner Man with his malicious twisting of Catholic doctrine whispering in the ear of the pope just this Easter Sunday – the kiss of death? — as d messages me immediately after, an angry, callous anti-Christian with no actual, real love for humanity as Jesus is said to have preached; just bleak, empathy-less, fascistic, deportational yearnings. Policies based on a complete lack of generosity -and love for your fellow man, the very basis of Christianity itself. So bless you, Francis, while dutifully giving JD his little Vatican tie pin souvenir as a sanctimonious keepsake, and – though on the very verge of death, for having had the conviction and the moral courage to justly, and calmly, put that hypocritical upstart in his place. RIP.

Argentina. I would still like to go. I would love a weekend in Buenos Aires drinking cocktails with d and new friends in some velveted bar. A spot of tango. And Santiago. The snow-capped vistas in the urban distance. Chile has long had a strange kind of appeal for me. All the space. I have also always wanted to travel to Brazil, one of my childhood dreams. But it is so far away from here. And if we did, would we have to stopover in ‘the US‘ ? The number of governments putting America on its travel advisory lists now treats America as though it were a Sudanese war zone in Khartoum – and it is growing by the minute. The country is no longer safe for foreign visitors. Who could have imagined this just a year ago? The British website warns its citizens – particularly non-straight individuals such as myself- that we are, to a large extent, taking our life in their own hands if we just naively think we can go to America and get back home when we plan to; that we could in fact be secreted away into interrogation rooms in inhumane conditions (W H Y ? !! ) and deported with chuckling malice and scorn by the gut-belted, power-tripping security guards (the sound of Latinos in chains being sent to El Salvador supposedly a ‘deliciously soothing AMSR?’ One of the most repugnant things I have ever heard).

No. With everything I have written on here and on social media, it is no secret that I am no admirer of the Malignant Tangerine. They would have me in no time. Indicted on arrival. The second I got near customs. Like the French professor whose laptop was taken and his entry immediately denied. There is no free speech any more – it is being eradicated by the second. But that is OK. I will just have to travel elsewhere. I have been to Mexico. That will have to do for now for further excursions into The Americas. I can live without scaling the Macchu Picchu. I will stay closer to hom. Japan is not perfection – nowhere is – but good god does it seem like paradise right now. Today in Kamakura, with its new green leafage, just flowering peonies, wisteria; its calm civility, its aestheticized peacefulness and alluring history, the holistic whole of the place, the breath of centuries, the total unconfrontationalness and general positivity of the atmosphere – to float about in this city this dreamy afternoon made me feel very happy indeed. True, a part of me is quite sad that I may not, in this lifetime, get to travel again in that Other Place – that vast, open country- with its alarming, but often endearing in- your-faceness and honesty; a country that in many ways I found so complex, bizarre, stimulating – and often exciting. But last night, as I binge watched Season Two of The Diplomat on Netflix on the sofa alone (an engrossing US geopolitical thriller starring the excellent Keri Russell and a searing Allison Janney in continously brilliant Anglo-American verbal repartee with the sardonic Rory Kinnear as the British Prime Minister), absorbed yet again in a decidedly imbibable and relatable piece of American culture, I realized that from now on, streaming the culture from afar, without venturing near it ever again in person, might be, realistically, the only American Travel option for the rest of my life. I am happy to keep all that vengeant baloney at full arm’s length. I don’t want it. What’s to like? Last night, when I was thinking about Trump’s ‘America’; how it is shunning the world; and trying to break it in the process, about what it signifies not only for me, but for hundreds of millions of others being shut out of the burgeoning , psycho, ‘Christo’ fascist Nation it is quickly becoming (poor us! ), I then finally realized that at the end of the day, more deeply in my heart – in reality – to crudely paraphrase Clark Gable – I really just don’t give a shit.