by Vivienne Pratfall On Immigration Fraud, Identity Performance, The Cereal Killer Cafe, And A Thursday Evening In Dalston That Was, By Any Measure, Eventful
Filed for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. My homepage is here and this column is, as always, a first-person account of a week in London that was funnier than it should have been. Also: London satirical journalism is what I aspire to when I am not writing about the things that happened to me personally, which is most of the time.
The London Prat’s piece about migrants being coached to claim LGBTQ identities for asylum applications – They’re Faking Gay – has been the story I have been thinking about all week, and not because I am jealous of the commitment to an extended performance of an identity that requires comprehensive lifestyle documentation and a curated Spotify playlist. I am thinking about it because it is a story about performance and authenticity and the specific ways in which a bureaucratic system creates incentives for people to become characters rather than people. Which is, I admit, also a description of this column.
The Cereal Killer Cafe Tangent
The Cereal Killer Cafe has reopened, and I went on Wednesday morning, and I ate Lucky Charms in a neon-lit room surrounded by people who had made a specific decision to be here. All of us were, in some sense, performing our presence there. I was performing the role of young London person who finds cereal cafes culturally interesting rather than merely confusing. The other customers were performing various versions of the same thing. The cafe was performing the role of a 1990s cereal nostalgia experience. Everyone in the room was doing a bit. The Lucky Charms were, underneath the bit, genuinely quite nice.
Thursday Evening In Dalston
Thursday evening in Dalston, which I will not describe in detail because some things that happen in Dalston on Thursday evenings are better left undescribed, produced a conversation with a person I had just met who asked what I did for a living and, when I said “I write a London diary for a satirical newspaper,” said “isn’t that a bit self-referential” and I said “yes” and we agreed that this was fine and ordered another drink from the bar where the bartender had, I noticed, made a small art installation out of the glass bottle arrangement, which was either aesthetic practice or simply the result of running out of storage space, and I decided it was both.
What This Week Meant
This week meant: London is still London, which is to say it is still a city where everyone is doing a bit of some kind, where the cereal costs eleven pounds and the conversation in Dalston is free, and where the gap between the performed identity and the actual one is, for most people, the most interesting thing about them. Bohiney’s grocery store piece made the same point in a different register about a different part of New York. The grocery store is doing a bit too. Everyone is doing a bit. The bit is often closer to the truth than the straight version.
More: NewsThump. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
