First devised by Guy Debord and his fellow situationists, the dérive, or drifting, is a form of playful city exploration through the invisible currents of the metropolis. This month, urban freshets are leading us to set up new pieds-à-terre in places we mistakenly thought we knew quite well already. From London to Tokyo by way of Paris and Hong Kong, districts like Yokohama and rue Tiquetonne are themselves irresistible invitations to experimental tourism – an unpredictable pursuit that may lead a traveller as far as Vilnius, where Crème de la Crème now caters to Aesop's Baltic followers. To many a Manhattanite, the Baltic may not sound more remote than upstate New York, yet this is where Marina Abramović is placing her Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art. Rem Koolhas and his minions at OMA are transforming a derelict theatre-turned-warehouse in Hudson into a venue for both new and historic performances. This out-of-the-way location requires a pre-planned detour, but destination-less wanderings can also be their own rewards. Thus it was, while rambling through a still-sleepy Welsh fishing town, that Dylan Thomas heard the verse he would later chisel into Under Milk Wood (the entrancing Sydney Theatre Company production runs until 7 July). Fugal voices lead the audience down the cobbled streets of the hamlet and into the very dreams of the townspeople – where the 'sloeblack, slow, black' sea lies always beckoning, inviting all to roam freely.
INSPIRING WOMEN
Few people have done more to make 20th and 21st century art accessible to non-billionaires than Sheena Wagstaff. As Chief Curator of Tate Modern, she has overseen dozens of critically and popularly acclaimed exhibitions while steering the gallery towards relatively uncharted regions. The renaissance of Turbine Hall as the home of monumental participatory pieces exemplifies her forward-looking tenure. Wagstaff's shoulders seem wide enough for the newly-woven mantle of Chairman of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Met – an area that has never been the Central Park behemoth’s strong suit. Her first challenge will be to take over the Whitney’s historic Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue in 2015, but her biggest may be to quiet the naysayers who deem New York saturated with contemporary art as it is.
VISIT
It would be unfortunate if the sound and fury of the London Olympics were to snuff out the brilliance of the British Museum’s Shakespeare: Staging the World (19 July – 25 November). This intriguing exhibition includes maps, medals and other Elizabethan minutiae, such as a sucket fork used for snacking on sweetmeats at the Globe. Digital interventions by the Royal Shakespeare Company highlight the connections between the objects, the city of London and the plays. These artifacts may seem mute at first, but an accompanying series of BBC Radio 4 podcasts reveals how eloquent they are to the inquisitive eye and ear. Far from being the merely passive objects of our gaze, they return it, providing an objective counterpoint to our subjective worldview and prodding us to reconsider our cultural assumptions.
MARVEL
When the Kauffman family first saw the blueprints for their summer retreat, they were not a little dismayed. They had hoped for stunning views of their estate’s waterfall but their fustilarian architect insisted on building right on top of it. Still, they trusted his instincts, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, a cascade of cantilevered concrete, instantly became one of the twentieth century’s iconic buildings and a textbook case on how to merge architecture, man and nature. Prior to the long drive into the Western Pennsylvania woods, children who require hands-on engagement can be prepped with the 815-piece Lego replica – even though of course, in the words of Douglas Adams, it manages to be 'almost, but not quite, entirely unlike' the real thing.
READ
The seeds for WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995) were planted during a days-long trudge through the peat-bogs, wild heaths and overcast beaches of East Anglia. Mixing fiction, travelogue and biography to the point where they become indistinguishable, the book comprises a series of interlocking digressions about humanity's propensity to destroy itself. These are not drawn ex nihilo, but rather are sparked and fanned by the changing scenery. A new film manages to capture this dismal loneliness: Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald). Neither adaptation of the book nor biopic, it takes both potential paths as points of departure. Grey-and-white shots of the book’s setting are a backdrop for the film’s own poetic achievements. The result is as successful at defying classification as the original.
LISTEN
In his 'Meditations on the Moon', Aldous Huxley calls the earth’s most luminous satellite 'a highly numinous stone', whose light variously suggests peace, awe, dread, love or loneliness. These many shades will be evoked in the Firebird Trio’s 'Music at Night' at the Melbourne Recital Centre (11 July), the second date in a trilogy inspired by the author of Brave New World. This program spans the breadth of the romantic century, from its advent (Haydn’s surprisingly melancholic keyboard trio No 31, 1797) to the threshold of atonality (Schoenberg’s early Verklärte Nacht, 1899). In the nocturnal intimacy of chamber music, the piano, cello and violin engage in alternately despondent and ebullient conversations, attempting to live up to Huxley’s lofty definition of music: 'After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible'.
SUPPORT
The Buxton Opera, Music and Literature Festival (7-25 July) manages to strip opera from the highbrowbeating that surrounds some performances at Garnier, the Met or La Scala, and promises an ordinary year’s worth of diverse refreshments for the ear and the mind. There are literary talks in the morning, music performances in the afternoon and opera at night. Over the decades, Britain’s most democratic and adventurous summer binge of Gesamtkunstwerke has made it its mission to revive little-known scores: this year’s Marriage of Figaro for instance is not Mozart’s, but Marcos Portugal’s. Gaps in the programme can be filled at the concomitant open-access Buxton Festival Fringe (4-22 July), which has carved out a yearly expanding space for its multi-talented participants, or in the stunning countryside of the Peak district, which just cries out for some deambulation.
EAT
The oversized blackboard menu at Fratelli Paradiso in Sydney’s Potts Point makes no attempt to be English-friendly, but fortunately the staff is, and the good cheer is dangerously contagious. Business lunches are not advisable as it is difficult to resist the floor-to-ceiling racks of Italian bottles. The dim lighting is counterbalanced by the undeniably sunny flavours of dishes with alluring sonorities. It is the kind of place where one tends to stick with whatever was ordered on the first visit – say, fried calamari followed by lasagna al forno – and feels guilty about being so predictable and routine. Breakfast is also unusually addictive and comforting, with the fluffy scrambled eggs with potato croquette, grilled mushrooms and crispy pancetta being liable to prolong rather than shake off Morpheus’s embrace.
DRINK
The Chinese character for 'Tea' is made up of the ideograms for 'Grass', 'Tree' and 'Man', showing the elevations that can be reached when people and nature collaborate. Taiwan is well known for its Oolong teas, but only on the eve of the new millennium did it start producing premium black tea, when the Tea Research and Extension Station came up with cultivar #18. Zenique’s Ruby Black Tea, organically grown in the mountains of Nantou county, is a prime example of this cross between a local wild strain and an Assam cousin, expressing hints of mint, cinnamon and honey. In keeping with Taiwanese etiquette, it must be served with soft and graceful yet unassuming gestures, and above all plain, as recent research suggests that milk greatly lowers the antioxidant capacity of black tea’s polyphenols.
CINEMA
Alice in the Cities (Alice in den Städten, 1974), Wim Wenders's first road movie, follows a German reporter as he wanders about, first through the US (having 'gone to look for America', in the words of Paul Simon) and later Germany (with the little girl from the title, looking for her grandmother with no other clue than a photo of her doorstep). Their peregrinations are set to the film’s meditative pace and magnified by the gorgeous, über-grainy 16mm photography of Robbie Müller. Despite a growing bond between the two characters, the film really talks about detachment, alienation and unshakable angst. It manages to be moving without sentimentality, thanks to the visual gusto of a filmmaker still discovering the possibilities of the road, his chosen medium and his own gifts.
'A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.' Frank Lloyd Wright