L’hôtel Européenne (Frantic, 1988)

The hotel exists only in 1988. Later on, the man will be in a nightclub called The Blue Parrot taking cocaine from another man’s fingernail. But to start, the man and woman are in a taxi. On the way there: a motorway surrounded by car factories, billboards, and electronic signals; the Citroën sign, red neon. The man and woman arrive at Le Grand Hotel, Paris. The logo is old and the lettering is fat and it reminds you of VHS cassettes. Next door, three Pizza Hut bins coloured grey. Across the road, a florist and a tobacco shop. The taxi pulls up outside of the hotel. The reception area lettering is mirrored. The reception area is busy. An elderly man is reading a newspaper.

The concierge is French and the man and his wife are not. American. So they speak in English. Upstairs they go. The carpet is grey. The hotel room has a telephone that is the same colour as an elderly woman’s tights, beige or tan or toffee. A complementary basket of fruit is placed on the table by a bellboy. Consider the pineapple and its history, as an image. The man and woman are husband and wife. She decides to shower. She sings that she loves Paris. The steam in the shower. The husband’s hair is greasy. He sits down and phones his family. In the background, Paris. The continental breakfast is laid out on a table, too. The croissants, the golden tabs of butter, the coffee, the sound of the glass and china clinking. This sound is important. Pause the video and think in silence. Think to yourself that you have lived in this image all your life.

The Hyman Stadium (Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, 2002)

The car is not real. You press the button and your on-screen alter-ego, voiceless and commanded by button presses, gets into the car and there is no time to shut the door. The realisation that braking can shut the car door. The car door swings to. The roads are not real and sometimes you see through the roads. The road glitches and you see an infinite darkness. Sometimes, in the past, your on-screen alter-ego gets stuck in the road. His torso — a blue Hawaiian t-shirt — is severed by this road. His legs move but they go nowhere. But these moments are rare. There is only one place we are going to. Thumb forward, driving to the Hyman Stadium. Time here, it moves quickly.

You reach the Hyman Stadium. It is busy. People walk around aimlessly. Several people walk into walls and bump their heads. They keep saying the same things over and over and over again. You aim a gun at an elderly lady with a shopping bag. She runs off. You see her recede into the distance and then the fog consumes her and she ceases to exist. Only then does she reappear, just behind you, memory wiped. You point the gun at her again and she drops her bags. She puts her fists up and punches you in the head. You die. Just before your body hits the floor, you catch a glimpse of the sunset — a mixture of orange, yellow, blue, purple — and your heart drops like an anchor. You travel to the stadium every day to catch the sunset. You kill people on the way. You crash cars. You die. You are respawned at the nearest hosipital. You think of this as a sort of digital Nietzsche, a digital eternal return. You say: the sunset, the sunset, the sunset.

Radio City, 1260 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 (Thanksgiving, 2010)

A Blackberry phone is held slightly away from the arm. Recording the maniacal ravings of a preacher outside Radio City. Cherishing the recording as if the recording were a validation of being alive, of experiencing. Think of the rooms you thought existed in Manhattan. Dark rooms coloured black and silver. Lonely bodies leaning against archways. Kitchen/living room divisions. Bookshelves with illegible names on the spine. Late-night diners, talking, long necks, craned necks, men, women, people everywhere, teeth. In Radio City, the carpet looks the same as the movies and so do the lights. Breathing the air as if to say I have been here, I have been here. Recycling air as if to mark your territory on the world. A piss-mark on the land to show you were alive.

Seated, the show starts. It’s the Christmas show. A nativity story with a camel on stage. The light is blue. The theatre is bigger than you imagined. Next to you, an American male with his family. You can’t see their faces because you don’t care about them. The male looks like a KFC bucket. He talks at you with a mouth filled with popcorn. He does not seem to be swallowing the popcorn. He is storing it in his lower jaw like a crane and saying oh boy on repeat. You watch the birth of Jesus juxtaposed with a Coca-Cola red Santa Claus (in your head pronounced by Joe Pesci ‘Santi-Clawz’) and you hear the roar of applause, you hear the bucket next to you say oh boy, oh boy, but you are just not there. In your head, you see a hostel with your luggage and then you get that end-of-holiday feeling, the feeling that you need to escape.