Yiannis: LP and MC's journalist translator-guide
Georgia Sagri: performance artist who was naked outside one of an important Athens university - scene of the 1973 uprising as a work of art back in 1999, then left to pursue art dreams in USA. See a 2008 exhibition
here
Daphne: A person at a party Georgia invites LP and MC to.
The thing you have to remember about Georgia Sagri is that her reputation precedes her. She's That Girl. the one everyone has an opinion about. She's the artist girl from Athens who became famous for sitting naked in a box in front of the Polytechnic University. The anarchist girl from a wealthy family who went to New York. made friends with some theorists, and helped to start Occupy Wall Street. l'd met her fleetingly in America at the side of a protest, dressed all in black, and it seemed immediately obvious that when the terrible film of the Occupy movement in America is inevitably made. Georgia Sagri will be the one played by Angelina Jolie, which makes little sense as she's a small, round-shouldered, pixie-faced woman. Yiannis tells us that we shouldn't talk to her, that she has nothing to do with the real Greece, that she's irrelevant, a poser. This just makes me keener to nail her down for a long interview.
We meet in a modestly pretentious cafe-bookshop in Exarcheia where, after cold coffee has been secured and a stack of cigarettes rolled, Yiannis and Georgia begin a curt, intense discussion in Greek, of the type generally undertaken by people trying to hard to overlook small, significant differences in socio-political outlook that nonetheless continue to hang in the air like a fart in the room. Eventually I ask them to please, for God's sake, if you can't say anything nice, at least say it in English. I am deservedly mocked, and Georgia launches into a dissection of the failures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, as she is recently returned from six years' work as an activist in New York.
Georgia looks sad, and so does Molly: we've all seen, in our many ways, how these gorgeous. transient communities can open up and then vanish, beaten back by police and fracturing under the pressure of internal disagreements. We talk about the intense joy you got in those temporary tent cities, in student occupations, in protest camps: the sense that a world beyond capitalism is possible, that it can happen in microcosm right now, and all it takes it a bit of courage and guts.
Georgia takes us to a party at the top of an unmarked building. From the balcony, as the light fades. Athens is all dark high rises hazed in a shallow bowl of pollution with the Aegean twinkling in the distance. We start to talk about cities - the ones we've loved and lived in and had to leave. Molly, collapsed from heat exhaustion on the patio, will never really understand because if you snapped her in half it would probably read ‘New York‘ down the middle like a stick of rock. ‘That's part of why I love her.‘ I explain to Yiannis.
‘New York, I mean. It's the sort of place you fall for even though you know everyone else has too and you don't even care. She's big and bold and tarty and you hold out for as long as possible and then somewhere between Bushwick and sunset over Chinatown you just give in. Even though you know she's never going to love you back.'
‘I mean. London will always be my city. but we‘ve been having problems lately. it's like the passion's gone.‘ I say, warming to my topic. ‘I just feel like we need to see other people for a while. I know all her ins and outs and strange drinking by-laws, and she knows I'll be back one day. She's that sort of city.’
‘Well, if that‘s true, then I suppose Athens is Yiannis thinks for a moment Athens is the drunk girl who turns up to your party, makes out with everyone and trashes your house.‘ At this point Georgia Sagri bounds out of the kitchen, grabs his face, kisses him hard on the mouth, and then kisses me. Her breath tastes like lemon vodka and she throws back her head and laughs.
It's five minutes to midnight. One of the indistinguishable bald, bearded Greeks has removed his trousers and begun to dance in just his socks and tightie whities in the knee-jabbing manner of a man having a series of grand mal shocks. Under his feet a small black poodle squeals in delight. There is something Satyrish about him: he was the one to bring the enormous hollowed-out watermelon full of suspicious gunge, which is a broadly representative sample of the dashed dreams of middle-class Athenian youth are currently guzzling through kiddie-straws.
All the young ladies wear the sort of floppy floral micro-dresses which would be an acts of masochism anywhere further away from the equator, and the air is hot and heavy with sex. A drunk girl named Daphne is running around with Christmas tinsel in her hair, shedding a trail of foil sparkles that stick sweatily to everybody's skin. Acting out: that's what springs to mind. There are cultural dialects of sexuality and where Northern Europe and America tend to congratulate themselves on their omnipornographic frankness, sensuality itself remains buttoned-down and buttoned-up. Whereas in the South, a sheer slip of conservatism skims lightly over the easy possibilities of flesh. Nobody needs, in short, to get blind fumbling drunk to get on with things.
The drugs that define a generation or a movement tend to mimic its teetering ups and downs: the sixties, after all, were a hell of a trip. But we don't live in the sixties. and right now the drug is MDMA and its derivatives.
The quantities of MDMA and its equivalents on offer amongst Athens' precarious youth are stunning, as they have been in London. in New York. in Madrid and everywhere I've watched the roller coaster of radicalisation pummel through the certainties of what it once meant to grow up in late capitalism. Not just because it's cheap, although that helps. A four-dollar pill, knarly though it may be, will last you all night when you can't afford enough beer to get out of your head. The pure, charging high of it, the uncontainable excitement, the confidence to dance all night, dance for ever, followed by the crashing lows that last for days of nervous depression. the full-body exhaustion, the hopeless hunt through trails of trash television looking for comfort: it's the emotional curve of post-crash neo-liberal lassitude in a pill, the promise of endless striving and reward that contains its own mortifying full stop.
It is, quite literally, a debt drug. MDMA increases the flow of serotonin, the love-chemical, the body's own natural happy-drug, in the brain, but borrows it against future reserves of the stuff, which then run morbidly low right through Blue Monday and Suicide Tuesday. The ecstasy craze began, fittingly, in the 1990s. Now the drugs are worse but the hunger is still there, and the comedown is becoming unbearable, and no amount of trash television will soothe the chill in the heart.
After we part ways, Yiannis walks home through Exarcheia. There, a few streets away from the apartment block, he runs into the sort of trouble that often befalls known journalists travelling alone where there's an armed cop on every street comer. The sort of trouble that later, when the bruises have faded, he makes me promise not to write about directly, lest he get into much, much more. The first we hear about it is a hammering on our door at eight in the morning. Yiannis fairly falls through it, white as a sheet and sober, having been up all night in a police cell. His phone is gone. and he's bruised, and he doesn't want to go home to his girlfriend because he doesn't want to upset her. I make tea, because it's what you do at times like this, and because it's what small British women do when they are considering what form vengeance will take.
