Field Season One: May 2025

May 29, 2025

My arrogance just did me in. After a very pleasant day of meeting with some local artists and visiting the art high school, (1) my triumph was wasted by own inability to chill out and ask for help when I need it.

I ordered a viral cheeseburger.

Nehovorím po slovensky.

Here, the act of consumption was not for eating, but for data, an idiotic monster of a plate designed to feed the algorithm and not my stomach. Starving, after having four coffees today (which is about 1/3 of the total coffee intake in my entire life), I returned to a place that had an excellent chicken wrap. However, perhaps my hypoglycaemia mixed with the overdose of caffeine compelled me to think that I speak Slovakian and to try something new (I say this as I type this from, where else, Coffee Sheep, the same cafe I have returned to every single day since I have been in Trenčín). The waitress asked if I wanted an English menu.

“Nie, ďakujem,” I say.

I can read this menu, no problem. I choose the Hot Cheese Burger.

“Bez šalátu,” I say, very proudly in my utterly incomprehensible Slovak. “Ja som syr!" (2)

She… nods. Slightly backs away. Probably thinking: what a muppet.

The Hot Cheese Burger comes, and I realize the drastic mistake.

Moby’s Extreme Ways is playing on the stereo. Just as the strings announce the start of the song and the piano thumping kicks the beat into gear, the waitress arrives with an imperceptible Mona Lisa smirk. She places the Hot Cheese Burger in front of me and proceeds to douse the burger in liquid, hot, melted, toxic nacho cheese, suffocating my burger in what appears to be a glacial explosion of orange. Moby croons “Extreme ways are back again… Extreme places I didn’t know…”

She casts a pair of rubber gloves on the table, and walks away. I am left to navigate this steaming pile of virality, to eat it with my camera. The gloves don’t fit, of course, and besides, I am useless as a social media influencer. I simply stare at it, utterly defeated.

I eat it anyway. This shitty cheese caking into my beard, and not in an endearing, Messy Marvin kind of way (3). No, something far more crueler, indicative of this age of excess. A middle-aged, foreign man, near tears, rocking out to Moby despite himself, his grey beard suddenly thick and matted with chemical orange. As I write this, I am still licking that damn cheese out of my moustache, self-conscious that some kind of hardened, scrap-cheese is lingering on my lip.

Traumatic childhood reference.

So, my lesson: I got away from myself, and forgot that, as I wrote yesterday, everything is a negotiation, in constant dialogue with those around us and with our immediate environment. The idea is that there is reciprocity in making, a form of exchange where each informs the other. As soon as the arrogance of mastery creeps in, you become a cheesy muffin, a pathetic outcome in tiny rubber gloves eating a viral cheeseburger, a victim of your own inevitability.

Don’t be a Hot Cheese Burger.

1) I met with Andrej Danóci yesterday who took me on a lovely excursion to Trenčianske Teplice, a spa town with an exceptional example of Czech Functionalist architecture from the 1930s, the Machnáč spa. And this morning, on my coffee drinking adventure, with the Žovinec Brothers. And, last night, Štefan Oliš, from the TRAKT collective. https://trakt.sk/partner/stefan-olis/

2) I was close: but not quite.

3) And, yes, your instinct is correct: Messy Marvin and I were doppelgängers.