Latte Art

I’ve had the best coffee I’ve ever experienced at a specialty coffee shop a few blocks from the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum. Normally, I hardly ever drink coffee (anymore) because it simply works too well on me—with the commensurate crash later in the day and a sizable chemical depression the very next almost always taxed on the backend. But I do make exceptions for special occasions since it is, like I just said, pretty much a guaranteed mini-psychedelic high for me.

Last legit coffee I had in such a celebratory fashion was right after the Nuggets beat the Thunder in game 3 in OT; and I literally wanted to enhance that high and ride that feeling for as long as I could. Luckily, I was on a tropical island in Southeast Asia during the entirety of that playoff season so I got to watch it in the morning poolside, and then I still had another 10 hours of sunlight to get the caffeine out of my system.

Of course, it didn’t get out in time and I struggled to fall asleep for a good while even that night. Just like it happens every single time, no matter how early I drink the coffee. Normally, caffeine supposedly has a 10-14 hour quarter life. For me, it may as well be 1400 hours. My CYP1A2 enzyme must be hella mutated. It takes its sweet time taking all sorts of strolls and camping trips through my system and refuses to leave. And god forbid I may have two coffees in two days (to make of for the bad decision of the prior day), the base of my skull right above my neck will get hard pimples—also guaranteed.

And it’s not even like coffee is real energy either. The caffeine binds to the adenosine receptors to block the messaging your body sends to your brain regarding how ‘tired vs energetic’ you are; you’re essentially pushing yourself despite not presently having the energy, and hence the crash—no free lunches, it’s always credit card debt. Just like with all addiction causing harder drugs, you’re stealing from your own future neurotransmitters. Debt-cycles certain systems and governments work to put humans in are inspired by the addiction-cycles native to your body.

But if I’m traveling, and I’m gonna be out and about all day long (hence guaranteeing being able to fall asleep due to physical exhaustion), and I have an ostensibly incredible activity right in front of me—I might take the risk. After all, it smells so delicious, and tastes almost as good.

(Nerdy info alert: apparently that intoxicating smell was exactly how the coffee plant was able to attract the bees and beat out the competition with that evolutionary advantage—by getting bees high.)

The coffee shop was packed—to the brim. Stylish Basque girl is there making sure people don’t walk in, and communicating that they can still be patrons if they’ll consume their (clearly) highly demanded products elsewhere. Around this time I’m getting an incredible amount of satisfaction from being able to complete basic interactions in Spanish without either getting stuck, or letting on to the other person that I’m one extra question away from getting exposed as a beginner level speaker.

“Oh, esta lleno. Entonces…puedo sentarme aqui? (Pointing to the two tiny benches for outside seating). Bueno, me gustaria un cappuccino para “aqui” (I did the air quotes—look at your homeboy going for humor in a language he can barely use).

My god, did this fucking thing smell and taste so absurdly good. It was a perfectly sunny and perfectly chilly fall day in the Basque Country. And, I mean it: it was the perfect amount of chilliness, with the perfect amount of the early autumn sun. Even before the coffee started fingering my striatum, it felt like simultaneously being in a cold tub and also sunbathing at high altitudes where you are actually literally closer to the sun. I think it helped that I regularly shaved my head and rocked a bald head that summer. My big noggin was absorbing all the vitamin D, prepping for the potential pimples that are gonna bust out on my scalp and get in my way during the next head shave in the shower in a few days.

I knew this was a precious 10-15 minutes I was going to have on this bench. I was very present for every sip, sloshed it around my mouth the best I could, and visualized the molecules going up to my brain after my stomach. Joining the heat intake my naked skull was receiving from space, it was warming me from the inside to offset that beautifully chilly morning.

Minutes later I am walking through the corten steel structures at Richard Serra’s ‘The Matter of Time’ on the ground floor and things start happening.

The gigantic structures (there were 8 of them to walk through and around) are already bent and slanted in very slow gradients such that as you are walking through them you start getting gently disoriented. But I shoot past that pretty fast: I am so aware of my body; every muscle feels lit up; every centimeter of my skin feels like it’s processing something tactile, be it the ambient temperature or my clothes. I’m getting ideas. Beautiful ideas—entrepreneurial, personal, interpersonal, projections into the future. I’m writing stories, involuntarily.

Well, to be fair, I think my brain works in that story-telling mode most of the time. But this one was simply feeling very ‘loud’. It felt like the difference between watching a movie versus the TV sucking you in and making you a part of the plot. Whatever I was thinking felt real, which made me excited, about the nice things I was thinking.

And this, is the reason why I still sometimes roll the slot machine of specialty coffee shops that are sus for potentially being high quality. Coffee is not only caffeine and adenosine blockers—it also has psychoactive compounds in it. The exact thing that made it seduce bees and allowed it to survive, by being a hottie with a special juice that everyone wanted a piece of.

I have had degrees of this type of psychedelic experience on coffee occasionally throughout the years. I think my being mentally open and unencumbered helps with the chances of this happening. When it happens, I notice it, and usually drop whatever I am doing to just enjoy the natural high that is coming my way the next however many hours I have. I’ve also had yogurt induced highs in the past (when it was combined with white rice is my suspicion). There is a myth that Gaudi would get high off yoghurt, which is, like I said, is apparently just a myth, But I have definitely had this serotonin explosion-like experiences of a chest filled-up wide open on yoghurt in the past.

And the same thing a few times with sunlight exposure. The most recent one was this incredible day of perfect sunlight in a mountain house I was renting at a very high altitude place. I took my clothes off and just laid under the sun. Everything tasted so good, all day long. The feeling tasted like one particular painkiller they had prescribed me after a major surgery. Do you know that feeling where a painkiller makes you feel so good, so absurdly, improbably good, that it makes you scared? That’s what it felt like at a certain point. I had been leaning onto that nice feeling, on that sun-drunk day, and at some point it got so scarily good that I got, well, scared, and stopped leaning into it to calm myself down. Otherwise, I was gonna pass out. Or at least, it felt like I would.

Luckily, the high at Guggenheim was in my brain, and wasn’t affecting my motor functions. I mean, the steel structures did get me dizzy at times while following their curvatures when I was walking through them, but it didn’t seem like my joints were gonna get loose and make me into a puddle. I simply had so many nice, wholesome, and lovingly lovely thoughts.

I had to keep pushing though. I had a lot more museum to go through. And I did go through all of the rest of the museum over the next 3 hours. But it was the last thing I did on the ground floor that actually knocked me the fuck out. Sort of for life. Because I got to introduced to the person who effortlessly and clearly became my favourite modern artist:

Enter: Yoshitomo Nara.

My face probably alternated between being mouth agape and brows furrowed with confusion during the next hour. I was hypnotized. I had never seen anything like this before. The exhibit hall was wide and expansive, had high-ceilings—the opposite of claustrophobic. Al fresco-philic?

And there were so many paintings by him, of these cartoon children, with the fucking universe inside their eyes, that were simply gigantic. And those gigantic paintings were sometimes put up not at eye level, but way higher than normal and part of me was saying “damn straight this is why art curation is a thing. These mofo’s got me hook-line-and-sinker. Oyyy, here is another one. And another one. Ahhhh, I don’t know what to do with myself”.

Homeboy clearly tapped into something exceedingly human. And I wasn’t the only one. If anything, I was hella late to the party. This guy has been producing literally invaluable works of art for a long time. You can’t buy his stuff. Even if you could, you shouldn’t. Any passing moment on this earth where his major works are not available to be seen by as many people as possible (i.e. publically available) feels like a waste.

It’s not just paintings. These gigantic paintings of small girls looking “up” towards you with maximal hypnotic effect. There are also sculptures, installations, and more—every avenue of creativity seems, at some point, to have been visited by Nara.

I go through the entire exhibit twice. The effect of the best pieces are not diminished the second time around. It’s just there, present—as an absolute value. These things are not good in relative terms, compared to some other thing elsewhere. These are just good, entirely on their own—even if there was nothing else in the universe to compare them with. That’s how it felt at the time.

What do we make art for? Some answers I have is that: it is for tapping into things that are uniquely human but are not easily accessible and expressible; to induce feelings in people, essentially hacking their emotional system through visuals or other senses, and making their boundaries compassionately violated in complete privacy; and there is also one answer that has less to do with the receiver, and more to do with the creator, in that I believe one of the coremost components of being human is self-expression (some need this more than others, but I believe we all do—small or large in scope), and for a uniquely creative person like Nara, it has to be simultaneously a frustrating need to make these and an incredible feeling of relief for having put it out into the physical realm. Pregnancies for brainchildren. I suspect this last one because when I sit down and bang out one these essays in 3-4 hours, what I feel is a relief-associated ‘lightness’ the rest of the day. The winner’s trophy of a one person race to express a feeling successfully. I did it, ma. I explained myself. I explained my humanity as deeply as my skills allow me, from a tiny slice of my existence. It’s as real as real gets or can be.

Is art an attempt to become and feel “more real”? For me, it might be. Writing is the only skill I have that might at all qualify as artistic. You can consider ‘story-telling’ as a broader category of what I do but so far in life I haven’t done story-telling in another form or medium. Maybe I eventually do, who knows…

But it makes sense to me that art is someone’s excess emotion that is testing the integrity of their skull from the inside, threatening to kill you if you don‘t find an outlet for it to bust out. And it threatens you because it knows that after incubating in you, if it successfully busts out, it’s might add to the collective human experience in such outsize ways that it selfishly frustrates you, hurts you, harasses you, depresses you, until you bend to its will and find sustainable ways to get it out. It knows what’s best for you. It knows that if you create it, and then set it free, other members of your species might connect with it, in their own times, on their own terms, and you can give them the feeling that they were never alone in that moment of enormously loud and challenging feelings that one time. Whether you can pinpoint to ‘that moment’, or it simply brings your whole being together in one fell swoop.

Yoshitomo Nara’s work brought me together in one fell swoop. It’s one of the few experiences of my life that was so loud (while still harboring a whisper-like quality) and it exploded inside me but without hurting me. My heart expanded. My mind expanded. I was emotionally peeled open, on a seriously (and objectively) beautiful day, I drank the right coffee from the correct beans that were cultivated and roasted uniquely to speak to my essence, and I knew that the consumption of this person’s art was gonna be a part of my life the rest of my days.

Funny thing is that it seems I had already received clues of this. I had discovered this one artist a few years earlier, and purchased a piece from a gallery that represented him. The discovery was made when a friend took me to that particular gallery, where we had the opportunity to have an extended conversation with the gallery owner (because it was an unusual hour in the middle of the week). We both purchased a piece each. One thing that bothered me about the whole thing was that this friend is one of those people who needs to “win” every interaction, and he feels like he has to get something extra from every negotiation that the other person initially wasn’t willing to give. I can give clinical terms for this but you get the idea.

And of course, after talking about himself and showing off with this and that to the gallery owner (while, honest to god, charming the fuck out of him), he negotiated so hard, to the owner’s discomfort, that we ended up paying a good bit less than what the art probably deserved. To be fair, it is my understanding that the artist still gets paid the same while the gallery just reduces their take, so it didn’t harm the artist. But I have to say, for optional, cosmetic purchases, I feel a bit dirty arguing about price, let alone negotiating. I’ll negotiate for services, for food, for clothes—happily so. But the reason I go to independent bookstores, comic book shops that carry back issues, and artists directly is that I want to contribute to their mission and help towards their continued existence. When I put it up on the wall of my beautiful apartment at the time (that I was quite proud of for a variety of reasons), I took a nice picture—with the sunset beaming into the living room right as they were about to disappear behind the Rocky Mountains—and put that up as a story with a tag to the gallery, the artist gave me a follow, and we became internet friends.

And Yoshitomo Nara’s art immediately reminded me of his. So I the moment I left the hall on the ground floor after my second run through the exhibit, I sent him a DM asking if Nara was one of the influences.

By the time I made it to the 3rd floor, he responded in the affirmative, and gave me a list of 5 other artists that contributed the most meaningfully to his creative evolution. He politely offered to share their links and profiles and I believe I gave a follow to almost all of them. I was clearly thirsty for this kind of stuff and I welcomed more of it in my life.

I excitedly purchased the overpriced exhibit booklet from the museum shop. Honestly, it didn’t even feel like an overpay. There was no reality where I wasn’t gonna buy it, so I simply did what I had to do. The coffee—at least the psychedelic part—was fading, right on schedule. But I was still alert, and the appetite suppressant effects of the greatest coffee ever was slowly fading. So I went to Etxanobe and had the 11 course lunch with a full bottle of wine. I chewed everything in slow motion. I was there for two and a half hours.

It wasn’t a drunk decision. I did it later in the day when I was just marinating on the glory of the day. I DM’d the gallery and purchased another one of his works. I had been eyeing it for a while. I had visited the gallery when I was catching up with one of my oldest friends that I had known since 1st grade. Coincidentally, his wife (who works as a content creator) had apparently did some promo work for that gallery just a few weeks earlier. I wanted to see that piece (which is much larger than his typical works [and I love gigantic paintings that’s cover entire walls]) in person after getting my attention snagged by it on Instagram a few weeks earlier.

Nara slammed my decision home. I could never own a piece by him, so I was gonna put my investment towards creativity that was following in his footsteps, chasing after similar human experiences, trying to induce similar feelings, for people who can commune with those feelings. I decided I might be one such person, and that I would get a lot from owning that work. When Instagram ads started promoting New York City-based auction houses to me soon after with new pieces that included a scribble by Nara on a ripped up envelope with a starting bid of $75,000 I became even more sure of my decision.

Within the confines of one single, solitary, and improbably beautiful day in the Basque Country, I was able to explain myself what “art” is supposed to be. It fell into place fully, satisfactorily, such that I think it may have given me confidence to make all such purchasing decisions (i.e. art) going forward. But it also gave me one more, maybe a more fundamental thing.

It made me so inspired, that I had to write about it. It first made my chest feel warm and fuzzy, but then it tested the integrity of my skull from the inside and gently harassed me to write about it. When I was younger this might’ve been more of a frustrated feeling, but now where I am in life, it was a gentle prodding for me to simply share. And share my feelings and my art and my humanity I did.

I hope it made you feel something.