Video Julia

Breakfast at the London Business School Library building

This is about plain breakfast at the library building of the London Business School. 

As I progress through my over-sized coffee, I wonder, is this business? And based on my impression, I answer quickly: surely this is business. My impression arises from my point of observation. I am sitting in the middle of the small-enough ground floor cafeteria (yes, that name still exists), and I am surrounded by what seem to be Business School instruments, accessories, devices, furniture and fashionable items that dress up the office-like vestibule that tries to create a cafeteria in the middle of the open. I must note that I am listening to Chilean sports radio while I am writing, so I feel shielded, as if I just had a vaccine to protect me from the flowing particles that make up this material and cultural environment. My own reflection - which appears in the laptop screen that I am using while I manage my healthy granola yougurt breakfast-in-a-cup - also situates me, almost taking my hands and telling me "you are alone here, you are here, you are one". This image is piercing and marks the distance: my shabby, untidy look, my latino face. This piercing is precisely the point of observation, the hole in my breakfast picture which sets up an eye for these favourite things of the business men to become.

I hover towards a man next to me, a blonde and handsome man, well dressed and carrying two tablets and two mobile phones. He is standing next to a TV screen - as if he was standing right next to a window showing rain or a bushy garden or an old willow. Only the TV is set to show CNN's news broadcast. My feeling is that this man, who looks just like the actor who plays the detective in the TV show "The mentalist", is almost bathed by these images, which oscillate between in-depth African experiential documentaries, yachts regattas, the journeys of Prince Harry in the south pole, and the prides and controversies around Mandela's recent death. These moving images are relentless, immortal, they are expelled from the liquid screens and filling every corner with light and sound in such a slow and creeping way. My man now averts his eyes from one of his 4 personal communication devices and looks at the screen. He leans back on the bright orange vinyl designer chair, placed in front of the round metal yellow table which stands low on the ground to the side of an spherical vinyl ottoman. He acts now according to my initial impression: he reveals to be carrying a suit bag and he looks as if he was resting on a wicker chair by the beach, looking at the horizon with sun glasses and receiving the gentle caress of the sun. And the sun here is this CNN screen, showing the endless circus of the global, the unending fayre of world pleasures, the encounter of cultures, the rush of airliners, the exchange of packages carrying race, gender, smiles, ties, power watches, just like the one my man wears in his right wrist. If the CNN screen (could be C-Span or Bloomberg) is the sun, then his watch is the moon. And he walks almost hovering with joy over the open field of those minutes looking down on earth, under the pressing warmth of the sun.

There are other things completing this panorama. Recycling bins stand perky next to trophy shelves, themselves standing next to a gigantic state-of-the-art copying machine, from which young men draw small papers for their mandatory readings. A wonderful spectacle of uniformity takes place a couples of meters away: 4 grey laptops show the glow of their white apples on top of a long crafty workshop-like wooden table. Young well dressed (particularly the scarves) women take short glances at the screens while checking their notepads. They are lifting something, it seems, transporting, replacing, rectifying, marking, encircling... pieces. In a closed room with wooden frame glass doors located on the other side, there is a group of asian students studying hard, drawing simple graphs on a whiteboard. They are dressed in sports clothing, but also office suits, displaying a nice contrast of enthusiasms and attitudes. Unlike the rest of us, they are visibly contained. If something cooks in there, under that pressure, it seems rather obscure from the perspective here in the open space, or at least uninteresting. I wonder if they are asians there, or here, for that very reason. Is that their Business there? or here?

A woman in a nearby table is reading the financial times. Isn´t that something? That one would expect to find here of all places? Here I think I end my reflection for today, because the memory of a street man walking into the immigrant deli where I was having lunch yesterday is too sharp in its contrast to her. The two images of the newspaper ritual collide in my mind, and meet ackwardly. It makes me think of the Chilean heroes of the everyday pavement of downtown Santiago, those who travel the narrow maps of administrative offices and fill the gaps between commands for earrings by indulging in morning coffee and a conspicuous read of the cafe´s selection of newspapers. They sit, so comfortably (time is all theirs at that window of opportunity), and navigate through the pages in search of the spicy taste of good old affairs. Sports, politicians, celebrities, weather. They exist here as well, at the delis and arab diners. They dwell happily at these places, of course, because they have always been migrants: the newspaper is a kind of passport to this kind of transport node, and front doors and specially vestibules a sort of micro-airport, from which human journeys are announced ("Gotta fly chief, see you tomorrow!") and performed (poorly kept doors are always swinging, or just left open for transit). Deli owners thus embody flow handlers, control tower managers, ground stewards. It is palpable: the worn out sheets of news-paper are stamped by this travelling hands, migrant, without accountable purposes or itineraries. Pure circulation. But the woman going through the financial times is different. Slightly, but crucially different. She performs a ritual full of distinction, of uniqueness. "Oh she is going somewhere". She is "up in the air", a traveller, a business woman. The paper is her marked map, her accurate guide to places. "Oh she is going places". I find in this the opposite of the street act of mapping by walking, mapping by migrating. "I long for the crisp sound of the wall street journal that has just been delivered in my hands" says with relish Nicolas Cage, the powerhouse investment banker, in the movie Family Man. She is feeling that crisp presence, the set-up experience of outdoor consultancy, the feat of reaching destination. She is not aware of the reality show coreography she is following, the fact that the paper was delivered by a simple man, who is on its way to nowhere but coffee and good old affairs. There is a contrast here. I am going to put it on my backpack, over my shoulders.

And beneath us, a stripped down long corridor with a line of lockers, where everyone is reminded of their numbers, their lock codes, of the numbering and the property and the security and the archiving. But more of this later...