25 JUNE 2009. Evening. I’m in London’s Soho having dinner with Slater Bradley. The Brooklyn-based artist is in town for the opening of an exhibition at the Max Wigram Gallery centred around a new videowork titled Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2009). Like Bradley, a native San Franciscan, the traditional Sunset has been relocated east, to the streets of Manhattan, through which an angst-ridden or perhaps just mentally disturbed youth wanders, occasionally muttering lines from further east still—borrowed from M. Agayev’s Novel with Cocaine (1934). In London, however, we’re simply waiting for burgers. Just before they arrive, Slater’s phone begins to hum—SMS whispers that Michael Jackson has died way back west, in LA. What follows is not a mouthful of beef and relish, but rather a series of feverish attempts to confirm the reports from waiters, fellow diners, and various mobile Internet devices. Because celebrity gossip site TMZ, at that point the only outlet carrying the story, was a source neither of us was prepared to designate reliable. And while I’m not now clear as to why we thought having an anonymous waiter confirm the rumour would have, by some strange alchemy, transformed that rumour into fact, it seemed to make perfect sense at the time. In fact everything did.