At Last, At Last, Free From the Past

2 December 2009

London

[coming soon]

Notes On A Mugging: The Perils of Well-wishers

21 September 2009

London

In her memoir Lucky, Alice Sebold writes: "Noone can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved."

This statement is a cornerstone of most therapeutic processes, and, in one sense, the remedy that most therapeutic processes strive to achieve: the victim choosing to recover from a trauma and reclaiming a sense of agency over their own lives.

I'm not sure that I completely believe this statement, as it doesn't acknowledge the great support and strength that other people can give you in times of adversity.

Within a couple of hours of being assaulted, I posted a status update on my Facebook profile. My motivation was mostly self-pity and a blatant need to elicit sympathy from my friends. It also seemed like a more economical way to spread the news without having to repeat a conversation with everyone I know. Facebook is a fantastic publicist, and within hours, I was receiving messages of support from friends from all over the world, which comforted me enormously.

Having said that, in the last three weeks, I have been confronted repeatedly by the limits to the help other people can provide, despite their kindness and concern. I have also been surprised and confounded and sometimes irritated by statements and offerings from friends and family that have been deeply unhelpful, and occasionally quite upsetting.

In the first couple of days, I remember being asked, repeatedly, "Are you OK?". Though it sounds like a common and innocuous question, I found it baffling, and struggled then and now to answer it. Though I couldn't be sure, I was never convinced that the question was genuine. I had no doubt that my friends asking me "Are you OK" were concerned for me and genuinely interested in my welfare. But in my mind, anyway, it was deafeningly obvious that I was not OK. How could anyone be OK after being assaulted and robbed outside their home and being punched in the head?

The rules of social intercourse dictate that we receive statements of concern and sympathy with graciousness and a sense of gratitude for the concern. I think one of the reasons for this is a kind of defensiveness, or a childlike behaviour to try and elicit protection. In a weakened psychological state following an attack, you feel especially vulnerable, so something in your head tells you to accept every kind word with politeness and thanks. Perhaps it's an animal instinct or a defence mechanism, to ensure that the kind words will continue. When you have been faced with physical violence, it's resoundingly clear that the world is a cruel place and acts of kindness are a gift rather than something to be expected or demanded, and so we become supplicants for other peoples' kindness, hoping for sympathy rather than another blow to the head.

As well as the need to protect yourself, the "Are you OK?" exchange is often motivated by a need to reassure the person who asks the question and diffuse any social unease. The standard response to "Are You OK?", in the rules of everyday parlance, is to say "Fine thanks" or "I'm OK", which restores a sense of ease and downplays any further discomfort in the social exchange. As I discovered over the last few weeks, if you answer the question "Are you OK" honestly - perhaps by saying "I'm not OK" or "I'm dreadful", the reaction is almost always an awkward silence, followed by a well-meaning but usually ineffectual statement like "I'm sorry" (more on those later). In the beginning, I resolved not to play along with the usual 'How are you/Fine thanks' routine and answer each question honestly. Despite my intentions, I found that I couldn't, and that the awkwardness that followed was too uncomfortable. So I did what I usually do, which is to make a joke and try and diffuse the situation. I settled on "Well, I've been better" as a middle road, which seemed more honest than "I'm OK", which clearly I wasn't, and "I'm awful", which was true but apparently too much for all but my closest and most understanding friends.

I've been thinking a lot recently about the nature of that social awkwardness. When bad things happen - violence, trauma, sickness, death - we feel frightened, because we are reminded of our own vulnerability. We also often feel powerless. It's distressing to see our loved ones in pain, and we want to do something to alleviate that pain, but more often than not, we can't. And therein lies one of the great pains of our existence - that despite feeling empathy and love, we are mostly powerless to prevent bad things from happening to ourselves and other people.

As I've learned over the last few weeks, some people are better than others about accepting this fact, or sitting with the reality of someone else's pain. I've been lucky to have a number of people responding to me in different ways, but if I'm brutally honest, not all of them have helped, despite their best intentions.

The friends who have offered me the most comfort have been the ones who haven't asked "Are you OK?" but who have known instinctively that I was not OK; who were able to see and acknowledge my pain without trying to alleviate it or insist that I look on the bright side of things; and who were able to respond to my emotional needs rather than focusing on their own emotional responses. It's this last group that interest me the most, because so much of what is expressed by wellwishers is more a function of their own shock and distress than it is an offering or a comfort to you. The irritating upshot of this is that you, as the "victim", generally spend as much time trying to comfort your wellwishers, assuage their anxiety, and dodge some of the unintended slights that their comments throw up.

Some friends immediately expressed horror, and told me how they would feel if something like this happened to them - which, of course, it hadn't. One friend said that if she ever got mugged outside her house like I had been, she would be terrified to go outside again and would have to move. That is to say, that she would probably be terrified and probably have to move, as it hadn't happened to her, and this was just speculation. It was also a kind of speculation that was completely unhelpful to me, and upsetting. I explained to her, gently so as not to hurt her feelings, that I would eventually need to leave the house again, and that I wanted to continue living in my neighbourhood, and that I needed encouragement to do this, rather than to be told how difficult it would be. My friend apologised profusely for "saying the wrong thing", and we effected an uneasy truce afterwards.

Some wellwishers tried to find answers or a cause as to why this had happened to me. Had I been drinking that night? Was I wearing headphones? Was I dressed in a business suit? Had I not noticed my attackers beforehand? Was the street lighting dim? Did I live in a "bad" neighbourhood with high incidences of crime? Did I cry out? Did I try to fight them off? I suspect that finding a cause or causes for the assault would help these questioners understand the crime more, even though these questions, when posed to me, simply made me feel like I was somehow to blame for the attack, or that I could have done something to prevent this happening to me.

These questions upset me, and made me want to bite their stupid heads off, but I knew I couldn't do this, because it would be rude and awkward, and that somehow I was responsible for dealing with their emotional fragility rather than my own. So instead of snapping, I would grit my teeth and smile, tell myself silently that I was not to blame for this, and answer peoples' questions politely. Yes, I had had a glass of wine that night with dinner, but I wasn't drunk, despite having an infamously low alcohol tolerance level. Yes, I was wearing my headphones, like I did every other night of the year when I had walked along this road in the two years I had lived here. Yes, I was dressed in my suit because it was a week night and I had gone out straight from work. No, I didn't notice my attackers, though I doubt that even if I had, I would have been able to do much to ward them off, since I was outnumbered. No, the streetlights were not dim. No, I lived in a "good" neighbourhood that is mostly middle-class and which to me had always felt safe. Yes, I did cry out, but noone responded to my screams, and my downstairs neighbour only came to the door after I rang her doorbell repeatedly and said my name. No, I didn't fight back, because I have never fought back in my life, I've never done self-defence training, and I was mostly too frozen with fear to even think of doing anything but cowering in a terrified heap against my front door.

I think the reason why people look for cause and effect is, to some degree, linked to our own sense of safety and our need to reassure ourselves that the world is a rational place. The alternative, of course, is to accept that the world is cruel or merely indifferent, that good deeds go unrewarded and that bad things happen to unsuspecting "innocent" people, and that human life is mostly composed of pain and suffering. In our world of aggressive self-interest, goal seeking, power-playing and the relentless pursuit of happiness, there's not a lot of room for random misery and pain, unless you're (a) a Buddhist or (b) read a lot of Thomas Hardy novels.

It's been interesting to watch peoples' sense of reason (including my dear old mother) get stripped away as they confront the randomness of the attack, and realise that it's been bad luck and an example of random cruelty. For me, though, the randomness of the attack has had a perversely reassuring effect. There's no way that I can see this experience as anything but awful, and pointless, and violating, and I am upset and angry that it's happened and that my life has now been railroaded into trying to recover from the physical and psychological damage this has caused. But the randomness of the attack, and the fact that the punch was apparently solely linked to my attackers' wish to rob me, has somehow made it easier to deal with, because it had nothing to do with me. If I'd been beaten up coming out of a gay club, the attack would have been no more my fault than this one was, but it would have felt more like a direct attack on my identity. In this case, I was nothing more than an easy target who looked robbable and who had the bad luck to be walking by at that moment. Had I been 15 minutes earlier or later, I might have missed them. I'm not sure whether this is just crass self-justification and I'm actually living in deep denial over the awfulness of the attack, but it seems to work for now.

Other people tried to offer advice, which mostly I found irritating and unhelpful. I was amazed by the number of people who suggested that I take up self-defence classes or become a karate black belt. "Perhaps a bit of tae kwon do would be good so you can sock it to em big time karate style if that ever happens again", wrote one wellwisher. Again, this made me furious - although I'm sure they didn't mean it, what I took from that statement was that if I had been a black belt, I'd have been better able to defend myself and less likely to have been assaulted, and that I was somehow weak or unmanly for not having done this. I took greater comfort from the police, who told me that they advise people not to fight off muggers in case they are carrying weapons, or from friends who told me they'd felt defenseless when they were mugged too.

Others reacted with anger, which was gratifying on one level, because it validated my sense of outrage that bad things happen and that they'd happened to me. What I wasn't prepared for was how unready I was to deal with other peoples' anger, or to share it and join in with it. One close friend called me the day after the attack, and was insistent that I "get angry", that I not internalise a sense of guilt, and that I mentally fight back against my attackers. Much as I loved this "Go gettem" call to arms and appreciated my friend's concern for me, it might as well have been expressed in Klingon for all the sense it made to me at the time. I was still in shock, and unable to express anything as expressive and outwardly-directed as anger.

Over and over again, I found that what I was listening to was other peoples' fears and feelings about my attack, and that I was then prompted to respond to their feelings rather than focus on my own. This was especially true of my mother, who was incredibly upset by the news, and for days afterwards, I found myself trying to comfort her or reassure her that I would be fine. A few days later, I realised that this wasn't what I wanted or needed to be doing, and that I needed her - and everyone else - to comfort me.

To really be able to comfort someone - or me, at least - you need to focus on the person and their needs, and not allow yourself to be overwhelmed by your own response. This is trickier than it sounds, especially if your instincts are to make someone "feel better". The friends who I've appreciated the most in the last few days have been the ones who were able to confront within themselves the fact that something awful had happened to me, and not shy away from it or insist on my feeling lucky or relieved. I'm grateful for the friends who have known how to make light of it (a tricky balancing act) - there's the friend who simply responded "You're a true Londoner now!" and my father, who rather wonderfully joked that my muggers might take pity on me for having no money in my wallet and slip my credit cards under my door with a note saying "You need it more than we do, mate".

I've appreciated those friends who were wise enough to realise that the best support is simply to tell me that they love me and they're thinking of me, without reaching for well-meaning but empty statements. Most of all, I've been hugely nurtured by the people who offered practical support or just their physical presence. I will never forget the kindness of my friend Stephen who I called from A&E at 1 in the morning and who got into a taxi and came across London to pick me up and take me back to my flat; Jane, who moved in and stayed with me for two weeks after the assault; Alan, who offered to drive me to and from hospital for my appointments with my facial surgeon and to and from surgery; Ange who (with Stephen) came to visit me in hospital, didn't flinch when I vomited up my rice pudding and discreetly got rid of the sick bowl; and other friends who made a pilgrimage to the meanstreets of Balham to come and visit me, rather than assuming that I'd want to "do lunch" in Soho like nothing had happened.

I had an interesting conversation with Ange in the first week after the accident about why different expressions of love and concern seem to resonate more naturally and be more comforting than others. Ange, who is something of a personal growth afficianado, had been reading a book called The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman, which is apparently something of a cornerstone of the self-help book industry. (I haven't read the book, so I'm paraphrasing from here onwards). Ange explained that Chapman's theory is that people tend to express love in five key ways: Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service and Physical Touch. Naturally, we tend to offer to other people the forms of love that we are used to or most comfortable with, and we're often puzzled or left cold if we give something that falls flat or receive something that doesn't hit home.

It's a rather simplistic theory, but it was intriguing and it helped make sense of why I spent so much time examining, appreciating or smarting at peoples' choice of words to me in the weeks following the assault, and why I've taken most strength from people who gave me their time and did practical things to help me. I was tickled by the friends who sent me flowers and cupcakes (especially the cupcakes, as you can't eat flowers), and sent instructions to each of them to continue sending them to me on a weekly basis, but mostly, I miss the company of people. "I'm thinking of you" is sweet, but "I'm thinking of you and I'm coming over to see you" means more.

I've surprised myself over the last three weeks by becoming more strident about identifying and expressing what I need from people, and occasionally having to tell people that their words or actions, however kindly meant, just aren't helping. Approaching these kinds of conversations feels for me like walking through fields of land mines. I feel extra sensitive about not wanting to offend people or throw their gesture of goodwill back in their face, and fearful that if I don't appear grateful or become cranky or "difficult", then all the goodwill will be withdrawn and I'll be alone. I cringe a little when people applaud me for being "a trouper" and "not letting the bastards get me down", as if what's required from a victim of violent crime is a relentlessly cheerful attitude with no room for depression or self-pity. I've been very, very grateful for those of my friends who've given me permission to feel bad, who've listened patiently as I've bitched about the stupidity of other well-wishers, and who've hugged me even when I've shrugged away from them.

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It's been a while since I first wrote this post (it's now November), two months have passed since I was attacked, and the shock is fading. I sent this draft to a couple of well-trusted friends, one of whom recommended that I not publish it in this form. Her thoughts, which I thought were pretty valid, were that I received the kind of support from friends that I received, and that the act of receiving something was itself a good thing. My friend also sensitively suggested that I be a little less critical of the "well at least it's not raining" attitude that was so irritating me. Her point - again, a good one - was that for some people, this attitude is less about denying the difficulty of life and hiding behind a cheery avoidance, and often more hard-won, born out of an understanding that life is sometimes really difficult, and that sometimes focusing on the positive can be as much of an act of survival as facing into the dark night of the soul. It was a comment that really stayed with me, and advice I'm really grateful for. I've decided to publish the post anyway, as a record of what I was feeling with the time, but with the proviso that, like most manifestations of grief and shock, things have a habit of changing over time. It's one of the perversities of human nature that sometimes words (especially hurtful words) stick, even when the intentions behind those words can change or fade away, and that's a risk I take in attempting to describe a frustration that no longer exists in the same form.

Gay Icons

[more to follow]

Notes On A Mugging: First Thoughts

20 September 2009

London

He had done this and I had lived.

Memory as an act of revenge.

These are the two lines that I remember forming in my mind in the first few hours after my assault by two young black men outside the front door of my flat on 2 September 2009. (More on that later).

The first phrase is a line from the first chapter of Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones, narrated in the voice of a 13 year old girl who is raped and killed by a middle aged pedophile in her suburban Pennsylvania neighbourhood - and for my money, the best part of an otherwise mushy and overwritten novel.

I'd bought the book after reading the first chapter in an airport bookstore - I can't remember where I was flying to, but only that it was a long flight and I wanted a book that was less "heavy" and more racy than the book I'd packed to read, and something. I skimmed the first chapter, and was impressed enough to want to keep reading. The writing had a cool precision and an unsentimentality that seemed to balance out the sensational and potentially exploitative subject of child abuse. The line He had done this and I had lived seemed particularly striking, partially because it jarred with the narrative. It seemed too perceptive an observation to have been thought or spoken by a 13 year-old. It seemed more like the cool voice of an older, more experienced looking woman, reframing her past experience through the voice of a child. Far from being the voice of a terrified child, it felt like the voice of a much older being - a prophet, a Sibyl, a voice from someone standing on the edge of the void - reporting on the bare brutal facts of survival in the face of violent assault.

As I discovered, the first chapter seemed almost completely unrelated to the rest of the book, which spins a twee narrative of the dead girl watching over her family in the aftermath of her killing, and offering angelic protection. It's a creepy synthesis of melodrama, garbled self-help philosophy and pseudo Christian TV fodder like Touched By An Angel. Unsurprisingly, it spawned a huge international publishing success. I felt mildly nauseous after finishing it, and also felt cheated - it was as if Sebold had written a brilliant first chapter to secure a book deal (and my interest) and had filled in the rest of the book with sentimental mulch. If nothing else, it was a missed opportunity.

A couple of years later (about six years ago, I think), I was in an airport bookstore again, and found a book called Lucky: A Memoir, also by Alice Sebold. The front cover advertised this as "By the Number 1 Bestselling Author author of The Lovely Bones".

Again, I read the first chapter, and again, I was hooked. This was the same spare, unsentimental style of the first chapter of The Lovely Bones, and the material made my hair stand on end. In the first page, she plunges into a graphic description of walking through a park at night as a 18 year old university undergrad, and being attacked, raped and violently assaulted by a young black man. It was her first penetrative sexual experience, and a searingly painful one, as he raped her and digitally penetrated her vagina with four fingers up to the knuckle. It was, simultaneously, almost unreadable, and utterly gripping.

I bought the book, and remember thinking to myself "Alice, is this is a dud the second time around, I'm going to kill you". This time, it wasn't a dud. I read Lucky almost without stopping over the period of 2 days. The book chronicles the assault, the aftermath, and a grim conversation with the police in which Sebold was told she was "lucky" - not just for surviving, but because she was beaten so badly by her rapist, which meant that police would have a fair chance of getting DNA evidence to be able to identify him and prosecute him. She describes, slowly and carefully, the process of recovery, her feelings of ostracism and misunderstanding from her undergraduate friends, her family's unwillingness to accept the gory details, and the harrowing process of testifying against her rapist at trial.

In the end, Sebold was "lucky", in the legal sense anyway, as her testimony helped secure her rapist's conviction and a prison sentence. As a lawyer, I have a depressing amount of knowledge about the difficulty of securing successful convictions for rape, and have to agree with the police officer who told Sebold she was lucky - generally, the only rapes that end with conviction are the "stranger attack" ones. Rape perpetrated on a woman who knows her victim or where there is little or no physical evidence of assault almost always end in non-prosecution or acquittal.

But the title of the book is, obviously, ironic, as Sebold's experience immediately marks her as unlucky. Her subsequent experiences, including a horrible first sexual experience with an uncaring boyfriend after the rape, and a period where she becomes a heroin user, demonstrate that her life was scarred by the unluckiness of her trauma. In the end, the act of writing the book appear to have been her salvation. She ends with the realisation that "I live in a world where the two truths co-exist; where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand".

A few months later, my friend Elizabeth Easther wrote a particularly perceptive review of Lucky which was published in Time Out London magazine. In 250 carefully chosen words, she asked herself why anyone would want to read such a harrowing book, but identified it as a clear-sighted account of a horrible experience. In a nice compliment to Lizzie, part of her review was quoted on a later imprint of the book: Moving, compelling and hard to put down; a horror story that, finally, gives way to hope.

The hope that Lizzie identifies comes, I think, from the clear-sightedness and honesty of the act of the memoir itself. Lucky operates as more than just Sebold's confession or as an exercise in writing therapy prescribed by a shrink (though I'm sure it served a therapeutic purpose in her own life). The fact of her experience and more importantly, the fact of her survival of the experience, and her ability to reflect on it so honestly, candidly and perceptively, creates hope in a reader that there are very few moments of human awfulness that can't be borne.

As a feat of literary authorship, it was also extraordinary. There's been a recent explosion of child abuse pulp fiction that now clogs the "True Life Stories" section of bookstores - usually a no-holds barred description of horrific childhood physical and sexual abuse, with a cover featuring a grainy black and white photo of a young child with the title scrawled in text typeset to look like child's crayon writing. We read these books with a combination of prurience, morbid curiosity and guilt, partially to see how much horror we can stand, and partially out of a deep-seated fetish we have about sexual perversion and the thrill of spying on other peoples' private traumas. Lucky confronts the reader in quite a different way. Her clear-eyed unsentimental style gave the reader permission to take in her experience without shame, and her graphic descriptions of her assault seemed to pare away any chance of a voyeuristic or prurient response to the gory details. It's quite something.

It's a book that appears to have a secret society of readership among women - when I ask female friends if they've read it, almost all of them say "Yes" in hushed tones. It's one of the best accounts I've read about the experience of surviving a violent crime, and the kind of book that I wish had been prescribed reading for my 2nd year Criminal Law class at law school.

I hadn't thought about Lucky or The Lovely Bones or Alice Sebold in years, until a couple of days before my assault, when I watched an online trailer for Peter Jackson's film of The Lovely Bones, which was filmed in my former stomping ground of Wellington, New Zealand, and is due for commercial release in December. It seemed like a strange choice for a director whose films feature hobbits and gorillas, although he was clearly drawn to the imaginative possibilities of creating the "afterlife" that the main character lives in for most of the novel.

I felt sad watching the trailer, because I remembered my experience, almost a decade ago now, of working as a journalist on the set of Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. I literally fell into a crazy opportunity to work for an American website filing monthly reports on the making of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and be the only journalist with access to the site for the 18 month principal photography period. For three crazy years, I got to visit the set and interviewing Jackson, the actors and the crew, flying around remote locations in New Zealand and writing articles that were read breathlessly by literally millions of Tolkien fans all over the world. It was a job that changed my expectations of what my career could be, and galvanised my belief that I could (and should) make a living as a writer or a creative artist. Art holds many functions in our lives - to reflect our own experiences, to comment on what it is to be human - but in this case, the "art" of Peter Jackson and Lord of the Rings was to demonstrate, to me and to most of New Zealand, I think, what was possible and achievable as an artist, and to lead and inspire by example. It was an experience for which I was and still am profoundly grateful.

As I watched the trailer for The Lovely Bones (which looks interesting but rather formulaic, some impressive SFX aside), I felt sad that I felt that I hadn't made as much use of the experience as I could have. Nine years later, I live in London, which is slightly more exciting than living in New Zealand, but I went back to the law, I no longer write professionally, and have let all my ties with creative communities drift away, except now as a regular theatregoer. It seemed then that I had an opportunity to segue into film journalism or into another creative industry, but I hadn't stepped up to the plate. At the time, I remember feeling that I'd been cursed by getting the perfect job when I was 25, and that I'd never find another opportunity to match it in terms of experience, exposure, audience or income. This was true, but possibly just a self-justification to mask more pressing fears. I knew that if I wanted a career in the arts or in journalist, that I'd have to beg and scrap for work, work my way up the food chain, and accept uncertain career prospects and a low and uncertain income. Like the good little princess I was - and still am - it seemed too difficult, too risky and required too much effort, and so I opted for the life I have now - a job in the law that pays me well, lets me stay in the UK but doesn't satisfy me.

A few days later, I was assaulted and robbed by two young men on a Wednesday night, as I was standing in my front porch about to unlock the front door to my flat. I was punched in the side of my face and had my bag stolen. As I later learned, the blow to my head fractured my cheekbone, requiring surgery under general anaesthetic to realign the bone. At some point in the first few hours after the assault, after the police came and the ambulance came and as I was sitting in A&E waiting for an X-Ray, despite the searing pain in my head, I remembered the two sentences at the start of this passage.

He had done this and I had lived.

Who knows where Alice Sebold's line had come from as my scattered battered brain attempted to make sense of a long confusing night, but out it came. He had done this and I had lived. I knew this to be true of my own experience. Someone I didn't know had done this to me, but I had lived, and I would somehow get through this. My immediate thought after this was fear - that this had happened to me and that I would have to live with it, be traumatised by the experience, be physically wounded and emotionally damaged, and possibly never be able to regain my former more confident pre-assault self. But I had lived.

It's important for me to separate this statement as my own realisation, if only because I was told by many different people in the days and weeks that followed the assault, that I was lucky.

A host of well-meaning friends and family members pointed out to me in the days that followed that the attack could have been worse - that I could have been knifed or even shot - and that I was lucky that my injuries weren't more serious. (These comments ended abruptly when it became clear that I would need surgery to correct my cheekbone fracture).

A week after the attack, I received a follow-up visit by two extremely handsome policemen, who told me that I was lucky that the attackers didn't have a knife, given the prevalence of knife crime in the South London area. They also told me some stories about similar attacks in the neighbourhood, including a man with a broken leg who was knocked off his crutches and robbed, and a woman who was punched so badly that her jaw broke and needed to be wired up for six weeks to heal. After hearing these stories, I was horrified and felt physically sick, and concluded that I was indeed "lucky" that I had not been injured more seriously. Then I did what I often do, which is to make a joke of it, and joked with friends that I was lucky not to have had my jaw wired up and being unable to talk for six weeks. Another friend joked that perhaps they were unlucky that I was still able to talk, and the ability to laugh felt somehow comforting.

Despite this, I still feel the need to draw a line between my own experience of my "luck" and other people telling me that I am lucky, and maintain a critical distance from other peoples' opinions. Why? Because having someone tell you that you are lucky, however kindly meant, feels somehow like my own experience is being diminished, or that the person is failing somehow to accept and sit with the awfulness of what did happen. I understand the need for people to focus on the positive and look for the possibilities of hope in the midst of a bad experience, even if it often results in cliches like "Well at least it's not raining" or "At least he went peacefully and wasn't in pain".

When you are in the middle of a traumatic experience, it is not always comforting to be reminded of luck, or encouraged to consider your misfortune in perspective. Receiving a blow to the head knocks you into a perspective that is uniquely and painfully yours. While I am often grateful for the perspective of others and their encouragement to me to see the world in a different way, for now, I only want to focus on my own experience. I imagine how some people would want to find some relief from their own suffering by focusing on their own fortune or by being reminded that their suffering is not unique. I am not one of those people - at least, not right now. In the statement He had done this and I had lived, there is room for little else but survival, and even less room for the perspectives of other people, however well-meaning. If I feel lucky, it is a luck that is mine, and noone else's. Luck is a blessing, but not something that someone else can give you.

Memory as an act of revenge.

This was the second thought that my brain seized on. In my memory of the night of my attack, it was a thought my brain retrieved from a mental filing cabinet, rather than something that randomly drifted past in a synapse. In Lucky, Sebold recalls a conversation with her creative writing teacher, Tobias Wolff (the author of This Boy's Life, later filmed with Robert De Niro and a young Leonardo Di Caprio) immediately after she spotted her rapist in the street, and Wolff told her to try to remember everything that happened to her. On the night of my attack, I remembered this remnant of Lucky, though I couldn't remember the passage exactly. For clarity, I have reproduced the passage exactly:

"Wolff stopped me and put both hands on my shoulders.

He looked at me and when it was clear to him that for that second he held my attention, he spoke.

"Alice", he said, "a lot of things are going to happen and this may not make much sense to you right now, but listen. Try, if you can, to remember everything."

I have to restrain myself from capitalizing the last two words. He meant them to be capitalized. He meant them to resound and to meet me sometime in the future on whatever path I chose....

He knew, as I was later to discover when I walked into Doubleday on Fifth Avenue in New York and bought This Boy's Life, Wolff's own story, that memory could save, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalised."

Re-reading the passage now, I see that I didn't remember it exactly as written. Sebold's teacher talked to her about writing as an act of survival. What I remembered, or thought that I remembered, was this: Memory as an act of revenge.

I'm interested by the disparity between the book passage as it was written and as I remembered it. Writing about an assault as a way of survival makes sense to me - through writing, we can shape our experiences into a coherent narrative, reclaim a sense of control over random and painful events, and express our feelings. Writing about an assault as an act of revenge pre-supposes that there is someone else in the world who I want to revenge myself on. Thinking logically, this would be my attackers, but it felt more generalised than that. In that moment, I wanted to revenge myself on the world, and show the world that this experience would not crush me or humiliate me or leave me feeling weak and powerless.

In a sense, my entire adult life feels like an extension of this impulse - to fight against a feeling that I am weak and powerless and prove my resilience to the world. This is a depressing realisation in some ways, but at that moment, it also felt real, and comforting. In the midst of feeling as weak and vulnerable and victimised, there was a part of me that concluded that I would find my way through this trauma, and that remembering the details and writing about it would save me and help regain my sense of power.

I thought in that moment that I would, at some stage, re-read Lucky. I haven't managed to do that yet (or finish any other book either), but that somehow it would be helpful. I'm not sure whether that was because I thought that it would be comforting to read about someone who had a worse experience of assault than I did, or whether the comfort would extend from reading an honest and intelligent account by someone else who survived an assault. Sebold was, in that moment, both an equal (someone who understands, someone who speaks the same language, someone who has had a similar experience to my own) and as someone from beyond the pale, who had gone much further down the dark pathway than I had, and could offer some clarity and hope that bad things can be endured.

In retrospect, I think both of these impulses felt true. Though the experience of being assaulted is unique to me, just as Sebold's rape was painfully unique to her, there is a comfort to be gained from understanding another's experience, or even meditating on someone else's misfortune. I'm glad to have read it, and gladder still to have remembered it in the middle of a long dark horrible night. I think Sebold was lucky to have had someone like Tobias Wolff tell her to remember, and somewhere in my heart, I felt happy that I was able to be my own creative writing coach and remind myself of the power of words. I feel relieved that I am able to articulate my feelings, and that I have an audience to articulate them to.

A Little Night Mugging

6 September 2009

The meanstreets of Balham, South London

[to be continued]

The Kindness of Strangers

21 August 2009

London

[coming soon]

Derek and Dungeness: A Pilgrimage

Dungeness, Kent

15 August 2009

Today I fulfilled a promise and plans to make a pilgrimage where were first forged 15 years ago - to visit Derek Jarman's cottage and garden in Dungeness on the South-East coast of England. Jarman was a artist, filmmaker, writer, activist - a Renaissance man for the modern age - who became one of England's most distinctive independent filmmakers, fearlessly and joyously depicted gay desire on screen. He became as well known for his public declaration of his HIV status in the 1980s, and his strident face-down of homophobia and public exploration of his illness in his life and art.




Somewhat oddly, for a man so identified with urban gay sensibility, he was also a keen gardener. In 1987, after the public declaration of his illness, he retreated from London, buying a cottage on the stark, windswept beaches of Dungeness in the shadow of a nuclear power station, and created a garden of local plants, carefully nurtured against the salt spray and headwinds of the coast.

Derek was the emblem for a generation of gay men, born after the war, growing up in the repressed 1950s, finding sexual freedom and political expression in the 1970s, only to be beseiged by AIDS and homophobia in the 1980s. He was also a pioneer of an explicit gay sensibility that was sexualised, fearless and confrontational, and never prettified or censored. In his own life and work, he became a vivid example of the politicised artist.

He created around him a modern day equivalent of the Bloomsbury Group (though possibly without the sexual bedhopping), a gaggle of artists and actors and designers, rent boys and scarf-waving interpretive dancers, to make a commune of artists, as well as a seemingly endless list of celebrity luvvies and hangers-on. His diaries drop almost more names than Warhol - it's an endless parade of lunch with David Hockney and Rupert Everett, phone calls to Annie Lennox, video shoots with the Pet Shop Boys, sneaking Ian McKellen into concerts at Wembley, slagging off Gilbert & George and hospital visits from Tory MPs. Many of his regular collaborators have gone on to achieve success, including the actress Tilda Swinton, who was his muse and star of many of his films, the costume designer Sandy Powell, the filmmakers John Maybury and Isaac Julien.

His work was sensuous and lyrical, often humorous and occasionally wistful and elegaic, but always fired with passion and anger and political purpose. He left behind a body of work and a legacy that's inspirational, and a compelling combination of art, politics, sex and sensibility that I don't think has been matched by anyone since. Maybe noone can replicate Derek because the intensity of the homophobic 80s and 90s that he battled has since been softened and gentrified. Or perhaps it's the unique qualities of the man himself - to date, noone else can pull off being poet, prophet, martyr, satyr, scout master and patron saint of naughtiness quite as well as he could.

I discovered Derek in 1994 when I saw a sparsely attended screening of his last film Blue, his elegy to his blindness in the final stages of his illness, which was completed as he was dying and released shortly after his death. He's been a central figure in the development of my own sensibility and politics ever since. He's been a hero, an inspiration and a provocation, a role model and an occasional sexual fantasy. I can't imagine my adolescence and adulthood without him somewhere in my life. I even refer to him as "Derek", as if I'm talking about an old friend.

When I watched Blue, I was dazzled. The film's sole image is a motionless blue screen for 90 minutes with Derek's voice narrating the story of his going blind as he develops full blown AIDS, his memories of past lives and lovers, and bitter polemics against homophobic Thatcherite Britain, set against a soundscape of music and voices. It was a simple but ingenious way of visualising his blindness and transcending it. I watched it with excitement that I'd found a gay voice who effortlessly claimed the role of artist, activist and poet, and created work that was both politically relevant, artistically stimulating and emotionally moving. I also remember a feeling of profound sadness that I'd discovered him just after his death, and that I'd never get to meet him or speak in response to the challenges he threw down in his film.

After Blue, I went off and discovered his writing and diaries (in the pre-DVD universe of the mid 1990s, prints of his films were hard to get hold of), and over the last 15 years, I've accumulated all his films. In 2004, by which time I'd moved to London, there was a small gurgle in the gay press and the art scene to commemorate the 10th anniversary of his death, with the BFI slowly producing new prints and DVD releases of the films.

With time has come a certain kind of canonisation - his place in the pantheon of independent filmmakers and as the lecherous uncle of New Queer Cinema seems assured, and a number of books about the Dungeness garden have been produced, placing Dungeness on the map as a kind of pilgrimage for fans - should we be called Jarmaniacs? Interestingly, while his films and writings are now more accessible than ever, it seems that it may be his garden that becomes the most tangible and moving legacy of his life and work.

In 1987, Derek was scouring headlands of Kent for a location for the film that would become The Garden. He remembered a cottage with yellow painted windows on the shingle, in the shadow of the Dungeness nuclear power station. Finding that it was for sale, bought it at Tilda Swinton's suggestion, promptly moved in, and used it as a second home, shuttling back and forth from his flat in Charing Cross in central London.

"Prospect Cottage, its timbers black with pitch, stands on the shingle at Dungeness. Built eighty years ago at the sea's edge... Now the sea has retreated leaving bands of shingle... Prospect faces the rising sun across a road sparkling silver with sea mist.... There are no walls or fences. My garden's boundaries are the horizon. In this desolate landscape the silence is only broken by the wind, and the hulls squabbling around the fishermen bringing in the afternoon catch... There is more sunlight her than anywhere in Britain; this and the constant wind turn the shingle into a stony desert where only the toughest grasses take a hold - paving the way for sage-green sea kale, blue bugloss, red poppy, yellow sedum."

Jarman wrote beautifully about Dungeness in his journals, and took a perverse pleasure in creating a home and a garden in such an apparently inhospitable place, and celebrated the strange, stark beauty of the rugged landscape:

"This symphony of colour I have seen in no other landscape. Dungeness is a premonition of the far North, a landscape Southerners might think drear and monotonous, which sings like the birch woods in Sibelius' music... Here, on the rare days when the wind does not blow, I will be able to give alfresco suppers with the nuclear power station as a backdrop."

The garden was started tentatively. Derek had an interest in gardening and flowers as a child, but his horticultural experience until that stage was limited to growing geraniums on the windowsill of his Charing Cross Road flat. He planted and patiently nurtured hardy native plants that grew in the beach area - sea kale, gorse, broom, fennel, lavender and wild poppies - facing a number of setbacks when winds and salt spray would level the garden or rabbits would devour the fennel.

He scoured the beachside and created totemic sculpture from cast off driftwood and found objects, and stones arranged in paganist semi-circles, and carefully collected and arranged cast-off bits of fishing paraphenalia - old anchors, chains, fishing nets, and even an old boat that was dragged to his doorstep and presented to him by friendly neighbourhood fishermen. On the side of the wall of the cottage, he had a friend spell out John Donne's sonnet to the rising sun "Busy old fool, unruly sun..." in raised lettering.

The cottage and garden had no fence or formal boundaries when Derek purchased it, an eccentricity that he cheerfully preserved. Visitors, fans and lost seagulls can wander in and around the cottage and visit, although there's a sign on the front door asking politely not to stare into or press your nose against the window. (Despite this, the windows are covered with nose smudge marks and fingerprints - it seems that an open window is an invitation to voyeurism).

Having read about the garden for years, pouring over photos from the illustrated books, re-watching The Garden and re-reading Modern Nature, Derek's journals about the construction of the garden, I've been itching feverishly to visit for years. I'm usually in two minds about whether to visit "literary locales" - the Jane Austen industry of Bath left me mostly cold, and I share with Derek a contempt for the English Heritage-esque prettifying of messy parts of history:

"Sissinghurst, that elegant sodom in the garden of England, is 'heritized' in the institutional hands of the National Trust. It magic has fled in the vacant eyes of tourists... The shades of the Sackville Wests pursuing naked guardsmen through the herbaceous borders return long after the last curious coachload has departed, the tea shoppe closed, and the general public has returned home..."

Generally, I prefer to remember my favourite writers and artists through their work, rather than drinking tea in the carefully restored 17th century cowshed where their pet cows once took a dump. With Derek's garden, though, the appeal to visit was irresistible, possibly because the life and the work and the art were all so inextricably entwined. And it seemed like a slightly more interesting day out than another trip to tatty old Brighton or gloomy Haworth on the Yorkshire Moors to see where the Bronte Sisters coughed themselves to death.

So, with Gay Stephen and James (two fellow Jarmaniacs) in tow, plus Kurt the American for a splash of colour and eccentricity, we set off from Charing Cross (Derek's old stomping ground) to Dungeness, in a journey that took around the same time as it now takes to fly to Amsterdam or Provence. Derek didn't drive, so relied on train travel to Ashford and taxis or otherwise commandeer his posse as chauffeur to get him to and from the beach.

On the journey down, we passed through some of the trashier parts of Kent - suburban railways stations with grim faced 16 year olds in shellsuits and fags sticking out of their mouths pushing baby prams. (Sadly, I just missed a perfect photo opportunity to snap a woman pushing a pram with twin baby girls wearing matching lime green velour jumpsuits - damn!) Ashford station is a terrifying, soulless place - rebuilt with big 80s platforms and a flashy shopping centre to incorporate commuters from the Eurostar, it's now a ghost town since the relocation of the Eurostar from St Pancras - another example of misplaced British entrepreneurialism gone sour.

From Ashford, we took the train to Rye (more on that later), and got a taxi to Dungeness. Our taxi driver was mildly amused about 3 city queens visiting one of the most desolate parts of the beachfront, and, like our taxi driver from the old Bloomsbury Group house in Charleston, had no knowledge of Derek Jarman other than the fact that he had a house with a garden that tended to attract queens from London to visit. We drove past the Camber Sands, which we agreed would be a great spot for a winter beach getaway, provided that our house was right on the beach, fully heated and insulated with a live-in sushi chef and a hot tub. (We're going in December).

From the descriptions, I was expecting a cottage alone on a deserted stretch of beach with nothing but the shadow of the nuclear power plant. Rather surprisingly, Derek's cottage was one of a series of houses along a small road, with a view of the shingle but a 5 minute walk to the beach, past a post-apocalyptic display of ruined ships, washed up crap, ancient tarred sheds, old fishing rope, and hardy kale. Like most beach in England, Dungeness is shingle (ie., pebbles), and supposedly the longest strip of shingle beach in Europe. The view is amazing - huge, broad skies, a washed out almost monochrome colour palette of greys and blues, and a 360 degree view of the horizon. After the noise and colour and crampedness of London, it was the equivalent of a moon landing.

The cottage and garden are still well looked after, and what looks like a fresh tarring of the plywood and canary yellow on the windowsills, and the garden flourishes, possibly looking healthier and more luscious than in Derek's lifetime. There was no sign of life in the house, though through the sunroom window there were a couple of opened envelopes on the floor and a half-finished novel on the sofa. (Was this evidence of a weekend visitor, or just more Jarman-inspired art direction?)

We walked to the lighthouse next to the power station, where Kurt spotted a little cafe selling smoked fish. I prefer my fish non-radioactive, but the others chowed down on mackerel, sardines and crab, which they claimed was delicious.

Walking back along the beach, we wandered through a wasteland of old tarred shacks, charred remnants of ships, old nets and gas cans. Gay Stephen and I were reading Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, and were reminded a little of the post-apocalyptic landscape he describes. It was a strange, weird landscape, like walking on the moon, or through the set of a science-fiction film.

It's also bafflingly similar to Southland in New Zealand where I grew up - flat landscape, huge skies, scrappy plant life with lots of tunnel-rooted plants like lupins to burrow into the soil to find water and stabilise the land, and a strange stark unadorned beauty. Like New Zealand, Dungeness has the same feeling of precariousness about being on the end of the world and about to fall off.

For Derek, the garden seems to have been an escape from the world, and a challenge to himself (whether brave or just masochistic, I'm not sure) to create beauty and meaning out of an inhospitable world. Perhaps there was an appeal about starting with the blank canvas of a bleak empty place. Perhaps in the parched landscape and the shadow of the power station as a momento mori, he had the perfect setting for the garden as a memorial for the dead. In his diaries, he suggested that he was inspired to create a garden of life as a symbolic challenge to his illness, though he sometimes despaired of the project: "I plant my herbal garden as a panacea, read up on all the aches and pains that the plants will cure - and know they are not going to help. The garden as pharmacopoeia has failed", he wrote gloomily, though it's still impressive that he found a use for the word "pharamacopoeia". Or just he just enjoyed the perversity and bohemian edge of living in a nature reserve in the same spot as a nuclear power plant.

All of us while we were there commented about feeling slightly unsettled, and it's true. A place as elemental and bare as Dungeness, stripped of all the distractions of modern life (except a single strip of road and a small kitschy local pleasure train service), and nothing but the looming reminder of the nuclear power plant, forces you to confront the landscape, and by extension, confront yourself. Perhaps Derek found that living in such a bleak place meant that the act of self-examination was inevitable, and put the complexity of the world into a kind of relief.

The image of Derek the artist as a hermit living in monastery of nature is appealing, and something that Derek himself was happy to propagate, but it doesn't seem to match the other accounts of his life - the phone ringing constantly, a role call of luvvies from the film and theatre world visiting the cottage, and tourists and well-wishers bringing cuttings for the garden. But regardless of his luvviedom and pretensions, the fact of the garden, like most of his work, throws down a challenge - to find your own voice as he found his, and to work to create art out of anything, using whatever resources you have available.

Taking up the challenge on the day we visited were a group of porn stars making what appeared to be a knickerless music video or a St Martin's art school undergraduate video. We didn't stay around long enough to find out, but the neon pink hair of one of the tranny hooker wigs certainly popped against the gray-blue skies. Gay Stephen sighed and wished he'd brought his American Apparel gold lame cunt-scarf that he wore to a dance party a few weeks ago and joined in. Not to be outdone, we posed for some brooding 80s New Romantic Pet Shop Boys video-esque poses in the garden, which we hope Derek would've approved of.

[insert image]

I was expecting to feel devastated and depressed by the visit, and imagined time alone lying in the garden, penning morose thoughts in my diary, and feeling the same sense of just-too-late loss that I first felt when I saw Blue. I don't believe in the afterlife, and I've always believed that the dead, once gone, are lost irretrievably to us, except through our memories and through whatever legacy they may have left behind them. Still, it's a strange thing for me to imagine that I "knew" Derek, when I never met him. Can you "miss" someone who you've ever met, and can my experience of him be considered even vaguely as authentic as the many many people who are still alive (including friends of mine) who did know him? And such is the grand illusion of Art - the belief that we can draw close(-ish) to others even after death, and see something of what they saw. It's the same illusion that makes me want to call him Derek rather than the more academic reference "Jarman", and makes me want to smile and feel slightly sad when I look at photos of him, looking battered but still handsome standing outside his cottage or striking a camp pose on his hospital bed.

Sometimes I'm convinced that Art does provide a connection through time with the dead - at other times, I feel cynical about the possibility of knowing or understanding anyone else, alive or dead. Surprisingly, my visit to the cottage left me feeling happy, inspired, and with a sense of connection through time with Derek, a sense of closeness that I had walked where he walked and seen what he had seen, and a sense of security that his work hadn't all been swept into the sea. I also felt seriously challenged to do anything the same with my remaining time on earth. I doubt that it's going to involve moving to Dungeness and planting a garden (although Stephen and Kurt found a fabulous California style bungalow down the road that they want to move into immediately and start swanning around in wearing matching Ossie Clark kaftans).

We then switched gears to Rye, the terribly-terribly sweet charming village straight out of an English Heritage brochure - known for Elizabethan architecture, cobblestoned streets, a 900 year old Gothic cathedral, more antique stores than two gay men can shake a little pooper dog at.

Here's some text from the Ye Oldie Rye website to describe the town, which gives you an idea of how much it prides itself on (and still lives in) the past:

"Rye describes itself as an ancient town, with a charter dating from the 11th century. William the Conqueror’s grandson, King Stephen, gave the town its first fortifications, of which the medieval Landgate and Ypres Tower are the main remnants. Rye was also a member of the medieval federation of Cinque Ports, providing ships to the Crown in exchange for trade privileges, although centuries of silting and long shore drift have shifted the coastline away, leaving the town stranded two miles inland. It remains a river port, however, and fishing boats still chug upstream to land a daily catch at the Strand Quay, amid moored yachts.... Elizabeth I liked it so much that she bestowed on it the title 'Rye Royale'."

Rye and its small town suffocations and bitchery are amusingly represented in Mapp and Lucia, a deliciously camp set of novels by E F Benson (a one-time mayor of Rye) about two snobbish middle class ladies in a small Sussex town called Tilling. The novels were televised by Granada in the mid-80s, starring Geraldine McEwan and Prunella Scales, and filmed in and around Rye. The series is screamingly camp, and pitched somewhere between P G Wodehouse and Noel Coward, by way of a Dynasty bitch fight. The link with Mapp and Lucia is still being worked over faithfully - there's a Mapp and Lucia walking tour given every month by a local middle-aged homosexual (which we stumbled into the middle of en route to the tea shoppe) and in the window of one of the Ye Oldie shop windows, we saw an advertisement for auditions for the Rye Players' forthcoming production of "Make Way For Lucia". (We insisted that Stephen audition for Lucia immediately, and discussed which kimono he should wear for his stage entrance).

We had a terrifying afternoon tea in Fletcher's House, named for the playwright who was one half of Beaumont & Fletcher - the cream tea and scones were great, but the psychotic staff were not. Deciding at half past 4 that they were just too goddam full, the maitre d' and then the chef slammed the door in prospective patrons' faces, told a family that if they left, they wouldn't be let back in, and the waiter cheerily confided in us that the Germans didn't know how to behave. (We didn't tell them Kurt's last name was Helfrich.) So much for the fantasy about small towns being filled with friendly locals with becoming accents and charming cap-doffing manners - actually, they're all cloven-hooved psychopaths.

While Stephen and Kurt hyperventilated over David Sharp 1960s pottery, James and I went through the National Trust rarified atmosphere of Lamb House - one of Rye's grandest addresses, and the former home of Henry James and E F Benson. As with most National Trust properties, Lamb House was presided over by a bevy of ladies in sailor suits and zebra print with green eyeshadow and hostile clench jawed smiles who ever so politely hand you a laminated card explaining how George the First took a dump here one night after his ship was stranded in Rye, and where exactly James was sitting when he picked up his fountain pen to write the last lines of The Wings of the Dove.

The ink pots and watch fobs were all perfectly arranged and labelled. The place was also sterile and completely characterless. The only vaguely distinguishing feature in the house which bore any evidence to an actual person living in the house was a creepy mausoleum to James's dogs, discreetly poked in a corner by the rear garden wall. Other than that, it was a museum, with all the messy realities of life as it's lived neatly tidied away - including the dead dogs.

Jarman hated Rye, and took several stabs at it in his diary, bellowing at the enforced tweeness and cynically commercialised heritage industry. Fifteen years ago, I'd have loved Rye and thought "how charming" and wished, for the thousandth time, that I lived in a Ye Oldie cottage in a little village like this instead of growing up in the harsher light of rural New Zealand. Now, I think I'm with Derek.

Strolling through Henry James's more-English-than-the-English garden gave me another huge appreciation for the confrontational nature of Derek's garden. When you visit a National Trust property, there's a reassuring set of rules and restrictions. There's a sign outside, a fine at the door, printed tickets issued by unsmiling attendants, ropes to tell you where to walk and not to walk, laminated cards telling you what to think, and an air of well-polished perfection and sterility. Even the shape of the gardens - carefully pruned hedgerows, boxed gardens, plants so well ordered they grew straight up like soldiers in formation and never, ever spill onto the pathway - demand reverence and a creeping, apologetic respect as you walk around them.

Jarman has nothing like the same reassurance - the garden stands open to the elements, already ageing (the house and garden is maintained, but things are aging, weather beaten and eroding with time), and there's nothing to tell you what to think. He demands that you take the garden as it is, on its own terms, and make what you will of it - which is what all great art should do.

I wonder now what Derek would have been doing if he had lived, and what he would have made of modern life with the rampant commercialism of the gay scene, the social progress with anti-discrimination laws and same-sex civil partnerships, and the "mainstreaming" of gay sensibility through bland fare like Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, or even Bruno. Re-reading the diaries is an immediate reminder of the wall of hostility he faced as an openly gay, openly-HIV positive man living in virulently homophobic Thatcherite Britain, and the amount of publicity he received (and occasionally courted). While the muckraking tabloids are still with us, there is a sense that the tide is turning and that "gay" is no longer to be feared and mocked. With that in mind, would he still have had his gay militia of Bloomsbury-esque painters, rent boys and defrocked bishops around him, and would his particular brand of articulate gay rage still have been needed?

It's possible, I suppose, that Derek would have morphed effortlessly into a new incarnation of his creativity, celebrated the new openness, and happily taken up the seat of Big Gay Granddaddy of modern gay culture (perhaps with maybe a cameo in Queer As Folk or an occasional appearance on Richard & Judy). It seems more likely that he'd have stuck to his status as an outsider and a critic, and possibly turned into one of those bitter old Stonewall-era queens who never fail to remind the errant thoughtless youth of today about how hard it used to be, and silently (or not silently) continued to lick his wounds about the horrors of the homophobic past. I have no doubt that he'd have taken issue with the complacency and apoliticism of most urban gay culture, and poured scorn on bourgeoise queens like Elton John and David Furnish for supposedly attempting to copy straight marriage - even though I'm sure he'd have accepted a wedding invitation. I hope that he would've also looked past the glossy surfaces of gay coolness and raged about HIV infection rates soaring, the continuation of gay-bashing, and the rather irritating tendency of many gay men to imagine that all is well in Gayland and there's nothing left to fight for. I'm sure he'd have thought of something.

It's all speculative, of course, but what is clear is that noone has replaced him. Perhaps noone can - perhaps he was too much a product and a symbol of his era to have been able to be reincarnated. And so, he continues to be missed, and in being missed, he is not forgotten. ("I place a delphinium, royal blue, on your grave").

Oh, and Derek, if you are out there somewhere in the big gay cosmos, I stole some plants from your garden and am attempting to grow them on my windowsill. I'm sure you wouldn't mind.

O, Holey Tight

10 August 2009
London

Somewhere during the last five years, Britain's broadsheet newspapers (including the Guardian, my rag of choice) are doing less hard-hitting investigative journalism, and more celebrity-stalking and pop-culture prophesising, presumably in an attempt to become a bit more "street" and snare a younger readership.

It began, I suppose, with the phenomenal success of Helen Fielding's newspaper column Bridget Jones's Diary and Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City column, both turned into books and later zeitgeist defining films and TV series, and since then, newspapers have been racking their cobwebbed brains trying to find a way to appear both authoritative and streewise. I've lost track of the number of (mostly feeble imitations of) "City Girl" columns in broadsheets and tabloids and "What's Hot/Not" columns where fashion trends are praised or shot down in flames, as newspapers try to compete with Vogue, Time Out and Vanity Fair to be not just a news source, but some kind of cultural oracle.

Even the venerable old Times this week featured, as their cover story for the Sunday Times Magazine, an interview with 20something Alexa Chung, who apparently is some kind of post-pubescent television presenter. I doubt seriously whether most of the Times's readership would even know who Alexa Chung is, let alone be interested in who her boyfriend is or whether she likes working for MTV in New York, but there she is in all her vacuous glory, while stories about the Iraq war are consigned to the latter pages.

I used to love this stuff, but the sheer repetitiveness of the style and substance means that there are diminishing returns of enjoyment. Once you've read your 4th "What's Hot/Not" column of the morning while trawling the Sunday papers, read what sounds suspiciously like the same copy for an interview with a bony Yoga-cised Hollywood starlet in three different papers, and realised that you are less than hip for not knowing who London's top 5 plastic surgeons are, you start to fall asleep. I call it Death by Social Commentary. Seriously, though, if every two-bit journalist is casting their eye over popular culture, where does commentary end and culture itself take off? If a fashion trend falls in the urban jungle and noone writes a feature column on it in the Independent, does anyone notice? I used to want to be a cultural commentator, but, as I dredge through week after week of journalists 15 years younger than me attempting to do the same, I'm tempted either to retreat to a desert island or just start contributing to the culture rather than competing to analyse it.

It's at moments like this, when I start empathising with old people and rubbishing the attempts of 20somethings to define their own youth culture, that I realise I am becoming over the hill, but I'm trying to remain in denial for a little while longer yet. As Miranda says defensively in an episode of Sex and the City: "These 20something girls think that they're hot. Don't they realise that we [ie., 30somethings] are still hot?" Bravo, girlfriend - let's live on in denial together.

Any-hoo, to spice up an otherwise tedious Monday, I was surfing the Guardian's website blog page (to try and be "down with the kids") and found a article in which Hadley Freeman, self-styled fashionista and snidely sarcastic social commentator, talks her distressed reader down off the ledge with a blog entitled, "Are laddered tights really fashionable?". I read this kind of stuff as a guilty pleasure, acutely aware that I should be reading more hard-hitting journalism and less pointless social commentary, but I'll ignore that for now, too.

Hadley used the opportunity to point out one of the main exponents (or offenders, depending on your point of view) of the ripped tights phenonenon - Peaches Geldolf.

Our Peaches is part of a newish breed of celebrity spawn - children of celebrities, who attract attention on the basis of their surnames, but usually share little of the talent, beauty or rock star cool that propelled their parents to fame. It's fair to say that in an entrenched and slightly septic culture like England, families and hereditary still count for more than they do in, say, New Zealand, where most people are descended from convicts and prostitutes and the democratic ideal of the everyman holds more sway. Even the children of "new money" have a certain amount of cultural cache, though the attention they receive seems to be 1/3rd voyeurism and 2/3rds resentment. Children of rock stars tend to be ripe for a certain kind of tabloid targetting, usually because they have silly New Age names, forgettable faux-careers that basically fill in time between shopping and attending parties, and manage to replicate some of their parents' bad behaviour - falling out of a nightclub at 3am, perhaps, or in Peaches' case, a Las Vegas wedding that lasted about 9 minutes.

Like many readers, I join in a slight sense of malevolent glee when I read about Peaches and her ilk being drunk, clueless, or drunk and clueless, and get a certain vicarious pleasure when I read other people tearing her to shreds. Then again, I'm always a little hesistant about my reaction, because on one sense it doesn't seem fair, and on another, it just seems resentful and nasty and a bit of a waste of energy. Reading about the Curse of the Ripped Tights, I experienced both these reactions again.

The consensus in Hadley's blog was that the ripped tights look was "trampy", and that Peaches was herself "a tramp". This is interesting, I think, because the word "tramp" seems to go to the heart of why we love to hate celebrity tadpoles like Peaches.

The truth is that Peaches is anything but a tramp (in the homeless pee smelling vagrant living-under-a-bridge sense of the word). She is the daughter of a multi-millionaire and no doubt comfortably living off a trust fund set up for her by one or both of her parents. She doesn't need to work for a living, and so she can experiment with being a student, a DJ, a TV presenter (if you missed her scintillating documentary on Islam, I'd advise you to... think yourself lucky), or yet another teenage Trustafarian who thinks it's fashionable to dress like a ragamuffin.

Herein lies the irritation caused by her dress sense. We all know that Peaches is wealthy enough to be able to afford any number of new pairs of tights, and she doesn't actually have to wear tights with holes in them. The fact that she does is clearly a matter of choice, presumably because she thinks that wearing holey tights makes some kind of statement: that she doesn't need to care about how she looks, that the "normal" rules about dressing neatly in public don't apply to her, or that she's affecting some kind of bohemian chic and dressing like a punkette to afford herself some sort of counter-cultural cool. She's able to "get away with it" because she has a degree of celebrity, and enough money to not really have to worry about what people think of her. If an actual homeless woman was photographed wearing holey tights, we'd either criticise her or pity her. If a celebrity does it, it's suddenly cool.

Peaches Geldolf is not, of course, the first middle-class teenager to try and dress messily as a form of fashion statement. However, she is (for some reason that defies logical explanation) one of the most socially prominent teens around, so the way she dresses becomes noticed. I think the holes-in-the-tights irritates because it screams so loudly about what Peaches is (a rich trust fund brat), what she isn't (poor) and the ridiculousness caused by the hole (ho ho) between those two facts. It's a question of authenticity, or the lack of it. When she dresses with holey tights, she's clearly trying to be something she's not. If she dressed like Princess Anne and was all Sloaney with twinsets and pearls and Hermes scarves, or even if she was a label-bashing footballer's wife type dragging designer bags down the Kings Road, people would probably hate her just as much, but somehow she would seem more... authentic.

I'd say that a lot of people (me included) resent Peaches and her kind because she appears to attract publicity merely for being the daughter of someone famous, having no other discernible talents or interest, and acting pretty much as you'd expect the children of the monied rock star classes to act - in other words, like a spoiled little rich girl, whose mediocrity and social gaffes are cleaned up by Daddy's money. It's here that I feel a little uneasy. There's nothing that the British seem to like more than a little class resentment of someone who seems to have it better than we do, which seems both pointless and self-defeating. Then again, there are some of us who think that fame (or infamy) should be earned, not inherited, and so far, Ms Geldolf hasn't done anything that would be worth reporting if she didn't have her famous surname. And so, on it goes.

All teenagers should be afforded a reasonably wide berth to make fashion mistakes and be pretentious. God knows most of us have gone through an Op-Shop phase where we wore ripped jeans, old men's coats, hats cocked at saucy angles and (the horror, the horror) yaks' wool kaftans to kick against our parents' middle-class notions of propriety. Peaches gets rougher criticism than most, precisely because she's in our faces all the time, which doesn't quite seem fair. Part of me thinks that the poor little mite should have the right to dress like a ragamuffin, provided that she cleans up by the time she hits 25. Then again, part of me just wants to run her over with a big cement mixer, or maybe just slap her until she's bright red and tell her to go home and put something decent on and stop looking like a streetwalker.

Peaches and other faux-celebrities aside, maybe the problem is not who wears them, but just the fact of ripped tights themselves that are a bad trend. In the 70s as modelled by Vivienne Westwood, they seemed culturally fresh and alive to the spirit of rock n roll. Now they just seem tired and a bit pretentious.

A few years ago, I was travelling through India, and I remember I giving my clothes to the hotel clerk in Delhi to have them laundered. 12 hours later, he came back looking very pleased with himself because he'd repaired the hole in the knees of my jeans, and managed to scrub out most of the faded colour in the denim. I didn't have the heart to tell him that they were Donna Karan designer jeans, and that the hole in the knee and the strategic fading was part of the design. How do you explain to someone who earns a few rupees a day, in a country filled with people wearing rags, that here in the monied West, dressing in ragged clothes is considered cool, and that you would pay a designer to dye clothing to make it look second-hand?

It's only in a culture of relative plenty that dressing like a peasant could be considered to be cool, or that dressing neatly could be seen as "trying too hard". So when I see Ms Geldolf and her kind affecting a look of poverty in an attempt to get street cred, or because she's just too lazy to change into a new pair of tights, I cringe.

It's enough to make you want to resort to some Alexis Carrington style 80s power-dressing. Bring on the re-runs of Dynasty, pronto! And for God's sake, paparazzi - just ignore Peaches and her goddam ripped tights and go photograph someone more interesting.

Cuddling up to the Antichrist

3 August 2009
London

Here in the lands of the chattering classes, we're not getting upset about MPs' expenses scandals, the melting of the polar icecaps or human rights abuses in Burma. No, we're getting hot under the collar about the latest scandal created by Lars von Trier, Danish movie director and arthouse enfant terrible, and his new film Antichrist, which shocked this year's Cannes film festival before being fast-tracked into general release in the UK.

Antichrist is a film that's had so much advance publicity and such extensive commentary that I almost felt like I'd seen the film before I got to see it, or at least could re-enact the film using sock puppets. It's a shame that so many of the commentariat felt free to divulge details of the film's plot before audiences had a chance to see it, as many of the "shocking" elements of the plot were less frightening for being able to be predicted. (One wonders whether films like The Crying Game would've stood a chance in our Internet age of having their secrets hidden beyond a week or two of general release).

Every year or so, a new film comes along that seems to hit a new high (or low) in terms of sexual explicitness, rampant violence or general freewheeling perversity, that kicks off a howl of self righteous rage in the tabloids, some very po-faced defence from film scholars and freedom of speech advocates, and a lot of eye-rolling from everyone in between.

Among all the cultural teeth-knashing about film and censorship seems to be a consensus that films are becoming more violent and more grotesque, partially as a form of one-upmanship to attract an increasingly jaded generation supposedly numbed from a diet of video games and hard-core Internet porn, or that film directors are using sex and violence as a vehicle for their own careers and establishing their edgy arthouse credentials.

There also seems to be something of a stalemate on the subject of censorship itself. One UK critic spluttered about the appalling decision of the British film censors to pass Antichrist uncensored, and asked a serious question (somewhat coated in spittle) about what it would take to get a film censored these days. The presumption behind his question seems to be that censors are cowed by the faux prestige afforded "arthouse film", and that there's a resulting moral decline because of their reluctance to censor truly shocking pieces of work. On the other side of the debate are the turtleneck wearing liberals (I'd include myself here) who are generally anti-censorship and pro-free speech, and who view any claims for censorship as mutterings of silly moral conservatives, and therefore to be ignored and made a joke of.

The joke about censorship is that, rather than discouraging people from seeing the piece of filth in question, it usually provokes far more interest than it may have otherwise. The most famous example of this in modern times is probably still D H Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was banned in England until a famous trial in 1960 held that Penguin's decision to publish the book in paperback was not a breach of public indecency laws. After the verdict, the book sold close to 2 million copies, and Penguin's success paved the way for the end of rigorous censorship in the UK. The chief prosecutor during the trial, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, was widely ridiculed for being out of touch with the changing social norms of the 1960s, especially when he asked the jury if it were the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read". It was a sensibility that reeked of snobbishness, puritanism and a father-knows-best mentality that was very un-swinging 60s. It seems to be human nature that we're drawn to whatever we're told we're not supposed to do, so if you tell someone not to read something because it will corrupt them, chances are that you've whetted their appetite to read it even more. If it results in corruption - well, baby, bring it on!

We're now living in an age - in the UK, at least - where liberalism is generally held up as a virtue, and explorations of sex and violence and general taboo-breaking are increasingly applauded rather than criticised. Many artists still contend that it's their job to push boundaries and explore the embarrassing, the forbidden and the morally dodgy, all in the name of freedom of expression or out of an attempt to try and understand human nature. This seems to have lead to a situation in modern filmmaking where the more taboo-breaking a film is, the more it will receive (a certain kind of) attention.

Enter Lars von Trier (the "von" is an affectation he added on at film school, take note) who has been making provocative and confrontational cinema for most of the last two decades. A screening of his film Breaking the Waves at a film festival in my university town in 1996 is still seared in my consciousness as one of the most hair-raising two hours of my life. The film festival's organisers cleverly promoted it as a love story, and didn't reveal that the film was akin to being trapped in a tumble drier at full temperature.

Breaking the Waves was the first of three films - the other two are The Idiots and Dancer In the Dark - in which simple-minded heroines with wide childlike eyes have horrific things happen to them as a result of their pure hearts being crushed in a cruel world - or possibly as a result of their director being a sadist who seems to enjoy watching women suffer. In the film, the heroine Bess is one rung above "village idiot" in the small Scottish coastal village where she lives and has strange conversations with herself where she pretends to talk to God. She marries a hunky oil worker who later gets injured in an accident. On his sick bed and apparently close to death, Hubby tells Bess to go out and have sex with other men and come back and tell her about it, which she faithfully does, like the big warm-hearted Madonna/whore stereotype she is, and ends up being gang-raped and killed for her efforts. The film finishes with a pointedly shocking ending which suggests either that Bess is a martyr and miracle worker, but felt at the time more like Trier was slapping his big Danish dick in the face of his audience.

Breaking the Waves was a huge international success, and propelled its stars Emily Watson and the (late, great) Katrin Cartlidge to fame, even though the film's mostly hand-held camera work and stomach churning subject matter made audience members want to be sick.

Opinions of Trier himself vary hugely, feeding his legend as an auteur and pop culture oddity. Watson and Cartlidge loved him, and Nicole Kidman eagerly snapped on a ball and chain to star as another big-eyed victimised woman in Dogville. Others haven't been so flattering. Icelandic singer Bjork, who starred in and scored Dancer in the Dark, described working with Trier as an experience of "profound cruelty", and apparently bit off a piece of his shirt and stormed off the set in protest. Paul Bettany, who was Kidman's co-star in Dogville, described Trier's directing style as a cross between group therapy and playground torture. One of Triers' tricks to warm up the cast was planting hard core porn in Bettany's bedroom to him look like a pervert in front of Kidman and the other female cast members.

In Breaking the Waves, Trier seemed to resurrect overnight what I think is now coined as "the cinema of abjection" - a modern day equivalent to a monk's self-flagellation ritual, in which you submit to the pain of an excruciating movie experience, and, by God, you learn to enjoy it, and even take some pride in your own self-laceration.

For generations of film students, this is a familiar ritual. Going through an "abject" stage at film school seems to be about as common as wearing black eye make up and an Op Shop trenchcoat, forgetting to shampoo and experimenting with anal sex as a way of proving your cool counter-cultural self. The more painful or incomprehensible a film is, and crucially the more unpleasant it is to other people, the more satisfaction you can take in learning to appreciate it, and the more coolly self-knowing you can appear. The impulse seems to come from a bit of leftover trendy anti-Establishment protest - if your parents or your local Tory MP hates it, then it must be good for you. For this crowd, of which I number myself as an alumni member, Trier's films provided the perfect blend of knee-jerk cultural cool and (usually) a genuinely traumatising emotional experience which it became your film studenty duty to endure.

Regardless of whether or not you're a film student, Trier's films do seem to strike audiences in the bowels, which seems to appeal to audiences tired of slick Hollywood propaganda who want to experience "something real". The move towards grubby authenticity seems to have been picked up by other arthouse filmmakers in the last decade, which has resulted in a handful of films featuring real sex or revealing the last taboo of censorship - the erect male penis, and scenes involving vaginal penetration. (I have yet to see a non-porno arthouse film that shows actual anal sex, but here's hoping).

The last major cinematic vomit-fest was caused by Gaspar Noé's film Irreversible, a truly stomach-churning film also premiering at Cannes, that showed a graphic, almost unwatchably horrible 9-minute rape scene, and a man getting his head smashed open with a fire extinguisher in the middle of a gay S&M club called The Rectum. In his review of Irreversible, Salon.com film critic Andrew O'Hehir wrote "I'm prepared to defend "Irreversible on aesthetic and maybe on philosophical grounds. But I don't have to pretend I enjoyed it", and he's right. His review (which is hands down one of the best pieces of film journalism I've ever read), describes succinctly the dilemma of the modern liberal cinema-goer, and how the goodwill of audiences to watch confrontation films can get battered down by filmmakers who seem cynical and coldly exploitative. Describing the rape scene, he writes:

"In a medium-long career of watching lewd, crude and violent movies, I'm not sure I've ever sat through a scene that was harder to take on so many levels....It's just nine minutes, but it feels like an hour, or a year. It was enough time for me to think about my life and wonder how I wound up as the kind of middle-aged ex-bohemian who would go to see a movie like this on purpose."

O'Hehir also takes issue with the filmmaker's apparently cynical use and misuse of filmmaking technique, and questions the artistic motives of any director who tries to tell a story through revolting an audience:

"Noé has an intuitive sense of the pathos and power of his images, and that, combined with his tremendous technical facility, make clear that he's a serious and talented filmmaker, not a shallow schlockmeister. Whether he has anything to say that's worth saying -- and whether it's worth sitting through the punishment this film inflicts on the audience -- is quite another matter."

All of which begs the question - why do we put up with films like Irreversible, and do the moral conservatives among us have a point when they say that the world doesn't actually need to sanction violent films?

My own views on censorship are probably still the same as they were when I was a film student. I'm pro-freedom of expression and anti-censorship, if for no other reason than I think that you need to be able to see a film to be able to judge it, and short of age restrictions, it's difficult to say who can and can't see a film without resorting to some form of evaluative fascism. In the intervening years since university to joining Andrew O'Hehir in the "middle-aged ex-bohemian" club, I've definitely become a lot less strident about the importance of "transgressive" art, and a lot more understanding of people who choose, for various reasons, not to watch the latest uber-violent or disturbing movie. And even though I still support the rights of people to watch violent movies, I agree with the pro-censorship lobby more and more when they argue that repeated exposure to violence probably does have a damaging psychological effect over time. Still, if we ban everything that's fun and bad for us, that wouldn't leave me with much of a sex life.

Like many a hand-wringing liberal, I wonder where it's all going to end (snuff movies on pay TV?), but I think it's important to remember that context is everything. A film like The Accused dealing with the subject of rape is not the same as a gang-rape fantasy in a porn film. Then again, it's so easy to splice and dice and circulate film clips these days, that even the most well-intentioned scenes can be re-packaged in a much nastier form. A quick web search on X-Tube while I was writing this blog post found clips of the rape scenes from both The Accused and Irreversible advertised as "Hot Rape Scenes!" alongside clips from softcore porn movies. Whether or not you'd be aroused watching these clips is questionable, but stripped out of their storylines, they do become just another piece of porn to watch while you're having a wank. Is this eroding society? Well, possibly. But I know, with a sense of Trier-like nihilism, that there'll be something nastier on sceens in a year or two as another director tries to up the ante and possibly scores an award and some street cred in the process. Hell, that could be me one day.

So, along comes Antichrist, which makes Breaking the Waves look like Playschool. It (Antichrist, that is, not Playschool) premiered at this year's Cannes festival, which seems to be the hip happening place to wheel out "transgressive cinema", and revolted audiences with its scenes of violence, including the "money shot" - a nice big close-up of its heroine cutting off her clitoris with a pair of rusty scissors - which apparently had audience members fainting, calling for smelling salts, and booing lustily. You gotta love those crazy French cineastes.

Despite the divided opinion, the Cannes jury awarded the Best Actress gong to its actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. This may have reflected the female-led jury's admiration for Gainsbourg's gutsy performance rather than for the film itself - the jury president Isabelle Huppert and jury member Asia Argento have both done their time playing crazy self-destructive no-knickers vixens on screen, and may have just been welcoming Gainsbourg into their sorority of artfilm danger sluts. Unsurprisingly, the distributors leapt on the film and it was fast-tracked into a summer release date in the UK, where the British film censors passed it uncut for general release, on an R18 certificate. (It has yet to screen in the US).

It's here that I have to contradict myself and describe the film's plot, as it seems impossible to discuss the film without doing so. If you haven't seen the film yet and don't want to spoil the fun surprise for yourself, go and read some other bit of my blog now - click here to read about my fun adventures at an orgy!

The film has two characters - a husband and wife who aren't named, and referred to as He and She in the credits (played respectively by Willem Dafoe and Gainsbourg). The film begins with an (admittedly stunning) slow motion sequence in which He and She make love in the shower and on top of the washing machine, while their infant son watches from his cot next door. Just to keep it real, Trier throws in a shot of an erect penis penetrating a vagina. (The press interviews tell us that stunt genitals were used, supplied by porn stars, although Trier has gleefully mentioned that Willem Dafoe's cock was far larger). As He and She pound away, the child climbs out of his cot and onto an open window and falls out the window into the snowy night, dying. She is hospitalised with depression, but He, who works as a therapist, breaks her out, insists that she throws her medication away and starts dealing with her pain. Despite her concerns that he's too involved to be her therapist and way too arrogant, she submits to some intensive cognitive therapy sessions where he makes her face her fears.

They retreat to their cabin in a mountain hideaway ominously called Eden (no points for clocking biblical references), where the therapy continues, but things shift into some kind of Gothic horror. She complains that the ground is burning, acorns hail viciously onto the roof, and He encounters a series of rancid looking animals, including a fox who croaks "Chaos Reigns". He discovers that She had abandoned her doctoral thesis on witchcraft, which she had been supposed to have been writing in the cabin the year before - her notebooks show disintegrating handwriting, in the manner of Jack Nicholson's failed novel writing in The Shining. When He confronts her during a therapy session, She reveals that she agrees with the witchburners' ideas that women are evil and able to bend Nature to their will. He then discovers that She appears to have deliberately maimed their son by making him wear his shoes the wrong way around, deforming his feet, which may have contributed to his falling out the window. A flashback reveals that She was watching the child fall while they had sex, and did nothing to stop him falling.

She begs He to have sex with her and slap her in the face, which He initially refuses to do. Furious, she runs out of the cabin and lies among the roots of an oak tree, masturbating naked. He finds her and starts having sex with her, rather surprisingly slapping her in the face a couple of times. As they pound away (Dafoe's toned buttocks providing one of the few moments of pleasure during the film), a sea of creeepy hands appear from under the tree roots, like a medieval vision of hell.

At this point, all hell breaks loose (literally). She attacks He, drilling a hole into his leg (which she then penetrates with her finger) and attaches a grindstone to his leg, then crushes his balls with a rock, and masturbates his cock until he ejaculates blood. For the piece de resistance, She gets He to masturbate her until her clitoris is engorged, and then cuts it off with a pair of rusty scissors while the menagerie of mangy animals look on. (I watched the clit-snip scene with my hands over my eyes, but heard the resounding sound effect of the shears snipping through skin, which is still ringing in my head). Then surprisingly, the mangy crow alerts He to the wrench, which She has hidden, and he is unable to unbolt his leg. He thoughtfully strangles She to death, which she doesn't appear to resist, and even looks a little grateful. He burns her body (oooh, just like they used to do with witches!), before limping out of Eden. The epilogue appears to show Nature restored to some kind of tranquility and order - the mangy animals become fluffy, and the hillside where He walks is suddenly flooded with faceless women, who appear to be the lost souls from the oak tree rising from the dead.

Reduced to plot, the film does seem ridiculous, which has certainly fed the critics' fires. Despite the Grand Guignol aspects of the plot, there is a lot to recommend Antichrist. Even its detractors agree that it's one of the most beautifully shot films of recent years (the cinematographer is the gifted Anthony dod Mantle, who won an Oscar for making the slums of Mumbai pulsate in Slumdog Millionaire), and it has a gorgeous look and texture that reminded me of painting more than film. (More on that later).

The performances also both deserve praise. As it's a Trier film, you learn to be on the look out for at least one crazy self-destructive woman who gets killed off to save the world, and while I tired a little of the She character as another of Trier's misguided avenging angels, I did think Charlotte Gainsbourg was fantastic. I feel a little uncomfortable about actresses having to undergo rape, humiliation, torture and full frontal nudity on screen before they get applauded as major talents, but in this case, the applause is deserved. It was a brave, fearless performance, with very little room for less than complete commitment, and for an actress usually noted for her reserve, she really went there - especially with the scissors.

I disagree with the critics (including the Guardian's chief film reviewer Peter Bradshaw) who've argued that Antichrist is a cynical exercise in arthouse exploitation, and that it can be dismissed completely as Trier saying a giant "f*ck you" to audiences and critics. Admittedly, parts of the film did feel like a big "up yours", but other parts felt affecting and moving and occasionally very disturbing, and it seems too easy to just shrug off those moments and dismiss them as art-porn shock effect.

My overall sense of the film was that I was watching a dream (a nightmare, more precisely) or that I'd actually entered into someone's subconscious. The film's very stylised, painterly look prompted this - many images made me think of Hieronymous Bosch's apocalypse scenes and Bill Viola's video installations and Francis Bacon's tortured portraits, and the soundtrack had the subliminal creepiness of a David Lynch film. It was beautiful and disturbing, as a lot of surrealist art is, even if it wasn't always coherent.

I'm still not sure that the film "works" - you have the sense of the film being composed as a roughly slapped together collage of images, which the hand-scrawled title credits seemed to underline. The movement from stylisation into Bergman-esque "marriage is hell" melodrama into magic realism and horror was jerky and awkward, there were moments that were po-faced to the point of almost entering into cam, and some of the dialogue exchanges between Dafoe and Gainsbourg seemed a bit stilted. Re-played with Monty Python actors or by Tina Fey and William Shatner, the script of Antichrist could become a comedic classic.

Overall, though, it felt visceral and compelling. I came out of it feeling much the same way that you do after you've woken from a dream - feeling alarmed and exhausted, not fully understanding what I'd seen, and feeling something that was more than just plain fear but less than full catharsis.

Trier has spoken in press interviews about his own battles with clinical depression before and during the making of Antichrist, and watching the film certainly feels like a cross between therapy and exorcism of some demons. This news has largely been poo-pooed as another pretentious Trier publicity stunt. Personally, I don't think it should be written off that quickly. The film (the first part of it, anyway) felt authentic in that it tried to push how far clinical depression could go, within the confines of a loving but deeply unhealthy relationship. The first scenes were airless and claustrophobic and very hard going. Gainsbourg was compelling as a deeply depressed, despairing and possibly suicidal woman dealing with appalling grief and guilt, and Dafoe's performance walked an interesting line between the therapist as both saviour and captor.

The film's sexual politics seemed messy and confused - partially out of bad writing, I think, and I sense more out Trier's need to be shocking and confrontational rather than coherent - but again, that feeds into the sense I have of the movie being the transcription of a bad dream.

But ultimately, it was that incoherency in the latter part of the film that brought the battleship down for me, and stopped me from really engaging with the film or wanting to applaud it. It was never clear to me how She reached the conclusion that She/Nature was evil (the film suggests that these thoughts developed long before her son died), whether this was simply a byproduct of her mental illness, or whether the film was actually supporting view of Female as a destructive force and Nature as Satan's sandpit.

The ending is particularly perplexing - in my reading anyway, Trier seems to suggest that once He had gotten rid of She, then Nature could transform and be beautiful and generative again, and souls could literally rise from the dead. Does that mean that Trier thinks that all females are crazy clit-snipping psychopaths, or was She just a bad egg? Was the final act of strangulation an act of misogynistic rage or He's final and most effective form of therapy? It seemed that there were a couple of beats missing in the plot - without them, it just seems like Trier is a sadistic child who couldn't wait to get to the gore.

Almost a day after seeing it, the film has still stayed with me, and I'm drawn back to it, not because I need to see Gainsbourg snip off her clitoris again, but because, like many dreams that we replay in our heads, it has a compelling, addictive (almost fatal?) attraction. In the interim, I'm on the hunt for some criticism of the film written by women - as, predictably, most of the art-wank establishment stuff I've read so far has been written by men.

Antichrist needs neither condemnation or deifying. It's a flawed film, but still a good one, and should be seen and discussed.

It has made me want to hide my nail scissors though.

A Very Bloomsbury Day Out

11 July 2009

Charleston, Lewes, Sussex

Today I fulfilled a longstanding wish to visit Charleston, a farmhouse in Sussex that was the former home of the painter Vanessa Bell and her lover Duncan Grant, and one of the many hangouts of the Bloomsbury Group, including Vanessa's sister Virginia Woolf, and a number of fruity tweed-wearing poofs who flirted with modernism, bisexuality, pacifism and floral wallpaper in the inter War period. As a wannabe literary lesbian, I've been obsessed with the Bloomsbury set since I first discovered Virginia Woolf as an English undergrad at university, and since then, I feel that I've been trying to defend them as revolutionary swingers, rather than as the pretentious middle class twats many of their critics accuse them of being.

By the time I got to university, literary criticism and academia was in the full swing of identity politics and post-colonial theory, and the Canon of dead white male writers was under attack. Even Virginia Woolf, who proved her feminist credentials with her essays A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas and was grudgingly acknowledged as one of the pioneers of modernism, was condemned as stuffy, snobbish, class obsessed and a representative of the white ruling classes. The remaining members of the Bloomsbury Group - art critics Clive Bell and Roger Fry, novelist E M Forster, political theorist Bertrand Russell and Maynard Keynes, professional homosexual and biographer Lytton Strachey, and various other hanger-ons - were written off as hopeless bourgeoise, mannered, pretentious and clinging too easily to their lives of privilege, trust funds and aristocratic hauteur.

Well, bollocks to that, I say. The Bloomsbury Group were certainly snobbish, elitist and clannish. There's evidence that they weren't nice to the more marginal members of the group, including Katherine Mansfield, Lydia Lopokova, Dora Carrington and others, and everyone seems to have been a complete bitch to Lady Ottoline Morrell, who nonetheless was a tireless hostess. And yes, some of the Group's then trendy politics may now be a little dated. But despite this, I've always believed that they deserve our praise and reverence. Why? For dragging England out of Victorianism and into the more promising realms of bohemianism and modernism, for criticising the stuffiness and hyocrisy of the Victorian era. For instigating a more public examination of the life of the mind and the state of consciousness. For analysing systems of political power and finding them wanting. For insisting on the importance of the personal as well as the public. For their experiments with modern living and more open acknowledgements of sexuality (although it did lead to a few quasi-incestuous marriages and a lot of broken plates). For being committed to art as a form of changing the world. For being unapologetically eccentric. For wearing yellow stockings and old curtains in public long before the Von Trapp Family made it cool. And most of all, for all being complete sluts.

The Group's clannishness extends mainly from its associations with Vanessa and Virginia's family. They were the daughters of an extremely scary sounding Victorian patriarch - Sir Leslie Stephen, best known as the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and with a beard and continual expression of melancholy to match his title. Their mother was Julia Cameron, a noted beauty, a cousin of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and a relative of the novelist Thackeray, so put together, they made a Victorian power couple to die for. And they did, eventually.

Being girls, Vanessa and Virginia didn't go to school or university - something that irritated Virginia all her life - but their father encouraged them to read and paint, and seems to have been encouraging of their ambitions to be artists. When their parents died, the Stephens ditched their dark oppressive family mansion in Hyde Park for a flat in Bloomsbury, around the corner from the British Museum, at that time a slightly down at heel part of town and certainly not a place for respectable Victorians to live, and they dragged themselves into the 20th century. The sisters started doing radical things like doing away with napkins at the dinner table and having coffee after dinner. "We were full of experiments and reforms... Everything was going to be new; everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial", Virginia wrote breathlessly in her diary. Meanwhile, their brothers went off to university at Cambridge, and came home for weekends bringing an assortment of faggy students with them, and their regular discussion groups at the Stephens' home was the germ of the Bloomsbury Group. Vanessa became a painter and rapidly embraced post-Impressionism; Virginia started writing reviews and essays; everyone read Freud, became fascinated by sex and subconscious, started reviewing each others' work and falling in and out of each others' beds; and so, a movement was born.

One of my favourite Bloomsbury anecdotes is the Dreadnought Hoax, where Adrian Stephen, Duncan, Virginia and others dressed up as the Emperor of Abyssinia and his suite and managed to fool the British Navy into inviting them aboard the Dreadnought, the biggest and newest of the Navy warships for an inspection and civic reception. It generated enough scandal to be mentioned in the House of Commons. It's an interesting story, because it represents what's most loveable and applaudable about the Bloomsbury Group (their boldness at satirising the establishment, their love of theatricality and spectacle) and also what made so many people dismiss them as irritating over-privileged aesthetes who were more pretentious than they were subversive.

As I never fail to try and argue until I'm blue(stockingened) in the face, the Bloomsbury Group were, on the whole, mostly aware of their privilege and the way that it informed their opinions and sensibility. It's true that they lived within some of the conventions of their time - most of the group kept servants, and Virginia had more than one or two bitchy things to say about people of lower classes, and they did reserve for themselves the roles of prophets and seers.

But rather than lazily pontificating about the ills of modern capitalism as they flopped around in chaise lounges while servants fed them grapes, they did, mostly, use the advantages that their income gave them, and roll up their flowing sleeves and put themselves to work, rethinking the relationships between men and women, the individual and the State, the existence (or not) of God, and debunk notions of patriotism and sexual repression. Virginia, rather than apologising for her wealth, identified it as crucial for her survival as a writer. Drawing on socialism and Keynsian economic theory and her own developing feminist theory, Virginia wrote in A Room of One's Own that for a woman to be able to write, she needs a room of her own (with a lock on the door) and £500 a year. Money wasn't just about being able to afford to shoot your own servants instead of pheasants and buy first editions - it was the key to the social and artistic independence of women.

Money, politics, pacifism, freefalling lust and multiple bed-hopping lead the Group to repair to the countryside - and this is where Charleston comes in. The musical beds goes something like this - Vanessa was married to Clive Bell, and had two sons with him, Quentin and Julian Bell. She fell madly in love with Lytton Strachey's cousin Duncan Grant, a fellow painter, openly bisexual and a sexy bastard to boot, and had a daughter with him, Angelica, who was raised as Bell's daughter (more on that later).

All the Group were pacifists, and the men of conscription age, including Duncan, became conscientious objectors. (There's a wonderful anecdote about Lytton Strachey being summonsed before a county court to get medical exemption for military service - when the magistrate asked "What would you do if you saw a German soldier attempting to rape your sister", he replied, "My Lord, I would attempt to come between them"). To get Duncan out of being called up, or for going to prison for conscientious objection (and so Vanessa could keep Grant around as her boy toy), Vanessa and Duncan moved to Sussex and rented the farmhouse at Charleston, where Duncan could work as a farmer, thus doing necessary work for the war effort, and where Vanessa could raise the children out of London and possibly find time to paint.

Somehow, Clive and Vanessa and Duncan managed to co-exist in the house without ripping each others' faces off (though Stephen assured me today that the house must be full of bad relationship karma). Things became more confusing when Duncan fell in love with David "Bunny" Garnett. Vanessa, desperate not to lose Grant to the lure of cock, allowed Garnett to live with them at Charleston, at at some stage had a brief affair with Garnett herself. Throw in innumerable visitors, half a dozen or so of Clive Bell's girlfriends and a few lovers for each of Vanessa and Grant (who also slept with Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, his own cousin Lytton, and no doubt a few farmboys in between), and it's kinda amazing that any of them found time to write books, paint or feed the children, in between sorting out who they were going to sleep with that night. Somehow, Vanessa and Clive remained married, and Vanessa and Duncan lived at Charleston until their deaths (Vanessa in 1961, Duncan in 1978, as no doubt a very dirty old man).

There was a slightly icky end to all the musical bedding. Angelica, Vanessa and Duncan's daughter, was born in Charleston on Christmas Day 1918, witnessed by Bunny, who is supposed to have commented on how beautiful she was, and how he planned to marry her. Angelica was raised assuming that Clive was her father, and that Duncan was just a fruity friend of Mummy's. She was eventually told when she was 17, which I imagine was rather traumatising, in a Liv Tyler "What? Steve Tyler is my dad?" kinda way. Things became creepier when Angelica ended up marrying Bunny (despite being 26 years younger than him), again with no knowledge that he had been her father's lover, and had four children with him. Unsurprisingly, she hit the roof when she found out the truth, divorced her husband, and in the early 80s (just as a major wave of biographies and critical studies of the Bloomsbury Group were being published), she wrote a Mommy Dearest-esque memoir, Deceived With Kindness, which was essentially a hatchet job about her upbringing (which she claimed to hate) and her fury at her parents for allowing her to live under a lie. Aaaah, bohemianism - it sounds good on paper, but so often leads to tears, broken plates turned into fish mosaics and bitter, face-scratching memoirs. I think the moral of the story is also never to trust a man who's nickname is Bunny.

Charleston is partially a memorial to the Group's experiments in modern living (there are one or two door panels that were apparently kicked in during arguments, and there's only a few pieces of the now priceless hand-painted dinnerware that the ceramicist Clarice Cliffe commissioned Duncan to paint), but also to Vanessa and Duncan's feverish activity. Borrowing a little from the Arts and Crafts movement, which advocated a breakdown between "high" and "low"culture and the development of artistry in everyday household objects, they set about painting the walls, furniture and every other flat surface in the house. (I suspect the children and the occasional farmyard animal may have been covered with paint in passing). Vanessa and Duncan were inspired by modernist art, including a show curated by Clive in 1912 which brought the early modernists and Fauvists (Picasso, Braques, Matisse and friends) to London, shocking the crowds with their bright colours and savage, "primitive" subjects, influenced by primal art and African tribal masks.

Vanessa and Duncan created their own kind of artistic language, creating a house in which everything is beautiful, decorative and somehow still functional and charmingly "home made" and personal. In addition to painting each others' portraits throughout their lives, they each decorated the others' bedrooms - Duncan rather sweetly painted a cockerel above the window of Vanessa's bedroom to wake her up each morning, and a bloodhound to keep guard over her while she slept at night. Even more intriguingly, they designed a number of patterns for fabrics, furnishings and carpets, which were woven by Duncan's mother, Ethel. (Stephen and I decided that Ethel was clearly a pushy Gypsy-esque stage mother who encouraged Duncan to drop his trousers and go hang out with the cool kids. Clearly, it worked. Go, Ethel!). When Clive extended the lease on the house, they built an add-on studio for Vanessa, which lead off her bedroom. (Vanessa and Duncan shared it for a while, but Vanessa eventually headed to the attic to make her own studio, and a proper room of one's own). There's also a gorgeous, rambling English country garden, decorated quirkly with Grecian-style statues, and hand-made mosaics, and a vegetable garden.

After Duncan's death, the house became derelict and was rescued from complete ruin by the Friends of Charleston, and converted into a trust. Following the major revival of interest in the Bloomsbury Group in the 1980s, and the resurgence of interest in Virginia Woolf after The Hours, Charleston is now a regular on the literary pilgrimage map, and a must for would-be bohemians (faux-hemians?) like me who worship at the eccentric charm of the Bloomsbury set.

Visiting the house makes you realise, yet again, the difference between the messy reality of lived experience, and the considerably cleaner, more sanitised and less messy version of "literary life" that gets sold to tourists in a literary museum. Despite the dazzling and incredibly densely detailed interior design and furnishings, the house has the formality and restrictions of any other museum trying to preserve fragile paintings, fraying rugs and valuable paintings - no photographs allowed inside, perspex screens over many of the painted walls, signs saying "Do not touch" on the furniture, and grim faced old ladies who appear noiselessly in doorways or at the bottom of the stairwell, noiselessly gesturing you towards the next room or waving an accusatory finger at you if you dare to rest your fingers on the back of a chair or if your bag accidentally brushes against the curtains. One short, crone-like warden was especially creepy, and had Stephen humming the theme from Don't Look Now whenever she came near.

The need to preserve is understandable, but what's lacking from Charleston is anything like the sense of noise and life and energy described in the letters and accounts from the time - children rushing around, animals wandering in and out of the house, Vanessa simultaneously trying to paint, give Duncan a hand job, milk the cows, and try and be on speaking terms with Duncan's latest London toy boy, the parties, pageants, late night discussions about communism and the war, the arguments, the tears, the deathbed confessions - everything that makes a house live. To fill that in, we have to use our imaginations, which aint so easy when your tour guide is a very nice posh lady in a beige suit who barely speaks above a whisper in case she disturbs the authentic Bloomsbury dust, and there's a gift store full of more beige wearing ladies selling heavily marked up Bloomsbury souvenir wares next door. Charleston's one concession to eccentric theatricals was happening that night - the Quentin Follies, an annual performance of cabaret, music, poetry and general camp old nonsense, commemorating the pageants and parties once thrown by the Group, was taking place in the cow shed that night. Oh yes, to the tune of £40 a head, daaahlings.

A charitable trust must make its money, I suppose, and I'm pleased that the house has lasted long enough after Vanessa's and Duncan's deaths for me to be able to see it - so these are the concessions that need to be made. Plates that were once casually thrown at errant boyfriends are now carefully stacked on side shelves, paintings once cocked at saucy angles are now wired to alarms in case they're brushed, and chairs once casually slouched over by the children are now painstakingly restored and refurbished with specially commissioned fabrics by Laura Ashley. To monumentalise something is to give it a value and a sacredness that it may not have ever had in real life. I suspect that Vanessa and Duncan might both have been horrified at the way in which their own lives - once representative of bohemian rebellion - have in turn become part of the Heritage industry. But as the alternative means letting things be destroyed and lost forever, I guess we'll have to lump the scary midget wardens and security alarms for a while longer.

To its credit, Charleston does manage to retain something of the impromptu home-made aesthetic that feels like (once upon a time, anyway) this was a studio and not a museum. There's the occasional detail that seems random and ramshackle - like the old coat, man's hat and umbrella hanging on a hook in the front door corridor - even though it may have been art designed by curators. The modernist geometric designs painted on the walls of the dining room still show paint drip marks and traces of damp. (Is the damp Heritage as well, now?) The Group's sometimes bizarrely random collection of eclectic design is still displayed - Staffordshire porcelain figurines clashing wonderfully with Duncan's paganist paintings of Grecian goddesses and African masks, and original prints of Picasso and Delacroix paintings squaring off against Vanessa's modernist portraits of family members.

The tour of the house saves the best until last - Vanessa and Duncan's studio, which is a breathtaking shambles of paints, drawings, photographs, easels and quirky details (pictures of cats, a male nude painted by Duncan, a cabinet inherited from Thackeray filled with Duncan's hand painted plates, a photograph of Nijinsky) and large windows letting in the afternoon sun and a view of the garden. Here, more than anywhere else in the house, can you get a sense of life as it might have been lived, in all its complexity and messiness.

In Hermione Lee's wonderful, intelligent and scrupulously researched biography of Virginia Woolf, she describes succinctly but unsentimentally the sense of almost-ness of visiting a literary shrine - the simultaneous feeling of connection with and appreciation of the past, at the same time as the realisation that the past is irretrievable to us. "The places [Woolf] lived in and visited embody my sense of her as at once distant and close," she writes. Visiting Virginia and Vanessa's former childhood holiday home in St Ives in Cornwall (incidentally, one of my favourite parts of England), Lee manages to convince the owner to let her stand in the garden of the house and watch the sun set over the St Ives lighthouse - a view made famous by Virginia in her novel To The Lighthouse:

"I stand in the garden, feeling like a biographer, a tourist and an intruder. It is getting dark. I inspect the stone step below the french window where the Stephen family and their guests were so often photographed. No convenient ghost is going to appear, casting her shadow on the step. However, looking away from the house, over the buildings of the twentieth century, at the distant view from this island look-out, I can allow myself to suppose that I am seeing something of what she saw. My view overlays with, just touches, hers. The view, in fact, seems to have been written by Virginia Woolf. The lighthouse beam strikes round; the waves break on the shore."

I sometimes like to poo-poo the whole notion of visiting literary heritage sites, believing (sometimes, anyway) that an artist's life is to be found solely in their work, and that it's both pointless and reductive to scurry around looking for archival details of the life that's been lived - and in the case of Vanessa, Virginia, Duncan and friends, lives that have been ended long ago.

Yet still I become curious and excited to walk in the same footsteps as writers and artists that I've loved, to see things as they might have seen them, and to somehow solidify the experience of enjoying a painting or a novel by seeing something of the material world from which it came. As a wannabe writer, it's certainly inspiring to see how other artists lived and worked - I terrified Stephen on the train back to London with my plans to Bloomsburyify my spare room, though I'm sure the sensation will wear off by lunchtime tomorrow - but it affects me on a more basic, human level, to know that others have gone before us, ploughing hard courses (and quite a few rent boys) on the way.

Perhaps what makes Charleston burn a little more brightly than the other literary shrines is that the house doesn't just represent the place where the artist lived or once went for a swim in the sea or got inspired to make a work of art - the house is the work of art, and so in that sense, it feels like you're just a little closer to the soul of the artists who lived there.

Entering Charleston is like going into a private world. Now that I'm back in London, it feels like I went back in time for the day, and disappeared into the head of someone's consciousness and read their own private language for an hour or two. I'm grateful for the opportunity to visit the house, sincerely pissed off that I'm several generations too young to have been able to shag Duncan Grant, or dance around in the garden with Virginia waving a scarf, and want to come back again soon.

Madonna Dearest

8 July 2009

London

I've been thinking a lot about Madonna recently - not because she's really worth the effort, or that she's that important in comparison to, oh, I don't know, global warming, world hunger, the credit crunch, or whether I should buy Stone or Ivory coloured Egyptian cotton sheets in the Heals clearance sale - but because the bitch is in the news yet again, and being more irritating than usual.

Only months after the break up of her marriage (of which Sacha Baron Cohen seemed to speak for us all when he said "This recession is affecting everyone... even Madonna has had to get rid of one of her personal assistants. Our thoughts go out to you, Guy Ritchie"), our Madge goes off to Malawi, buys the country and makes a bid to purchase another brown child, rather creepily named Mercy. Then a friend of a friend, Sandra, who's a Jewish sex therapist (long story) thoughtfully lent me My Life With Madonna, a hatchet job of the Material Girl written by her big fat gay brother Christopher Ciccone, which I devoured over a weekend. Throw in Madge's latest tour for her awful new album Sticky & Sweet, thoughtfully timed for Gay Pride weekend in London, and basically she's hanging around more persistently than a bad case of crabs.

Madge has reached an interesting status in the land of celebrity where whatever she touches becomes significant - not because of the inherent interest of the fad in itself, but because she is seen as a pop culture barometer and trendsetter, so she deems it interesting merely by her attention. Much has been written about Madge's apparent ability to latch onto cultural trends just before they hit public consciousness. Fran Liebowitz once wrote derisively, "She finds things five minutes before they hit the mall", meaning, I guess, that Madonna is much closer to bland commercial banality than she is cutting edge.

But, banal or not, on it goes - crucifixes with lace, androgyny, geishas, gay boyfriends, weird new age religions, African babies - she scrapes it off the side of the pavement and makes it cool, and suddenly everyone wants in on the fun. She adopts an African child, suddenly thousands of American couples do the same. She gets interested in Kaballah, and suddenly a remote branch of Jewish mysticism becomes new celebrity religion. In terms of pop culture, only Anna Wintour and Oprah seem to have the same sustained influence - Oprah says "Read this book" and a million middle class housewives read it and make notes in the margins for their book club discussions, and Wintour rules world fashion with a frosty smile and a velvet covered fist of iron. Madge is, if nothing else, impressive.

Of course, now that she's 50, the skin is starting to look a little drawn and stetched, the make up is getting bigger and more drag queeny, and her intensive work out sessions and apparent hunger strike means that she's looking a little too haggard and sinewy. On the front cover of Hard Candy, trussed up in a shiny looking black corset, fishnet stockings and a peroxide blonde hairdo and circus ringmaster's top hat, she looks less and less like a pop icon and more like a transsexual hooker touting for trade outside a truckstop.

Like many a gay boy, I've chimed in with (now increasingly cliched) defences of Madonna and her art. As she gets older, more earnest, less sleazy and attempts to pedal Judaism to Africans, as her desperation to maintain an age-inappropriate gym-toned body as part of her apparent quest to become invincible or immortal continues, and as her albums become more and more like mercenary attempts to stay "down with the kids", I grow tired of our Madge, and secretly enjoy turning to tabloids with photos of her looking like a piece of old gristle. With the schadenfreude coursing through my veins, it was the ideal time to read her brother's bitchy memoir, which is the biggest showbiz hatchet job since Mommy Dearest.

Somewhat predictably, the book is a cringing combination of sour grapes writ large, coupled with the squelching sounds of a cash cow being milked vigorously for maximum profit. Despite Ciccone's frequent protests that he loves his sister and wants to celebrate her as an artist, the book is a bitch fest from start to finish, filled with the kind of catty jibes we all want to make at our siblings but seldom get the opportunity of a multi-million dollar book deal to be able to express. He has a major chip on his shoulder about being her dresser - a job he appears to have decided, no doubt with some therapeutic input - isn't fit for a grown man, and has an ongoing bitch and moan about being underpaid by Madge for doing interior decoration on her first 40,000 houses. (As one dry-eyed review put it, the book might as well have been called, Sis You Didn't Pay Me Enough). It gets progressively less interesting as he gets written out of her life - apparently because Madge has a problem with his escalating drug habits - but comes crawling back for every crumb he's thrown. He desperately tries to make a big deal of Guy Ritchie's supposed homophobia (apparently his best man made a joke about Guy being a "poofter") which never registers as shockingly as he tries to make it, and crucially misses the opportunity to try and explain why Madonna - once an interesting pop chameleon - has become just another religious fanatic peddling Kabbalah bottled water and wearing red wrist bands to ward away the Evil Eye while she buys up her United Colours of Benneton family. It's possible that by this point, he's just too far away from the sacred table - even though he's probably the guy who bought her the table from Sothebys.

Despite Ciccone's efforts, the book has an unintended effect that's common to many a celebrity slaughter story - the celebrity under attack emerges as considerably more impressive than the embittered sibling/nanny/life coach wants you to accept. It's clear that Madonna treated her brother as an employee, and held him at arm's length for years, drawing him close and pushing him away when it suited her. It also sounds like he was a whining deeply co-dependent little mumma's boy who wanted spanking as much as Madge could dole out the discipline, so to that extent I think Ciccone has got the sibling relationship with her that he deserves (whether he knows this or not). The book also underscores a horrible truth that even he can't help but admit - that without his sister, he'd be a nobody, and that the only reason anyone is buying his silly book is to find out more about his sister, rather than about him. He flatters himself at one stage that people want to know what it's like to be Madonna's brother. Chrissy, my love, we really don't care about you - we're just using you as an excuse to get closer to HER.

For those who love Madonna, there's probably enough in the book (whether intended by Ciccone to be in there or not) confirming her status as a confident businesswoman and a smooth operator. For those who think she's the Antichrist, it confirms everything we were hoping was true - that she's an insecure emotionally frosty control freak who only does something after pre-calculating how it might advantage her, frequently flies into irrational I'm A Celebrity tantrums, and lives in a myopic bubble of her own creation.

On a deeper level, it works as a dirty pleasure and something of a wish fulfillment exercise as you observe someone trashing a sibling with a fury and lack of caution that children of large families like me can only dream of. On a much sadder note, the book is so brutal that it's overwhelmingly clear that Ciccone has permanently estranged himself from his sister, from which it seems impossible for him to recover from, and placed the other members of his family in the middle of a cold war which it will be unbearable to try and negotiate through. So, farewell, cash cow - I hope he milked it for all it's worth.

In the meantime, I sincerely hope Madonna will stop adopting children, or else we'll have to ask the UN to go in and take the bitch out with a round of ammo.

Sweatbox London

1 July 2009

London

London is burning up in summer heat, and as usual, no one has any idea what to do. The last two weeks have shown temperatures in the late 20s and occasionally early 30s - mild by tropical standards, but sweltering in England, and as usual, public services are completely unprepared to deal with anything resembling a heat wave or a dramatic change of temperature.

Heat. Drama. Change. They're things that the English sensibility doesn't seem very well equipped to deal with. It appears that the perfect English weather is an overcast 14 degrees, with maybe a slight threat of rain - just enough to encourage you to wear your beige Mac when you leave the house. Despite the endless moaning about the vagarities and changeability of English weather, and its propensity to rain, I'm not sure the English could deal with unambiguously hot sunny weather all year round, despite the number of chavvy families who head off to the Costa del Sol for August. In London, the fat lazy bastards running London Underground seem able to seize on any fractional change in climate as an excuse for explaining why the Tube is packed up. A heavy snow fall this year brought the country to a standstill, and made England the laughing stock of Europe for not knowing how to defrost their way out of a storm. If the temperatures raise about the mid 20s, track lines start to buckle and trains have to crawl along at snails pace. Again, we're going back to that mythical not-so-sunny 14 degree day that's supposedly the English ideal. Anything slightly more dramatic will cause palpitations, breakdowns, and no doubt another round of signal failures.

Whether it's because of stoicism or just a compete inability to deal with the realities of global warming, London's underground and most buses still don't have air conditioning. London Underground have promised it will be in place sometime before the Olympics (presumably so the millions of tourists expected in the city won't die of heatstroke while trying to get to the Olympic Village to watch greyhound racing) but not for at least another year. When it's 35 degrees Centigrade on a train at 7.30am in the morning and you're sharing a carriage with 200 overheated and heavily sweaty City workers, this news isn't exactly encouraging.

Even less helpful is London Underground's rather maudlin attempts to respond to the hot weather by putting 1950s era fans in the underground walkways (a waste of energy and space), or by making unbelievably irritating announcements like "During this warm weather, it is advisable to carry a bottle of water with you" - wonderfully unhelpful when you're trapped on a stalling train without a bottle of water, and there are no vending machines or water supplies underground except for the occasional shop (that usually takes the opportunity to bump up the price of bottled water during summer).

Still, let's not overlook the upside of the summer weather, which, when you're lucky enough to escape the office or the train, has been glorious. In this respect, it helps living 4 minutes away from a public park crammed with cute shirtless Australian surfers. It's also a fabulous excuse to catch up on your summer theatre schedule, as you can usually be assured of air conditioning in the theatre. With this in mind, I took a trip down nostalgia lane and queued up at the Donmar Warehouse on Saturday morning to get tickets to the very sold out season of Ibsen's A Doll's House starring X Files alumni Gillian Anderson. Sci-fi geeks were in double raptures over the presence of not only Agent Scully on stage, but also Christopher Eccleston (aka Dr Who), leading to a fascinating combination of assuredly middle aged middle class theatre goers in to see a nice bit of Ibsen, crossing wires furiously with 15 year old geek girls from Arkansas who are orgasmic with delight at seeing two sci-fi TV stars in the naked and trembling flesh. It also helped that they're both fantastic in the play.

On the downside, I had to go out of town last week to a meeting in Birmingham. Because the summer sun isn't guaranteed in London (and last year's summer was over in 3 weeks), we tend to want to stay around and catch the rays when they come out. Going to a shit city in the Midlands where it's almost guaranteed to be colder and more miserable isn't this little brown hen's idea of fun. And so it was - leaving London on a gloriously sunny Tuesday morning to get into a dull overcast day in Birmingham, to spend the day indoors (admittedly air conditioned) listening to fat middle aged businessmen droning on about construction. The meeting finished by 3pm, but because my boss wasted time schmoozing potential clients, we missed the 3.10pm fast train back to London. Ne'er mind, we thought - there's a train every 20 minutes. Alas, we were wrong - the next three trains were cancelled, due to something inexplicable called "signal failure". Ho hum. Eventually, the dwarves of British Rail sent a small toy train of the kind that I think were sold to the Indian Government in the 1940s, which regularly break down in remote parts of Bangalore - helpfully, it had no air conditioning, no buffet car, and stopped for half an hour in a remote rural station in the full glare of mid afternoon sunshine, so we were roasted like lobsters. A journey that should have taken 90 minutes took almost 4 hours, leaving me feeling tired, dehydrated, cranky and with a burning desire to slap someone working for British Rail.

As I crawled onto the packed Northern Line and emerged into Leicester Square, I decided to walk down Charing Cross Road to Trafalgar Square and grab a drink before I walked to my 8.20pm date at the National Film Theatre. I was still muttering and cursing like a crazy person, sick of the heat and the crowds and the general air of stupidity and slowness that seems to descend in Central London during tourist season. I was saved by walking - literally - into an open-air screening of the Royal Opera House's production of La Traviata, which was being beamed onto an enormous screen in Trafalgar Square for several thousand seated and standing spectators. It was a glorious sunny evening, and for half an hour, Trafalgar Square was the best place in the world to be, and the most appropriate stage to contain the camp rapturousness of Verdi's opera. Renée Flemingwas in glorious voice as Violetta, and Joseph Calleja had the kind of voice you just wanted to deep fry and eat on sight. It was heavenly. This, I thought is why one lives in London and even occasionally braves the indignities of train travel in the Midlands.

My evening movie date was with a friend, but also with Cary Grant in North by Northwest. After a long sweaty sticky day, here was a hero for all times - dapper, witty, immaculately dressed in his blue suit, and apparently able to fall down Mount Rushmore without so much as breaking a sweat or mussing his hairdo. Cary, je t'aime.

Book Club Part Deux: Clotted Cream and the Holocaust

20 June 2009

London

After a cancellation due to an emergency trip to New York, a couple of rehearsals of scone baking, and a long distance phone call from Ile de Re to discuss the right kind of tea, the second meeting of our book club (tentatively named the Fag Bangles?) finally came to order at Gay Stephen's all white minimalist mausoleum in Lowgate (aka Archway). Our book this time around, selected by GS, was The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, John Boyne's deceptively simple little fable about a young German boy who stumbles into an existential crisis in the middle of Auschwitz. Stephen made perfect scones and chocolate brownies, and served champagne and tea made from rose petals that had apparently been rubbed between the thighs of French virgin nuns, which seemed gloriously inappropriately decadent, given the subject matter under discussion, and in between comparing notes about our recent meals at the MoMa restaurant and comparing photos of Annabel splayed on the floors of hotels at 3am looking for room keys, we

It wasn't a book I was familiar with or even particularly drawn to, and only came on my radar because of the recent film version, (which, unlike the book, was universally reviled by critics for supposedly sentimentalising the Holocaust.) The book was applauded, and at [ ] was a fairly easy afternoon's read. It's a book that tends to divide audiences in much the same way as The Sixth Sense did - either you worked out within the first fifteen minutes that Bruce Willis was a ghost, or you got a big surprise when the plot twist was revealed at the end. Or, as Ange explained it, "it's like when you watched City of Angels, either you saw the truck coming [that squashed Meg Ryan on her goddam bicycle] or you didn't." Personally, I was so irritated with Meg that I was silently praying for a truck to run her over, or maybe a bus, but that's another story.

With Boyne's sing-songy fairy tale like narrative, I was never sure whether we were supposed to be lulled into the childlike sense of comfort of having a story told to us, so that we wouldn't clock the reality of Bruno's situation, or whether he assumed that we would read the narrative as adults, clock the deliberate naivite of Bruno's perspective, and pick up the clues that he was dropping about what was really going on.

The four of us had mixed reactions, which says as about the way we all choose to read as it does about Boyne's cleverly ambiguous storytelling. Six years of law school and a healthy dose of critical analysis means that I'm now apparently unable to read with an "innocent" unenquiring mind, and I'm continually scanning the landscape for clues about what the story is, what the author is doing, what the sub-text is, and whether what I'm being told matches up with the suspicions I can smell. So, when Bruno finds out that Ishmael, the little boy in the striped pyjamas on the other side of the barbed wire fence, has the same birthday as him, or when Bruno had his head shaved to get rid of lice and became even more identical looking, I suspected that some kind of life-swap was going to occur. Gay Stephen, on the other hand, was able to suspend disbelief and express surprise at the book's devastating ending, in a way I'm quite envious of.

It's not exactly a major contribution to the genre of Holocaust literature, but it does add something to the genre of Holocaust writing in that it provokes the reader into seeing the Holocaust through the eyes of someone other than the victim, which we agreed is an important perspective to try and consider if we're going to try and understand why the Holocaust happened. I was especially struck by the way the book explains how hate is taught, how Bruno is encouraged not to see Jews as human, and how bad things are allowed to flourish if people just accept the status of their lives as they are and don't ask questions. In the end, it's Bruno's empathy for Ishmael that "saves" him morally and gives the book its quiet sense of moral outrage, and it struck us that this is the point with which we all have to struggle

Ange had a fascinating perspective on Bruno's story, as a member of the white middle class growing up in apartheid South Africa, and her sense of confusion when she was being taught the codes of racial segregation in school, and searching for justifications that were never provided. Her example seemed like proof that it's possible to question the injustices of our situation, even if we're living comfortably and there's no incentive to see things from a more uncomfortable angle, which was strangely comforting.

More problematic was whether the book actually represents the "see no evil hear no evil" attitude of Nazi Germany, or whether it's a perspective as worthy of consideration as, say, the memoir of a Holocaust survivor. None of us have Jewish heritage, but we imagined that if you had a history of relatives who were sent to the gas chambers, you'd possibly be less interested in a story written from the perspective of a concentration camp guard's son. Then again, how will we ever understand why holocausts happen - both in WWII and in all the depressing reoccurrences since - unless we hear from the baddies corner?

That lead us into an interesting conversation about whether the sins of the fathers are (or should) be visited on their descendants, whether Holocaust guilt exists in modern-day Germany, and whether the book's (slightly too trite and obvious) ending lays down some kind of challenge to the reader:

"Of course all of this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could really happen again.

Not in this day and age."

The depressing thing is that it has, many many times. Boyne doesn't answer the great question of "why", but in the book, but - without wanting to turn his work into something trite like a self-help leaflet - he seems to lay down a template for empathy, and the importance of questioning the status quo.

And the scones, generously doused in clotted cream and Bonne Maman raspberry jam, were fucking great. We took our plenary session in the Waterlow Gardens just up the road from Stephen's flat, rolled down the odd grassy slope, took some stupid pictures on Ange's iPhone (while I silently wondered how much longer I'll be able to restrain myself and remain iPhoneless), and agreed on Ange's selection for our next meeting: Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled. Like ten thousand American Indians, I have my reservations... about self-help books as appropriate reading for a book club, but since the four of us speak in psychobabble all the time to each other anyway, it probably won't be too much of a departure. We'll see, I guess. But it was a glorious afternoon.

Word has spread of the fabulousness of the book club, and we seem to have a long list of gay men (predictably) who want to join. As the camp commandant (or, at least, a camp commandant), I'm saying a big ol' no to having any more book bitches join, at least until we've completed a rotation of the four of us first, which probably makes me mean and judgey, but seems sensible. It's enough of a headache trying to organise four busy beavers to get together once a month, and I fear that with too many gays, it'll just turn into an endlessly art directed Martha Stewart feature. It always pays to keep the gays hungry and gagging for it. Mwah ha ha.

From Whoopi to Tilly

6 June 2009

London

Sister Act: The Musical, Palladium

Grasses of a Thousand Colours, Royal Court

One of the fantastic things about London is that, on any given night, you can throw 60 quid in the direction of any number of entertainments. Theatre, musicals, comedy, opera, clubbing, tranny cabaret, snorting coke off a 16 year-old's ass in a nightclub - it's all available for the taking. At a price, of course. The downside of London is that because you're competing for space with 6 million other people, you generally need to be organised and plan ahead if you want to take in a show. Being a Type A control freak with hints of obsessive compulsiveness, I take this kind of forward planning for show bookings to the level of coordinating a military operation. Which is why days like today, when tickets to a matinee of the new Sister Act musical just magically appeared the day before, are so much fun.

Kerry, a friend of my current housemate and fellow train wreck Annabel teaches at a posh London school, and one of the parents of the over-privileged brats she teaches inexplicably gave Kerry house seats to the Saturday matinee of Sister Act, the Whoopi Goldberg produced musical version of the 1992 film, which opened in the West End last week.

Regrettably, Annabel had a date with her five year old cousin (let's call her Daisy), who she was supposed to babysit (or was it a date a bottle of wine? Possibly the two together?). The thought of Annabel being around young children is kinda frightening to me - I guess you just have to know Annabel to get this - and the thought of her babysitting made me think more of Elizabeth Taylor on an all-night whiskey bender in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? rather than Mary Poppins. She assured me she was going to have lots of fun with Daisy, who she adores. I got to sit through lunch with Annabel a few weeks ago (I ordered Eggs Benedict, she ordered a beer and a salad, and proceeded to pick at both with her sunglasses on) and her cousin, and they were pretty cute together, and even exchanged hair bobbles. Rather more worryingly, Annabel appeared completely uninterested in Daisy's infant brother (let's call him Max), who she completely ignored for the whole lunch, as she and Daisy sat rolling their eyes at each other and talking about how stupid boys are. Precisely how Annabel planned to babysit both of them together, I wasn't sure, but I had visions of Annabel mixing martinis with Daisy using a little dolly's tea set while Max was gagged and tied to his highchair in the next room. Whatever.

Anyway, Annabel needed a nice way to tell Kerry that she wasn't going to get down with the hoodies because she had to go to suburbia and babysit Daisy and Max. Possibly realising that Kerry would find this excuse highly improbable, Annabel hatched a cunning, mutually beneficial plan to send me, her designated fag bangle, in her place. Annabel has a convenient but rather patronising theory that gay men are all like Jack from Will & Grace, and as such, is forever waving shiny pieces of paper in front of me saying "Look honey, something sparkly and pretty" in a breathy Karen voice, and expecting me to jump up and down excitedly like a hyperactive cocker spaniel. It's at this point that I usually yell at her and tell her to clean her hair out of the bathroom plughole or collect her panties that've been drying on the heater. Unfortunately, I do conform to most of the stereotypes she (half-ironically) has about gay men, so I don't always win the argument (dammit!) On this occasion, however, getting free tickets to a West End musical involving singing nuns was like being given a big gay Christmas present, so I dutifully clapped my little hands together and we started planning outfits for what I would wear to the show, while she wondered whether she would need to Hoover her vagina in preparation for the weekend.

I was slightly hesitant about going to another musical based on a film. I'd been to see the musical of Priscilla a few weeks before, and hated how the edginess and queer inflections of the film had been ironed out to present a sexless camp hens' night in Blackpool version of dragdom, with karaoke versions of pop songs replacing the plot or anything resembling a heart or a brain. I also felt kinda nervous that, since the tickets were a freebie, that I'd somehow be compelled to smile a lot and pretend I was enjoying myself, which I'm not great at faking. It's like being the only sober, bored person in a barful of screamingly drunk friends who are all having the times of their lives - a situation I've been in many times, by the way. Still, I was determined not to shit all over everyone else's good times (I save that for when I'm out with other gay men) and I hoped that the Whoopi humour of the film would somehow rub off into the musical.

Fortunately, I loved it. Goldberg and her producers took the sensible step of hiring a real songwriter - Alan Menken, who wrote Little Shop of Horrors, among other things and lyricist [ ] to construct a proper musical, rather than just re-hashing the film screenplay and soundtrack, and took the brave step of reconfiguring the story so that it wasn't just refried Whoopi.

Admittedly, the first couple of scenes weren't inspiring. Rather than hiring a mid-40s washed up comedienne in the Whoopi role, they hired a stunning looking 25 year old woman called Patina Miller with lungs of brass and a Lauyn Hill/Aretha Franklin-esque voice that blows the roof off. Miller was immediately compelling, but already the humour of the film seemed to be missing. The joke of Whoopi was that she was was over the hill, clearly not that talented a lounge singer and therefore even less likely to be able to pass as a nun. Miller, by comparison, seemed only minutes away from winning American Idol, getting a recording contract and singing "Happy Birthday Mr President" for Obama's next birthday. It didn't matter - Miller was immediately compelling, with a voice that was literally jaw-dropping to listen to, even though her idea of characterisation seemed to comprise largely of strutting around in leopardskin, doing "black talk" and snapping her fingers, apparently learned from re-watching 70s blaxploitation films like Cleopatra Jones and Foxy Brown.

Things didn't really hit their stride until Delores gets to the convent, encounters the singing nuns, and attempts to fit her soul sister routine into a nun's habit. It's here that the music and writing really started to soar, with an incredibly funny number where the nuns take turns to explain what brought them over to the faith - my favourite lines were one addled-looking nun who sung "I had a revelation/When I went off my medication", and another who trilled that her family thought she looked like Sally Field (a fun nod to The Flying Nun that was only picked up by the gays and the old ladies in the audience).

From there, the 70s disco/Motown inspired tunes became bigger, bolder and badassier, with some booty shaking choreography, and a set design and wardrobe that lunged merrily into retro kitsch. There aren't many musicals that can boast a 40 foot high rotating silver-plated Virgin Mary. At times, the attempt to beef the secondary characters' roles up to make sufficient material for 20 or so musical numbers seemed a little stretched - each of the male bad guys got a song, which seemed a little unnecessary, and there was a dweebish cop who provided a rather anaemic love interest (though he had a great afro).

But in the end, Sister Act delivered, not because it was the most sophisticated musical ever written, but because it it had everything you want from a musical - high spirits, a bootylicious heroine, some self-knowing silliness and a big heart. Best of all was the mighty, magnificent Miller, who ate up the role with limitless energy, and a show that was admittedly cheesy, but still full of heart. I yawned my way through Priscilla and Wicked and pretty much every other karaoke musical I've seen, admiring the pyrotechnics and the flashing lights, but feeling bereft of any kind of thrill or tug, however sentimental, on the heartstrings. Sister Act blasted us out of the theatre on the kind of high I don't remember feeling for a while, and had this little faggy white boy strutting like a soul sister for at least a couple of hours.

Later on came the main feature - the play I'd booked in to see several weeks ago, which couldn't have been more of a contrast from Sister Act. My lovely friend James, a theatre director who's now working for the Arts Council in one of those fun-sounding but terribly paid arts development roles, organised for us to go and see one of the plays in the Royal Court's Wallace Shawn season.

Wallace Shawn is a tiny, gnome-like American actor who, despite looking like he should be living in someone's garden holding a fishing rod and despite also having a persistent lisp, is a noted Shakespearean stage actor, and has made his name playing small quirky men in film, most memorably as the comical chess-playing villian in The Princess Bride. He is, naturally, very funny, and seems to realise his career is itself a joke, given his physical improbability as a star. I didn't realise he was also a playwright, but, well, he is, and one of the queens who directs at the Royal Court seems to think he's the hottest thing since pastrami on rye, so there's a whole season this summer devoted to the man's work. The play James and I went to see, called (somewhat pompously) Grasses of a Thousand Colours, had the intriguing casting combination of Shawn himself, plus Miranda Richardson and... Jennifer Tilly.

James didn't warn me until we got to the theatre that the play was 3 and a quarter hours long, which seemed, if nothing else, a little indulgent. The press notes promised that the play was obsessed with penises, which was a comfort. "There'd better be nudity," I muttered as we climbed the 14,000 steps to the Jerwood Upstairs theatre and took our seats, though we were hoping that it would be Miranda and Jennifer, not Wallace, who got naked. It was your usual Saturday night crowd at the Royal Court - press agents, one of the Fiennes brothers, and Alan Rickman sitting a few rows ahead of us. It wasn't until halfway through the play that I realised the woman sitting on the end of our row with the loud, slightly grating donkey-like braying laugh, was Meg Tilly, Jennifer's sister, the one-time big 80s film star of The Big Chill and Agnes of God. Well, of course she was in the audience, wasn't she - supporting Jennifer, who despite being the slightly trashier Tilly sister, seems to have had the most enduring career legacy.

The play was... well, really really fucking long, for a start. I generally don't have a problem with long plays, and if it's something gripping like Angels In America or Arthur Miller or a Robert LePage epic, or Helen Mirren chewing up scenery in Mourning Becomes Electra, then I can quite happily watch all night. By contrast, Grass of A Thousand Colours, would probably have been better titled had Wallace left off the "Gr" at the start. The play was essentially a series of monologues, divided into three one-hour acts, that at times seemed like they would never end. Wallace played a quirky, hyper-literate and totally cock-obsessed scientist, narrating a long (long, long) tale about his sexual adventures with three different women - his wife Cerise (Richardson, strange and feline), a foxy mistress (the ever-foxy Tilly) and some other woman who was so insignificant onstage that I can't remember her character or name.

The actors mostly addressed the audience directly, which initially kept our interest up, but seemed confrontational and made the process of entering into the world of the play - a strange, possibly futuristic world where bestiality and incest seemed to be commonplace and where women carried around business cards engraved with pictures of their vaginas. On and on and on Wallace talked about his penis, and the apparent fascination it created to women much more attractive than he was.

The writing was often very funny, with some abrupt changes in tone and subject - a discussion about environmental science would pause, and then begin again with "As the strip clubs didn't open until 4pm...", but otherwise seemed aimless, directionless and hugely self-indulgent, with diminishing returns for our long and patient attention. The theme, if you could call it that, seemed to be some kind of quasi-ecological warning about what happens when you mess with nature. Shawn's character had created drugs to make animals eat each other, thus reducing world famine, creating the odd killer intestinal virus in the process, and as a result, the animals were fighting back.

The second act really disappeared into surreality, as Shawn described meeting Tilly's character, having sex with her, and then going to a castle in a forest where he has an orgy with farmyard animals, including a mysterious white cat. It's unclear what's real and what's imaginary, until Tilly, who's been asleep on the couch for most of the act, wakes up and describes following Shawn into the forest, and taking a seat at the animal orgy banquet table, verifying that we are no longer in Kansas anymore and that the play has descended into some kind of weird alternate reality.

Tilly, whose career has mostly been typecast playing clueless sexpots and vamps, isn't exactly the first name that springs to mind when you think "Hmmm, we need to cast a new play at the Royal Court", but in that scene, she proved why she was perfectly cast. Despite her rather limited career, and her apparent typecasting (again) as a pneumatic sex pot, she was weird, quirky, sexy, compelling, and kinda scary. She was playing the mistress to Shawn's sexual fantasy, but you sensed that she'd be just as likely to rip out your heart and eat it in front of you as a form of foreplay as she is to play footsie under the table. She's a truly eccentric and original actress - the gravelly gin-and-cigarette voice, the wide-eyed Betty Boop face, her strange intonations and line deliveries, as if she's just landed on Earth in her own spaceship and she's trying to learn English, and a foxy but very odd sexuality. Shawn clearly knew what he was doing, and although she is, truly, one of the last actresses I expected to see on stage at the Royal Court, but she was fantastic, and a welcome bolt of adrenaline and kookiness to lift our interest in an otherwise stale sexual monologue.

It was even more fun having Tilly playing opposite Miranda Richardson, an actress who's no less eccentric but who seems to move in a different hemisphere to Tilly. Almost inevitably, as part of the rather tired middle-aged male fantasies of Shawn's characters, all the women end up getting it on together, in a Playboy version of lesbianism that seemed a little, well... 70s, but it the sheer pleasure of seeing Tilly and Richardson on stage together made up for the embarrassing pussy jokes.

There's a very funny interview Tilly gave recently in The London Paper, where she generously laments her own LA cluelessness:

"Everyone in this play is so intellectual. Miranda knows so much about literature and art. I spent too much time in LA so my brain is like tofu. I'm trying to have a conversation and I'm like 'so, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston...', and they're like, 'oh, de Kooning and Proust...'"

Having two genuinely eccentric actresses on stage made me realise how rare eccentricity and offbeat humour in actresses, who mostly have to subscribe to the three great stereotypes of Hollywood women, as quoted by Goldie Hawn in The First Wives' Club: Debutante, district attorney and Driving Miss Daisy. Apart from Tilly, I can only count eccentric funny oddball actresses on one hand - Dianne Weist, Diane Keaton, Angelica Huston, Tilda Swinton and Joan Cusack, and most of them come from the cinema of the 70s and 80s. Even in theatre, where roles for women are more expansive, the list of nutjobs is as big as it should be - so bravo to Shawn for giving Tilly an unexpected spotlight in this otherwise tedious play.

After what felt like about 14 and a half hours, it was finally over, and it was "revealed" (well, I'd guessed it in Act 1) that Miranda was in fact the white cat, and all the sex Wallace had been having with the cat was actually with his-ex-wife-Miranda-as-the-cat. There were some fun videotaped images of Miranda with cat make-up on, and she appeared to look on calmly while Wallace described everyone else died of some nasty intestinal virus, but all in all, it was a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Now if only it'd had a few Motown numbers from Sister Act to liven things up, then we'd have really had a party goin' on.

But that's what I love about London. You can see a glitter-strewn disco nun musical in the afternoon, and watch Jennifer Tilly and Miranda Richardson getting it on at the Royal Court in the evening. Long may the fun continue.

The Prime of Miss Susan Boyle

1 June 2009
London

I returned from New York just in time to see the long-salivated over final of Britain's Got Talent, an otherwise inane TV show that took the established format of talent competition as light entertainment (as once demonstrated by harmless fluff like Opportunity Knocks) and sheep-dipped it in the gladiatorial brutality of Big Brother-era psychological mindfucking.

Programmes like these are successful because they play out (and play into) familiar archetypes that we find comforting. The extraordinary success of this series was due almost entirely to Susan Boyle, an unassuming and rather dowdy middle-aged woman from a remote part of Northern Scotland, who dazzled the judges and audiences worldwide by letting rip with a powerful, Broadway-style soprano. Boyle's version of Les Mis powerballad I Dreamed A Dream has been downloaded over 4 million times, and made Boyle an instant celebrity, and had me weeping into my hanky as I watched her on my Mac in a Sheffield hotel room. (I suspect I may have been crying more because I was in Sheffield than because of Susan, but that's another story...). 

Boyle's victory in her initial heat raised some critical self-examination (but not much) from the liberal press, as pundits pointed at her as an example of the dangers of judging people on appearances, and how the sheer magnitude of Boyle's talent was a welcome respite from an entertainment industry that seems to exist on PR puffery and too much Botox. Mostly, though, people were just delighted that the TV show, normally a guilty pleasure in which we laugh at talentless wannabes sweating under bright stage lights, for once seemed to be a magic carpet that transported an unassuming talent from obscurity into a brave new world where her gifts would be appreciated and applauded. The reason we all watched, and cried, was as much for the surprising discovery of the talent hidden beneath the "ugly duckling" as for the talent itself. Boyle was the little battler who emerged from nowhere to become a star - surely still one of the most powerful myths of self-betterment that our culture clings to, and a talisman that life can be improved, happiness achieved and life isn't always so shit as we think it is. ITV were there to be both circus ringmaster and keeper of dreams - and I'm sure their through-the-roof ratings helped their advertising revenue.

But life as a television celebrity is dangerous territory, and, sadly but predictably, the worm turned. After the initial flush of success, out came the predictably nasty comments from members of the press who should've known better, and members of the public who clearly didn't know any better - that Boyle was ugly and frumpy, that her virginity was a joke, that she was apparently unfamiliar with tweezers and waxing, and that her comments and personality revealed her lack of sophistication in worldliness. In other words, all the qualities that Boyle was initially loved for, became a stick that she was beaten with.

And then it all came crashing down this weekend. Rumours were circulating that Boyle had been nervous and erratic before the final on Saturday, and was being placed under enormous pressure to perform on the night. Despite performing magnificently, Boyle lost the winning title in Saturday's big final, and looked tired and devastated, though she cheerily put on a brave face for the cameras, and everyone went "Awwww, what a good loser she is". Perhaps even more than stories of underdog success, the Brits love a beautiful (or even an unbeautiful) loser. This morning painted a much less photogenic picture, as Boyle was examined by psychiatrists at her hotel after "acting strangely" and was eventually admitted to the Priory, the ultra trendy nuthouse for all A-list celebrities when they're feeling a little battered by life in front of the Daily Mail photographers. Boyle's dream had apparently gone sour, and she wasn't quite the stoical and gracious loser we thought she was.

Almost inevitably, out comes the hand-wringing analysis about how wicked reality TV is, as pundits have reached for the let-bash-the-media stick and complain about the decline of moral standards on television, blaming ITV, blaming the advertisers, blaming the tabloids, blaming Simon Cowell and his permatanned smirk - blaming anyone but ourselves.

Whether or not this is true, what dazzles and infuriates me is why noone realised this before now. But then, that would've interfered with our entertainment. As long as Boyle was a success, we were happy to watch Britain's Got Talent, reassured by the myth that she was following her dream, that talent was being rewarded and that the underdog was finally getting her dues, and we didn't need to feel guilty for her being placed under massive pressure. What noone before now seemed to stop and consider - apparently not until Boyle is in the throes of exhaustion or a nervous breakdown - is that these shows function on creating enormous psychological stress, which gets sold as entertainment.

The drama of Britain's Got Talent comes from creating competition, putting the contestants literally under the spotlight, and feeding on their tension and nerves. The competition becomes not just about talent, but about endurance to hold up against extreme stress. As a culture, we're used to applauding pluck and endurance against hardships, and seeing the little guy pull through against the odds.

Over the last few weeks, Boyle - a woman who has spent most of her life as a near recluse, and who hasn't had any formal performing arts training - has been expected to react to this competition with limitless depths of calm, poise and commitment, to battle on in stoic Celtic warrior queen fashion and not to display un-TV friendly emotions like aggression or anxiety. (Then again, had she lost it on screen, I'm sure this would've made an even bigger ratings hit).

What we don't stop to consider is that not everyone is psychologically equipped to handle that much stress, and the likelihood of appearing on a reality TV show and suffering some kind of nervous condition - depression, anxiety, hysteria, maybe even psychosis - is just as probable as winning the big prize and beaming a photogenic smile at the cameras.

Boyle's life has been suddenly and inalterably changed. Her concept of privacy will be invaded at a level that most of us can't imagine. Her every move over the last few weeks has been scrutinised and debated and made the subject of betting shop odds. This has been an unbelievable amount of change and stress, that would freak out the most psychologically well-adjusted person. From what we know of Boyle's life to date, she may be especially vulnerable to stress and to psychological problems, because she seems so innocent of and unused to the hard-as-nails soundbite-friendly Youtube exposed modern world. Is it any wonder she cracked under the pressure?

What irritates me most about the analysis I've read is that noone has stopped to query how exploitative and abusive these shows are, as long as the winners look happy and noone craps themself on camera. I have no doubt that there are many other reality TV "stars" who have experienced some form of mental illness after their 15 seconds of fame, but their stories aren't usually told, because noone likes stories about a sore loser.

Now that the truth is out, hopefully we, as an audience, will take more responsibility for what we watch, and realise the potentially devastating consequences of encouraging these shows.
I wish Boyle a speedy recovery, and every success with a promising recording career. I hope that whoever is around her makes sure she's treated gently and not exploited further.

Oh, and as a final ridiculousness, there are plans afoot to make a biopic of Boyle's brief ascendency to media fame. Catherine Zeta-Jones is tipped to play Boyle - perhaps getting into a fat suit so that she can "play ugly" and win another Oscar? This appears to be the artistic equivalent of a dog eating its own shit, and a sure sign that we're too bored and lazily voyeuristic for our own good, and all on the road to Hell. For God's sake, I beg ye all - turn off the tube, and watch porn instead. At least it's honest about being exploitation.

The Joys of Afternoon Tea

31 May 2009
London

"Under certain circumstances," wrote Henry James in the first lines of A Portrait of a Lady, a classic I unaccountably didn't read at university and have just started (and am loving), "there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."

Bravo, Henry - I'm with you, girlfriend. Miss James, who from what I can tell was something of a bitchy queen, carefully disguised in layers of crinoline and some really really long sentences, goes on: "There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not - some people of course never do - the situation is in itself delightful".

I come from a family of afternoon tea lovers. My mother, who I blame for all my most interesting neuroses and addictions, was a mighty defender of the tradition of afternoon tea. She owns at least three tea services - one which is so flash that it's "the good tea service" and sits in a china cabinet and only gets used when a member of the family dies - can rustle up a round of scones and pancakes in less than the time than it takes most of us to shampoo, and knows her Royal Doulton from her Wedgwood. I'm not sure whether it's something to do with my parents both being raised on farms, but they've always been "lunch" and afternoon tea people than evening dinner people - possibly because they knew they had to get home to tend to flocks or get up really early to milk 400 cows by sunrise. Whatever the reason, they love socialising through the day, and since I was very small, has always "done" afternoon tea on weekends for family and friends.

Unsurprisingly, I love afternoon teas. I also love morning teas, elevenses, late lunches, brunch, breakfast (before it became replaced by brunch), working lunches, dinner, late night snacks and midnight feasts. But most of all, I love afternoon tea, if nothing else but for the hour of the day, which seems to lend itself to relaxation and eating carbs - the rigours of the afternoon are over, the evening awaits, but (in summer anyway) the sun is still shining and the atmosphere feels laden with... well, humidity, usually, but a sense of after-lunch fullness and contentment, the promise of late night naughtiness, and the delight of catching one's breath.

James, the eccentric old lush, agrees with me. He describes a particular fruity afternoon tea at the start of the novel:-

"the implements of the little feast [being] disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense, turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come and which is perhaps the chief sourse of one's enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o'clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could only be an eternity of pleasure."

I think perhaps it's advisable to read James only during afternoon tea time, as otherwise his langorous prose would put you to sleep. But he does hit on the quietly sensual, after-dinner nap quality of a good afternoon tea done well - as long as you're the one taking afternoon tea, of course, and not the poor servant cleaning up afterwards.

Hmmm, that's another thing. The English don't "have" afternoon tea, and it's a bit trashy and nouveau riche and Antipodeans-abroad to say "do" afternoon tea. One takes afternoon tea, preferably on the terrace with a magnificent view of one's country estate, with peasants tipping their hats respectfully in the background. I'm not sure that I've ever "taken" afternoon tea in my life - I take medicine, and I frequently long to be taken to paradise (or just taken from behind), but in my quaint Antipodean sensibility, the only time I'd take tea is if I shoplifted it from Fortnum & Mason.

Which brings me to the point of my little mid-afternoon dalliance, which is to describe a truly delightful afternoon tea at Fortnum & Mason, grocer to the Royal family (who, despite being German, still know a thing or two about afternoon tea). It was organised by me (naturally) in honour of my 30somethingth birthday, and, this being London, needed to be organised months in advance to ensure that enough of my friends would be forward-booked to attend, so I wouldn't end up sitting alone and crying into my teacup like Maggie Smith in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.

For the last couple of years, I've organised a big kick-ass party for my birthday, but as I retreat further into middle-aged old fartdom, the thought of running around filling champagne glasses and looking on helplessly as people ground cake crumbs into my carpet, and explained that they'd blocked up my toilet because of all the cheese they'd eaten at Claridges the night before (yes, that means you, Annabel). This year, I resolved to either hire staff to do the catering, or better yet, go somewhere fun where cute underpaid people in aprons would bring you food to your chair and refill your champagne glass if you clicked your fingers. The English may not be able to kiss, dance, emote publicly, win Eurovision or make a decent cup of coffee, but they do know how to do a damned good afternoon tea.

As my Facebook photos show, it was a glorious afternoon. I was a little worried when Sunday's temperatures were in the mid 20s - will people really want to dress up and drink hot tea and eat carbs on the hottest day of the year? Well, they did, thank God, although Annabel (my current refugee houseguest) and I managed to slip in a white trash escapade before we got to Fortnum's. I'd blown all my money and maxed out my own surviving credit card on too much shopping and too many cocktails in New York, and realised I'd need to exchange my remaining $125 US dollars for pounds at a currency exchange. On a Sunday. Annabel, being a refugee, hadn't been back to her own House of Horror in a week, and was running short on glamorous afternoon tea outfits. I committed the cardinal sin of suggesting, just before we were about to leave the house, that she might want to rethink her outfit and put on a skirt. After a mini-meltdown (in which I'm thankful I didn't get slapped), Annabel had rethought her entire wardrobe, but we needed a trip to Primark for her to "accessorise up".

With about 14 of the Tube lines not running on Sunday, somehow we fought our way to Marble Arch and ploughed through tens of thousands of slow-walking sweaty people to get to the currency exchange and Primark. I've usually turned up my nose at Primark and assumed that the clothes are cheap, unethically sourced, probably the handiwork of some underpaid 7 year old in a factory somewhere in Thailand, and contributing to an environmentally unsustainable "junk clothes" culture. But I'd not recognised Primark's usefulness for insane women needing to reaccessorise an outfit in less than 30 minutes. Annabel put Gok Wan to shame, trampling through Primark like a wildebeeste, frantically grabbing bangles, scarves and platform wedges made of some wood substitute that might or might not melt in direct sunlight.

"But they're cheap, unethically sourced, probably made by some 7 year old in Indonesia and contributing to an environmentally unsustainable junk clothes culture!", I remonstrated.

"Who cares," she snarled, stepping over the unconscious body of an old lady who she'd punched in the face to get the last pair of the shoes in her size. "They're cheap and I found them in less than half an hour." She had a point.

Off we trotted back onto the tube, and despite talking so much that we missed our first connecting stop, we managed to haul ass and get to Fortnum's in time to powder our noses. Everyone else arrived, appropriately booted and spurred (and some slightly glowing from the heat of the Tube), the champagne flowed, the china tea service was poured out ever so nicely, and the three-tiered cake plates of crustless sandwiches, mini-quiches, scones and cakes of chocolately deliciousness were all perfection. Conversation was appropriately light, gay and fragrant, and while I was disappointed not to entrap a few straight men (I only know two, and they were both away shooting wild animals, I think), the gays and the girls got on just fine. Most importantly of all, I looked fantastic.

As the conversation briefly turned to homelessness (and what was the going rate for a beggar on Kensington High Street these days), Big Gay Kenny reminded us that the great Emmeline Pankhurst and her suffragette friends had first congregated in Fortnum & Mason, on the pretext of having afternoon tea, but really to plot their feminist revolution. As (mostly) New Zealanders, we could, of course, be smug about having given women the vote back in 1893, whereas Britain limped into universal suffrage sometime in the 1920s, only after civil disobedience, hunger strikes and a suffragette throwing herself under the King's horse. Amid so much comfy tweeness, it was good to know that even this most charmingly unchanged of places had still been privy to revolutionary conversations.

I had a great moment as I looked around, discreetly ploughing through someone else's plate of scones and hoping that they wouldn't notice, and realising that everyone around the table was a dear friend, that most of them had seen me at my worst, most wretched moments over the last six years, as well as the high points, and they were still there for me. It was a moment unobserved by anyone except me, and a great one. And, thank God, the cake kept coming! Yum!

As a few people wafted off to evening appointments, a hardcore group of 5 stayed until the waiters minced over, hovered at our table and coughed politely, eventually indicating that they needed to de-louse the toilets of tourists, then close and lock the restaurant for the night. Out we swept into glorious mid-afternoon sun, for a stroll through Green Park. Aaaaaah, summer birthdays and afternoon tea - you can't beat 'em.

Henry James - choke on this, faggot.

Last Exit to Manhattan

28 May 2009

New York City

When you're on holiday, you don't necessarily want to engage with the outside world, or with boring things like news, politics or family members describing the bowel movements of their children. New York is the perfect place to escape the travails of Real Life, partly because it is its own gloriously self-contained universe, but partly because America is also so cheerily unapologetically inward-looking. Even New York, which is supposed to be the most cosmopolitan and world-wise (or is it just world-weary?) of the states, is so high on the popper aroma of its own fabulousness that the rest of the world just sounds like a cheap rumour, or something you'd imagine in a sci-fi movie.

After a week of getting high on the energy of New York, I realised it was time to check in with the Mother Ship, and bought a copy of the New York Times (naturally) to read with my morning coffee and muffin at Cafe Grumpy on West 23rd. The strange overlong and slightly too narrow rectangular shape of the New York Times made me feel very Upper East Side latte drinking turtleneck wearing Jewish American Princess (well, minus the turtleneck, obviously, as it was 25 degrees at 9 in the morning). To its credit, the NYT has become slightly more focused on the rest of the world, though interestingly the writing never questions America's centrality in world affairs or tries to imagine a non-American viewpoint.

The papers today are full of Obama's new nominee for the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, who, if she's elected, will be the first Latina woman on the bench, and one of only two women. Despite rumours to the contrary, the Supreme Court creates public policy (though the judges will rigorously deny this) and in recent years have made important pronouncements against Bush's policies of torture and imprisonment of terrorist suspects without trial or legal representation. Sotomayor is heralded as a liberal appointee, who will load the decks in a court currently split almost equally down a conservative-liberal divide, though her body of work doesn't point clearly towards a particular political agenda. For the time being, the liberal press are celebrating the ascension of a non-white non-male perspective into a position of public office, and a woman whose rise from humble working-class beginnings mirrors Obama's own story, with one of those amazing mothers who worked around the clock to buy her daughter an encyclopaedia set and put her through college. Now she faces months of grilling from conservative Senators and critical barbequing from every media organisation in the country. Go gettem, girlina.

Meanwhile, on the West Coast, the courts upheld the recent ban on gay marriage, to general knashing of teeth and promises of resistance from Californian gay activists. I've never been much of a believer in legal equality of marriage (to misquote Groucho Marx, I wouldn't want to be a part of any club that'd refuse to have me as a member), am am happy to settle for the separate-but-equal legal recognition of civil partnerships, and leave the semantics of "marriage" to the straights. Still, Sweden has had gay marriage since 1989, and I'm sure in 30 years we'll be wondering what the hell the drama was all about. Until then, I think I'll leave the West Coast activists to their protesting, and push for civil partnership instead.

Equally as relevant but much more fun and fascinating was the NYT Arts & Culture section's expose on airbrushing of starlets on magazine covers, and the beginnings of a backlash against the homogenising smoothing out of foreheads, removals of crows feet and elongation of body shapes, so that all the Kates and Melanies and Gwyneths and Reeces become the same Plasticine-shaped face.

OK, well, so much for the real world. I planned to visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a much rated memorial to the shitty living and working conditions of millions of European immigrants streaming into New York in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The details are depressingly the same worldwide - no welfare system, overcrowding, extortionate rents, unsafe working conditions, suppression of the labour union movement, inadequate nutrition, widespread disease and epidemics wiping out neighbourhoods by the block. The guided tour I booked promise to take me into the inside of life for a fictional Irish (or was it Armenian?) family of 14, who sewed blankets in a sweatshop in between phases of dying from cholera (or was it scarlet fever?) In the end, I decided to blow it off and embrace a far more authentically American tradition - shopping. It seemed somehow more appropriate to commemorate a history of exploitative labour conditions by buying clothes being made in 21st century sweatshops. After an afternoon trawling through the Gap, Banana Republic, Brooklyn Industries and a blissful couple of hours hunting through piles of crap for designer discount gems at Loehmanns (my guilty shopping secret in New York), I was feeling thoroughly fucking American.

Even more surreal was my meet-up with David, my Big Gay Italian-American Fairy Godfather. David, like most self-respecting Chelsea Girls, seldom leaves the 2 blocks surrounding his apartment on West 23rd St between 8th and 9th Ave, and considers it a day's adventure if he retreats below 20th St. I met David at his local Depot Store, where we discussed anal sex and French arthouse movies (I'd seen Erick Zonca's Julia starring the terrifying Tilda Swinton the night before) while helping him pick up hooks for his bedroom closet, and then into Whole Foods to buy a roast chicken, while we discussed strategies for how to deflower a cute French grad student. I'm not sure what he planned to do with the roast chicken, though I had a theory it would end up in the bedroom closet as well. David is my intellectual pimp daddy, the ringmaster to my siphillitic show pony, the Marquis de Sade to my Justine. He has a massive classic American free-standing refridgerator with an ice machine in the door, that I'm not sure he knows how to use, let alone open, an adorable boyfriend called Michelangelo who's a noted queer activist, and a well developed understanding of the importance of sado-masochism as a teaching method. I miss him.

My final night in Manhattan was spent, appropriately, cutting the labels off my purchases and schlepping down to a bar in Chelsea for a farewell Manhattan in Manhattan with Miguel. It had already started to rain, and by the time I left the following morning, it was pissing down like a flood. My hotel had thoughtfully but cheesily ordered me a black stretch limo to take me to the airport - I think this is what they think tourists want? Give me a yellow cab any day. The interior looked like the set of a cheap 80s porn film, and the windows were either tinted or covered with brown scum, which kinda killed the view - not that you could see much through the rain. My last view of New York was slightly less inspiring than I'd hoped - the overwhelming ugliness of industrial suburbia in the rain.

Back at the British Airways counter, I could relax back into shite English service (I think I spent as much time in the queue as I did in the air flying into town) and had an almost-altercation with the security staff when they wanted to impound some of my Dean & DeLuca purchases. I was saved by a pushy female security guard with a very broad Longue Eye-land accent who explained to her colleagues that Dean & DeLuca was a "real classy" deli. "Honey, you don't wanna be losing your Dean & DeLuca, that shit is expensive. You gotta fight for it, honey!"

You do indeed. I fucking love this city, and I'll keep on fighting to come back to it.

Up (and Over) the Hill in New York

26 May 2009

New York City

Perhaps to downplay fact of my birthday, which becomes a progressively more depressing prospect every year, I decided to spend this one in New York, the city where you're only as young as (who) you feel and where attitude, the right sneakers and a little dog can cover up a multitude of sins.

I usually try to spend my birthday in a whirlwind of activity, all the better to take my mind off my impending middle age, the realisation that I won't live forever, and the fact that I've spent the best part of a decade in a profession I hate doing work that's mostly meaningless to me. I've sometimes wondered whether I could survive a birthday on my own with no celebration or contact with the outside world (though I'm sure my mother would find a way to call me even if I was on a desert island), but to date, I haven't managed to do it. I'm not sure exactly what I'd prove by doing this - That I'm happy being alone? That I except my own mortality? That I don't need other people? - and I'm not sure whether it would be an achievement or an acceptance of defeat. Anyway, that's for another day.

This birthday I woke up in New York, with a vaguely hazy hangover from one too many Manhattans with Miguel and his slutty friends in a gay bar in Hell's Kitchen. My folks called from New Zealand, and I gave them the usual G-rated version of my travels, expurgated of anything involving sex, grief, doubt or unhappiness. Then I ran like a flapping queen in the wind to make it to 7.30am Sun Salutations at the Laughing Lotus Yoga Centre, which seemed like a good way to start my birthday. Lovely and earth motherish though the (mostly) female teachers are at the Laughing Lotus, they run a damn tight ship, and if you're not there by 5 minutes into the class at the latest, the door gets slammed shut. As I powerminced down 6th Avenue, an old crazy black woman pushing a shopping trolley (which I'm guessing she stole in 1979 and now lives in) spotted me and started running down the street after me. For an old timer whose diet smelled like it'd been largely pizza crusts from rubbish bins and gin for 20 years, the old girl certainly picked up the pace, and started screaming, "I gotta tell ya about this great shit I did!". Running through the streets of Manhattan being pursued by a compulsively shitting bag lady - now this was a more appropriate way to celebrate my birthday.

After a leisurely coffee at Cafe Grumpy and a sachet through the New York Times, which broke the news of Obama's nomination of Latina Appeal Court judge Sonia Sotomayor to fill the soon-to-be vacant seat on the US Supreme Court, I headed uptown to catch up with the suave suited David the Attorney, one half of my old friends and now resident Chelsea Power Couple David & Barrie (Inc.)

David was being air-lifted to Palm Springs to take depositions in some horrific and neverending litigation case, and was going to be out of town for the rest of the week. We had a corporate law power coffee from a chic (and very narrow) little espresso bar filled with chic Italian coffee boys and lots of crisp white shirts and Brooks Bros suits with stressed looking corporate types gripping their Blackberries in one hand and their double espresso in the other. It felt like an episode of Mad Men, in which David was Don Draper and I was Peggy (naturally).

David and I discussed the strange evolutionary position we found ourselves in as senior assistants, now within spitting distance of the big money of partnership but burdened down with 60 hour weeks and enormous caseloads. David is a dazzlingly committed attorney, and in one sense functions as my own cautionary tale for why I should never attempt to practice law in New York - I simply don't want to work as hard as he does. By comparison with the British culture of "duvet days" and a leisurely 5 weeks of leave per year, Americans seem to work until they drop, only have about a week of holidays a year, and energetically work themselves into the ground, no doubt to cover their asses in a grim economy where there's no guaranteed social security and the work culture is "win or die".

After I left David, I headed to my new spiritual home, Dean & DeLuca, for some lunch, and then, despite some grim looking rain and thunder clouds forming, walked up to Columbus Circle at the corner of Central Park and took the A train up to 191st St to seek out the Cloisters.

The Cloisters is one of those New York tourist oddities that seems improbable to describe, and represents something about the sheer confidence of 19th century American enterprise. Built in the grounds of a huge park at the top of Manhattan Island, overlooking the Hudson River, the Cloisters is the home of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's medieval art collection, and built from the pieces of something like 5 French medieval monasteries, that were bought by Rockerfeller sometime in the early part of the century, shipped to New York, and painstakingly reconstructed into a single building. After a hefty trek through the way way WAY uptown Latino neighbourhood (where my pidgen Spanish served me just long enough to buy a new mobile phone top-up card), you take a right turn into densely wooded parks overlooking the Hudson, and follow a winding trail through rose gardens and grassy meadows until you reach the Cloisters, and can first see its rooftops through the treetops.

Approaching the Cloisters is a bizarre experience. It looks like a perfectly respectable medieval monastery, until you pinch yourself and realise that you're not in medieval France but in 21st century Manhattan. Of course, it's too eerily perfect and not quite "ruined" enough, and, unlike most real abbeys or religious ruins, easy to get to and features its own gift store. The Met's medieval collection is astounding, and enormous - rooms full of rare tapestries, altarpieces, engravings, copies of sepulchres and innumerable Madonnas with Child or Madonnas lugging a dead Jesus around. The centrepiece of the building are two cloistered gardens growing "traditional" English plants and herbs to try and give tourists some idea of how monks would've made herbs or brewed their own beer. It's a weird simulacrum that comes close to but doesn't quite the same as the much messier, less tourist-friendly real thing

But therein lies the slightly kitschy delight of the Cloisters. When you go around a ruin or a museum in Europe, it's generally in hushed silence, taking photographs is discouraged, and there's usually a sour-faced looking uniformed attendant with a moustache and a rape whistle ready to intervene with a "Shshsh" or a disapproving look if you dared touch anything, take a photo or speak above a whisper. Of course, this being America, it's the constitutional right of every Staten Island housewife to be able to waddle around taking photos of everything in sight (even if you're photographing a medieval tapestry that's probably being slowly destroyed by the camera flash), walk around talking loudly about your husband's haemmeroid operation, and demand that there be a rest room and gift shop at every 50 paces. And therein seems to be the appeal of the Cloisters - it's a slightly classier version of those fake European cities in Las Vegas where you can go to medieval France without ever having to leave New York or endure the messyness and discomfort of an actual medieval site. It also represents the great American curatorial tradition of gargantuanism - why have a painting of a monastery or a 19th century Colonial home when you can actually reconstruct the entire monastery, brick by brick?

I've been intrigued by the Cloisters since watching Hal Hartley's film Amateur years ago, where the final scene - a shoot out in a convent involving Isabelle Huppert with a black rubber skirt and a handgun - was filmed there. Sadly, hand guns weren't allowed to be taken inside, but there was an attractive Goth couple both dressed in black leather who were most accommodating about taking photos. (Incidentally, whenever you travel by yourself and you want the obligatory cheesy photo of you in front of the Eiffel Tower or Manchu Picchu or whatever, always seek out an American. They alone understand the inviolable right of every individual to have a great photo in every situation, they know instinctively how to frame you in the shot so that there's enough of you and the monument on show, and will happily take and re-take the photo until you've got it just right. An American will never roll their eyes at you and mutter "Bloody tourist" or question your right to take a photograph that you'll either never look at again or spend evenings boring friends and family with in interminable slide shows. No, God bless 'em, Americans know that regardless of substance, morality or truth, a good snap shot is the crucial thing. It's surface as depth, and I love it).

[more to follow]

The Joys of Chopped Liver

New York City
23 May 2009

There's nothing more fantastic than waking up in New York City. Well, possibly it'd be even more fantastic to wake up in New York City sandwiched between two New York firemen, but I've only been here for less than 24 hours, and miracles on 19th Street don't just happen overnight.

Our day started in true Chelsea homo style with an early brunch (I think it used to be called "breakfast") at Cafeteria, the gayest all-night diner in New York, with all-white decor, a seemingly endless array of willowy 19 year-old Abercrombie & Fitch models wandering around pretending to serve food, and a menu of mostly Chelsea Queen fodder: egg white omlettes, salads and decaf lattes. We went for the full-scale full-fat version: Eggs Benedict with something called "home fries" (translation: potato wedges, so called to differentiate them from the shoestring-width French fries) and studied the tallest, blondest and willowiest of the bus boys to see if he changed his facial expression within a 60 minute period. He didn't. Our waitress was a little more fun. For a start, she was actually a woman (yep, a real one), and she began her service by coming up and stroking Stephen's tattoo and asking whether it would hurt if she got a dolphin tattooed on her ass. We offered to show her ourselves using one of the table knives if she didn't bring us our coffee immediately, which seemed to do the trick.

After breakfast, we got a discounted pass from the Maritime to go to Equinox, a new amazingly gay gym on 17th St @ 10th Ave. As it was brand new, it was still reasonably clean and didn't smell of old socks, and was staffed with the requisite bored-looking personal trainers, and endless rows of treadmills on which the headband-wearing inhabitants ran and ran endlessly, looking like Pod People. While Stephen went and did something butch with free weights, I minced up the staircase into the yoga studio, where a smiling, slightly condescending yoga instructor with big hair called Adam took us through yoga boot camp. Here's Adam's profile on the Equinox website:

"After spending five years (and the better part of a million hours) as a writer in advertising, Adam David realised the thing he most wanted to say "New and Improved" about was himself. He is now devoting himself full-time to [himself and] the study, practice and teaching of yoga. He teaches a dynamic, innovative class, incorporating his sense of humor, a genuine enthusiasm towards the members, and music ranging from Krishna Das to Outkast. His goal is to get each and every member to be able to look like a pretzel, and all the while feel like a gummy bear".

With that degree of self-promotion and ripe material for mockery, it's difficult to know where to begin. The class was actually fairly good, despite Adam's tendency to say things like "Just be in your reality" while we were in downward dog. It's difficult to laugh contemptuously and roll your eyes when you're upside down. There was a tense moment where Adam laughed as I lost my balance trying to do Tree pose (where you balance on one leg). "You self absorbed cunt", I thought silently, despite trying to breathe and think lovely non-yogic thoughts. Later, when I was trying to balance on one foot and Adam wafted by, smiled snidely, and stage-whispering in my direction "Don't fall over". I smiled back and said "Please don't condescend to me". I'm not sure he understood my accent or was even listening, as he laughed back and wafted off again. Best of all was our view from the studio, which looked out over the cityscape of the Meatpacking district - and a big pack of overweight construction workers in hard hats who ranged between amused and mildly disturbed as we wrapped ourselves into various positions. Adam, of course, didn't think to lower the blinds to give us some privacy, but as this is New York City, people will take any opportunity for exhibitionism, so I don't think anyone minded.

As I unwound myself from the final lotus position, Stephen was downstairs in the lobby, checking out the disappointing range of post-gym snacks, and ending up buying some packaged shit called Muscle Milk which will probably give him kidneystones. As we lounged on a big porno couch, the muscle mary on the next couch got into a screaming match with whoever was calling him on his mobile phone. I missed most of it, but Stephen said our big-biceped friend wasn't ready for a relationship right now, and wanted his friend to stop stalking him. "Just be in your reality" we told him, before heading out into the morning sun.

After a quick stop off at Jamba Juice - a tasteless but strangely addictive form of fruit juice ice slushie that's big with The Gays, we went back to Gay Hotel and changed for a post workout breakfast at Cafeteria (sweetie). Gay men go to Cafeteria (on 7th Avenue @17th St) for the same reason that dogs lick their balls - because they can, and it's easy. Very easy, from the look of some of the willowy Abercrombie & Fitch party boys who waft around in white jeans pretending to be waiters. Planted right in the middle of Chelsea (I think someone in Sex and the City describes themselves as being "in the middle of Gay and Gay", which seems appro for Cafeteria), it has pretentious all-white decor, a mostly pretentious mostly all-white waiting staff, great American diner Lite food, and even better opportunities for cruising. Unlike Fire Island, they do serve egg yolks and carbs - a suspiciously patriotic Jim Crow-esque thing called "home fries" (translation, potato wedges: I guess as opposed to French fries), and the Latino busboys are always very attentive with refilling your water glass.

For our waitperson, we had a woman - yes, a real one! - who immediately started stroking Stephen's tattoo lovingly, and wanting to be our new best friend. (Now that's good service). After brunch, we lost the Juicy Couture and glammed up for my birthday lunch at The Modern, the restaurant attached to the Museum of Modern Art. Stephen had been raving about this place since visiting in January, and I wasn't about to be talked out of a free lunch. The gorgeous Jodie the Lesbian joined us, and we had one of those magical afternoons that was a combination of divine food, wonderfully attentive service from a Catherine Deneuve lookalike waitress who knew the menu, could abseil her way around the wine list, and flirted just enough to be fun. At one point, the manager came up and kissed Stephen's ring finger and called him Godfather. With three of us, we were able to binge-eat our way properly through the menu, which included:

• Tarte Flambée Alsatian thin crust tart with crème fraîche, onion and applewood smoked bacon
• Warm Veal and Goat Cheese Terrine with watercress
• Flounder Tartare with asparagus, yuzu juice and breakfast radish
• Slow Poached Farm Egg “In a Jar” with Maine lobster, hearts of palm and sea urchin froth
• Roasted Long Island Duck Breast with peppercorn-crusted apples and toasted pistachio-truffle dipping sauce
• Grilled Veal Flank Steak with sautéed foie gras, asparagus and spring garlic foa
• Beignets with maple ice cream, caramel and mango marmalade
• Rhubarb and ginger compote with Swiss goats cheese

... and a little birthday chocolate thingee for me, with a very minimalist single MoMA candle wedged into an expensive looking raspberry.

I wasn't hugely impressed by the preponderance of froth on the menu, which struck me as just being foam with flavour, but Stephen (and later Annabel, to whom I have to report all my culinary adventures) assured me that froth was very now. "It's the new 'shavings'", Annabel explained, after she'd masturbated over my description of the menu. Other than that, the food was divine, the company was superlative, and I was so content I didn't even feel the need to steal the cloth napkins from the bathroom.

After a quick mosey through the MoMA store, and a last-minute waddle through the Hiltonto take a dump in their bathrooms and laugh and point at fat polyester-wearing middle-American tourists - we headed up to Central Park, apparently just in time for a thunderstorm. We stopped off briefly in the Meadows to admire the teenaged Abercrombie & Fitch party boys throwing their silly little gridiron balls around ("If one of them hits me, I'm suing", I thought), and headed to the Bethesda Fountain.

Along with the "Imagine" memorial to John Lennon, the Bethesda Fountain is the unofficial heart of the Park, and the "Angel of the Waters" statue is one of the most popular and recognisable pieces of sculpture in the City. (My otherwise useless guidebook told me that it was sculpted from 1868 by Emma Stebbins, the first woman to receive a commission for a major piece of art in New York City). The Angel is now synonymous with Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, a mighty piece of theatre that is, among other things, a requiem for the AIDs-stricken gay population of New York in the 1980s. Despite the gorgeousness of the day and the gaudy carnivalesque crowds (including what looked like a white trash shotgun wedding party from Queens), Stephen and I both took a quiet moment to remember friends we'd lost, and the general shittiness of growing up in a homophobic society in the post-Reagan, pre-Will & Grace era.

Dabbing at our eyes like old ladies at a funeral, our spirits were suddenly roused by a big queen doing an impromptu hula-hoop work out in the Meadows. Swing out, sister! And that's the thing about Central Park - one homo's memorial is another's performance space.

It was Saturday night in New York, and neither of us felt much like going out, although it was Fleet Week and most of the sailors we'd spotted in the streets seemed totally up for it, as well as immaculately pressed and laundered. Since the Roxy was closed, the dark rooms moved out of state by Giuliani and the Bowery full of 13 year-olds, we went out on a limb and walked in still balmy evening heat to the Lower East Side, and to one of the hidden wonders of New York's cultural life: Katz's Deli on East Houston Street. Made famous by that scene in When Harry Met Sally where Meg Ryan shows Billy Crystal just how easy it is to fake an orgasm, it's been running since 1888 (Harry Houdini was apparently one of the earliest celebrity patrons) and sells Jewish kosher food, including its famous pastrami on rye, bagels, chicken soup with mozza balls, salami, chopped liver, and baked cheesecake. Despite the tourist interest and the walls lined with photos of famous Jews smiling and eating salami (with the odd hip Gentile thrown in for fun, like Bill Clinton), it still retains a little of its Lower East Side shitty chic (especially the bathrooms, the floors of which appeared to be covered with straw). Our waitress, who I think had actually served Houdini when she was a girl, took our order with the world-weariness of an Old Testament prophet. No sparkling water here, darling - it's Seltzer or nothin' - but she did cheer up when we told her we wanted to smear ourselves with chopped liver because it was so good, and she cheerily posed for a photo next to the giant salamis. It felt sacreligious to admit it, after a lunch of such glamour and sophistication, but I loved Katz's chopped liver more than I could ever cosy up to salmon-flavoured froth.

I was struck with how similar my Irish Catholic family's home cooking was to "Jew food" - like the Yentls of the Lower East Side, my mother served up a lot of chicken soup and pastrami (we called it "silverside"), though she never did much with liver or cheesecake, or liver-flavoured cheesecake for that matter. Fortunately, Stephen knew how good the cheesecake was, and wisely ordered an extra piece to take home for that perfect pre-breakfast snack the next day. Home we went with our cheesecake, cackling like hags, and we were passed out by midnight. I know, I know, the cool kids of Studio 54 would've been disappointed, but honestly, we couldn't have added anything more to a kick-ass fantastic Noo Yawk day.

Return to Gotham City

New York City

22 May 2009

I'm sitting up in bed at the Maritime - possibly the gayest hotel in the world - nestling into the 500 count Egyptian cotton sheets and looking through our custom-made 5 foot wide porthole window at our view of sunrise in Midtown Manhattan. On a clear day, you can see the class struggle forever (thank you, Mike Leigh), as Gay Stephen and I debate whether to go to Gay Gym at 9am or 10am, what we're going to be eating at Cafeteria, the open-all-hours gay diner in Chelsea, and more importantly, what to wear to lunch today at The Modern, the Museum of Modern Art restaurant. Our view through the Round Window isn't exactly the same as in Playschool - a striking geometric array of brown-bricked office buildings and warehouses in the former Meatpacking District - and a more austere view of Chelsea than you normally catch from the streets. Were it not for the "Luxury Condos For Sale" banners hanging from the tower block opposite, you could almost imagine you were back in the Meatpacking District days of 1970s-era unreconstructed Meanstreets New York.

After a fairly effortless but child-plagued flight from Heathrow's new-ish Terminal 5, and the customary shitty service from the polyester-clad bitches on British Airways, we hit New York in late afternoon, and a balmy California-like 23 degrees. As a proper fair-skinned Victorian lady, I'm programmed to swoon and having fainting fits if the temperature rises about 12 degrees, so while I sweated and felt nauseous in the back of the taxi cab, while Gay Stephen fanned me with his NYC guidebook. Driving over the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan, you're reminded, again, of how radically different New York is from European cities, built as a monument to the Age of Steel, rather than brick or wood or glass. We got a fun mini-tour through the Lower East Side, Soho and Greenwich Village, watching the hot young things in strapless dresses and flip-flops and the boys with their artfully mussed haircuts, carefully gym-sculpted upper arms and canvas man-bags strutting their stuff. This is truly a city where you walk the street like you own it, and take the spotlight like you're the star of your own movie, just being careful not to step in dogshit along the way.

The Chelsea Boys still waddle around, their massively over-developed upper arms bulging out of their generic Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts and hanging away from their bodies like orangutang arms (Jodie tells me this is called "carpet layer arms"). A little pooper dog with a Chanel outfit has always been a must-have Chelsea accessory - this year, it's an iPhone (for the Chelsea Boy, not for the dog, though I'm guessing iPhones for dogs aren't that far away). This leads to some interesting collisions and cruising opportunities, as the Chelsea Boys, normally so steely-jawed and deliberate as they march to and from the gym, clutching their Starbucks trim soy decaf frappucinos, now have their noses in their iPhone, leading to the occasional Chelsea Boy mid-pavement smackdown.

The attitude on the streets is exciting after the insular reserved moodiness of London. In London, you do almost anything to avoid making eye contact with people on the street. In Chelsea, it's more or less mandatory, though the stares tend to start at your crotch area, work their way up to your arms and finish at your hairline. Since my arms are still so skinny they could fit through napkin rings, though the same can't be said for my waist, and my skin the colour of parchment, I'm not getting cruised a lot, except by old guys who are re-adjusting their toupees at the same time - in other words, much the same as in London.

Our hotel, The Maritime, is right in the middle of Chelsea Boy country, on the corner of Gay and Gay Streets. (Officially, it's West 19th @ 9th Avenue). Architecturally, it's either a triumph of 60s-retro hotel design or a depresssing testament to the gentrification of the Meatpacking District. Once the home of the Maritime Union headquarters, it was given a chi-chi makeover a few years ago and now attracts gay Eurotrash tourists like me. Each room has an enormous porthole for a window, and the decor and furnishings are a strange mix of Rat Pack era teak veneer, 60s Japanese modern prints, and nautical-themed bed-linen. The mini-bar is generously stocked with $25 bar nuts from Dean & DeLuca, designer condoms from Kiki de Montparnasse, and bottles of sparkling Evian. The bathroom has a walk-in shower (enough, I think, to fit at least 4 or 5 busboys at once) stocked with lots of little gay bottles of gay skincare products, but fairly crappy water pressure, and a 10 minute wait for hot water. Still, in matters of grave importance, style not substance is the crucial thing.

Best of all is the service from the tired-looking but ever helpful navy blue clad teenagers at the service desk. While Gay Stephen was busily hanging up his American Apparel jumpsuits, I called downstairs to reserve a table for dinner at Matsuri, the hotel's Japanese restaurant. The bland voiced but scrupulously polite girl who answered the phone asked for our name (I was pretending to be Stephen, though now I wish I'd pretended to be his executive assistant: "I'm calling on behalf of Mr Yates"). Missy on the phone said it wasn't a problem, and asked for my first name. "Stephen", I said, wondering if we were going to get individually autographed placemat settings. She then asked me whether "Stephen" was spelled with a "v" or a "ph". "With a 'ph'", I stuttered, wondering whether she was next going to ask which kind of endangered wood we'd like our chopsticks made from.

It's that moment which Stephen (who is, among other things, a customer services trainer) calls "The moment of truth" - the recognition that the person serving you is doing more than just taking your money and sweeping up after you, but actually engaging with you and trying to make your soulless consumer experience a little more meaningful, or even helping you to live the cliche and have a nice day. When you come from England, bad or indifferent service is so widespread and you get so used to apologising for even walking into the store, let alone wanting something, that you're initially suspicious when someone in an American store smiles at you or tries to help you, and you assume they must either be high or looking for a tip. Gradually, we thaw, and by the time someone takes the trouble to notice how you spell your name in a restaurant reservation, we're are almost weeping with relief about being treated like human beings.

Quentin Crisp, England's great stately homo and famous resident of Hell's Kitchen, recalled the same experience when he moved to New York City in the mid-1970s. He described customer service in a shop in England - usually a bored looking teenaged girl reading a book on the counter, and growling "If it's not on the shelf, we don't have it" in response to any questions, and compared it to his first experience in a store in New York, where a salesgirl helped him sort out his loose change (tourists always pay for everything with notes, Crisp said, because as a stranger in a new currency, we're terrified of coins) and squealed "Isn't this fun?". And so it is. I had my own Quentin experience when I first visited New York at the end of 2004 - in addition to buying a ridiculous Crisp-like fedora from Paul Smith and mincing around town like the village pansy, I visited a Gap store on West 23rd St where a coked-up but adorably puppy-like salesboy was hyper-ventilating in his excitement to find me the perfect pair of jeans that sucked in my muffin top and made my ass look spankable.

It's easy to be cynical about the glacial smiles and gently flirtatious hustle of salespeople here in Gotham City - the aim of most sales transactions is, of course, to make you spend more money in their store. In a country with no minimum wage or compulsory health insurance and minimal social security, providing good customer service becomes less about wanting to make people happy and more a Darwinian survival strategy. It's also frightening to observe the devastating effects on peoples' ego that too much in-store subservience can create, and the creation of arrogant finger-clicking clients who treat sales assistants and hotel clerks like servants. But that being said, it's a joy to get to a city where going into a shop needn't be as painful as a visit to the dentist nor as humiliating as being shat on by a Trafalgar Square seagull. And this is why I love shopping in New York.

It's been enormous fun travelling with Stephen, whose eye for detail in stores and restaurants is as exacting as mine when I'm proofreading friends' emails for spelling mistakes. To this end, we've decided to create our own reality TV show where we drive around the world in a bright pink Mini Cooper, revolutionising customer service, writing "Clean Me" on dusty display stands in Macys, and charming and terrifying salesboys everywhere into stopping balancing on one hip and pouting and hauling ass to deliver great service. Stephen will, I suspect, be wearing American Apparel, and I'll be wearing my gay fedora and a little scarf tied in an Ascot.

After an indifferent margarita at one of the cheesy rooftop bars in the Maritime (called Cabana!, but looking more like the set of a bad 80s porn movie), we then inhaled the menu at Matsuri, one of the best Japanese restaurants I've ever eaten in, and again rejoiced over dealing with waiters who could talk intelligently about the menu, bring us iced water without being asked, managed to engage in banter, and checked in on us to ensure that we hadn't fallen asleep in our miso or impaled ourselves on our chopsticks. If we ended up stealing one of the funkily designed linen dinner napkins, it was less a gesture of contempt than admiration for their interior design scheme.

Struggling to fight the desire to give into jetlag and pass out, we joined my friend Jodie for a late-night cocktail on West 20th St (I ordered some hideous version of a watermelon martini, but by this point was beyond the point of caring) and watched the late night freak show of Chelsea muscle boys in tank tops walking their rat-sized dogs and the occasional homeless person rifling through the garbage for recyclable glass and aluminium. It's fucking great to be back.

Priscilla: This Bus Just Tanked

11 May 2009

London

A few months ago, my glamorous friend Gay Stephen invited me to go and see a West End musical. Not just any West End musical, mind you, but the freshly hatched musical version of the drag comedy film The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. Priscilla is the latest in a long list of the new form of West End show - the "karaoke musical", which, inspired by the massive success of Mumma Mia, either focused around either the music of a successful rock band as a kind of play-length tribute band (Mumma Mia channelling ABBA, We Will Rock You featuring the music of Queen), or based on a successful 1980s-era film.

Since I've been in London, we've had plays or musical versions of When Harry Met Sally, Footloose, Desperately Seeking Susan, Dirty Dancing, Grease, Hairspray, and soon to come is a musical of Sister Act. The musicals have almost always been rubbish, but they've endured and been box office successes (OK, Desperately Seeking Susan only lasted a few weeks) largely on the strength of clever marketing and a cynical awareness of the power of rehashing a previously successful formula. For producers, there's less risk in mounting a musical based on a successful film, as it comes with an inbuilt audience - the Gen Xers who count the film as one of their pop culture references, and who are now in their 30s, with disposable income and feeling nostalgic for the films of their youth.

The box office results speak for themselves, and it's interesting to note a corresponding decline in new "real" musicals being launched - the WWII-era musical Marguerite launched last year, earned rave reviews and got its star Ruthie Henshell an Olivier nomination, but that didn't put bums on seats and the show closed early. Likewise with The Drowsy Chaperone, an American musical set in the 1920s, imported from Broadway. It was a huge hit in New York, running for over a year, but it sank without trace in London after a couple of months, even with Elaine Paige in the lead. Critics argued that it just didn't travel well outside of a musical-comedy literate Manhattan crowd, which may well be true. The formula for success is clear - either do a revival, or base it on a 1980s teen movie or a well-known band.

The great anomoly of late is the much raved-about Spring Awakenings, which is a revival of a long-forgotten 19th century German play about horny adolescents that's been turned into a musical, which seemed to borrow as much from reality TV shows like Pop Idol or teen soft-core porn show Skins, having its stars grab microphones and burst into song, masturbate on stage and rape each other. Understandably, it's had hit success, recently transferring from the Lyric Hammersmith to the West End. OK, let's revise the formula - success equals a film or a famous band or masturbating teenagers.

So back to Priscilla, a show that has been playing successfully in Australia for several years, and seemed destined for the West End. Not only was it based on a successful film, it was also soaked in cliches of Ozzie kitsch that a British audience would find reassuring, enough sequins and camp to bring in the gays, and a great movie soundtrack that would translate into a snappy sing-a-long show. Former Neighbours star Jason Donovan was conscripted to play Tick (the role played by Hugo Weaving in the film - in a nice irony, Donovan was originally offered the film role, but turned it down, fearing it would pigeonhole him), and the theatre was inevitably kitted out with a giant spangly stiletto on the roof. Success seemed unstoppable - and it has been.

I initially winced when Gay Stephen suggested that we go, largely because I feared it would be a cheesy dumbed down version of the original, with audiences full of middle aged slags from Blackpool in cheap spangled halter tops (or suburban gays in cheap spangled halter tops), all along to have a girls night out and have a laugh at "the gay musical".

Then I stopped myself and realised how much I loved the movie Priscilla when it was released, and how I owed it to my former self to go and see it onstage - if for no other reason than to mark the passage of time. Priscilla was the first...

[more to follow...]

Birth of a Book Club

25 April 2009

London

As part of my inexorable march towards middle-classness, I've crossed into an exciting new suburban sub-culture. No, not wife-swapping, though if the neighbours make any more noise than they do now, I may be tempted to take over a saucepan, a gerbil and some Krisco the next time they start screaming at each other at 1 in the morning and join in. My new suburban adventure doesn't involve nudity, rubber body stockings or Ann Summers sex toy catalogues, although at this stage, anything's possible. Instead, I have created a Book Club. 

Book clubs have become a slight liberal in-joke in recent years, associated with boozy middle aged ladies wearing straw hats shrieking with menopausal excitement over Joanna Trollope and too many daquiris. Then I realised that as I am, spiritually anyway, a middle aged woman, I might as well run with it. My reasons for wanting to start a book club are fairly self-explanatory - I like to read, I don't read enough, I miss being an English Lit student and having long arguments about books, and I want to resume the position with people I don't hate, preferably over fantastic food. 

Being an academic geek, I went online to see if I could find useful, or at least entertaining guidance on how to run a book club. While some American websites were helpful (Book Browse and Barnes & Noble), there was very little around in the UK that didn't involve Richard & Judy or the word "Baptist" in the reading list. The information I did find was so banal and self-explanatory that, although if read aloud could prove very entertaining, didn't seem to provide any added wisdom. 

"Make sure everyone who comes to the book club has read the book", one website suggested. A good point, to be sure, and something that I seemed to remember formed the punch line of a Seinfeld episode, when George Constanza joins a book club, fails to read the assigned book - Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's - and watches the film instead, only to be humiliated by his book club members when he fails to spot plot details from the book that were excised in the film. Sadly, the website I found failed to suggest interesting ways of ensuring that people did read the book in time. Obscene phone messages? Slamming the door in their face on arrival if they haven't finished the book? Pointing at people randomly and barking random questions about plot details or names of minor characters?

Thank God for the American websites, that boldly went where the understated, slightly self-embarrassed "What do you mean you haven't read Proust in the original French?" English websites could not. My favourite was the Book Browse website, which was written like a self-help manual, and the text had a world weary, battle scarred quality, as if the writers had survived several scary book groups that self destructed, turned into drug trafficking operations or where people got slapped. The site even included a page called "Difficult Meetings" (again, written with the clear-eyed grimness of someone who has looked into the heart of darkness), where people from dysfunctional book clubs would write in with "Dear Abigail" questions, and the website folks would offer helpful suggestions for what happens when people talk too much and ways to encourage people who don't talk to say something. (Clearly this wasn't going to be a problem for me or any of my friends). There was also advice something along the lines of what you'd tell a 16 year old girl on her way to a blind date so that she doesn't end up being gang-banged in the back of a car later - don't invite strangers into your home, meet somewhere neutral and public, always carry a clean hankie, and don't bring up risky subjects like your interest in public urination or nipple clamping your pet dog.

My favourite question on the Book Browse site, which I'm guessing was based on someone else's real life car crash experience, was "We're a newly formed book group and one person is making life a misery for the rest of us, she arrives drunk and is offensive". Ye Gods - was this a book club, or a chapter meeting of AA? Book Browse's solution to this was to vet all your members before the first meeting (though again, I'm not sure how - by asking them to exhale into a breathalyser?) and to set out ground rules at the start of each meeting - again, something in the manner of AA meetings. A possible mantra for the book group dawned on me: "God grant me the serenity to read the books I can't be arsed finishing, courage to accept the opinions of those who I find stupid, and the wisdom to know the difference."

I assembled three single friends who I know like each other, and who's opinions I can listen to without sticking forks in their eyes: Gay Stephen, Annabel the Slut, and Lovely Angela. Annabel the Slut was immediately, slobberingly excited (the book club thing was something we'd talked about a while ago), and, being a Leo, she immediately tried to take over, suggesting new members and begging us to come and visit her in her Essex prison in Chav-on-Sea. Clearly, she had to be slapped down to size and learn her place, but her enthusiasm was infectious. Lovely Angela was also keen, as was Gay Stephen, although he expressed some concern about being too slow a reader and worried about his ability to compete with three hyper-active over argumentative lawyers in the discussion section. I suggested that if things got out of hand, he just tap on the table with his Prince Albert to restore order. I didn't want any more than four - mainly because I couldn't be arsed cooking for five, as I wanted more food for me, and four seemed a more manageable number of people to try and corral together for a monthly lunch. 

As for Book Browse's advice on not inviting people with drinking problems to a book club, I realised this was a lost cause. As Annabel the Slut was more or less promising to turn up drunk and disorderly, and given our anticipated wine consumption, it was pretty much a given that we'd be dealing with slurred speech and drunkenness in most of our meetings, so I decided to roll with it. Hell, at least red wine would keep the conversation lubricated, if possibly not always coherent.

Next, the book. Without fail, all the book club websites advised me that the selection of books was the most difficult and controversial part of forming a book club, and usually the reason why some book clubs succeeded and others ended in mutiny and blood on the walls. The book club websites were divided on how to choose books - some suggested rigid adherence to a pre-agreed neutral list of books, which Book Browse and Barnes & Noble and even sad old Richard & Judy and WH Smith in the UK all helpfully provide, whereas others suggested the standard democratic approach to letting each person choose a book. My friend Fiona, who works in publishing and knows a thing or two about book clubs, told me despairingly about her book group where they allowed members to pick their own book, and she ended up reading Jodi Picoult's entire ouevre. Oh, the horror!

It's at this point that some discussion of literary snobbery has to enter the conversation. As with most middle class forays into popular culture these days, there's usually a gaping ravine between the "shoulds" and the "wants". As nice university educated Guardian readers, we know that we should be reading books that are intelligent, literary, challenging and self improving, but unless we're incredibly disciplined or masochistic (which amounts to much the same thing), we put these books back on the shelf and turn to something racier and more entertaining. I wanted the book club to be enjoyable and not feel like hard work or a school assignment, but I also hoped that we would end up pushing ourselves slightly and read things that individually we wouldn't normally read. The trick seems to lie in negotiating a balance between fun and Victorian self-improvement.

For our inaugural meeting, I selected Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin - a compulsively readable novel about Eva, a resolutely un-maternal travel writer who reluctantly has a child to please her husband, and ends up raising Kevin, a frightening affectless child who grows up to stage a Columbine-style massacre at his high school. Kevin was all over the book club circuit a few years ago like a rash, and seemed to have been written to provoke debate about good vs bad motherhood, the nature/nurture debate, and whether we're born bad or have it beaten into or out of us. As Annabel the Slut helpfully pointed out, Kevin even has a series of book club discussion questions in the 2006 Serpents Tale edition that we could go through. I wrinkled my nose at this a bit, thinking that reading off a pre-prepared Q&A sheet was a bit poor form, and that surely we four intellectual glamazons would be able to think of our own questions. (As it happened, the questions came in handy, but more on that later).

Shriver herself was an interesting character, who seems to share some of Eva's arrogance and outspokenness - famously winning the Orange Prize for fiction in 2005 and telling the press she was happy to win and thought she'd written the best book, later justifying her point of view by saying that she was tired of expectations on women to be uncomfortable with competition and being self-deprecating about their own success. Shriver went on to have a brief career as a newspaper column, where she could be relied on to be controversial and provocative, though where she's gone to now, I'm not sure - no doubt enjoying the royalties from Kevin, which has sold over a million copies.

Interestingly, none of the "big" American reviewers were wild about the book, most notably the New York Times, who called it overwritten) but it caught on primarily because of word of mouth. This was a book that people - especially women of childbearing age - wanted to debate. The book horrified and appealed because it gave voice to a deeply seated taboo - that parents may not like their children, and that despite parents' best attempts a child may still grow up to be a bad egg. Shriver's style is overwritten, but she very coolly and unsentimentally loads the bases, creating a reluctant mother who may or may not be the source of her son's problems, and a child who it is impossible to feel empathy for, then sets the hounds running (I know, I'm mixing my sports metaphors) and suspends judgment. 

After years of casual discussions of Kevin, I've come up against much the same initial reaction from mothers who've read the book, which was usually something along the lines of "It wasn't an accurate depiction of motherhood"; "I'm a parent and I bonded with my child, so there must be something wrong with Eva"; and "It was written by a woman who isn't a mother, so she doesn't know what it's really like". Well, blah blah blah. 

If I dug a little deeper, though, I'd get a more interesting response. Many of the mothers I talked to would, after a little prompting, drop their voices, look around to make sure that no one else could hear them, and admit that the book hit on some hard-to-face home truths: that there are times when they hate their kids and want to throw them across the room (as Eva does with Kevin at one point), and that every expectant mother is terrified that they may not bond with their child or that they'll otherwise fuck up their child's lives. For my generation, there's a particular anxiety about abandoning (or at least suspending) a satisfying career to have a child, and a continual sense of inadequacy that they can't give fully to both their families and their careers. Kevin is a book that pries open and exposes those murky fears, and presents a worst-case scenario. The We Need To Talk About... of the title seemed to be a call to arms to talk about the downside of parenthood that isnt' featured in Baby Gap commercials or Hallmark greeting cards.

I was excited about the idea of having four people who didn't have children debating the book, if only because it might be refreshing to have a conversation about how horrific parenting can be without having to deal with parents who would inevitably feel compelled to justify their own parenting skills. None of us are parents, but we all have experienced childhood (well, maybe except for Gay Stephen, who claims that he was arranging dinner parties only a few hours after his birth), and have plenty of experience of gazing (mostly in horror) at other people wrestling with screaming children. We have all suffered through interminable lunches and weekends away with friends where the agenda is dominated by a child's toilet training regime, or where conversation is made impossible because someone's little darling won't "go down". I have a nephew who I'm fairly certain is going to grow up to be a serial killer or at least the local pedophile, so Kevin resonated with me not so much as a dark fantasy, but as a recognition that some children are just hard work. 

The others enthusiastically agreed (Good - it's so much easier when people just do what you tell them to do), and amazingly, we managed to get a free Saturday together within three weeks. Lovely Angela, who was the only one of us who hadn't read Kevin, was very sporting about trying to plough through it in three weeks, even more sporting when she confessed on the day that she hadn't quite finished it, and sporting above and beyond the call of sporty duty when she allowed us to tell her the surprise ending so we could all discuss the book together. Thanks, doll.

The day came. I rose at dawn, rubbed rock salt into my skin, stuck a whole lemon up a chicken's bum, roasted it with some garlic and rosemary, artfully compiled the Leon superfoods salad into my Wedgwood salad bowl, guiltlessly boiled some new potatoes in a desperate need for carbs, fished the skein of peach puree out of the back of the fridge to make Bellinis, and called the first meeting of the coven. 

It was, I'm happy to report, a roaring success. As always in London, things kicked off about an hour later than scheduled. Lovely Angela, who said that she was going to be late because she was meditating with a hot Frenchman, was early, Gay Stephen was right on time, and Annabel the Slut, as always, was late, and arrived just in time for the roast chicken. After Annabel and I traded a few bitchy passive-aggressive bitch slaps about her being late, as we are wont to do, we settled into the food (which was superb - like Lionel Shriver, I see no point in being self deprecating about my hostess skill), I got drunk on a second Bellini while the other two polished off the red, and we proceeded to talk about Kevin.

I was aware of the warnings from Book Browse not to dominate the conversation. Then again, I've never been in a conversation that I didn't want to dominate, and figured that the others knew me well enough to shout me down - especially Annabel the Slut, who at one point asked me to stop talking and eat more chicken to which Gay Stephen promptly made a satisfyingly queeny little "Oooooooooh" sound. As I'd hoped, we all came to radically different conclusions about Kevin and the moral responsibility of Eva for her rotten child - I leaned more towards Eva being a bad mother, Annabel the Slut argued that Kevin was just a bad child, and Gay Stephen said, rather profoundly, that Eva wasn't a mother, and that the book was more about her inadequacies than her son's. We were all (happily) divided over the end of the book - I read it as something of a reconciliation between mother and son, whereas Annabel the Slut and Gay Stephen saw only Eva's misery and estrangement - but agreed that Shriver's point was that there were no easy answers. Well, at least, that was what I thought, no one disagreed with me, and even Annabel the Slut admitted reluctantly, as she stuffed chicken skin into her mouth, that I had a point.

We then got into a really interesting (if somewhat grim) conversation about how Kevin forces Eva to confront that there is no boundary between pulling the trigger and not pulling the trigger, and that life may be as meaningless and devoid of motivation as Kevin seems to want it to mean. Kevin structures the massacre so that it means nothing, and resists any attempt to blame his killing on "a reason". My reading of this was that he wants to become like the computer viruses that he collects and keeps in his room - they are pure, devoid of reason or motivation, and only exist to destroy. (Of course, Kevin likes the celebrity he creates, and has a malignant sense of enjoyment at breaking the rules - something he seems to disavow by the end of the book, when he realises life in an adult prison isn't going to be fun). Somehow, this lead us into a discussion of the ways in which people create children to give their lives meaning, and the ways in which we create habit and routine as an excuse for being able to get out of bed in the morning. By the time we got to dessert (apple pie with raspberry yoghurt), we agreed that we all possibly needed Prozac, but that we'd "done" Kevin satisfactorily. Amazingly, Ange was still keen to finish the book after we'd shredded it. 

Full of food and self-congratulation, we eagerly planned our next few meetings, and I was relieved to get agreement on no Jodi Picoult. As we lolled around on my carpet, drinking coffee and laughing at the fact that I alphabetise my DVD collection, we agreed that, given our busy working lives and general lack of time to take a shit, lead alone read a new novel every month, we should only go with books that were 300 pages or less. Sadly, this means excluding all Jordon's volumes of autobiography. (Damn!) 

Next up is lunch at Gay Stephen's, where we'll be reading John Boyle's The Boy In the Striped Pyjamas, for sometime in early June. I really can't wait. Applications are already streaming in from friends eager to join, and they're being required to submit a glossy 6" x 8" black and white photo portfolio and a 1500 essay on why they think they're cool enough to join the coven. In the meantime, I'm trying to think of a cool name for the group. I'm rather fond of "Lucky Bitches", named after the French & Saunders parody of Joan and Jackie Collins, but would like to something even vaguely suggestive of literacy rather than snorting coke off a table in Malibu. Time will tell...

Pleasure and Pain with Miss Jane

19 April 2009

London

One of the pleasures of being a rich capitalist bitch living in London with no dependents and lots of yummy disposable income is being able to go to the theatre all the time. In my six years since mincing into London, I've gone to the theatre on average twice a month, and moved progressively from standby or standing seats in the nosebleed section and early morning queuing at the National for last minute day seats, to the front of the stalls, centre aisle. I used to recoil in horror at top price seats in the stalls of West End shows being FORTY POUNDS - now I scarcely bat an eyelid to fork over sixty quid to see Kathleen Turner's facelift close up, or to sit underneath Brian Dennehy as he sweated his way through Death of A Salesman, or Judi Dench getting her baps out during Noel Coward's Hay Fever. (Well, she didn't actually get them out, but I was close enough to her to get a mouthful if she'd turned the wrong way. Hmmm, must stop this line of humour. Jokes about Judi's tits really isn't a good look). 

Anyway, the point is that in all this time, I've hardly considered the vicarious pleasure of someone else organising theatre tickets, or enticing me back into the back row. Enter Miss Marla Jane Lynch, theatrical luvvie and current box office manager of the Menier Chocolate Factory, who has re-introduced me to the pleasures of the nosebleed section. Jane somehow manages to exist in London on the same income I think I spent on Jasper Conran Wedgwood last year, and still be a good time girl. I'm in awe of her, and I've enjoyed reliving my own initial enjoyment of life in London through her saucer-sized eyes and "I'm here!" enthusiasm. 

Thanks to Miss Jane, I've gotten freebies to see two delicious productions this year - A Little Night Music at the Chocolate Factory and later in its West End transfer, and Mishima's Madame de Sade, starring Saint Judi "Get em out for the lads" Dench. I've written about A Little Night Music in a previous blog, and adored it, though I could've passed quite happily on Mishima and Saint Judi, fab frocks notwithstanding. But it's a relief to have a theatre pal who's tastes can range, like mine, from Sondheim musicals to weird Japanese sado-masochist drama. Better still, I'm rediscovering the sado-masochistic pleasure of life in the cheap seats. Thanks, Miss Jane.  

Lost in the English Riviera

2 April 2009
Torquay, Devon, England

Today I fulfilled a tacky tourist dream of adventure I'd had since I was 10 - to visit Torquay, a now slightly faded about the edges English seaside resort town, and legendary home to Fawlty Towers, the greatest English comedy ever made. A couple of weeks ago, I was asked by a colleague to replace her in a speaking slot at an industry conference based at a hotel in Torquay. The opportunity to be exhibitionistic AND stay in a Torquay hotel seemed too good to pass up, and now, here I am. 

The hotel is, as I'd hoped, huge and kitsch - a Victorian-era monstrosity built in the days when London's jet set flocked to Torquay for their summer beach holiday, long before steamboat or air travel was easily available. Since the annexation of Spain as an English holiday pad, Torquay has fallen out of fashion, and now reminds me a little of Cuba - a sense of a glorious past now mostly gone, with hotels exuding the smokey slightly hungover feel of a great party the night before that you've arrived slightly too late for. And it has palm trees, too. 

I arrived at the hotel at around 8pm, and amazingly still sunny and mild, so I had time to nip around the corner to Gleneagles, the hotel where John Cleese, co-writer and star of Fawlty Towers reputedly stayed and encountered the unbelievably rude service of a hotel manager who was later monumentalised as Basil Fawlty. 

Fawlty Towers wasn't filmed in Torquay, of course - the set was in an old country club somewhere in Buckinghamshire, now tragically demolished. But my guess is that the legendary appeal and continued popularity of the series brings as many saddos as me to the town as Jane Austen brings Darcy-obsessed tourists to Bath. I was orgasmic with delight to be there, and tried to absorb some of the slightly surreal dreariness about the English seaside holiday that the series managed to convey. 

Being in Torquay took me back to my high school thespian days, when I convinced my otherwise unremarkable dumpy little English teacher to let our class stage an episode of Fawlty Towers, with me as Basil, naturally. We (that is, I) chose "The Builders" - the one where Basil pays Mr O'Reilly, an incompetent Irishman, to do some construction work, against Sibyl's warnings, everything goes wrong and Basil ends up threatening to insert a garden gnome into Mr O'Reilly. It was the only of the 12 episodes that had enough unity of time and space action (most of the episode takes place in the lobby) to work as a stage play, and plus it gave me an opportunity to spank myself on the bottom screaming "You're a naughty boy, Fawlty!" and be slapped several times by girls. Unsurprisingly, it was a brilliant success, even though the boy playing Manuel was about 12 stone so some of the physical comedy didn't work. Even my mother laughed and confessed to me that I should be an actor (something she spent most of my adolescence trying to talk me out of). 

Back at my hotel, I had a sudden panic attack alone in my room, surrounded by cornflower blue floral everything (bedspread, curtains, chair upholstery, writing paper), and was kept awake most of the night by the dreadful ABBA revival band playing downstairs. Normally I'm ok with the kitsch fun of ABBA, even after Mumma Mia! seems to have crystallized their music into a kind of white trash hen's night awfulness forever, but the kitsch combination of Torquay, blue floral and Ring! Ring! (Why Don't You Give Me A Call?) coming up through the floorboards was too much to bear. 

Fortunately the next morning was bright and sunny, and my speaking spot wasn't until the mid-afternoon, so in between pretending to sound interested in other people talking about their lives, so I could explore the hotel. It was hideous, certainly, but somehow it made up for its hideousness by being really really huge. So huge that I'm amazed Stanley Kubrick didn't use it as the set for The Shining rather than have his own hotel town built on a studio set. 

Everything was decorated with a slightly twee Victoriana - sitting rooms with fake rococco fireplaces, teak veneer on everything, enough floral to stop a Sevres porcelain shepherdess in her tracks, imitation Louis Seize armchairs with Miss Marple lookalikes asleep and drooling in them, and a fabulous Agatha Christie-esque terrace looking down onto the tennis court and swimming pool (now both disused and replaced by a rather ugly modern sports centre built round the back by the kitchens) and a weird geometrically landscaped gardens, with Torquay's famous palm trees.

Basil: We have palm trees here in Torquay. Do you have palm trees in California?

Annoying American Tourist: Burt Lancaster had one, they say, but I don't believe them. 

The dining room was the size of a football field, garishly decorated in Masque of the Red Death red chintz, and now serviced by bored looking Eastern European teenagers serving microwaved croissants and sausages tasting vaguely of fecal matter. Floors of bedrooms went on forever. Curtains and upholstery smelled slightly of wee. At any moment, Miss Marple could've walked in, taken out her knitting and asked for a train timetable for the next express back to St Mary Mead. I was in kitsch heaven. 

Vive la Revolution or Let Them Eat Cake?

1 April 2009
London

"He don't know if he's a communist
A hedonist or a whore..."

Someone once said – I wish I could remember who – that you’re a socialist until you’re 30 because you want to be, and you’re a capitalist from the age of 30 onwards because you have to be. Today, as anti-capitalist protesters prepare to march on the Bank of England, I was contemplating the slow erosion of my faux-hemian student activist former self into the cheerily money-grubbing corporate whore I’ve become. 

10 years ago, I’d probably have been out with the protesters, no doubt waving a stupid placard or worse still, participating in subversive “street theatre” (or just using words like “subversive”, “hegemony” and “patriarchy” in everyday conversation). Today, as a member of the establishment, I feel a sense of resentment towards the protesters, who I want to dismiss with a contemptuous rolling of my eyes, or maybe just prepare a vat of boiling oil and pour it over them as they come mincing past our office building. I’m also wondering just what happened in the interim 10 years to effect such a sea change.

As a student, I was certainly more stridently left-wing than I am now (I seem to have settled, like most well-educated 30something Guardian readers earning a lot of money, somewhere vaguely left of centre). But I was a lousy student radical. The one political march I did go on in 1994, where the students’ association of my university was protesting the increase in student tuition fees and the downscaling of arts subjects, turned into a nasty riot, with police in riot gear and batons smashing their way through many a dazed undergraduate. I still remember the moment of terror when the huge crowd ahead of me suddenly split off and walked in another direction, leaving me in the front row of a group, who then went another way and proceeded to rip a locked door off its hinges. I hated the noise, the crowd hysteria and the mindless insanity of it all, and so pulled my way out and walked home. I was disturbed by the way in which otherwise docile pot-smoking undergrads could be turned into violent thugs, solely on the strength of being together in a tightly packed group.

To this day, I’m not really convinced that marching and protesting does much good, other than to make the people who go on them feel good. I’ve always questioned what protests can achieve, other than turn into a media circus. I understand the need to protest. I’m sure for some people it’s important to feel like they’re a part of something bigger than they are, and add their voice to a political dialogue. I’m also part of a generation that’s been raised to romanticise the protest movements of the 60s and 70s, and the images of Martin Luther King leading the March on Washington, Whina Cooper leading the Maori land marches in New Zealand in the 1970s, and the little Chinese man playing chicken with a tank in Tiannamen Square are now part of my generation’s sense memory.

But for me, success is the only test of genius. If a protest can’t actually change something, then it’s all a bit of wank, isn’t it? My therapist tells me I’m too results focussed, and perhaps he’s right, but I guess I’ve just listened to too many wannabe radicals, all schooled on their Marxist and Hegelian theory, working themselves up into frothing fits of self-righteousness about their cause, to the point where I’ve sometimes wanted to reach for the tear gas and shut the pretentious fuckers up. The professional protesters I met at university were frequently little Napoleons, who imagined themselves capable (and enjoyed) being able to manipulate audiences with a few well-chosen words. But for a few eloquent examples who went on to become politicians, most of the radicals either hang up their placards and went back to being middle-class faux-hemians, or became professional protesters who rioted at everything, possibly because it was easier than ever having to be constructive rather than reactive.

Still, students protesting for the right to study Russian is one thing, and people protesting about unnecessary wars in Iraq or for a monumental global financial cock-up is another. Never has the right to protest seemed so relevant, even as it seems to be more and more futile in its effects.

I believe that change is possible, but I’m not sure that protests are the key to effecting change. Sure, they can provide a striking cover image for the cultural studies volume that will no doubt accompany the protest, but change is created in other, slower, less glamorous ways. It’s not about not feeling strong enough about an issue to want to express your opinion – I just think it can be done in other ways, which are slightly less eye-catching, and significantly more difficult to practice.

I felt particularly conflicted over the protests surrounding the G20 summit and the recent financial crisis. For those of you who know me, and even those of you who don’t, I am deeply ambivalent about my job in the City, and frequently wish myself gone from it. I justify it to myself on the basis that I’ve made a Faustian pact - to work in the City for as long as I can stand it, so I can pay off long-standing student loan and credit card debt (now mostly done), and so that I can afford my very consciously bourgeoise lifestyle of theatre tickets, overseas holidays, my own home (where I live, both hermit-like and self-indulgent aesthete) and hopefully save enough in the process to go off and do something more interesting one day. As the years tick on, there’s diminishing returns to my plan, but for the present, anyway, I’m going to stick at it. In the meantime, I practice an air of contempt for what I do, figuring that if I make myself feel slightly uncomfortable about my own life, that’ll be the grit in the oyster I need to not get too complacent and actually escape one day.

Somewhat predictably, though, I’ve become a closet defender of the rights of professionals to do their thing. People may cry, “Burn the bankers” and try, stupidly and reductively, to blame the financial crisis on too much greed, but to me, that’s just naive. People are essentially self-interested, especially in our age of rampant self-absorption, if someone's going to pay you lots of money to take huge risks, you'll do it.

The G20 protests have stirred up my general anxiety about capitalism in general. The old liberal left-wing hippy in me clings on stubbornly to the belief that life shouldn’t just be a competitive struggle, and that there should be a safety net to ensure equality of life for everyone. I also want to be paid a little bit more than everyone else for being smart and hard working, and want there to be a societal incentive for striving for success. It's also worth noting that acceptance of homosexuality only tends to have flourished in capitalist societies, and been mostly disapproved of in socialist countries, so I owe my ability to be a fully integrated sexual being through a culture of rabid self-interest and individualism, not a culture which caters to the good of the masses. Cuba, long held up as a paragon of socialist government, treated its gay citizens appallingly, as the writings of Renaldo Arenas prove. The exception to the rule appears to be Denmark, which legalised same sex marriage in the late 1980s, proving itself a rare example of enlightened socialism. Otherwise, there's not a lot of showbiz in socialism. And therein lies the paradox of being a Chardonnay socialist. 

I’m blithely aware that I have the smarts to succeed in a capitalist universe. As my friend Jodie the Libertarian Lesbian never fails to tell me, in between extolling the brilliance of Ayn Rand and offering to lend me her dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged (a book I've never been able to bring myself to read), I'd make a great capitalist. And she's mostly right. I do. I have the breeding (by this I mean that I am white, male and from a middle class family), the education and the skills (and a non-existent gag reflex) which will ensure that, failing a brain tumour or a Max Mosley-esque sex scandal in the tabloids, I’m always going to be able to find work, keep a job, and generally “succeed” in the material universe, I’m therefore in a position of privilege.

This privilege extends not only to my own life and the kinds of choices I can make, but also to the amount of largesse I can afford in my political thinking. It’s easy to be a chardonnay socialist when you have, well, a lot of chardonnay lying around, and you don’t have to worry about being anything like (or anywhere near) the deserving poor who you hand-wring about.

So, while I'm mostly happy to be another woolly-headed liberal, over the years, I've become more and more contemptuous towards people who dismiss capitalism out of hand. As the G20 summit approaches, I've been progressively more and more irritated by "anti capitalist" protesters who moan about overpaid City workers see us as a faceless mass of chinos, boat shoes and expense accounts at champagne bars and lapdancing clubs. As an overpaid City worker myself, I feel the need to launch a counter-protest. Dismissing bankers and lawyers as wankers ignores the years of hard work and study, the long nights at the office when most people are comfortably at home, the sacrificing of time spent with family and friends, and the commitment to just bloody getting the job done rather than watching the clock, leaving at 5 and not really giving a shit. That’s what being a professional is – doing the job even when you don’t want to sometimes. If you love it, then good for you, but mostly we know that we don’t love it, and we’re prepared to pay the price to get a financial reward. I’m sure some City workers are a bunch of greedy pretentious cunts who burn pound notes in derision at poor pom-pom-hatted wearing protesters. The reality is much less black and white - yes, there are a few wankers, but mostly, the City is populated by hard working people trying to get as much moolah together as quickly as they can so they can enjoy their lives. And personally, I don't think there's much wrong with that. 

What I’ve hated the most about these protests is how incoherent the agendas are. There are anti-capitalist protesters who obviously can’t wait for May 1st and just want to have a good old moan about the fact that England isn’t like Communist China. There are people wanting to send a message to the G20 summit leaders about the need for more regulation of the industry. And then there are those, I suspect, who just want to have a good whine about people who earn more money than they do. There are the anarchists and the revolutionaries, who want life to be a constant re-run of Battleship Potemkin, and the drama students, who just want a chance to strut their stuff.

There’s something about protesting that appeals to our subversive, post Marlon Brando “we love wild boys” culture. It’s hip to be counter-cultural, in a way it never is to tow the line. Whatever happened to Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird? He was, and probably still is, my hero, and one of the reasons why I wanted to become a lawyer. He worked inside the system, but critiqued it, remained humble and upstanding, and achieved something that the outsiders who he defended couldn't do on their own. Yes, perhaps now it seems like liberal do-gooding and a way of keeping the great unwashed in their places, but it worked.

Protest is a compelling way (and nowadays, possibly the only way) for people to make their voices heard, but I doubt seriously whether it's going to change anything. And these days, I’m not sure that that's a bad thing. As Penelope Keith says in To The Manor Born, “Democracy is all very well, but why give it to the people?” 

Death of the Chav Queen

22 March 2009

London

Jade Goody has finally died, oddly enough on the UK day for celebrating Mother's Day. Personally, I'm relieved, as now (hopefully), after a few predictable weeks of tabloid noise, the whole circus of her death will fade away, and then (again, hopefully) she'll be forgotten. Then again, that may not be possible, as England seems to be limbering up for a national week of mourning, just like they did 11 years ago when that other media-codependent celebrity dropped off the twig.

I've spent much of the last six years trying to forget about Jade Goody, or move to a part of the national consciousness where she wasn't a permanent fixture. It's been impossible. When I got to the UK in 2003, Jade was a celebrity, and in the papers often enough for me to ask who the hell she was. The answer I got confounded me, and went something like this:

"She was in Big Brother. No, not the series happening this year, last year's episode. No, she didn't win, no. She got voted out, and the tabloids called her a pig. Why is she famous? Um... because she was really mouthy, and a bit thick, and got really well known for saying stupid things. No, there's nothing else - that's pretty much it."

Therein lies the existential mystery that is - or was - the career of Jade Goody. Famous for being on television for 15 minutes, famous for being thick, and famous for not doing a whole lot else, thus defeating most of the received pre-Warholian notions that fame needs to be based on some kind of talent. Somehow, she managed to hang on into public consciousness long after many a Big Brother contestant faded back into white trash obscurity. Five years later, she'd amassed a fortune of around £4 million, through television appearances, promotion of a best-selling perfume (I think it was called "Chav: The Fragrance"), an autobiography and, predictably, an exercise video. Not bad for a girl who reputedly thought a ferret was a bird, an abscess was a green drink from France, that Pistachio painted the Mona Lisa, that there was a part of England called "East Angular" and that there was a language called Portuganese.

In her brief, largely cringe-worthy life, she became symbolic of the new order of post-Big Brother celebrity - no talents other than to attract attention, a childish need for approval through the accrual of public recognition, and a misguided belief that being on television was itself a form of achievement. In the early days of Big Brother, it was mostly novelty and good fun. By the time Jade turned up, it was clear that it was less a game show than it was a circus of emotionally disturbed attention seekers who thought fame brought validation.

For most of us with nice middle class upbringings, we assumed that if you were stupid and talentless, the best thing would probably be not to draw attention to this fact, and certainly not go on television to advertise it. Jade seemed to typify the new breed of reality TV babies who were born without that particular self-consciousness, and who revelled in having no inhibitions, or who just didn't have that filter between the brain and the mouth that said "Crap idea - don't say it". Jade's particularly brutal form of self-disclosure was applauded in some quarters for being honesty, and elsewhere, was written off as self-serving, ignorant opportunism.

Even when she was being thick as pigshit and just as malodorous, Jade managed to stay in the headlines, establishing a new rule of celebrity that publicity by any means necessary. She won a coveted place in the London Marathon, making a lot of noise about the fact she'd done no training and been eating lots of curries. She then collapsed half way through and had to be treated by paramedics, costing more than the amounts she'd purported to have raised for charity. Yes, it was embarrassing - but she was still in the news.

Television celebrity is a fickle business, and the medium that made Jade a star turned on her and almost ate her last year. She almost committed career suicide when she went on Celebrity Big Brother, and leading a gang girl cabal who picked on a Bollywood actress and called her "Shilpa Fuckawallah, Shilpa Durupa, Shilpa Poppadom." She was voted off the programme shortly after, and in the mad mad world of television celebrity, Shilpa became the good fairy to Jade's evil witch and turned into some kind of national example of stoic bravery and fortitude, and was invited to a reception at the House of Commons. Ye Gods.

Jade emerged from "Shilpagate" (how tiresome it is that anything vaguely reeking of scandal gets the suffix "-gate" attached to it) crying and apologetic, though it wasn't clear that she even realised why she was being criticised. As one commentator put it, it was like she was a child who'd just been chastised for doing something that she didn't know was wrong. The more cynical of us speculated that she was crying not because she knew she'd given offence, but because she'd lost her meal ticket. A couple of hastily arranged photo shoots of her kissing and making up with Shilpa were arranged, but it didn't seem to work - she was back to being the nation's favourite pigdog again, and a representative of everything that was wrong with the white uneducated working class.

Somehow, like a persistent poo that you just can't flush down the loo, no matter how many times you try, Jade bounced back, and her "controversial" Big Brother appearance became a new meal ticket. (In fact, "Controversial" became the name of her next, best-selling, fragrance).

The next twist of her story seems so surreal that it could only be real life, as not even the most venal of TV producers or press agents could dream it up. Jade went on Indian Big Brother, presumably as some kind of extended "mea culpa" for Shilpagate and an attempt to show that she was down with the curry munchers - and because the money was good. She was then told, via the Big Brother diary room, that she had cervical cancer. It seemed so opportunistic a turn of events that it was hard to believe that her publicist, the dazzlingly omnipresent Max Clifford, hadn't made it up.

In the shifting sand world of celebrity, cancer is the equivalent of a get out of jail free card. It appears to absolve anyone of moral responsibility, and means that all your acts are suddenly imbued with selflessness, and courage. Actresses playing a cancer victim almost always bag an Oscar nomination (less so if they play a woman who contracts the clap or who has an abortion). For Jade, the Big C provided her with the perfect legitimisation of all her money-grubbing activity to date. She wasn't going on television because it was easy money and comfier than living on welfare cheques or her old career as a dental nurse - she was now doing it because she was a self-sacrificial mother who was trying to provide for her children in the event of her death, and a "spokesperson" for cancer awareness. Jammy cow.

I think it's sad that anyone should have to die when they're 27, and it's awful that she's left two young sons motherless. In that sense, I don't feel any more or less sorry for her than any other young mother who dies young. I also don't blame the woman for using whatever means she had to make some cashola - even the most appalling parent must want to do something to lift their children out of the gutters. There's another, possibly less mercenary but much more tragic dimension to Jade's death rattle in these last few weeks. Presumably, once she knew she was terminal, she also wanted her (until that point, fairly facile) life to mean something, cos God knows it hadn't meant much till then, so "cancer spokeswoman" might as well do.

That's where I choke and want to stamp my little foot in protest. I acknowledge that the news of her illness has raised the cervical cancer statistics in young women, but I dispute that this was anything particular to do with Jade's life or achievements, or that she's a "spokesperson". When celebrities who contract an illness (a "good" illness, mind you, not something nasty that reeks of moral irresponsibility, like AIDS), they automatically seem to become "spokespersons" for the disease, despite their lack of knowledge about the condition. Even if they speak publicly about the illness, and "raise awareness", it's ultimately themselves they are raising awareness of. Jade wasn't a spokeswoman for cancer any more than Princess Di was a postergirl for bulimia and self-mutilation. It happened to her, she spoke publicly about it, and she lived with the illness. Loudly. Any other celebrity with the same amount of media attention could have achieved the same thing, with any other disease. It worked because it taps into deep seated fears about death and dying, and our love of a "rags to riches" and self-identifying underdog story. It has nothing to do with that person, other than that they are happy to impart their experience publicly. That appears to have been Jade's particular "talent" - to live her life without any internal censorship and put herself and her failings and vulnerabilities on display. And this appears to have been why people loved her.

There was an interesting analysis of the Tao of Jade in the Guardian a few days after she died, which I now wish I'd kept the link to. The writer essentially argued that Jade's appeal was never going to be understood by middle class liberals, because she was a stupid chav (no argument there), but that for the rest of the country, who are also stupid chavs, she was an equal, and by association, had become a role model. The writer noted that among Jade's kind, it's considered pretentious to get by on your intelligence, and true peer respect comes from being an East End gold-toothed geezer, who does a bit of wheeler-dealer trickery and makes a bundle from pulling one over the Establishment. In other words, if you're a lower class chav, it's you against the cold unfeeling world, and if you can make a fortune without betraying your working class roots and becoming "posh" or being too much of a smartie-pants, then we, your fellow great unwashed, will stand by and applaud you.

I'm not sure whether this is just the Guardian indulging in a little more Guy Ritchie-esque geezer chic, but he has a point. I think Jade represents a particular kind of dream that exists in all of us to some extent, but appears to exist more in people who aren't as.... traditionally ambitious as Guardian readers are. She represents the hope that you can be who you want to be - an uneducated single mother from a broken home who hasn't succeeded in any traditional sense, but who becomes famous for being herself.

It's a gritty cynical reality that's in marked contrast to the way the middle and upper classes have romanticised the ascent of the middle classes - through hard work and determination and through pursuing formal education. Jade is the anathema of that (now increasingly antiquated and Dickensian) notion of "self improvement" - although interestingly, she was determined to raise as much money as she could to send her sons to private school, so perhaps she had a little more faith in Education than we think.

For Jade, being famous appeared to be tantamount to being loved. It's a wish we all have as children, I think - the wish for unconditional love and acceptance - and which some of us spend years crying over in therapy sessions for feeling that we were denied. Jade bypassed the therapy and went straight for the Madonna-style fame. I have to give her credit for creating a much better life for herself than anyone thought imaginable. Who knows whether she got what she really wanted or not. Well, presumably she didn't get what she wanted, ultimately, because she's now dead.

In the final analysis, I can't really blame Jade for being Jade. She used what was within her (rather limited) means to improve herself. Her "talent" for self revelation as I may, I can't really endorse this as a good enough reason for someone to be famous. I'm too middle class, too obsessed with genius (mine and other peoples') and too contemptuous of mindless self-revelation to want to applaud Jade for her "openness". I want to believe in people raising themselves up through education and hard work, not through flashing their vagina on television and being thick as pigshit and then selling some trashy perfume in the mall. But therein lies the danger of commentating on modern celebrity - at the end of the day, it ultimately comes down to judgment on the basis of taste, which aint so fashionable any more.

So rest in peace, Chav Queen. Death may have granted you a respectability and depth that you wanted but never really had in life, and predictably, the people left behind who are even stupider than you have already started to eulogise and mythologise you. It's easier, I suppose, to pretend that your life added up to something meaningful, rather than it being meaningless. But for me, your life will only ever be an example of some kind of postmodern Darwinian struggle, a rather depressing example of the appeal of publicly-broadcast voyeurism, and a reminder that, rich, poor, chavvy or brilliant, we're all on a one-way march to the grave. I will never ever seek to be like you, and I will pity you in a way that many people may find condescending but that I'm prepared to stick by. And if your sons grow up to be cute and gay, I will do my best to hit on them in a bar when they're older.

Death of a Redgrave

19 March 2009

London

I was never much of a fan of Natasha Richardson until I came to London. I'd first seen her in films like The Handmaid's Tale, and yawned my way through The Company of Strangers and tried not to laugh during the earnestness of Nell. (A friend of mine does a great impression of Jodie Foster playing the mongol in Nell that still makes me laugh whenever I remember it). Natasha always looked stiff, slightly frosty and always appeared to be miscast, never quite gelling with the role or achieving enough emotional credibility to be interesting. She had, of course, the lineage to die for, though her upbringing - a socialist revolutionary mother, a bisexual father who eventually died of AIDS - seemed a bit scary. Still, she was a Redgrave, she had great cheekbones, and - lucky bitch - she was married to Liam Neeson, one of the most handsome (and enormous-cocked) actors in Hollywood. As a friend later said, bitchily, "She's clearly got a vagina like the Grand Canyon. Well, you'd need to with Liam Neeson, wouldn't you?" Well, quite. Here she is with Liam, in a Broadway production of Anna Christie, when they fell in love with each other. Looking at the size of Liam's arms, it's easy to understand why.

Just before I left New Zealand, I went to hang out with my friend Monique on a beach somewhere in Auckland. It was one of those postcard-perfect summer afternoons, the pohutakawa trees were in blossom, the sands were golden, and I was still thin enough to wear a t-shirt on the beach without revealing a muffin top. I have a photograph of the two of us standing on the beach, no doubt smothered in sunblock and trying to look carefree and sunkissed.

Both being pale-skinned and not used to too much sun (I'd grown up in Invercargill, rainy white trash capital of the world, and she was a Palmerston North girl), we decided, rather inexplicably, to go to see Maid In Manhattan. I seem to remember there wasn't a lot else on that fit our rather truncated timeframe (I needed to be back at the airport by the early evening), and Monique queried whether we needed to go to a film so desperately that we would actually pay to see something with J-Lo in it. Things became even trickier when Monique spotted some of her high school students going into the cinema, and wondered if she'd ever be able to live down the humiliation of being seen going to Maid In Manhattan with her fag bangle friend. I think I convinced her to go on the strength of Ralph Fiennes and Natasha Richardson - two classy British actors - being in it, and if nothing else, it would be interesting to see how on earth they managed to exist in the same filmic universe with someone as monstrously-egoed as J-Lo. (This was 2003, in J-Lo's transitional period from being "Jenny From The Block" and an ok actress in films like Out of Sight, to the monstrous global brand and egomaniac that we know and love now).

The film was, of course, terrible, though just fascinating enough in a "so bad it's good"/car crash way to maintain our interest for 2 hours. We marvelled over the number of close-ups of J-Lo's arse, which I think had its own credit in the titles, and no doubt also its own driver, make-up artist and a couple of exhausted personal assistants. We threw up our hands in horror the casting agent who thought that Ralph Fiennes could act believably alongside J-Lo, and puzzled over why Natasha Richardson, who had by this point distinguished herself on the New York stage in Cabaret and Closer, would want to be within 5 miles of this piece of crap.



To summarise: J-Lo plays Marisa, who works as a maid in a New York hotel, despite having hair extensions, porno nails and her own lighting crew following her around while she makes beds. Because she's still Jenny From the Block and she's still keepin' it real, she lives in the Bronx with her mother and her adorable wide-eyed son, one of those Hollywood moppets who's both cute and preternaturally wise, who you want to smother with a pillow. In between folding towels and scrubbing shit off toilet bowls, I think she's doing a PhD in business studies, filming an exercise video, and single-handedly running a charity for blind ponies in the Bronx. (Or is that J-Lo? Well, same diff). Everyone who meets Marisa is immediately struck with her beauty, her intelligenbce, her sassiness, and the Botticelli-esque proportions of her derriere. Marisa meets Ralph Fiennes, a senatorial candidate, who is equally smitten, takes her to the ball and offers to marry her. Or at least be one of her personal assistants. J-Lo, of course, doesn't just say yes right away, because she's keepin' it real - she says yes when he buys her an enormous diamond ring. You go, girl!

Somewhere in the middle of all this slop, Natasha is playing one of those bitchy upper-class English characters who only exist in American studio films, who's meant to be the ugly sister/rival to J-Lo's working class Cinderella, and tries and steal Ralph away from her. Boo! Hiss! It's a role so badly written and paper-thin that you wonder whether she was drunk, or just desperate to pay her drug dealer or Pilates coach bill to accept the part. There's a great moment where she looks at J-Lo and says "You would make a fan-taaaas-tic personal assistant!", wbhile J-Lo smiles beatifically, knowing that she's not just a maid - she's a multi-millionaire singer/actress/model with her own fragrance, hundreds of personal assistants, and a hot booty.

Anyway, after we'd finished laughing and throwing up, Monique and I agreed that it was one of the worst films we'd ever seen, and it marked it seemed to be a low point for Natasha Richardson's career (though in retrospect, I think the film did quite well at the box office, which apparently still counts for something).

A couple of months later, I was in London, and "Our Tash" was starring in a successful revival of Ibsen's The Lady and the Sea, a role once made famous by her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, for which she was getting rave reviews. The Times published a rather funny interview with Tash, in which she freely admitted that she'd had a nose job, that Maid in Manhattan was a piece of shit, and that she wanted to do more theatre. Good for her, I thought. I decided I needed to see the production - I was in London, after all, and this was why I'd come in the first place - and by a happy twist of fate, the morning I called the box office, they had a return in the Stalls. It was the (then) huge amount of £29 - I wasn't yet working in the UK and I was still converting all my purchases in sterling back into New Zealand dollars, which, given that the exchange rate was 3 dollars to the pound, made buying the theatre ticket the equivalent of purchasing a small two-bedroomed house in New Zealand. Still, I was young, carefree, and in London and going to see a Redgrave on stage.

Somehow I made it from Wimbledon to Islington, where the Almeida was, to see the show, and was pleasantly charmed to discover my seat was in the front row, and that most of Tash's acting was stage right, in my direction. Hoorah!

Tash was fantastic, and it remains one of the best performances I've ever seen on the stage. It seemed hard to equate that she was the same person who'd hammed it up brutally in Maid in Manhattan - she was alive, passionate, erotic, terrified and utterly compelling.



I was so dazzled by her, that I considered hanging around the stage door to get her autograph and to try and see her nose job close-up. After years of watching other people do this with stars from The Lord of the Rings, I decided against it, as it just seemed a bit too desperate, and so I trekked back to Wimbledon, thinking "Wow. This is what London is about". The show had been sold out for weeks, and this was an impossible-to-get ticket, and yet, here I had one. Life seemed pretty damn good.

I'll always be grateful to Natasha Richardson for giving me such a dazzling first experience of London theatregoing. I've been to hundreds of shows since, but like sex, coke and shoplifting, you always remember your first time.

Sadly, she never performed in the UK after that, and it was with great sadness that I read about her horrifyingly premature death yesterday. Her taste in film roles may have been questionable - she went on to make two enormously profitable but appalling looking films for children, The Parent Trap with Lindsey Lohan (in her pre-trash queen days) and some piece of shite with Julia Roberts' niece where she's playing the headmistress of an imaginary English girls' boarding school - but her talent on stage, at least as I saw it, was beyond reproach.

The great tragedy of stage actors is that their work is ephemeral, and it's not really possible for subsequent generations to be able to appreciate their work. People still rave about Gielgud and Olivier, but they're only remembered to us through their film work. Sadly, Natasha Richardson didn't have as impressive a body of film behind her to create a great legacy, and her brilliance, which revealed itself on stage, will have to be remembered in theatre reviews, and by the audience members who were fortunate enough to see her on stage. I feel very lucky to have been one of them.

My Bloody Valentine

14 February 2009

London

There are few greeting card holidays I hate more than Valentine's Day. I know it has its roots in some old pagan mating custom, and then got annexed by Christianity, as most pagan mating customs tended to be, but now it's just turned into another commercial opportunity for Hallmark cards and florists to sell overpriced tat, another opportunity for couples to be smug about their status, and for yet another round of culturally approved singleton-bashing. 

I am, as I have been for many years, single, and mostly happy about that. I have a full time relationship with myself (or, more accurately, my other selves), and certainly don't sit at my window moping about why I haven't met the man of my dreams. I can happily go to movies on my own, I can sit in restaurants and cafes on my own without pretending that I'm waiting for someone else, and if there are no available gentlemen callers, I'm happy to spend the evening with my left hand. I love having the whole of my queen sized (naturally) bed to myself, without having to fight for the duvet or be woken up by snoring, and I love having the freedom to plan weekends and holidays without having to consult someone else's schedule. I have a strong circle of close friends who I can rely on to laugh with me, offer a shoulder for me to cry on when it's needed, and celebrate my highs and commiserate with me on my lows - and occasionally, when I can be bothered, I'll return the favour. Like many singletons, think that it would be great to be in a relationship some day, but until then, I'm happy with my own company, and I feel glad in the knowledge that I know myself. I feel complete on my own, and while I think a relationship (well, the right relationship) would be good for me and add something to my life, I don't look at a great gaping hole in my psyche and think "I lack". I am single, therefore I am.

Which is why events like Valentine's Day drive me insane with rage, because it underlines, yet again, our society's obsession with people coupling off. Worse still, it "celebrates" a largely pre-fabricated version of romance and coupling that seems stuck in a sickly mid-80s aesthetic of hothouse-grown red roses wrapped in plastic, teddy bears, balloons saying "I Wuv You" and candlelit dinners set to an appalling endless loop of Whitney Houston power ballads. OK, so it's not just about the soulless excess of the 80s, but the cliches associated with Valentine's Day and the tiresome repetitions of behaviour that's considered proper romantic behaviour are irritating and unimaginative at best, and soul destroying at worst.  

I know it's probably asking to much to imagine a society that doesn't endorse coupling off. Most of our laws and social rituals are based around the expectation that two people (usually a man and a woman) will hook up, get a mortgage and fart out a couple of kids. That's lovely - sometimes, as an aspiration - but the prospects for those of us who don't attain this status, whether through choice or bad luck, lack of opportunity or just lack of focus, is still pretty grim. Days like Valentine's Day tell singletons that they haven't made it, that their status is mostly null and void, and that they missed out on the big prize, or that we aren't fully integrated citizens or satisfied human beings unless we're in a couple. 

It's no wonder, then, that events like Valentine's Day seem destined to pit singletons against couples, with each group digging their heels in, getting defensive (as I am now) and staking their own claims for happiness. I'm more than happy for friends when they find someone they want to be with, and three or four of my close friends are actually in relationships I'd want to be in myself. They've mostly been supportive and non-judgmental about my own single status, and for that, I'm very grateful. But there are, I'm sorry to say, many coupled up friends and acquaintances (and, predictably, most of my family and relatives) who feel compelled to "sympathise" with me for not having met someone yet, despite no cues from me about being unhappy with my life. 

 

The depressing thing is that most people, coupled or single, accept as a truth that there's something wrong with being single. It's not surprising, I guess, since it's only been since the 1960s that Western men and women were able to find a status for themselves in the world that didn't require marriage and children, thanks to the rise of youth/counter culture, the releasing of the stranglehold of organised religion, the availability of contraception and a little bit of pot on the side. 

Yet, 40 or so years on, it's still widely thought that singlehood is a slightly embarrassing half-life, a waiting room that we have to sit through before we pass through to Coupledom, and if we're unlucky, we get stuck in. It doesn't matter much in our 20s - we're young and fresh faced and arrogant, we still assume that we're going to live forever, society still validates our assumption that we're the It crowd, and we can say things like "I don't think I'll ever get married" while elders roll their eyes and smile knowingly. Something happens when we get into our 30s - clearly it's a bigger deal for women than it is for men, as they start to realise that their child-bearing years aren't limitless - and many of us start to panic. 

It interests me that of my age group, I know of very few people who have either made a conscious decision to be single (as opposed to it being a default position because "they haven't met the right person") or who have admitted to themselves that singledom, rather than being a consolation prize, might actually be a valid life choice for the rest of their lives - not because they don't think they're worthy of a relationship or because they have some kind of emotional autism, but because that's what they really truly want, and that's what feels right. 

It doesn't help, of course, that there are so few examples in popular culture of happy successful singledom - real or fictitious. Admittedly, it is easier for men - society is more comfortable with the myth of the man alone, or the urban swinging bachelor, whereas single women mostly only have Miss Havisham, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Bridget Jones to look up to. As affectionately drawn as Bridget Jones was, and as many delicious sideswipes as Helen Fielding made at "smug marrieds" along the way, at the end of the day, Bridget got her Pride & Prejudice-meets-Pretty Woman happy ending, with a relationship to complete her. I loved Bridget Jones - the books, the movies, Renee, the soundtracks - and I won't deny that she expressed something in the zeitgeist about the longing of single girls to find themselves a man who wasn't a loser. Sex and the City flew the flag of sassy singledom for a while, before Sarah Jessica Parker started disguising her wrinkles with Streisand-esque soft focus lighting, and all the characters got partnered off in the final series. (Don't even get me started on the movie). So mostly it's boo-hoo, I'm single, until Prince Charming comes along. As for real life examples, the list, especially for women, is fairly sparse. Sure, there are the former 60s hipsters - the Joan Bakewells and Jane Birkins - who are now widowed or single and still going strong as funky pensioners, but their lives and celebrity are still largely defined by their relationships with famous men in their youth. So essentially, women are left with the same romantic fantasy that they've had from the age of 6, and it's slightly depressing that we haven't evolved much beyond this. The time has come for something new.

For gay men, singledom is slightly easier, though it's a rather complex business. Rightly or wrongly, society still assumes that gay men are largely uninterested or unable to maintain committed relationships, and will merrily stick their dick in everything that moves - a cliche that most gay men are, at some stage of their lives, happy to endorse and live up to. When you look at the bar and club staple of gay culture, it seems like everyone's single. This is partially because for gay men, adolescence lasts approximately 15 years longer than it does for straight men. Many gay men still seem to experience a renaissance in their 30s and into their 40s, possibly after living a fairly straight-laced life in their teens and 20s, and so stay on the dance floor longer, unencumbered by the demands of wives and children. It's also caused by uneven numbers of singles vs couples - whereas a straight married man takes a prominent and public role in his social circle, a gay man who finds his mate tends to disappear from the scene, moveto suburbia and spend the next 7 years arguing over bathroom fittings with his significant other and pouring over Nigella cookbooks for elaborate couples-only dinner parties, surfacing only at the occasional AIDS charity or for a quick, discreet threesome in a bathhouse. 

So it seems that while straight girls are sitting at home crying over re-runs of Four Weddings and a Funeral, gay men are still partying on, without a care in the world. Yes, the times, they are 'a changing, and with the legitimisation of gay marriage, one day it's possible that gay couples will be no more extraordinary than redheads or left-handers. But while gay men have won themselves the right to have their own Big Fat Gay Wedding, it's interesting to reflect that the numbers of gay couples looking to take up civil partnership hasn't been that high. I expect it'll take gay men a generation or so to get used to not feeling marginalised and decide to cash in on the Heals gift vouchers like the rest of their straight colleagues.

Despite the relative freedom enjoyed by single gay men, the pressure to be in a couple is just as strong in gay 30 and 40something land as it is for the straights. Single gay men seldom get invited to dinner parties, though you may get an online invitation to join the host couple after dinner to try and spice up their flagging sex life. Whether you're gay or straight, being part of a couple gives you safety in numbers - there's one more person to go shopping with, split the bills with, share the hotel bedroom with, fill the time in between that first and second latte with, and keep an eye on the luggage at the airport for you. If you're lucky, they might even agree with you during debates, and hold you on cold winter evenings and assure you that you won't die alone. When you're a singleton, you have to do this for yourself, or find a like-minded friend to do this for you.

All of which would be fine, if each side of the gay/single divide could respect the other's choices and viewpoint, but it appears - on fucking Valentine's Day anyway - that this is impossible. Couples must be endorsed for simply managing to crawl into the same primordial swamp together, while singletons wait around nervously at bus stops, checking their mobile phones to give them something to do with their hands, and avoiding the Soup-for-One aisles at the supermarket.

I know that not all couples feel this way, and that many liberal-minded couples hate the enforced jollity of Valentine's Day as much as I do. But the fact remains that singletons just don't get the same PR as couples do. There's a fantastic episode of Sex and the City called A Woman's Right to Shoes, where Carrie bemoans the lack of a national holiday for singletons. Having just attended a baby shower for a pretentious married friend of hers, who derided her for her irresponsible singleton ways, Carrie reflects on the relative injustices of life, where she is compelled to celebrate her friend's choice of marriage and children, but not the other way around:

"And if I don't ever get married, or have a baby, I get bup-cuss. Think about it. If you are single, after graduation, there isn't one occasion where people celebrate you.... Hallmark doesn't make a "Congratulations, You Didn't Marry The Wrong Guy" card. And where's the flatware for going on vacation alone?"

At the end of the episode, Carrie announces that she's getting married to herself, and gets the snooty friend to buy her an expensive pair of Manolo Blahniks as a wedding present. Ok, so it's only SATC, and it's a little depressing how every life-affirming choice has to be linked back to shopping, but it's a point well made. Until singledom gets seen as a valid choice in its own right, rather than some kind of void or absence of proper social status, there'll never be peace between singletons and couples. 

I can take a small comfort in the fact that many of my coupled friends - mostly the ones with children, of whom there are now an extraordinary number - often tell me that they envy my single lifestyle. (Well, the women envy my freedom to go to the theatre and my disposable income, and the men envy the fact that I can get a blow job 24 hours a day on tap). I've looked on, sometimes amusedly, as friends of my age have become parents, many of them blithely assuming that they'd be able to continue somehow with the self-involved independence of their student days, only to find that parenthood is a one-way ticket to a country you've never been to before, speaking a language that you don't understand and having to do things that no amount of reading or advice can adequately prepare you for. In some senses, my parents' generation were better equipped to be parents, as it was more universally expected, and their expectations of their own lives were much lower than our post-capitalist Have It All aspirations for our lives. 

I don't doubt that all of my babied-up friends haven't loved the experience and aren't anything but delighted to be parents, but it sure is a different world from childless singledom. As for my coupled-up friends without children - well, there are very few of them left these days - apart from the gays, of course, who make up for their lack of children with their proliferation of mood lighting and throw pillows. 

So, even though society won't acknowledge it, maybe being a singleton is the new black. As an act of good faith, today I tried to meditate away my Go Fuck Yourselves rage I usually direct towards the world on Valentine's Day, and tried to see couples in the same way as I do the French - vaguely related to me but on another wavelength. As I looked at the ugly, bored looking couples travelling down to London for "a big V Day weekend" on my plane last night, I tried not to silently judge them. As I saw tired-looking men fish artificial looking red roses wrapped in cellophane out of buckets at M&S, I endeavoured not to roll my eyes in disdain at their lack of imagination. When I went into my favourite local cafe for brunch today (alone, of course) and the maitre 'd tried to sit me in the nosebleed section so he could free up the comfier tables for the couples, I sat where I wanted to anyway. As I had my latte and Eggs Benedict and watched couples at neighbouring tables holding hands continuously as they ordered food, I tried to banish thoughts like "I wonder if he's given her a venereal disease" from my mind. As I read the weekend newspapers, I took a deep breath and avoided reading the cover-to-cover lists of Fun Things To Do With Your Loved One articles, and patronising "Alone This Valentine's Day?" and "Still Haven't Found Someone Special?" lonely hearts adverts, and read the interview with Joan Bakewell where she talks about loving living alone instead. I made a point of texting my fellow singletons to tell them I loved their work. And this evening I went home, cooked myself dinner, arranged some roses (yellow, not red) in a vase, poured myself a rare glass of wine, toasted my general fabulousness, and snuggled under a duvet on the couch to watch my two favourite movies about relationships: The War of the Roses and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 

I don't give up on the possibility that one day, I may meet someone who I can stand for long enough to want to be in a relationship, and that I too might pass over from the single life to being all loved up and happily co-habiting with the hairy rapist of my dreams. Hell, let's throw in a labrador as well. If it happens, I hope that, rather than crossing over to the Dark Side withva shrug of my rounded shoulders and a passing thought of "Well, thank God that's over", I'd retain a love and appreciation of my single life (and, knowing me, hold in my head the possibility that I might be single again one day), and I'd try to remember not to sneer at, pity or condescend to anyone who's single. Well, no more than I condescend to other people generally, anyway. 

Until that unholy alliance is joined, I'm flying the flag for singledom. So watch it, you smug married motherfuckers!

Lost in Vienna

3 February 2009
Vienna, Austria

After my spectacularly fun trip to Vienna last summer, I've been keen to return to the land of cobblestoned streets, Faberge-egg like cathedral domes and apfelstrudel for a repeat visit, and to have some parent-free fun with my friends Nicole and Billy, who are living here. (Actually, I should rephrase that, as it sounds as though I'm coming to Vienna to go to swingers' parties with Nicole and Billy. Liberal though they are, I'm not sure that's what they had in mind when they said "Yeah, come over!")

This time around, with crisp winter weather and without two 75 year olds in tow, my trip was a slightly more relaxed affair, where I was free to explore some of the racier art galleries and take a tentative exploration into the Viennese sexual underground. (More on that later...).

By an amusing twist of fate, my trip here was unexpectedly extended, as snowfall in England has lead to the country literally shutting down, with airports closed and flights being grounded. Well, I could think of worse places to be grounded than Vienna, and if faced with the choice between schlepping around through coffeehouses, Hapsburg palaces and art galleries, or being in London in the middle of a transport emergency, fighting my way to work and getting the red-eye flight to scuzzy old Belfast on Friday, there's no doubt in my mind what I'd choose. Actually, I'm still wondering whether my subconscious, sensing that I'm not wildly enthusiastic about work at the moment and wanted a break, didn't just will this to happen. This is the city where Freud invented psychoanalysis after all... Mwah ha ha.

It was snowing the morning I arrived in Vienna, but of course, being Austria, it was perfect designer snow that fell neatly and picturesquely on rooftops and church steeples, not on the streets or footpaths, and didn't turn to slush or black ice within 24 hours. True to stereotyped form, the Austrian airport authorities were dazzlingly well-organised - the tarmac was scrubbed clean by little men wielding toothbrushes, the landing was smooth, and our luggage was on the carousel before we'd even had time to clear security. A sleek BMW cab drove me down an immaculate highway to the central city, and within 20 minutes I was having my first Viennese coffee and stuffing my face with applestrudel. Austrians treat snow with much the same principles as they treat tourists, dog shit and gas explusion - as a necessary evil, but something that can be managed efficiently so as to minimise inconvenience.

Naturally, the Viennese have been laughing their heads off at the silly old English, who can't organise their way out of a paper bag, let alone out of a snowstorm, and can't understand why English people wouldn't automatically put snow tyres on their cars on the 1st of November or have snowscrapers in the streets and street urchins paid to throw grit on footpaths before dawn. Even the po-faced TV newsreaders couldn't resist cracking a smile during news footage of English highways grinding to a standstill - Nicole told me that the evening newsreader reported, somewhat tongue in cheek, that "the English were having trouble driving home in the snow without any snow tyres", with a jolly Austrian "Ho ho ho" to follow, no doubt. At the airport, people were much less discreet, and as footage showed on television screens of a confused looking Gordon Brown standing outside Downing Street with the equally puzzled looking Chinese ambassador (who was no doubt thinking "Why doesn't the fat Scotsman just get his scraper out and dust off the snow himself?"), the locals roared with laughter.

Aaaaah yes, mein leiblings, I'm happy to report that the English are, once again, the laughing stock of Europe. London may be one of the biggest cities in Europe, but we sure as hell can't deal with something as simple as a snow storm. Equally as predictable is the Guardian's reportage of civic response to the problem: a lot of finger pointing, local authorities saying "It's not our problem", politicians shrugging their shoulders and saying "It's a once every 20 years freak storm", accountants estimating the millions of pounds lost to the economy as business grinds to a halt, and pedestrians in the street swear with frustration about our general incompetence, and no one - no one - being able to promise that we'll be better prepared next time. Only in England.

As Billy pointed out in his blunt, charmingly accented English last night: "De weather in England isn't dat great, so why don't zay do something?" Indeed, Billy, indeed. The English seem to suffer from a kind of collective denial when it comes to the weather. Every summer, people desperately try and sit outside cafes in freezing temperatures, sipping their citron presses with their sunglasses on and trying to look Continental and interesting, pretending that we're all in the South of France or Tuscany - but we're not. We're a country with temperate, continually changing weather, and we're completely unprepared for temperatures below 5 degrees or above 15. At the slightest hint of snow, or fog, or even bright sunshine, our public transport system grinds to a halt, chaos descends and we all have to revert to living like it's rationing during World War II. We're a big enough and wealthy enough country that this shouldn't happen. I know that too much efficiency might just stand in the way from letting the English complain about the weather, which they are fond of doing, or using the weather as an excuse for why they can't or won't go to work, take their clothes off, or do something exciting involving a pulse and adrenalin, or otherwise let go of the beseiged loserdom that we seem to hold to our bosoms like an emblem. Personally, I wish they'd just take a leaf out of the Austrians' book, roll their sleeves up, ease into some liederhosen, sort out the snow and then join me in the communal baths later for a bit of thigh-slapping.

As England turned into some kind of post-apocalyptic third world state, I had a delightful couple of days skipping around Vienna in the snow, watching old ladies strutting around in full length fur coats (politically incorrect and quite possibly immoral, I grant you, but very glamorous) and well rugged-up Viennese schoolchildren politely tabogganing and throwing snow balls at each other in parks. As a boy from a low lying coastal town at the bottom of Noo Ziland, I didn't see much snow growing up either, so snow is something of a novelty for me too. So, when it comes to snow, I'm not big on decorum, and I was more like the squealing Japanese tourists, going completely apeshit when I saw the snow outside the Hofburg. The crisp winter weather and blue skies have been wonderfully bracing, and better still, provide a fantastic excuse for me to stop in another cool cafe for a coffee and torte every 15 minutes, figuring that I'll burn off the calories by goosestepping around the Ringstrasse and powerclenching in and out of art galleries.

My parents' taste in art is fairly traditional and conservative, with a strong leaning towards country peasant chic - give them a milkmaid churning butter, a couple of cows and a windmill, and they're in heaven - so my last visit was spent sedately strolling through the Kunsthistorisches (Museum of Fine Arts) and overdosing on Vermeer and Breughal and Rubens. This time, I was able to plough through the sexier end of Viennese art - the emaciated yet somehow still sexy nudes of Egon Schiele at the coolly minimalist white stone bunker that is Leopold Museum, and the over-marketed yet still lusciously erotic Klimt at the Belvedere, the old Hapsburg palace that rivals Versailles for size, splendour and gold-plated bling.

On Sunday, I was lucky enough to catch the final day of the Belvedere's winter exhibition, a recreating of the famous 1908 Secession exhibition where Klimt and his boy band of funksters unveiled their artistic manifesto of sex, death and modernism, hovering somewhere between the clean lines of Art Deco, the lush florals and swirls of Art Nouveau and the cold colourful brilliance of Surrealism. It's one of my favourite periods in art history, both for the boldness of the work, the new freedom with which they explored the dangerous and the erotic. It's fun trying to imagine how shocking Klimt and Schiele and their kind must've been when they first unveiled their works, and it's inspiring to think about how bold their work was, stripping away centuries of traditional representational painting of "safe" religious or Classical subjects, and re-create the world in racy full-frontal glory.

After a restorative half cake-size slice of torte served by a very dishy waiter at the Schwartzenburg Cafe just off the Ringstrasse, where the fur-adorned patrons happily hang their coats up on coatstands at the door without fear of being robbed (amazing to a hard-bitten Londoner), Nicole and Billy went home for a mid-afternoon nap (or possibly to do some tantric aerobics in their living room - I didn't ask) and I decided between a trip to the Albertina Gallery or a visit to a Viennese sauna. I figured there was only so much art that one homosexual could stomach in a 48-hour trip, so decided to visit the house of ill repute.

Since my last visit, I was struck by how orderly and well-behaved the locals were, and how there seemed to be almost no sexual charge in the streets. Though Nicole assured me that, once drunk, Austrian men were as boorish and sexist as any Essex builder or City boy could be, but somehow that wasn't immediately apparent in the public spaces of Viennese cafe society. As a connoisseur of the sexual underworld, I decided to burrow down a couple of layers and see what lay beneath.

I had a theory that Vienna, like all cities where diplomacy and good behaviour is considered critical to maintaining a sense of social order (like Wellington, Adelaide and Washington), all the less orthodox social activities would be neatly shrink-wrapped and contained out of public view - or at least made safely and hygienically available to access without interrupting with evening dinner and theatre plans or visits to the Cartier shop with Mother. Saunas have always provided a place where men can have sex together discreetly, without needing to deal with the more open (or occasionally strident) tone of gay pubs or clubs - and it's a wonderful way to exfoliate at the same time.

An acquaintance of mine (I'd be pushing it to call him a friend) who is now a conservative Member of Parliament, once told me how impressive Vienna's saunas were, how clean, how polished and athletic the men were, and how neatly "the business" (I guess he meant sex with men) could be "taken care of" enjoyably and discreetly.

That was more or less my acquaintance's approach to sex and life all over - the need to maintain neat and respectable outer appearances, not do anything that might frighten the horses, and keep one's sexuality mostly hidden and not discussed in polite society. As a fellow Catholic boy, it's a dynamic I'm familiar with, and I've certainly played out the same dance of good boy by day/bad boy by night as my acquaintance does, though as I've gotten older and more strident myself, I've recognised that the "don't frighten the horses" approach to sexuality is really just another form of internalised homophobia. As a proudly flag-waving big fat homo, I find the sauna culture occasionally alluring (especially when in foreign cities) but mostly a little too closeted and impersonal for my liking. Still, with only a week in Vienna in the middle of winter, it didn't seem quite the time to storm the Embassy and hang a giant rainbow flag from the Opera House or bag myself a Hapsburg descendent. I figured visiting a sauna would be a fun way to keep warm for a couple of hours, and being Viennese, it was certain to be scrupulously clean and snow-free.

Which it more or less was. Despite being called "one of the most beautiful saunas in Europe", the decor was tacky (think Arabian Nights meets Las Vegas), though the venue (just off Stephansplatz, the main square in central Vienna) was supposedly built on the site of an old swimming baths where one of the Hapsburg princes had got into trouble for feeling up an infantry officer in the late 1890s, resulting in a flurried cover-up. My fellow patrons were mostly unfailingly polite, athletic (God bless any country that requires its young men to do compulsory military service!) and paid particular attention to hygiene - their own and other peoples'. I've never seen bars of soap used quite so thoroughly and acrobatically in my life. I was interested to see a lot of younger men there, as I usually associate saunas with an older, more closeted generation, but this seemed to be as much a part of their Sunday afternoon routine as going to the gym, shopping for little boots or ironing their trousers for the morning.

Predictably, though, gay men in Vienna act much the same in a sauna as gay men do anywhere else. There's a minimum of talking (and all of it in German, which despite sounding sexy and authoritative, was incomprehensible to me) and, with nothing else but tacky porno music and dimmed light to guide you, physique is king. Generally, gay men tend to pair off with their physical replicas - muscle guys with muscle guys, twinks with twinks, bears with bears, with black and Asian men left as pariahs or novelty fucks, and older men desperate for whatever they can get. If you fall between categories (in my case, pigeon chest meets muffin top and no tan) or if you prefer men who aren't your physical replica, then the game of seek and destroy becomes more tricky.

Despite these generic challenges, I was impressed and amused by the principles of Germanic efficiency applied to a gay bathhouse. I was especially taken with how all the men had their own pairs of plastic flip-flops for inside the sauna, no doubt to avoid athlete's foot or the risk of treading in anything (or anyone) unexpected. Given the grunting sounds coming from the steamroom, that was probably wise. I felt rather naked and new kid on ze block without my own, and at one point I almost took someone's much dryer towel than mine by mistake. The horror! I didn't meet the Gestapo sex sarjeant of my dreams, but then I wasn't looking for much more than a friendly good-natured afternoon encounter before limbering up for a coffee, some torte and some postcard writing at Gerstner's cafe around the corner.

Monday was a bit of a disaster, as I taxied out to the airport, having an interesting conversation with a (hot) Iranian taxi driver, who decried Austria as being a closed "fascist" society that treated foreigners like shit, only to discover that Luton was closed, all the flights cancelled, noone behind the Easyjet counter, and queues of 50 people trying to get a flight on the other airlines. There seemed little point in hanging around, and the earliest I could get a flight back was Thursday afternoon, so back I trawled to Old Vienna. Nicole and Billy were total troopers, and were happy to let me stay with them so I parked my little gay wheelie bag at Nicole's big flash corporate law office, and minced off to explore more galleries. I know - it was tough being stuck in a gorgeous city like Vienna with nothing to do except sweep in and out of galleries with big hair, drink coffee, eat cake and write postcards, but by God, someone had to do it!

My find for the week was the Kunst Forum, which had a fantastic retrospective of Georges Braque, Picasso's partner in crime and one of the leading lights of Fauvism and Modernism. (Incidentally, I was suprised to discover that "kunst" doesn't actually mean the plural of "cunt", as I'd assumed, and is actually German for "art". I'm not quite sure why that wasn't apparent to me before, though I quite liked the thought of walking past the Historical Cunts Museum every day on my way into town).

For the rest of the week, my routine went something like this. At 6am every morning, I would wake up to the sounds of Nicole and Billy (both of them morning people, relentlessly energetic and sporty) doing 30 minutes power-skipping in their bedrooms to a soundtrack of classic 80s aerobics tracks like Olivia Newton John's (Let's Get) Physical, and no doubt wearing Bjorn Borg headbands. While all of this was going on, I was hiding under Nicole's sleeping bag on their Ikea sofabed with a pillow over my head, trying to imagine I was in my happy place, and silently hoping that they would simultaneously have strokes and collapse onto the stereo, turning it off in the process, so I could go back to sleep.

After breakfast, which for Nicole and Billy was something healthy like a banana and muesli, and for me was some nice Austrian bun made of white flour covered with Nutella, they'd bound out the door at about 7.30am, leaving me the morning to wake up, check my email, laugh evilly at news from colleagues stuck on suburban train networks, and limber up for a mid-morning stroll into the Museums Quartier to get some coffee and write another 10,000 postcards.

Vienna is, of course, famous for its kaffeehauses - some 19th century wag once wrote that thr Viennese coffeehouse was created for people who wanted to be by themselves, but who didn't want to be alone, and like generations of wannabe urban hipsters, I've also responded to that sense of public solitude and detached community. Viennese cafes are particularly good at creating a sense of unhurried ease - it's quite acceptable to sit at your table all morning, reading the paper, drinking coffee (and occasionally re-ordering), people watching and now even working on your laptop, without feeling pressure to finish up and move on so the maitre 'd can cram in some more clients. When things get busy, waiters will think nothing of asking you to shimmy along or share a table with new customers, but somehow there always seems to be room for all, at a pace and sensibility that, to me, anyway, reeks of "civilised" middle class urban culture, and something that's sorely lacking in London.

The slight drawback is that, unlike New Zealand and England, smoking is still legal - and widely and enthusiastically practised - in Viennese restaurants and cafes. So as I park myself in yet another chic coffeehouse, order a cafe melange, get out my postcard stack and strike a pose as I write witticisms to friends back home, within 20 minutes, I'm silently suffocating on 2nd hand cigarette smoke, and wondering how long I can go on trying to look nonchalant and cool before I pass out and have to be carried outside to be revived. Still, at least I haven't tripped over someone's pet dog (or child) in a cafe yet. I hope they get lung cancer too, the fuckers.

My gallery trawling continued at a steady but unhurried pace, with one a day. (I wish I'd limited my torte and strudel intake to one a day also, as I now can't fit any of my trousers, but that's a regret for another time). Last year, my folks and I swooned endlessly over the Albertina, an old royal palace tucked behind the Opera House and now a beyond-chic art gallery, showcasing some state rooms with Venetian blinds to die for (I seem to remember my mother getting so excited that she wanted to clean them), and a mostly Modernist collection. This winter, the Albertina was showing a retrospective of the artist Gerhard Richter, a now very fashionable (and still - barely - living) Austrian artist who rose to prominence in the Pop Art milieu of the 1960s and 1970s (like Warhol, he had a thing with cows, and smearing blood onto old family photos) and produced an enormous array of work, never staying too long in one genre or style, and moving apparently effortlessly through photography, harsh neon-coloured light installations, massive multi-coloured abstract oil canvases, small beautiful abstract watercolours, and towards the end of his life, some very beautiful photographs of Austrian mountain scenes that look like the opening scenes of The Sound of Music. (Must everything in Austrian culture always refer back to nuns and Nazis?).

On Wednesday, my (hopefully) final day in Vienna, I took the U-bahn a little further north to hunt out the Huntertwasser House and museum. Huntertwasser was one of those larger than life, slightly freak-of-nature artists whose life and work seems so colourful and eccentric that you wonder cynically whether it wasn't all just for publicity. He created his own idiosyncratic, highly colourful, childlike artistic language that seemed inspired by the erotic swirls of Klimt and the bold colours and simple lines of "native" art or the work of Paul Klee, but was less languid, and more vital and expressive, and also a bit nuts.

He was the quintessential artist-as-philosopher, wanting art to be accessible, and wanting to add colour and beauty to every day existence, and railing against what he saw as the stifling conservatism of Viennese society and architecture. Unlike most artists who protest against bourgeoise conservatism and then happily pocket the huge paychecks that the bourgeoisie pay them for their overpriced art, Huntertwasser did at least try and practice what he preached, writing extensively, putting as much effort into the design of a United Nations commission to design a stamp as he did into his own work, and taking his art into other arenas, most notably architecture.

Personally I've never really responded to his paintings, and after an hour of staring at his huge multi-coloured swirls and space-age shapes, I'm in danger of developing a migraine. I can appreciate art that looks primal and childlike, and I love the energy and simplicity and free form of his work, but there's something vaguely claustrophobic about all those tightly coloured circles and psychadelic colour combinations that makes me less likely to start a revolution and more likely to want to lie down in a darkened room with a bag of frozen peas on my head. I think Huntertwasser's genius lay in his architectural projects, and it was here that he was best able to share his "vision" in a way that becomes meaningful for other people.

In the early 1990s, Huntertwasser designed a block of flats, now known as Huntertwasserhaus, which embodied his philosophy of environmentally harmonious urban living. The walls and surfaces and floors are uneven, windows are of uneven shape (with Huntertwasser trying to make windows in living rooms bigger to let more natural light into rooms), communal spaces and community centres, and stairs all through the building lead to a roof terrace with trees and plants. Huntertwasser was obsessed with trees, and laid down a philosophy of "tree tenancy", arguing that that trees needed to be treated with the same respect and given the same rights as humans living in cities, and that urban environments needed to be designed to allow peaceful co-existence between trees and humans. The resulting building is extraordinary - part circus tent, part psychadelic spaceship, and the kind of building you'd imagine Hunter S Thompson, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary, the Beatles, Kenneth Anger and Marianne Faithfull all squatting in in the mid 1960s. Despite a lot of anxiety with getting planning permission past the Viennese planners, who were horrified at the irregularities of the design, the buildings have become a landmark, and one of the most desired residential locations in the city, apparently with waiting lists of thousands of people (and trees) wanting to be tenants.

After a week of looking at beautifully preserved Viennese buildings designed on classical symmetrical principles, Huntertwasser's building jumps out like a spaceship from whatever planet Ziggy Stardust was supposed to have come from. It's a wonderful embodiment of his ideas about colour and freedom being as important to a city's soul as the need for order and unity, and makes you wonder how different a city Vienna would be if all the buildings looked like this.

There's a somewhat random Kiwi connection with Huntertwasser, which is why I was pleased to hunt him out the day before Waitangi Day, New Zealand's national holiday. The Big H had a long standing connection with New Zealand, since touring there with his art in the mid 1970s, eventually living there for months at a time (converting an old pigsty into an art studio) and designing an alternative New Zealand flag which got rid of the Union Jack and incorporated the koru (unfurling fern frond), an iconic Maori symbol. More eccentrically, he also designed a public toilet for the Kawa Kawa District Council, in a particularly nondescript, small town part of the rural North Island. It's a fabulously crazy building, and looks as weird in rural countryside as the KunstHausWien and Huntertwasserhaus look in Vienna. Amusingly, the locals put up a lot less resistence than the Viennese did, and I seem to remember locals being interviewed at the time saying typically uninspiring but relaxed Kath & Kim comments like "Aw yeah, it's a bit different, isn't it?". (For the uninitiated, "It's a bit different" is New Zealand speak for "It's weird, but we'll give it a go").

He expressed a wish to be buried in New Zealand, six inches under the soil, wrapped in a shroud with no embalming, and have a tulip tree planted on top of him, so that he could become a tree. Now that we're living in a green-conscious world, we're all far more au fait with this process, and I'll guarantee that Nate's "green funeral" in the final series of Six Feet Under turned millions of people onto the idea of this kind of burial as something something natural and beautiful, but at the time, everyone in New Zealand thought he was a bit bonkers, and Huntertwasser had to get special permission from the New Zealand local authorities, as his plans weren't in accordance with regulations about the disposal of human remains. I've no idea whether the laws in New Zealand have changed, but it certainly seems a nice way to go, and slightly more humane than being dumped into a Kleensak and left outside for the rubbish man.

All of this seems a long long way from Vienna, but impressively the KunstHausWien, the museum designed by Huntertwasser and now an unofficial museum/shrine to his life and work, manages to create as much of a lush, colourful wildernessy feeling as seems possible in the city of Mozart and strudel and the Hapsburgs. There's also a neat joke in the lobby - an otherwise efficient Germanic sign showing directions of the various parts of the museum - bathroom, restaurant, coatcheck, etc - also has an arrow for "New Zealand, pointing downwards, of course. The grim looking unsmiling woman behind the ticket counter explained to the tourists in front of me, no doubt for the 61st time that morning, "No, New Zee-land iz not in basement, it iz a joke, New Zee-land iz south, so ze arrow points south." She then smiled through clenched teeth, and the tourists nodded meekly, then picked up their tickets and change and scurried away.

In the evening, Nicole was in Greece for a work trip - something to do with her clients wanting to set up a casino in the middle of the Acropolis, I think - so Billy and I headed to his favourite local schnitzel house, where we were served enough breaded veal on a plate to feed the population of Lesotho for a year. Billy sensibly had the "kinder" (childs) portion, which was still the size of his head, but I, like the stupid gobsmacked "Isn't this gorgeously authentic and old world?" touristy way, went for the whole hog - and by God, I got it. After eating till I thought I was going to pass out, I conceded defeat, and the bored looking waitress brought me a doggy bag, no doubt also for the 61st time that day. As I wondered whether I had enough breath to walk home without crawling, I thanked God that I wasn't a vegetarian (dining out in Vienna would be rather trying otherwise) and asked Billy about rates of coronary heart disease in Austria.

My final morning was spent in the cafe at the Leopold Gallery, once again eyeing the cute waiters and wondering if I left them a big enough tip they'd consent to have a quick threeway with me in the cloakroom before I went to catch a train. Sadly, my German didn't extend this far. Note to self - must learn German for "Can I have the bill, and a double penetration, please?" Somehow I managed to miscalculate my leaving time by an hour (probably from looking at the time on my Blackberry, which was still set for London GMT +0 time) and so ran hell for leather to get the uber-fast train to the airport for my 2.45pm plane. I got there at 2.30pm, which, had the plane left on time, would've meant I'd have been fucked, but thankfully it was still snowing in London, and Luton had only opened at 11.30am, and our plane hadn't even been defrosted yet. Sometimes, English inefficiency can be your best friend.

After a week in Vienna, I was ready to go home - to have stayed any longer, my routine may have become a little repetitive and less fun, and I'd either have had to learn German or got a job as a waiter turning tricks at the S&M Cafe across the road from Nicole and Billy's flat (that's "Sado-Masochism", not "Sausage & Mash", by the way). As it was, I felt lucky to have had an unexpected week, charmed again by the reassuring efficiency and polished beauty of the city, nicely reconnected with the fabulous Nicole and Billy, and refreshed and ready to return to icy sludgy miserable old Blighty. Goddammit, I miss the coffee (and the coffee boys), though.

If At First You Don't Succeed....

28 January 2009
London

Despite being payday, today was a particularly foul low point in my well-renumerated but soul destroying career. I've been working for several months on a disgusting project with the Northern Ireland government, which requires me to fly to Belfast for weekly meetings with ugly middle aged bureaucrats with bad haircuts, cheap shoes and polyester short-sleeved shirts, and implement a badly planned project with more grumpy ugly middle class civil servants who resent being told what to do by slick wankers from London. I'm being told continually to lie back and think of the money I'm making, but I'm not quite completely soulless enough to buy that line, and mostly just stare out the window of the plane on the way home, cursing my existence and wondering how I went from being Rosedale Intermediate Drama Talent Quest winner 1987, to an unhappy nearly middle-aged construction lawyer with posture like Early Man and the beginning of crow's feet.

Anway, by the time I'd run to get a cab back to the George Best Belfast "We're So White Trash We Named Our Aiport After A Dead Footballer" City Airport, fight through the ridiculousness of their airport security (which requires you to jam all liquids into a small plastic colostomy bag, then take off most of your clothes, your belt and your shoes and get frisked by an unattractive 18 year old with acne) and stopped for a quick, self-pitying splurge at the Clinique counter in Duty Free, then lined up with all the white trash alcoholics to get on the plane, I was about ready to asphxiate someone with my bmi sick bag, or perhaps commit hari-kari with a plastic fork from the hostess trolley.

I picked up a copy of The Times in the business lounge (well, the cheap business lounge for people who aren't slick enough to be members of the real business lounge upstairs), and read with amusement a story about Henry the 111-year old tuatara, one of the few celebrities from my home town of Invercargill in very southern New Zealand, who has just fathered a spawn of little tuataras after a long stretch of infertility.

Tuataras are a member of the lizard family, indigenous to New Zealand, and thought to be one of the last living descendants of the dinosaurs. Because of New Zealand's geographical remoteness from the rest of the world's land mass, we have a rather strange flora and fauna - no native mammals (apart from an unprepossessing species of bat), birds who've grown so complacent about there being no natural predators that they've lost the ability to fly, live on the ground and lay ostrich-sized eggs, and, somehow, the tuataras.

Every year at primary school (and almost every weekend when it wasn't raining), I was dragged to the Southland Museum and Art Gallery, a rather uninspired 1930s red brick building in Queens Park, to look at the Tuatariam, where Henry and his fellow creepy crawlies lived behind glass screens in their own little nature reserve.

Though their lineage and rarity sounds impressive, up close, the tuatara is less than inspiring. Tuataras are possibly one of the most inert and boring species on the planet. Coloured somewhere between algae green and mossy grey, so as to blend in with their stoney leafy rainforest habitat, their party trick is to sit completely still, as if frozen or dead, and then when you're not looking, scuttle into a hole and disappear. That's it. No singing, no dancing, no amusing frog noises, no poisonous venom, and skin too tough and scaly (and now too rare) to make into handbags or shoes. As a tourist attraction, they're interesting for about 5 minutes, until you get bored standing waiting for them to do something, and wander off to the gift store to buy a tuatara shaped keyring.

Believe it or not, their inobtrusiveness and lack of drama is, in fact, a cunning survival instinct. By staying completely still and blending into their surroundings and being so small as to avoid detection, they've managed to survive all the other geological tumult that wiped out the dinosaurs. Because they were cold-blooded and scaly, they weren't of much interest to predators like stoats and weasels in the 19th century. And so, as civilisations have come and gone, the tuatara has endured - small, scaly, and boring - but endured nonetheless.

In this sense, the tuatara is the perfect symbol of my home town and the people in it - inobtrusive, quiet, conservative, effortless at blending into the furniture, culturally unremarkable, benign and sedentary, with an impressive habit of sticking around till the bitter end. It's not the most glamorous way to live, but, by God, they're still here. Growing up, I never really "got" this mentality. Peering through the plate glass at Henry (who was separated from the other tuataras because of his tendencies to go all Alpha male and bite off their tails), I used to think "One day, I'll escape this town, and you'll still be stuck in this goddam Fantasy Island playpen, living on flies and being pointed at by incontinent children. I'll show you, you boring motherfucker!"

Fast forward twenty years, and here I was, on a plane from Belfast to London, reading about Henry's unexpected launch into celebrity. After years of infertility, and a cancerous growth on his bottom, Henry had managed to shake off the big C, get his mojo back, mate with one of the females and produce some little tuatara babies.

Here's a picture of Henry, looking appropriately stately, and the accompanying text in The Times:



"When Henry was born, Queen Victoria was still on the throne, the aeroplane had not been invented and children could leave school at 12. Henry, a New Zealand reptile known as a tuatara, stayed a bachelor throughout the First and Second World Wars. By his 100th birthday, he had still not fathered a child. Then his zookeepers removed a tumour from his bottom and he found a new vigour, as evidenced by the birth of his first offspring".

Given that tuataras are endangered species, and mate with the regularity and enthusiasm of a giant panda, the conservationists at the Gallery were terribly excited about this, and alerted the media. (I was also amused to read that the museum geeks planned to publish three hours of video footage of the new arrivals on their website, a film that was bound to be as rivetting as Andy Warhol's seven hour film of a man sleeping, called Sleep). As nothing ever happens in my home town, it was front page news in the featherweight daily The Southland Times, and then got picked up as one of those "fluffy bunny" stories they play at the end of TV news just before the weather - y'know, one of those quirky life-affirming "human interest" anecdotes to make you feel slightly less crap after an hour's news about war, famine, global warming, nuclear weaponry proliferation, unemployment, the credit crunch and the shit weather.

As an Antipodean expatriate living in London, I note with amusement that New Zealand and Australian news almost never gets reported in the media, unless it's about sport, or some cheesy story about a koala accidentally getting its penis caught in the exhaust pipe of a German tour bus. As part of Britain's not-quite-shaken-off sense of cultural superiority towards the former Empire, it's seldom acknowledged that Australia and New Zealand are developed 1st world nations with their own political systems, economies and cultural reference points. In Britain's cheerfully naive view of the world, New Zealand is a magical land of mountains, rivers, tattooed Maori warriors doing the haka, millions of sheep (insert tedious bestiality joke here) and, of course, hobbits and elves. Admittedly, New Zealand is as complicit in fostering this myth as anyone else, relentlessly advertising itself in tourism material as a untouched paradise.

Objectively speaking, New Zealand is untouched, and compared to London (or worse still, Belfast) in winter, it is a paradise. But it does bug me that the election of a new Conservative government several months ago only made it to page 5 of the dailies, whereas Henry the tuatara getting his groove on got a photo in The Times. We exist, it seems, to provide "local colour" to fill the gaps between the sports and style sections in the newspapers of real cities. Sigh.

Nonetheless, I was secretly tickled to see Henry the Stud have his 15 minutes of fame on the world stage. For that moment, anyway, it was somehow comforting that now matter how far you'd travelled, you were never really far away from Home. It was also slightly irritating to realise that to find fame, I didn't need to have flown to the other side of the world to live in the Big Smoke, but I could have just stayed at home, lived in a glass case, eaten insects and lived to over 100, and then found a second wind and fathered a child at an insanely old age. Bah humbug.

Well, good luck to you, Henry. If I'm anything as hardy as you, I too plan to live to be a very grumpy scaley old man, and bite the tails of everyone who comes near me.

Milk Is Good For You

23 January 2009

London

I've been hanging out to see Gus van Sant's new film Milk for months. Actually, I've been hanging out to see Milk for fifteen years, since I first read about Harvey Milk. 

[more to follow]

O, Happy Day!

20 January 2009
London

Go-bama! Good speech, remarkably grounded and humble and sobering and still holding out the audacity of hope. And I'm in love with Michelle, who bought her gloves from J. Crew this morning - and here I was thinking she'd just left the oven gloves on when she cooked nachos last night. I love that she's about 14 feet taller than that evil glassy-eyed robot Laura Bush, and wondered what the gift they gave the Bushes was - a human heart, possibly? But a damn good show (despite that bizarre hat with the diamanted bow Aretha Franklin was wearing) and a great day for the world. Here was a President-elect who spoke to the world, not just to America.

I don't doubt that he's got an impossible Sisyphisian rock to push up hill, and I wouldn't be surprised if his hair goes white by the end of the year. I just hope he'll still keep the moves (see his little sexy dancing routine on the Ellen show if you don't know what I'm talking about), that Michelle keeps him in check, that the girls get their goddam puppy, and that he still walks like he's got a big dick, things will be ok. Or at least, bearable.

Farewell to Pinter (and silence in theatres...)

3 January 2009

London

Pinter is dead, and so, apparently, is the possibility of ever being able to sit through one of his plays without a chorus of punters coughing through his scripted silences.

On Christmas Day, one of my dinner guests, Miss Marla Jane, who is an unabashed Dr Who fanatic, was desperate to watch the Dr Who Christmas Special. (Trust me, there's a link in here to Pinter... eventually). As she explained with wide-eyed, pert-nippled ecstasy to my other guests, it was her first UK Christmas, and therefore would be the first time she'd ever seen the Special on Christmas Day, as opposed to waiting to download it or wait for the DVD release like the freak she is. So, we let her watch the show, and smiled good-humouredly through her running commentary and explanations of references from the 134 previous episodes she'd memorised.

About 20 minutes in, I lost interest in special guest David Morrissey (and couldn't help but think he was much better in Basic Instinct 2, when he was wearing less clothing) and went into my bedroom, hid my head under a well-plumped pillow and absent-mindedly checked my email. Being a good middle-class liberal, my computer's home page is the Guardian website, and as I logged in, the headline on Xmas Day was that Harold Pinter, playwright extraordinaire and Nobel Literature Prize winner, had died on Christmas Eve, aged 78.

I felt really, really, really sad, in the slightly silly way you feel sad when someone dies who you never knew personally, but whose life or work affected you in some way. Pinter isn't exactly my generation's playwright - that position may have been Sarah Kane's, had she not topped herself before she turned 30 - and he's best known for the work he wrote in the 60s and 70s, when I was but a glint in the milkman's eye. But he was, arguably, one of the greatest living playwrights of my generation (particularly after his ass-kicking Nobel Prize acceptance speech, where he denounced American foreign policy as glorified terrorism), and, living or dead, and a writer who gained enough fame to get his own adjective - "Pinteresque" is now synonymous with use of pause, and dramatic situations of menace and ambiguity. He was one of the first "modern" playwrights I studied (at 15, with my drama teacher), and since reading The Caretaker, I've been in love with his gallery of strange, sad, funny men with their displays of thwarted machismo, sudden lurches into violence, and apparent inability to understand themselves or the world around them.

For me, true genius or success in writing lies in being able to create a voice that's uniquely yours, that isn't quite like anyone else's in the world. Pinter managed this more successfully than most other writers, living or dead. In the same way that you can recognise Mozart within a few bars of any of his music, you can recognise the weird repetitions, the black humour, and the savage, surreal beauty of his sentences, which hang suspended in mid-air, ambiguous and unknowable.

After Dr Who was over, and we were limbering up for the dessert course, I let it slip that Harold Pinter had died. Timmy was correctly surprised and a little mortified, and Marla Jane was too high on David Tennant to really register, and my other two guests had no idea who he was, trying not to sound too much like a snob or turn dinner into an Open University lecture (which, given that I am a snob and school teaching runs in my blood, is pretty much impossible).

So, after everyone went home, I did the two million dishes, read the effusive obituaries (most notably, Michael Billington, who spoke about Pinter as the close friend he was), and thought that maybe I should go to the production of No Man's Land, which was just about to finish its West End season. It wasn't one of his major works, and I was a little underwhelmed by the casting of David Walliams from Little Britain, who looked as though he was punching above his weight by attempting to act alongside Michael Gambon. In case it's not compellingly obvious, I'm not a David Walliams fan, and just wish he'd go and rub some more seal fat on himself and swim the Channel again - permanently.

After a quick chat with Timmy, who'd seen it and liked it (though admitted that he'd go to watch Michael Gambon even if he was reading the telephone book - I've never really believed people when they've said that, incidentally), and then blew a big-assed hole in my Christmas budget to buy a seat in the stalls.

Due to some perverse notion that's now escaped me, I went with the Saturday matinee, figuring that it'd leave me my Saturday evening free to trawl for dick on the internet or do some laundry. Matinee audiences are generally guaranteed to be quiet, respectful of the actors, and so decrepid that they don't have cellphones, let alone play with them during the show or forget to turn them off. There's always something charming about seeing the blue rinsed hair reflected in the glow of the theatre lights, and you know that noone will run too quickly to the bathroom or the snack bar so it's easy to head them off at the pass or trip them up if they get pushy.

What I failed to take into consideration is that a matinee audience in London in the middle of winter are usually in the last stages of consumption. From the moment the lights went down, there was a symphony of coughing, hacking, nose-blowing, phlegm-sucking, sneezing and other assorted mucuous-related sound effects. In a Pinter play, which is heavily infused with pause and relies on silence to draw out the meanings in the text, this was fatal. Throughout the show - which was brilliantly acted, except for the mediocre David Walliams - there wasn't a single pause that wasn't broken by someone coughing up half their left lung. At one point, the coughing seemed to resound around the theatre, like a Mexican wave of phlegm. Unfazed, the actors ploughed on, despite some beautifully observed reflective moments being trampled through

Better still, some old trouper managed to arrive late, then fall through her chair which smashed with a resounding crunch. "Oh Christ, I've gone through my seat!" she cried with a posh Home Counties accent, while the other old ladies sitting around her tried not to titter. As ushers tried to pry her out of her seat and softly request that she quieten down as the play had begun, The Lady Who Crunched continued to yelp at the top of her voice "But I've fallen through my seat!" Well, I don't blame her - the Victorian-era West End theatre seats are small, rickety, uncomfortable and desperately in need of refurbishment, especially from large Home Counties scone-eating bottoms - but we were seeing Pinter, not Victoria Wood, so it would've been easier had the ushers just taken her outside and stunned her with a tazer gun.

Somehow, the actors ploughed on, the play reached its melancholy and strangely beautiful conclusion, and the spittle brigade calmed themselves just enough to let the final lines of the play recede without interruption. After the curtain calls, I turned to my neighbour, thanked her profusely for not coughing during the show, and shed a silent tear - both for Mr Pinter, who's works will live on, but for the death of any possibility of a silent audience where his work can be savoured and enjoyed to their fullest again.

I'm as fond of making a big noise as any other homo worth his slingbacks, but when it comes to theatre, why can't everyone just think Pinter and shut the fuck up? If I have a hacking cough and I'm due to go to the theatre, I either don't go, or I fortify myself with cough syrup, lozenges that I unwrap so I don't have to unwrap them in the theatre and make noise, a gallonload of water, and if I do have to cough, I try and smother myself with a scarf so as to block the noise. Foremost in my mind is, "This is a theatre. It's a public space. I am not the only one here. Other people are trying to watch the play, and to do so, we all need to be quiet". I don't expect that my behaviour should always be a model for others, but I think in this case, it should, and it mystifies me that other people can sit there, casually hacking away without putting their hands over their mouths, noisily unwrap sweets or even talk through a show, blithely unaware that they are being noisy and disturbing others.

It's at moments like these that I turn to my frequently-thumbed through copy of Lynne Truss's missive Talk To The Hand, which despairs of the decline in modern manners, and argues that we've turned into a culture of self-obsessed narcissists who fail to appreciate how our behaviour affects others.

Then again, I could just be an over-sensitive puritan who's overly attuned to other peoples' noise and just dying to judge other people... which of course, I am. I'm aware that clearly other people aren't as annoyed by this as I am. Returning to Jane of the Doctor Who fanaticism, when