Did you know that 2008, the year of highs - Obama, Tina Fey, Fleet Foxes, the Boston Celtics winning the NBA title, the On the Road manuscript making its way to the UK for the first time - and lows - economic meltdown, Sarah Palin, Mumbai terrorism, Boris Johnson's election - will last a little longer this year? Apparently there will be a 'leap second' added to official scientific atomic clocks around the globe to account for the Earth's varying rotation. Even Big Ben will be adjusted. I haven't yet figured out how I will spend that extra second. If past New Year's Eve midnights are any guide, projectile vomiting.
I see Big Ben almost every day, and every time I pass I think of my brother. For a number of years when we were growing up, if you happened to ask him the time, he would refuse to tell you saying with a NYC accent, 'What am I, Big fuckin' Ben?'
I do find myself getting a bit soppy at New Year's when I read those 'celebrities who kicked the bucket' annal round-ups, feeling inexplicable pangs of sadness for people who don't mean anything to me at all. I mean, god rest Eartha Kitt, but I probably haven't spared a thought about her since catching one of her Batman reruns ten years ago (and, quite frankly, I preferred Julie Newmar's Catwoman), but there I was, feeling all blue about losing her on Christmas Day. I guess death unites us all.
But there are other folk that I think the world is poorer for their absence. So adieu David Foster Wallace, Paul Newman, Studs Terkel, Bo Diddley, Bettie Page, Albert Hoffmann and Harold Pinter. Still, there are others who stuck around far too long: hope you're roasting in hell, Jesse Helms. Incidentally, I was in the National Portrait Gallery yesterday and expected to see a crowd paying homage to Justin Mortimer's rather sombre Pinter portrait. Alas, he was competing with the nearby Sam Taylor-Wood video installation of David Beckham sleeping; I was the only one venerating the great playwright.
As for your Expat, well it was a great year professionally and I am looking forward to 2009 with confidence, hope and optimism (but the ketamine is just kicking in). But I hope all y'all are too.
Yes, I went to see the teen paranormal romance blockbuster hit Twilight. Let's set the scene: The Peckham Plex cinema for the 6.30 showing. There was me, my friend (like me, a strapping adult male), and the rest of the audience either groups of teenage girls, or younger girls and their mothers. I was feeling a trifle uncomfortable in these pedo-sensitive times. I felt that the mothers' were looking askance at us like we were Latvian sex traffickers about to ask: 'Hey, how much you want for the little girls?'
I did largely enjoy the movie, it has to be said, even though if it plays like a long, third-rate Buffy episode where Joss Whedon decided not to write any jokes. But even third-rate Buffy is good as vampires are always sexy, and longtime Expat File readers will know my heart melts at any star crossed lovers story.
Still things a few things irritated. 1) It takes Bella about 45 minutes into the movie to figure out that pasty-face, Elvis pompadoured, can't go out in the sun, skin cold as death, superhumanly strong Edward is a vampire, when even the dullest person would know off the bat. More importantly, all of us in the theatre know it going in. C'mon Catherine Hardwicke, cut to the chase! 2) Bella is the new kid in this piss-ant town in Washington State, and the high school is so multi-cultural it makes a Benetton ad look like a Klan meeting. I've been to many piss-ant towns in the US and they are invariably full of toothless, inbred rednecks. And all of the kids must have been sired by supermodels and champion athletes because even the geeks are beautiful and buff. Most unbelievable of all: not a zit to be seen. 3) Edward the vampire, though looking 17 (well he actually looks about 25), is 100 years old. The deal is, he and his vampire siblings (they are good veggie vamps, only subsisting on animal blood) keep moving about going to new schools every four years. The question is, why? What kind of fresh hell would it be to have to repeat high school over and over - worse than being the undead, that's for sure. He was turned into a vampire in 1918, so I reckon this is his 22nd go-round of doing pre-calculus and elementary biology. Why not go to university and study interesting things? By my maths I reckon he could be on his 12th PhD. Maybe put that big vampire brain to use researching Alzheimer's or finding something new to say about Emily Dickinson.
There has been a lot of chat around the books and the film that author and yummy Mormon mummy Stephenie Meyer has basically made stories that are right wing propaganda and adverts for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. That is a view about as spot-on as when born-again idiots say Harry Potter promotes Satanism. I've not read the books but the film is just a PG version of a vampire story with sex verboten and the violence off-camera. I am troubled by the central theme that sex equals death, but anyone who has, say, been brought up Catholic or has lived in a post-AIDS world has probably had similar stuff shoved down their throat. So to speak. Anyway, kids will work it out for themselves. Look how well I turned out.
Leaving the theatre, my friend's bus came by immediately and he hopped right on. I decided to walk, as it is only about 15-20 minutes back. Peckham is the only place in London that I have felt threatened in daytime. Now I was left to negotiate the gauntlet of its streets in the dark, my senses all a-jangle after seeing a vampire movie. After a moment, though, I was cheered by imagining that if a vampire swooped down to get me, he would probably be set upon by one of the roving gangs of knife and gun-wielding hoodies who would shout as they hacked him to pieces: 'Peckham Boyz, innit! South side!'
I made the mistake of going to the nearby 24 hour Sainsbury's on the 23rd December. I usually eschew supermarkets and shop locally. Still, I was buying an unconscionable amount of food and booze (particularly for these straightened times) so I bit the bullet. It is one of these supermarkets which sells everything and it was the busiest shops I have ever been in; the aisles were clogged like a Mumbai rush hour. It was after watching some old lady bash her cart repeatedly, bumper car style, into a man's cart that was in the middle of the aisle, that another woman near to me said she had lost the will to live and abandoned her cart, strode purposefully out of the store, to presumably down a dozen whiskies at the nearest pub, while absently toying with the loaded pistol in her hands.
Forced to meander in a slow zombie stroll through the shop I witnessed heaps of shopping stress. A couple argued violently over the turkey or goose conundrum. 'No sprouts this year,' a man said defiantly, then started meekly filling a bag, cowed by his wife's thunderous face. The best was a middle aged man and his frail elderly mother, unsteady on her feet and seemingly barely in control of an overstuffed cart. 'Just keep going, Mum,' the man implored. 'Keep going?' she wailed, 'I can barely walk!'
Still, I had quite a fine Yuletide, chock full of my famous nut roast, a rather tipsy Christmas Day featuring a few spirited games of Cranium (the cheaters won), and the briefest of moments where I contemplated going to Midnight Mass. The five hour time difference between here and the States once again proved to be a Christmas Day minefield. I called home at about 9 pm GMT after drinking steadily since about 11 am. Sure I may have said a few injudicious things, but I have no regrets; my five year old cousin would have eventually found out that Santa isn't real.
I spent last night with the other do-gooders of the Amnesty International Southwark group taking part in the AIUK Christmas Card Campaign. Excuse me, greetings card campaign - this is an important distinction. The idea is to send cards expressing solidarity to prisoners of conscience and those unjustly imprisoned across the globe. Given that a good portion of these people are in Africa, the Middle East and Asia many of them would be bemused at receiving a card with a manger scene of the Baby Jesus, Mary and poor cuckolded Joseph (and that's a bitch to be cuckolded by God, isn't it?).
Someone also brought a couple cards that showed a boy with a Santa hat scrunching up his face in disgust at the Xmas dinner table with the caption underneath: Bloody Sprouts! I'm not sure that bit of British culture would translate to the seven October Protesters student activists currently detained in Laos. Even the 'Happy New Year' cards might be in bad taste, as Earnest French Girl pointed out, to someone like Patrick Okoroafor of Nigeria who has been jailed since he was 14 in 1995 on trumped up charges: yeah, another year in Aba Prison is going to be just ducky.
So most of the cards we had last night were tasteful, 'Season's Greetings' type things. At some level it is a touch incongruous - there we were lawyers, journalists, accountants and TV people, sitting around in Sweet Steph's plushly appointed high-rise flat with its views of the London Eye scarfing mulled wine, mince pies and canapes (the spring rolls were delish!) writing cards to people who have gone through hell. How can we relate to what Binyam Mohamed (tortured at Guantanamo Bay), Ferhat Gercek (shot and paralysed by Turkish police for selling a left-wing magazine, awaiting trial), or Francois-Xavier Byuma (Rwandan human rights lawyer jailed after a show trial) have experienced?
Yet I quibble. If I was rotting away in a rat infested cell in Karachi or forced to wear orange pyjamas (surely worse than the waterboarding) in Gitmo I would be cheered to think that some people besides my friends and immediate family were thinking of me. And it is a little thing to do during the season whilst we wallow in drink and food and rampant commercialism.
In other AI news, on the 6th December all the London groups gathered near Tower Bridge for a little celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the end, we held glowsticks and arranged ourselves into the Amnesty logo. Here's the shot from the top of City Hall, which looks cool, I think.
The Yuletide has come to the Expat's part of London. The Barrister and I bought a Charlie Brown Christmas tree on Saturday (short, a bit sparse and rather pathetic looking), but we adorned it with baubles and fairy lights from the 99p shop, transforming it into a magnificently festive Tannenbaum. Then to a mulled wine and mince pie party on Saturday night, complete with homemade Aberdonian shortbread from The Daily Wail Sub.
Later on, after a robust sing-a-long, there were Festive Olympics, including the 7 metre dining chair hurdles and the women's sock wrestling championship. I was previously unaware of the rich tradition of sock wrestling, the sport where competitors each don an ankle sock, and then wrestle to try to rip the socks off of one another using any means necessary. We fellas spent most of the time watching, mouths slightly agape, The Ad Guy videoing it on his phone. Women grappling on the floor in shortish skirts and dresses? Nothing says Christmas more, does it?
Yesterday a few friends, perhaps thinking I needed a bit of Americana, took me to The Big Easy on the posh King's Road. As the name suggests, the food has a Nah'lins flavour - Cajun BBQ, jambalaya, with some Mexican and burgers thrown in. It's like an American bar and grill and more so - American football on the television, Bud on tap, free popcorn served at the bar, massive artery clogging portions. It reminded me of "Irish" pubs I have been in in places like Stuttgart, Rome and Hamburg, a hyper over-imagined version of the thing place it was trying be. Still, stuffing my gob with shrimp fajitas, washed down with margarita pitchers. Nothing says Christmas more, does it?
Despite having won The Booker Prize last year, I have avoided this book. Everyone I know who read it told me they hated it or that it was hard going, and even the Booker Prize chair called it bleak. I notice on Amazon it only gets 2 1/2 stars from readers. I also find Anne Enright's occasional Guardian Review column rather pretentious. But a friend gave it to me recently, so I thought, OK I'll have a go, and it is brilliant.
It is, however, unquestionably bleak. The narrator is angry, dissatisfied Veronica, one of a dozen Hegarty children. A Dublin housewife and mother, she is mourning the recent suicide of her beloved brother Liam. Liam was an alcoholic and a “terrible messer” who put rocks in his pockets and slipped into the sea at Brighton. In trying to deal with Liam's death, her relationship with her "vague" mother and her collapsing marriage, Veronica begins drinking heavily and thinking obsessively back to some dark secret in her, and her brother's, past.
So, yeah, on the surface bleak. But the whole thing doesn't crash down on the reader's head, mainly because of Enright's prose, which is merciless, hard, yet there is tremendous beauty in the spareness—and humanity.
Despite what Derridean deconstructualists might say, we don't read in isolation; when in your life you read a book is just as important as anything. I read this just after I came home from the States visiting the home of my two elderly parents. I could almost feel death there, sitting on one of the side chairs at dinner, hovering while my father watches TV. A clear-eyed, unflinching yet ultimately full of compassion book about love and death and dysfunction quite frankly floored me.
Here I am at the end - the very end, I mean the very, very end - of the BBC1 10 o'clock news, giving my thoughts on misery memoirs. Giving my thought is more accurate, as it is literally about ten seconds.
I found myself obsessively looking at this over and over today, wondering why in the hell they chose this particular snippet when I was so much more witty and articulate during the 45 minutes or so they were filming at Organ HQ. And doesn't the camera just add a few pounds? I thought so, I was on the running machine for a good wee while today.
Quite a few people were tuned in; I got a number of emails and calls today about it and they all were fulsome in my praise. For example, my flatmate The Barrister said I had 'expressive eyes and a manful confident demeanor with bags of sex appeal'.
OK, I made the last couple of things up. But, this confirms my theory that it doesn't matter what you do or say on the TV, it only matters that you are on it. I am reminded of Dana Carvey (yes, Garth off of Wayne's World) saying ages ago that if you put a grapefruit on television 24 hours a day and then after a few weeks brought that grapefruit out to, say, a shopping mall, people would scream 'Hey, isn't that the grapefruit on TV?!' and clamor to get their pictures taken with it. And he said this years before Big Brother.
In one of his Guardian Weekend scribbles the excellent David Shrigley had a cartoon that was just text saying:
Heaven
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Hell
You'll have to take my word for it; I can't for the life of me find the cartoon on the web, or on his quite frankly poorly catalogued website. The above is a pic from one of his exhibitions, a pretty nice sideswipe at that charlatan Damien Hirst, I think.
Anyway, I was thinking of that cartoon as I trundled down south from Edinburgh today after a dissolute weekend. I'll be kind and assume Shrigley was perhaps talking just about the scenery. If so, hell probably starts sometime just outside of York. It is a beautiful train ride, through the Borders and the Yorkshire Moors and then: hundreds of miles soulless out of town shopping, the same shops, the same indentikit buildings, the same neon nothingness. It is like in a Hanna Barbera shows when, I don't know, Hong Kong Phooey is speeding along and the same background whizzes behind him over and over. Oddly comforting, though, to the American; the sprawl looks like home.
I do find myself getting a bit soppy at New Year's when I read those 'celebrities who kicked the bucket' annal round-ups, feeling inexplicable pangs of sadness for people who don't mean anything to me at all. I mean, god rest Eartha Kitt, but I probably haven't spared a thought about her since catching one of her Batman reruns ten years ago (and, quite frankly, I preferred Julie Newmar's Catwoman), but there I was, feeling all blue about losing her on Christmas Day. I guess death unites us all.
