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.
Thanksgiving is by far my favourite holiday. Free from the religious or patriotic claptrap that engulf most American holidays,, it is just about eating, drinking and making merry. Like any fun holiday, it is almost pagan, despite being only made a national holiday in the 1930s by FDR to help folks forget about the Great Depression (it has always been a holiday in Massachusetts).
There are some folk who are not so wild about it. A day that commemorates the Pilgrim's first sucessful harvest - and by implication clearing the way for more white settlers - is not celebrated so much in the Native American community. I'm fact, Native American protesters usually go down to Plymouth Rock each Thanksgiving to throw blood on it. I don't know whose blood it is, actually. A slaughtered whitey, one hopes.
Yet where am I spending the day? In the bosom of family and friends stuffing my face with pumpkin pie until immobile? No I am on a train to Edinburgh called the Highland Chieftan eating a Marks & Spencer Mexican three bean wrap and some Kettle Chips. It is the first Thanksgiving I've not celebrated since I've been abroad. Usually I whip up my famous nut roast (secret ingredient: grated green apple. And semen. Not my semen, mind). My vegetarianism has waxed and waned over the years, but one thing that turned me was cooking my first (and only) turkey and having to remove the euphemistically named gibblets. Gibblets sound like a children's board game. What I discovered was that they are the poor beast's internal organs. Incidentally, Benjamin Franklin propsed the wild turkey as the US national bird. Would American history have been different if we adopted the comical, ungainly and skittish turkey as our national symbol rather than the war-like bald eagle? Discuss.
I have become, it seems, some sort of voice of authority, declaiming from my observation deck atop Endeavour House. Here is me giving my thoughts on BBC Radio Scotland on the impact of Amazon.co.uk (available for 6 more days, I think). And here I am quoted in the Hootsman on misery memoirs.
On Monday, I hit the Holy Grail, BBC TV. I'm ready for my closeup Mr DeMille.
So I went to my first rugby match on Saturday at Twickenham, which is, according to billboard's plastered all over the place and the adverts that run on the big screen incessantly during intervals, "the home of rugby". Here's a shot from my seat, to get the blood stirring for those interested in the pageantry of an international sporting match, the astonishing athletic prowess, the rampant homo-eroticism.
It was interesting going to a rugby match; I have only been to football matches here. In football, fans are corralled, like the animals they are, into separate sections, where they bray for each other's blood, hooting like baboons, perhaps hurling piles of excrement at each other. In rugby the crowd mixes together pleasantly, people applaud for the other team and don't call even them cunts! Alcohol is served (real ales, for goodness sake) and you can even buy it in bottles. I have seen pies at Easter Road, the Hibernian ground, turned into deadly weapons (they do have the density of granite), I can only imagine what Neds with glass bottles could do.
And yet, I couldn't really warm to the rugby. The game itself was boring, a rather pointless to-ing and fro-ing of territorial acquisition, much like a Balkan war. And there is something somehow false and oh so terribly middle class English about the whole thing. These people are watching what it is essentially a blood sport; why are they sitting down as if at a terribly straightened Sunday roast at their granny's in Maidenhead?
I've been up since 5.00 watching the results, scarcely believing it, my glee rising with each passing moment, each state falling to Obama, each gain in the House or Senate. I cried as I watched Obama's acceptance speech, maybe more from relief than anything else. Maybe this for Britons is analogous to Tony Blair sweeping into power. And let's bask in it before the cynicism seeps in, which it undoubtedly will. There is so much to be done - a horrific economy, two ongoing unwinnable wars.
By the way, Bush apparently called Obama to tell him he had an 'awesome night.' I'll miss W's stirring, Jeffersonian rhetoric.
There will be a lot of talk about America finally living up to its all men created equal credo. To an extent that is true, that so many rednecks and crackers apparently managed to vote for the black guy. But I think it is just another tiny step on a long road to America ever having any kind of racial equality. Obama may be in the White House, but most blacks still live in poverty, the divides are still deep.
And something that nobody seemed to have mentioned at all during the campaign is that America has already had a popular black president: David Palmer in 24. I'm joking but not entirely. I honestly believe that seeing a black president battling terrorists with Jack Bauer for five years perhaps subliminally helped Obama's profile with the dumb-asses who make up the majority of the US electorate.
But the big news, of course, is the people of Massachusetts voted overwhelmingly to decriminalise marijauna. Hey, I might move back!
I come home tonight oddly unsettled. Not because I have just seen Daniel Craig's second go as the moody, brutal, muscular kick-ass Bond - which is not terrible, but is a second or third rate Bourne film. And not because I walked back through Peckham.
No, I sit here a few hours from the polls closing on the East Coast, hoping but wary. I know all indications are for Obama in a cake-walk, but there is this horrible nagging feeling that something (such as, I don't know, racism) is going to go wrong. In the past few days, I have become a surrogate pundit for friends here, as the real American, asked to give my take on which way it's going to go, and also to explain the intricacies of the electoral college, why the Cuban vote matters in Miami, etc. I've found that I can lie outrageously and most people will believe me: "In the event of an electoral college tie, it will be settled by a game of horseshoes between the candidates. That's how James K Polk beat Henry Clay in 1844."
The headlines repeated on almost every outlet about this being "an historic election" are starting to grate. Well, aren't the all, for Christ sakes? I'd prefer a the more honest: "Hey, A Black Guy Might be President!"
Here's the book I just finished, Sherman Alexie's Flight, given to me by the writer, ornithologist, photographer and digital archivist Michael J Bennett during my stay in the US.
In fact, it was Mike who first introduced me to good old Sherm ages ago with The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, a collection of interweaving stories about the hard life on the reservation. Alexie's writing is a bracing antidote to most fiction about American Indians, which seem to be either hippy dippy stories about vision quests or isn't the white man a bastard, Dances with Wolves-esque type stuff. Alexie doesn't turn away from hard life of the modern day Indian, or the horrific past, but he does it with dark humour and without self-pity, making it miles better than the sanctimonious claptrap about the Indian experience that white writers seem to churn out.
Flight is narrated by teenager Zits (he has a lot of them), a half white, half Indian orphan who is continually in trouble with the law. He is befriended by an anarchist named Justice, who convinces Zits to go into a bank and shoot the place up. As he is standing there weighing whether or not to open fire, Zits time travels through American history - jumping in and out of the bodies (a la Quantum Leap) of various people: a white FBI agent involved in murdering Indian activists in the 1970s; an Indian child who witnesses the battle of Little Big Horn; his own alcoholic father, long since dead; an elderly Indian tracker named Gus in the 1870s. The plot is a bit thin, but the novel is carried by Zits' bitterly funny voice and Alexie's ability to be breezy yet poignant and provocative.
By the way, here's Alexie on the always excellent Colbert report promoting his newest, a YA novel.
A few shots from the US. My friend, the writer, ornithologist, photographer and digital archivist Michael J Bennett with Tundra (Mike is the one with the cap) in the wilds of Petersham, MA; pumpkins for sale in New Braintree; what my skilled hands did with one of those pumpkins; the Granary Burying Ground in Boston; and, this is not actually the US, but a clear shot of Greenland from 37,000 feet in the air on the way back.
Keen Expat File observers will note a lapse of 15 days from the last missive. Not, because, a la my last post that I have blog fatigue, but that I went back home, in the welcoming bosom of family, and off grid. I had to work for the first few days I was there - slavishly so, I might add, for a publisher did pay my flights over to Boston. All right, slavishly might be the tiniest bit of exaggeration. But the time went too quickly and I didn't get to see as many people as I thought I would.
As always with return trips to the States there are mixed feelings. There are so many people I miss, of course. And so many little things: the home fries at the Boulevard diner; Fenway; Sam Adams on tap; the view from the top of Mount Monadnock, Jeopardy! with Alex Trebek; the love notes etched into the window pane in the Old Manse in Concord MA by Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne; that people in shops apparently really, truly want me to have a nice day...
But I left for a reason, I guess (I mean apart from the murder charge). And some of those things kind of make me break out in a cold sweat during most trips back: the shrill, strident tone of the news reporting; crawling, sprawling suburbanisation; the blinkered unthinking patriotism of most of the country; Simon Cowell...
Those things I object to in America exist in the UK, in one form or another. But the beauty of being an ex-pat is that you can tune them out to some extent. If you don't really belong somewhere, you don't ever have to care as much. But then, do you ever feel at home?
I read somewhere that people start up blogs, are all gung ho, but then in a few months just lose their mojo. So a look at my postings - a paltry six in September, this is the first in October - seems I've hit the wall. True, I have been busy, but it doesn't take much to dash off a few lines, now does it? And it's not like I am doing this for the amusement of anyone but myself.
But then again, I am doing it for other people - in that this is a public facing diary if I can't just write whatever stuff that comes to my head like I do in my regular diary. Or, ahem (voice deepening) my journal - the old fashioned one kept with pen and ink and a Moleskine notebook (I do have a bit of a Moleskine fetish it has to be said. Have you seen the new Volant range? And the soft cover notebooks - oh yeah, baby, 'get in touch with your softer side') Sorry, drifted off there. Anyway, I made the mistake of re-reading an older diary, and the overwrought stuff within brought a flush of embarrassment to my face. And that was stuff I wrote just a year ago. Hate to look at my teenage diaries.
Anyway, let's get back to the blog; my life filtered, cleaned up and suitable for blog-cast.
I have mentioned before that I live next door to a mental hospital and have on occasion come across some of its patients. Tonight, there was a big black fellow outside the hospital, clinging to a lamppost as if a lover, yelling in a West African accent: 'I didn't kill any individuals' over and over again. And as I came closer swivelling his eyes on me, trying to make me understand that he didn't kill any individuals.
Now, that gives one pause. The Bedlamites I come across are usually rather benign, bumbling around in just their dressing gowns - confused more than anything else. I found myself nodding to this man, though he seemed like he might have killed individuals and maybe even entire villages of people in some child soldiering past in Sierra Leone.
I went to a creative writing group last night at the hip, funky, comfortable Three Kings pub in Clerkenwell (they have Deuchar's IPA on tap, always a good sign). I found these folks online, as we live in that kind of world these days, don't we, and didn't know what to expect. There is always the possibility going into one of these things blind that you might end up having to listen to some old biddy's five cycle epic poem on her allotment plot called The Tyranny of Slugs - and then try not to be too mean when you have to say what you thought of it.
But it was brilliant and all the work was strong, diverse work. In a way meeting by the web is beneficial. I suspect in creative writing programmes you have much of the same people. Middle class folk writing about the drudgery of the suburbs and marriage.
There was a lovely 74 year old lady there, a Hungarian who has lived in Paris for 40 years and recently come over to London. She is a web writer, putting her diaries, kept since a child, on her various blogs, along with photos and other musings. There was a funny exchange when she was talking about her diaries someone asked 'are you going to try to get these published?' And she said, 'But I publish every day.' Which I thought was quite a progressive, web 2.0 way to think. I noticed she posted some pics on her Flickr site of our meeting in a folder called Dare to Share.
I left the meeting inspired to finally round the bend and finish my long gestating and much-hyped novel. It was good to share it with some others - I have only shown it to one or two people whom I care about and trust. Strange that about 60,000 people read what I write every week in The Organ, yet creative stuff, I keep that close to the chest.
Busy days at The Organ and too many boozy nights mean I have been neglecting you, gentle Reader.
I was deeply saddened last weekend when I heard that David Foster Wallace hung himself. I had come into his stuff late, only getting into him after reading his story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I was put off when Infinite Jest originally came out, not because of its heft, but because I thought that all those footnotes and endnotes was nothing more than clever-clever post-po-mo jiggery pokery. When I finally read it, I discovered that underneath this stuff is heart and optimism. And it's also a mammoth book of ideas, boundary-pushing, brilliant.
I was talking about DFW with a friend from home and he said that he couldn't believe that someone could write Infinite Jest and top himself. But then I was thinking how can you write something like that and not kill yourself? You write something like that, maybe your work is done. And maybe if you are optimistic, yet clear-eyed you will be continually let down by the world. Suicide becomes the logical option.
Another day, another bout of low level violence on London's public transport. I'm on the way home from a publishing 'do on the number 12 from Oxford St. Am feeling blue, because of a number of things, but mostly because that's just me. So I'm listening to the folder on my iPhone I've cleverly called 'wrist slitting music'. So I'm engrossed in that in my it-would-be-amusing-if-it-wasn't-my-life way, when I'm tapped on the leg by the guy sitting opposite.
'The fuck you lookin' at, Boss?' he asks.
I stare for a long second or two, weighing my man up. He's up for some sort of scrap I can see by his eyes. I've been threatened and/or brought into some kind of Travis Bickle bullshit three times in the last few days. The worst incident when I was threatened with a stabbing at the fucking Camberwell Library amidst the graphic novels section. Tonight, I'm tired, I'm fucked off, don't at the moment care if I live or die, to be utterly frank. And I say, 'Looking' at you, fucko.'
This takes him aback, cause this thing is all about power. He wanted me, the middle class white boy to crumble. And I can see his eyes calculating. And they slide over to this older, dumpy East Asian woman and he says, 'the fuck you looking' at?' and she just gets up and walks away. And that leaves me and him, and we sit back and don't look at each other for the rest of the ride home.
I went to Tate Britain this afternoon to see the Francis Bacon centenary exhibition. It was a bright sunny day, just a bit of autumn bite in the air. Fall is my favourite time of year, and I sauntered down Millbank to the museum with a spring in my step, an ain't life just fuckin' grand smile on my face.
Then I went inside and was bludgeoned by Bacon's paintings, my spirit crushed by their unrelenting bleakness and unyielding brutality. In Bacon's work there is no hope, no humanity - life is just suffering and violence and horror. It is his portraiture that disturbed me most, his subjects scream (as in the famous reworking of Velazquez' Pope Innocent X), their faces are blurred or partially erased or distorted. They all made me feel hollow and despondent.
There was an interesting room which with collected ephemera from Bacon's studio. Bacon, apparently, always claimed his paintings came out in a spontaneous rush. But this archival room showed that he obsessively planned, made lists of potential subjects and worked and reworked preparatory drawings. That Bacon self-mythologised in this way probably says more about how the public believes an artist produces his stuff - it all must be in a mad spontaneous rush, Mozart dashing off the Jupiter symphony in an afternoon, say - not about grit and hard work.
Of course, the Tate being a modern museum, it has to be down the the kids, and I mean little kids. In the middle of the exhibition, they had a table with paper and art supplies so that little children can doodle and paint. This is in a room called Apprehension with Bacon's work from the 1950s which, according to the exhibition notes, is fuelled by "a sense of dread pervading the brutality of everyday life" and has "an air of personal menace" due to his violent affair with lover Peter Lacey. In one painting, a distorted, grotesque baboon wails, in another two naked men grapple in what could be construed as a rape scene. And today, there was some little girl at the table drawing a golden sunset with a box of Crayolas.
It gets more bizarre. The events around the exhibition include a session for kids aged 5-12 called, I shit you not, Bend it Like Bacon, where the little shavers get to "re-enact the lying, crawling, bending, standing, turning and falling figures you can see in Bacon's paintings." Ooh, that'll be fun. Especially if they get to pretend to be the half-human, half-cow eviscerated carcasses of the Crucifixion triptychs.
Yeah, I could show pictures of rolling hills, etc of the trip to the Old Sod. But you've seen them all on posters, the Rough Guide and Guinness adverts. So here are a few of the signs that made me chuckle during the holiday.
1: I kept looking at the figure in the top sign, taken at Rosses Point, Co. Sligo - he looks like the victim of foul play rather than stumbling off a cliff. Shot in the back, just how they do it in those parts.
2: Everywhere on the streets in the rather salty district of Stonybatter, Dublin are signs imploring the locals to pick up after their damn dogs, some in Irish. They don't seem to work.
3: I sure hope this dog from the Maynooth area gets founded.
4: I wasn't able to take a snap of this road sign because we were trundling by at speed, but found one on the interweb. I could not for the life of figure out what it meant; I eventually guessed, 'No Tie Fighters in squadrons of three.' Apparently it has something to do with car or truck axles.
Taking a pause from my jaunt to the west of Ireland to blog from a lovely little cafe in Galway city. This is either a brave new world web 3.0 isn't the digital age just grand kind of thing, or very, very sad.
Dr K and I were in Sligo town, the Land of My Fathers and Mothers. A lot of it is very inspiring, all rolling hills punctuated by the odd sweep of a cliff face. We visited Yeats' grave in the dramatic little chapel in Drumcliffe on a misty, wind swept day with flocks of swifts coming out of the steeple, swirling around our heads. And later traditional music in small, dark pubs of an evening. All very Irish Tourist Board approved.
The big disappointment is that apart from the scenery and the town's geared up for tourism, there is a brutal ugliness to the architecture to the west of Ireland. The landscape is scarred by new build McMansions and property developments, all built in the 10-15 years of the economic boom. I understand people have to live somewhere. But why, if you had a wad of cash to spend on a new home (and a lot of these are second homes from Dublin folk), would you pick an area of astonishing natural beauty, and build a home that could be indistinguishable from those in the soulless suburban hellholes of Essex or Bakersfield, CA?
So we've tried to avoid those places, going off the beaten track as much as possible. Dr K is a new driver, not yet passed his driver's test (you can drive in Ireland with a learners if someone else with a license is in the car). He, like many new drivers, follows the road rules to a T. Yesterday, we turned the corner of a back road and found a cow in front of us, blithely chewing its cud. Dr K slowed, applied the handbrake to see if it would move. It was a sort of Mexican stand-off, our car and the cow on an empty stretch of road. When the cow didn't move, he decided to overtake, signalling as he did so. Just so the cow should know.
I was at the gym yesterday, forced to watch the Olympics because that is what was being shown on all the TVs in front of the cardio machines. It was rowing, a sport the UK - excuse me, 'Team GB' - is good at. So the commentary was insufferable, full of exhortations to yell at the TV screen to urge the coxless fours on. As I was thinking what kind of twit would do that, the pixie with the blond ponytail next to me on the treadmill started screaming 'come on, guys, come on!'
So I was getting fed up and was about to leave when they switched over to the women's beach volleyball. Suddenly I thought, well, perhaps I should take a little while to enjoy this acme of athletic competition, where sporting endeavour bridges the gap between cultures. I did watch for a bit, but ended up being annoyed at the fundamental dishonesty; the announcers were treating it like a normal sport, and not that the only reason it was on was that there were incredibly hot chicks in bikinis falling about in the sand.
The American broadcaster NBC is far worse - this slide show supposedly explains the rules of the game, but is there only to show some incredibly toned backsides. This is utterly gratuitous, yet, somehow when I look at it, the mind doesn't stay focused on the gender politics.
Since nobody cares about 95% of these sports, I want to hear announcers being more forthright about the sordid reasons we watch. Maybe Gabby Logan could say, "Here comes Usain Bolt in tight fitting Lycra - check out that package, ladies" or even "Welcome home, Gary Glitter - just in time for the 'women's' gymnastic finals, exclusively here on the BBC."
In a couple of months, I will be flown out to a secure, undisclosed location (OK, Salem, MA), to interview Brunonia Barry, the author of the this tome.
When I got the proof, my heart quailed. The Lace Reader. Doesn't make the pulse race, now does it? My spirits were lowered even further when I read the first page, which contains cryptic instructions for lace reading set down by the main character Towner's great-aunt Eva. I thought I would be subjected to a few hundred pages of How to Make an American Quilt-level guff. But thankfully, it is far more interesting than that.
Lace reading is predicting the future through lace patterns, and all the women in Towner's family can do it (and read minds): Eva, her estranged mother May, her twin sister Lyndley. The novel opens with Towner returning to Salem because Eva has drowned swimming in Salem harbour. The police can't prove anything but it seems not to have been an accident. Malevolently hovering around the periphery is Cal, Lyndley's adoptive father (he didn't adopt Towner, it's complicated). Cal, a former drunk who abused his wife and Lyndley and who may have killed Lyndley, has now turned to God and is the leader of a fundamental Christian cult who call themselves, wait for it, 'Calvinists.'
It is a deeply feminist book. The Calvinists are patriarchal and are played off against Towner's family (including her agoraphobic mother May who runs a home for abused women on an island in the harbour) and the modern day witches in Salem. In less deft hands, it could have been preachy. But Barry handles it with humour, which she manages to combine with page turning suspense, throwing in an ending that I did not see coming (turns out Vader is Luke's dad!).
I'm looking forward to meeting Barry, not least because she calls her blog The Bru-haha.
Just a few shots from my iPhone of my trip to Edinburgh - have I mentioned I have an iPhone? Yes, I believe I have.
There's the Royal Mile hoachin' with tourists. The courtyard at the Pleasance. The view from the bridge at Dean Village near to where I used to live - the Water of Leith, according to the warning sign posted by the council was 'running in full spate.' Finally, that's me sampling a Rollover, advertised as the world's best hotdog. It wasn't.
Chugging along back from Edinburgh on the east coast mainline train service - facing the opposite direction from the way the train is going which always makes me feel queasy. National Express's very slow wi-fi means it is taking ages for each page to load (and National Express must use a Swedish server - I was invited to 'Logga in med ditt Google-konto' just now). Might not be a bad thing; I can do useful things like read or write my novel rather than facebooking, watching the Tudors on the BBC iPlayer or, well, blogging.
Haven't yet crossed the border; this part of the trip first hugs the coast, the train skipping along on the top of cliffs and through tiny fishing villages. Then inland a bit, through farmland, with lots of sheep, cattle and the odd bit of wildlife. A flock of crows mobbing a bird of prey catches my interest.
Caught up with friends in Auld Reekie and 'did the festival' as much as I could. Since I have been away for so long I loved every minute of it and was not so fucked off at the air kissing theatre luvvies or embarrassed by the Americans who bark inanities to the locals like 'I'm Scottish, too. One sixteenth, on my mother's side, my great-great grandmother was from Carlisle."
I did see Gordon Brown chatting with Ian Rankin at the book festival. El Gordo is brainy, well read, an intellectual and absolutely screwed. He talks to people as if they are reasonable and as smart as he is. This is noble but misguided. He fielded questions from the crowd and one lady had a very tart comment about the Labour goverment meddling with everything in people's lives. He answered her by talking - for a long while - about the Calvinists in John Knox's Edinburgh. Now there was a group of people who meddled in people's lives! And I was thinking, you just don't get it, do you Gordon? This is not, even in the more cerebral setting of a book festival, what people want to hear their PM talking about.
Shortly after lift off, the plane banks sharply, pinwheeling south to north. The large Glaswegian lassie sitting next to me takes the opportunity of the shift in gravity to lean over and ask me if I want to shag in the toilets. My ears are popping and the air conditioning is blasting. I'm not sure I've heard correctly. I say 'excuse me' and she repeats the question, slurring her words a bit more this time. I politely decline. She nods and smiles then nods off.
I had seen her with her pals, who looked like they had just had a heavy week in Tenerife or Ibizia, outside of security. Near the entrance there was a pile of discarded bottles and cans which people realised they couldn't take through, including a full Fosters. 'Gie's tha can, girls,' she said, downing it in a few greedy gulps. My kind of woman.
Outside Edinburgh airport, it is raining and cold and it feels so refreshing. My journey to Stansted began with getting stuck on the Central line just before Liverpool Street for about 15 sweaty and suffocating minutes.
In central Edinburgh, the festival is in full swing. My friends are talking about how busy town is, but I just smile - it is far less busy than even the most sedate days in the West End. Late at night, I look out of my room at my friend's flat, listening to the cars clumping over the cobblestones, watching the swollen Water of Leith rush by, the river lit by the yellow street lamps. There is only one brewery left inside the city - but you can still smell the malt and hops when the wind is right, like tonight - and it smells like home.
At long last I have fallen in love again. With my brand new iPhone. How did I ever live without this beautiful little device? It's after one on a school night yet I am up downloading stuff. I just installed this app which makes the phone sound like a light saber. It's so cool.
I have a trump card whenever people start rolling out stories of famous writer spotting: I once saw Alexander Solzhenitsyn playing tennis.
It was the end of the 1980s. Bush Senior was still in the White House, we could fill up our cars for about $1 a gallon. Even though perestroika was breaking out all over Eastern Europe, Solzhenitsyn was still living in exile in a tiny town in the US state of Vermont.
I was at university at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst at the time. One October day, a few of us took the hour or so drive up north to visit a friend in Vermont. Also, frankly, to stock up on beer; Massachusetts had a drinking age of 21, in Vermont it was 18. After meeting the friend, he casually said, ‘Hey want to see Alexander Solzhenitsyn play tennis?’
A question I never thought I would be asked. But apparently the Nobel laureate was a keen player and was regularly seen at the town’s public courts. We duly went to the town centre and sure enough, there was the great man – bearded like a prophet, patrolling the baseline. He couldn’t move too nimbly, but his form was impeccable. Say what you will about the Soviet system, it instilled athletic discipline.
His death has meant that I might go back and try to reappraise his work. We were force fed his books in the high school – because the Commies were, you know, evil. Maybe they aren’t the turgid pieces of anti-Soviet propaganda that I remember them as.
I've been watching with some interest the case of 'Clark Rockefeller' and his abduction of his child, Reigh Mills 'Snooks' Boss following a court-supervised custody visit last week.
Obviously kidnapping children and lying to your wife about your identity for 12 years is, well, a trifle naughty. But I am fascinated by people who are able to make up their own past. On one level it is so bizarre but on another perfectly logical: don't like who you are? Why not pretend you are a scion of one America's richest oil and bank families?
In a way, it must be oh so liberating, to cast away whatever the accident of birth made you and remake yourself in your own image. I takes a bit of gallus as well, but it must be exhausting. Remembering your stories and keeping them straight must be exhausting (various reports say Rockefeller said he was an economist, physicist, mathematician and 'working top secret for the Pentagon'; police say he had at least 4 aliases).
One of my favourite novelists, Patrick O'Brian, writer of the Aubrey/Maturin stories, reinvented himself. He was born in England as Richard Russ, yet after WWII rid himself of his first wife and a dying spina bifida plagued child, concocting a phony patrician Irish-Catholic lineage, then married Countess Mary Tolstoy. The Maturin character in the books is a spy, and there are a number of passages about how he finds it difficult to constantly lie to everyone. Re-reading these bits with the knowledge of O'Brian's life adds a bit of poignancy.
I wonder how common this is? Obviously in today's retina scanning, ID card culture, it is far more difficult, but Mr Rockefeller shows that it isn't impossible. But how much do you have to hate your life, and yourself, to do it?
I stood stock still in the street yesterday as a woman walked past pushing her baby along in a pram. I was rooted to the ground (and disconcerting the woman as I stared) because I realised I couldn't think of the American word for pram. It took a few hours before it came to me: stroller or buggy.
An ex-girlfriend, who is German, used to say when she went back to Germany after an extended stint in the Anglophone world she couldn't speak German properly for about a week - forgetting even rather elementary words and phrases. It is sort of like that for me; British English has become my mother tongue. And because I write for a UK magazine, I spell British, throwing in those unnecessary 'u's and replacing 'z's with 's's. I even think in British; when I was writing that sentence I was thinking 'zeds' not 'zees'.
It was a slow process - which I started dropping words and phrases into my speech ironically, almost with quotation marks: 'Fancy' another round, pal? Gradually, I dropped the quotation marks and now it has become second nature. There were practical aspects as well with pronunciation; such as saying 'chew-na' for tuna when I lived in Scotland because no one at any sandwich place seemed to be able to understand my American accent.
When I go back to America friends take the piss - or give me shit, rather - for both my accent and words I use (incidentally - the British take piss, the Americans give shit - indicative of the national characters? There's a phd thesis in there somewhere). And I find myself feeling uncomfortable using American slang. 'Bucks', for example, just sounds wrong and when I say it, I do so with quotation marks.
Perhaps I was affected so much when I saw the woman with the pram, because I realised I am no longer really American. But I'm not British, either. I do have an Irish passport as well, but have never lived there so saying I'm Irish would be something of an affectation. So what am I then? Stranger in a strange land, man without a country, rootless, homeless.
It is one of those humid days, hot, oppressive in the way that only London seems to get - something about concrete and steel that seems to both reflect and refract the heat back at you. And there is little respite, most places aren't air conditioned, are built to keep the heat in not out. On the way home from work at a traffic light, I was the victim of a drive-by. A guy in a white van peeled by and blasted a bunch of us with a super soaker. 'I wish the water was cooler,' a girl next to me giggled, dabbing at her top. 'Let's hope it's just water,' I said.
I miss the sea. It has been a big part of my life in Boston, Edinburgh, Brighton. Even the other river cities I have lived in - Glasgow, Hamburg, Budapest - were all on working rivers. You never felt trapped because there was constant activity, goods being docked, things being ferried away. When I lived in Hamburg whenever I felt down I would go to the Elbe and watch the container ships - these hulking, boxy beasts waddle downriver. I always found something beautiful in their ugliness, maybe because psychologically, there was always this feeling of movement and freedom, always the possibility of escape.
A stroll on the Southbank today and the Thames seems sluggish and hemmed in, the only river traffic garbage scows and party boats, a clogged, constricted vein.
I stumbled upon this a couple of weeks ago in Fopp. Since joining The Organ, I rarely buy books as publishers bombard us with them. Yet I have a penchant for anything about the Age of Sail and Harry Thompson's fictionalised account of Darwin's voyage to the Galapagos looked interesting. And it was £2.
The main character is actually Robert FitzRoy, the captain of HMS Beagle. He is by far more compelling than Thompson's Darwin: intelligent, manic depressive, a holy roller whose beliefs are put to test by Darwin's emerging theories. FitzRoy's downfall - he butts heads with his superiors because he does the morally right thing no matter what the consequences to his career or bank balance - is poignant.
The problem is the bulk of the book (and what bulk - 744 pages) is largely discussions between Darwin and FitzRoy as they wrangle over transmutation of the species. This is an argument that was cutting edge in the 1820s. Now, excepting the born-again troglodytes who live in America's Deep South, it is old hat. Darwin and FitzRoy's arguments become tiresome quickly; I felt like I was trapped, forced to listen to two super-keen 18-year-old university students who just read Nietzsche for the first time. Judicious editing of about 400 pages could have saved this book.
Thompson was a TV writer and producer, known for his work on Have I Got News for You and his part in creating the Ali G character. He died in 2005 after, according to his bio on the book, "a brave fight" against cancer. No one seems to ever have a cowardly fight against cancer, do they?
To Moro, the Spanish - North African restaurant in Exmouth Market with good pals P and M, the folks who let me crash on their sofa bed when I first moved up to London and was between flats.
The food was excellent. Moorish cuisine? I say it's more-ish! I don't often go for goat as I'm a vegetarian (but not at restaurants - which is a bit of a fudge, really). But the slow roasted kid was tender with this tingly spicy-sweet sauce. The saltiness of the mojama (which sounds to me like a Spanish curse word) was set off by the eye-poppingly fresh salsa.
We went to Cafe Kick afterwards, this retro 70s pub with old fashioned table football (or foosball as we say in America). I was beaten on the foosball pitch in succession by P, who said he spent most of his university days playing so that's not too bad; M, who is a girl and said, 'I've never beaten anyone before!'; and a one armed man. Let me repeat that. A one armed man, some other pub patron who rocked up and asked for a game. For those readers who are unaware, I have the use of all four limbs.
Some photos from our luscious garden in lovely Camberwell. We have tons of herbs, vegetables, some flowery things I take no interest in. There's cannabis and coca leaves to sell to the neighbourhood kids. When I say 'our' garden I mean my flatemate's as she does all the work. I usually sit out there of a sunny day reading, saying, 'You ought to do more weeding near the tomato plant, Anna. Now pick me a couple of courgettes, would ya? And get me another beer next time you're in the kitchen, that's a good girl.'
An old rocker getting back on the booze and a fling with a 20 year old girl is, if anything, just a bit cliche and tiresome. Yet I do have some measure of sympathy for Ronnie Wood, or "the drink ravaged guitarist" as The Sun would have it.
I met Ronnie last summer in Budapest to write a piece for the Organ. He was genuinely nice and gracious seemingly grounded without rock star airs and graces. This is strange to say since I met him in his dressing room amidst the sprawling Stones encampment. I think it was because there was a feeling of domesticity and normalcy, probably due to his wife Jo, who was just lovely and kind. I have, obviously, more sympathy for her.
Yet you could just tell that he was an addict. He was sober then, but fidgety, jumpy. He seemed like he was clinging on for dear life - and it was his wife he was clinging to.
Still, every cloud and all... Ronnie's autobiography has gotten a nice bump in sales because of his fling with "Russian doll" Eka. No such thing as bad publicity.
PN is no more. A little old skool Naughty by Nature TuPac tribute sums up my feelings. LT - ain't no shame, you were beaten by the best. Mourn you till I join you. Word is bond.
A friend, a Londoner, told me that to survive in The Big Smoke, you should exploit it rather than letting it exploit you. It can get to be a grind if you let it, but there is so much to offer, so many quirky things to do.
On Saturday I went on a Beatles walking tour with GD and RG, two rather cynical Scots (if you take my cynicism and multiply it by a factor of ten, then you might be near GD's). It was hilarious, actually. The obsessive anorak who ran the thing was brilliant and just happened to own a Beatles memorabilia shop that we ended the tour at. He obviously lives and breathes all things Beatles. Which isn't that bad, I suppose; he could be an Oasis obsessive. He had this weird automaton delivery, with pauses in the wrong places - that I am sure he has done three times a day for the last 15 years or so. He met Paul in 1982, which he showed us a photograph of.
Still it's odd going to these places that once featured in the lives of the great and the good and pretend they still have resonance. We started at Marleybone station where the opening scenes of A Hard Day's Night were filmed; the main bit is now a Marks & Spencer. A place where John Lennon was busted for drugs 40 years ago is an estate agent's. I kind of found myself shrugging my shoulders a lot, trying to figure out why I should care.
We did go to Abbey Road and walk across the zebra crossing, annoying tons of motorists. A lot of doggerel was scribbled along the wall at Abbey Studios, including the bit above by Amanda from Canada. 'Which poet, Amanda?' I wondered.
A week of dissipation. Two leaving 'dos at The Organ - the lovely Nat from ads, who will be much missed. And Mr Schmooze, Snake Hips, Big Hands, The Face of the Organ, Joel. The magazine has been running for 150 years but Joel has left a huge thumbprint on it; he knows just everything about publishing and the book trade and was the go to rent-a-quote for the national newspapers and broadcast outlets not only because he is glib and articulate but because he knew his stuff.
Also a couple of publisher lunches, a day of judging for The Organ's award show at alarmingly trendy Shoreditch House; the upstairs bar rammed full of Nathan Barley types. Best of the week, though, was a launch for a Phaidon book on Paula Rego and how she works. I'm a big fan of her stuff - beautiful, disturbing, all about power games and gender and how childhood can be both charming and sinister. She was at the launch, but I was too star struck to approach her. An added bonus was I got to go to the launch with K, the smartest and coolest person I have ever met - and she is cool in a completely unaffected, so money and she doesn't even know it, way.
For the second time in about three weeks, I have rescued my cat Soze (above) from the clutches of a fox. Both were late at night - the first I was coming home from the pub and as I rounded the corner to my flat block, Soze scampered out with the fox in hot pursuit. On Friday I came home from the pub (hm, a pattern is developing) and Soze was perched on our garden shed, with the fox below, trying to scramble up.
I'm not sure if the foxes were really trying to eat Soze -vulpesLondinium is famously well fed and there are more than enough chips and kebabs strewn on the ground in my neighbourhood to keep them fat and happy. But the Sozemeister is an easy mark, not much of a fighter.
I cannot convey how much I worry now, though. She is in the garden as I write this and I keep peering out just to make sure she is OK. She has been with me for near to six years now. She is reliable; unlike humans she does not dissemble, there is a constancy with her. True, she often treats me like staff, her meows could probably all be translated to 'Feed me, you bastard' or 'Open this door, you bastard.' She has pretty much destroyed my flatmate's couch.
But then I like to pick her up by her front paws so she is standing on her back legs and pretend she is dancing (I particularly like making her do that Travolta in Pulp Fiction thing) which she bears with much grace. And when she is sleeping I put things on her like sunglasses and my Red Sox cap. So we both win. It's a give and take thing.
I live across the street from a mental hospital. It's not a full-on bars on the window, McMurphy and the Chief playing basketball kind of place. There is a Victorian frontage, but most of it is smooth hermetically sealed modern office block look - which I find more unsettling than some ancient Bedlam.
As I write this I can see about ten people taking a smoking break outside. They seem part of the same therapy group. An even mix of men and women in their forties and fifties, they crowd close to one another, rarely speaking, sucking greedily on their cigarettes. They all look rough, not necessarily poor, but used and beat, dazed. And I wonder, what do they talk about? Why can't they meet each others' gazes outside?
The proximity of the hospital means I often come across people raving to themselves and at me. When I first moved here I thought an inordinately amount of people were using the hands-free mobiles. But no.
Leaving this morning I came up to this woman in the street. She was a large black lady, wearing a pretty summer blue polka dot dress. She was standing in the middle of the sidewalk and I as I tried to get by she placed a hand, lightly, on my chest. 'Why are you here?' she asked, wide-eyed and staring. Before I could answer, she said again, lower, 'Why are you here?' Then she laughed, a long deep laugh and she was off, crossing the road to the hospital.
I watched her go into the building, the glass door swinging behind her, thinking, why indeed, why indeed. After a moment or two, I finally moved, trudging slowly towards the bus and work. And I looked back once, thinking, did that really happen?
By most accounts Jay-Z did the business at Glastonbury last night - giving two fingers to the nay-sayers, most prominently mono-browed has-been Noel Gallagher.
The visceral reaction to the announcement that Jay-Z was headlining was more than a bit troubling, with its obvious racist undertones. "Glastonbury's always been about guitars," was Noel's reasoning. And white folks playing those guitars to mud drenched white folks in the audience. Having Negroes with baseball caps prancing about on stage - why that's a bit much, isn't it? Still having Jay-Z there (and Ms Knowles in the VIP section) meant there was at least a handful of the black folks at Glasto this year - I mean apart from the ones cleaning out the port-o-loos.
Perhaps we should leave the irony that Noel's guitar music was invented by black people so that a few decades later white people could make money playing it. Still, Noel has every reason to thank Jay; whatever reason would we have heard Wonderwall at this, or any subsequent, Glastonbury?
Festivals are mainly for white, middle-class tossers. I, of course, will be hitting the Green Man later this summer and just been invited to Latitude mid-July. Really want to go to Latitude but have some previous commitments - and it was one of those things that a group of friends got tickets, didn't ask me initially and one has pulled out. Having been slighted, not sure if I want to grace them with my presence. Still, Latitude seems like how festivals should be, a mix of music and culture and comedy. Death Cab for Cutie, Omid Djalili and Irvine Welsh all on the same bill? Genius.
The post is really only an excuse to show Hardknock Life. Still his best. Although maybe the Dr Evil/Mini-Me version tops it.
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.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
