A few months ago a friend grasped my wrist and gave me an impromptu psychic reading. He told me I needed more zinc (spot on - my kinesiologist made the same diagnosis). He told me that prosperity would return once I had put up my elephant coat-hooks on a wall facing the front door of the house (I haven’t, and spookily, prosperity hasn’t returned). And most mysteriously of all, he told me that I must read “a blue book.” A couple of months later, I am reading How To Be An Artist by Michael Atavar, a book that not only has a blue cover, but a cover of a particularly ravishing shade of blue. This is a blue that was carefully chosen. This cover is all about blue. The book is excellent and I am not surprised my spirit-guides recommended it.
I am writing this review in a restaurant. A friend has just called in to confess that she is going to be half an hour late, which, given that she is being tortured by a suburban train service, means a full hour late, and so I have borrowed a biro from the waitress and I am scrawling in the margins of an ad in a magazine. This is a very Michael Atavar activity. “Use delays,” he writes. “They are magical moments.”
Mr Atavar is both an artist and an artists’ advisor. He has helped me with my Arts Council grant applications over the years. What he offers us is an artist’s how-to book that comes as a refreshing alternative to Julia Cameron’s endless sausage-factory of “Artist’s Way” tomes. And we do need an alternative, because Cameron’s books, although intermittently inspiring, are also exasperating - and alas, in my case exasperation has finally won.
If you are tired of Cameron’s verbosity, Atavar is laconic (I want to say terse; I’m tempted to say gnomic). If you suspect Cameron of being a bit of a princess - for example, if you suspect (without any evidence) that she drifts through Central Park on rhinestone-encrusted slingbacks on her way to lunch with Scorsese and de Niro - then you will appreciate Atavar’s punk rock authenticity. Julia Cameron’s books seem to be full of people who, after successfully contacting their inner child, are whisked up into the celestial spheres of Hollywood and Broadway. In Atavar’s world, no-one gets whisked anywhere. You are instructed to put on your own bloody play, clawing together a budget with the sweat of your brow. In a word, Michael Atavar’s world is more real: he offers real advice to real artists - as opposed to dreamy pep-talks for people who are, one suspects, just pretending.
more about How To Be An Artist here
My new play Relax is scheduled to go on at the Warehouse Theatre in Croydon next March. Reader, putting on theatre is an extreme sport. You book the theatre before the play is completed - obviously. The play is never really completed, and you’re insane if you don’t keep working on it up to the last available moment. In this case, the rate at which the play is changing has been accelerating with each re-write.
After the last reading we did a month ago I dismantled the machine completely. I reduced it to a pile of nuts and bolts on the garage floor. I changed two out of the four characters and added a new fifth one. I changed the style and pacing, abandoning the Pinteresque approach. (Yes, Pinter is funny up to a point, but it’s possible to be a lot funnier.) There are now no long dialogues. In a word, I am sinking into the warm, comforting arms of Feydeau.
One of the alarming things about all this is that you find yourself assembling a production without knowing precisely what you are putting on. I have the sublime Garry Parsons creating a poster for us. When I briefed him, I was describing characters I hadn’t even written.
And then you find yourself talking to the nice man who’s going to handle your press and marketing campaign. He wants me to come up with a sexy photo to market the play. So you hire a model, who isn’t even an actor, and get him to pose in an outfit referring to the one sexy character in the play, exposing more flesh than your character ever does. It’s all so virtual! A photo that isn’t really of a play that doesn’t exist! Naturally one would like to do it more logically, even more honestly, but that is not how theatre works - not on this level, anyway.
If one were being strictly accurate, one would announce as follows: “On March 12th at 7.30pm, at the Warehouse Theatre, Croydon, Robert Farrar and Phil Setren will present a play on some topic or other, containing a number of jokes. Here is a photo of a man with his top off, which you might find arousing. See you there.”
In Wei Wu Wei today (Why Lazarus Laughed, p142) I read: "That Zen takes every opportunity of jeering at reverence, as opposed to all the popular religions which encourage it, is evidence of Zen's superior penetration and doctrinal purity: it is uncompromising and makes no concessions."
Absolutely. A few months back I noted, after seeing a production of Loot, a Zen-like quality in the writing of Joe Orton. I now understand the connection.
Sunday morning, 9am. I've got people coming round so I glide up to the Happening Bagel Bakery at the top of the Blackstock Road. They have all sort of bagels - onion, poppy-seed, sesame - and I buy a big selection. They're all priced differently so it's a complicated sum. The man behind the counter is huge and rather fab, and the woman beside him, who may or may not be his wife, is small, pretty and maybe a little shrewish. They start to bicker lightly about what the total is and who should be adding it up. He turns to me and comments, "She doesn't trust me." The woman replies, "Why should I?"
Reader, I finally went to Lulu dot com, the website that enables you to publish your own books. My agent told me a bout it years ago, but hey, I'm a Leo, a fixed sign, you know? I need to be ready.
Well - what can I say? It seems that publishing (par example) a play on Lulu is significantly cheaper than photocopying it, so even if that's all I do, I will have made a saving on my next production. But there's more to it than that! I sniff the air and discern, afar off, the rumblings of a new punk rock.
Punk rock, for those of you too young and fresh and lovely to remember - for those of you upon whose skin the youthful glue still sits, like morning dew - was the moment in popular music when musicians revolted against the oppression of a lazy and decadent industry that wouldn’t have known a decent song if it had come at them with a chainsaw. The musicians worked out ways of circumventing the means of production. They formed their own companies, they created a stir, they started magazines and reviewed themselves.
At the time I was a snotty little prick whose idea of fun was Alan Aykbourne at the National Theatre and trips to Florence to glotz at the marble bottoms of Michelangelo statues (I had yet to experiment with LSD). I disliked punk because it was ugly and rude and because there seemed to be no place in it for a fragile young pouf such as I. The message of punk, however, went in, and when I eventually formed my own band there was no question that punk must be at least a part of it. We were ragged and makeshift and I didn’t always sing well, but in terms of causing a stir and going for the jugular you couldn’t fault us. You know what? I’m proud of the Mystery Girls. Why? Because we were more interesting than anything on the X factor - as indeed all of punk rock was.
I think some people these days - the people who weren’t really concentrating at the time, or who lived, perhaps, in the Middle East - remember punk rock as a lot of people shouting and playing out of tune and wearing bin-liners. But the movement did give us some heart-ravishing masterpieces. (The Banshees’ Juju album is one). This was music which the old record companies wouldn’t have released in a thousand years - and which the old journalists (lest we forget) wouldn’t have tolerated if they had. But punk was rock's second flowering, and the basis of all subsequent intelligent pop music.
People bewail the influence of the internet. File-sharing is killing music and illegal downloading is going to kill poor old Hollywood. And now - Lulu! Every bum on the street will be able to publish his blitherings and we will all be overwhelmed in a rising tide of nonsense. How awful. But the punk-rocker in me is not shedding a tear...
Below is the proof of the cover I designed last night for the self-published Lulu edition of my play Wild Fruit. Note the punk-rock design decisions: grainy stills from the video are used, rather than silly old dress-rehearsal pictures in glorious 35mm.
It took me all of about two hours to publish the play. For the cover I used the first design template that the website offered me and I didn't even bother to re-read the text. For all I know it is addled with typo's - and I don't care. I didn't change the typeface or the format. I just uploaded my lovely masterpiece "in its present state", as Roxy Music would say. This, surely, is the way ahead. Why pretend to be Bloomsbury when one so obviously isn't?
So far I haven’t got anyone’s approval for this design - for example, the actors - so forgive me if it disappears from this site in a couple of days’ time...
Image: cover of the lulu edition of wild fruit
I recently got roped into a "recipe exchange," basically a chain email which I had to forward to twenty friends, and I also had to send a recipe to the guy at the top of the list. Apparently I am going to receive 36 recipes back. Well, I probably won't because I only sent it to 15 people. But seeing as the recipe took me an hour to write, I shall now share it with the godzillions who read this blog. Never waste, never worry. Here it is:
Home Made Pesto
Home-made pesto tastes much nicer than the stuff you buy in jars, because they add some kind of acidic preservative. If you make this for your friends they will think you’re very classy and you’ve made a huge effort.
I use Pecorino because I am intolerant to cow’s milk but of course you can substitute Parmesan if you prefer. Percorino, however, will make your pesto taste very ooh-la-la.
A vegan version, omitting the cheese, is nice too.
I won’t specify precise quantities because there’s no point. The quantities will become apparent as you go along.
Pesto sauce originally contained no pine nuts. These were a decadent later addition. They make it richer, so don’t overdo them.
For enough pesto for 4-6 you will need:
1. A medium-sized basil plant, the kind they sell still growing in its pot. The basil must be the classic green type. Red basil makes pooh-coloured pesto and tastes like mud.
2. A good aromatic olive oil. You will probably use between a half and a whole cup.
3. A handful of pine nuts. Beware of the outrageous price of pine nuts in Waitrose.
4. Between a half and a whole cup of grated Pecorino cheese.
5. Garlic
6. Salt and pepper.
Method:
1. Pluck the leaves off the basil plant and wash them. Don’t use the stalks.
2. Put all the leaves in the blender, add a few pieces of chopped garlic (not too much) and some salt and pepper, slosh olive oil over it all and blend into a runny goo.
3. Pause and taste. Read some Andrew Marvell.
4. Throw in a handful of pine nuts and blend again. If the paste becomes too thick, add more olive oil.
5. Throw in the grated Pecorino and blend again.
6. Pause and taste. Your pesto should be a thrilling bright green sludge the consistency of thick porridge or molten polenta. Add more cheese or nuts if it is too runny. Add more salt, pepper and garlic to taste. The amount of salt and garlic is crucial. Get it right and they'll talk about you long after you die. Don't hold back. Basil is a hard-working herb but it needs back-up.
To use with pasta:
Top tips:
1. Please cook the pasta in properly salted water. Pasta is not the time to start worrying about your salt intake. Under-salted pasta is an abomination. (I once had a hot Italian boyfriend who was very disdainful when I under-salted the pasta.)
2. Just before the pasta is ready, spoon one or two tablespoons of hot pasta-water into the pesto and stir in. This will soften the cheese and help the pesto to cling.
3. Watch the pasta like a hawk and drain it about thirty seconds BEFORE it is perfectly cooked. (Over-cooked pasta is the other abomination. If there is an Italian in the room, kill yourself.)
4. Mix the pesto into the hot drained pasta, if necessary adding more olive oil and pepper. Serve with extra grated Pecorino on the table. It’s not necessary but people like to have something to do.
5. The result should be an almost uncannily bright green pasta dish that smells divine and tastes so too. Few people dislike it.
How long did it take you? Ten minutes. How many dinner-party invites will it earn you? A godzillion.
Ah, London! Crossroads of the world! How can you tell which of the people sitting on the tube are British and which are foreign? Well, here’s one way of telling the English-speakers from the rest.
You’re on (for example) the Piccadilly Line and the train stops at King’s Cross. The driver makes an announcement that is piped, not very clearly, into the carriages: “Due to a person under a train at Hammersmith, there will be severe delays on the Piccadilly Line for the next two hours. Passengers are strongly advised to get off here and continue their journeys on other lines.”
All the English-speaking people immediately get off the train. The non-English-speakers carry on reading their newspapers. The doors slide closed, and the train trundles off at 2mph, stopping and starting, into the tunnel.
Et voilà! You know who speaks English!
* * *
Opinions are like arseholes (we all have one) and for many years I have been of the mind that Samuel Beckett is the most overrated writer in the English language. I crowed with Schadenfreude when Channel 4’s production of Beckett’s complete cannon scooped the lowest ratings in the channel’s history, and I lit a cigar when Camille Paglia wrote of the absurdity of Susan Sontag’s mounting of a production of Waiting For Godot in the besieged Sarajevo. But last night my friend the lovely Darren was in town and I had to find something classy to take him to. In the past I have picked a whole string of winners. Darren, who is from Nottingham (where, he tells me, shopping is the main entertainment) is under the impression that whenever I go out I see only sublimity, and naturally I want to uphold this illusion. So when I saw that Complicité were doing Endgame I decided to take a view. The chances of Complicité delivering a duff show, I reckoned, are virtually nil. And indeed this is the case.
It was (to quote TS Eliot) satisfactory. As we all know, Endgame aspires to be the theatrical equivalent of hell, so one was not expecting to be rolling in the aisles. Simon McBurney, Complicité’s fabulous chief, was a masterclass of physicality, and it was a gorgeous pleasure just to hear what he did with his voice. Meanwhile Mark Rylance in the central wheelchair-bound role turned in the sort of performance that make you thank God for London - super-brilliant and super-nuanced down to the last split second. Rylance has never had Peter O’Toole’s beauty but he certainly has his talent. This was a louche, decadent, bitterly hilarious take on the role. This was, thank God, a post-Keith Richards take; one might almost say, a post-Pirates of the Caribbean one.
Reader, I am not going to let you down by joining the flesh-eating zombie ranks of the Beckett fans. Of course the playwright deserves some credit for the triumph, but let’s not get carried away. Complicité are quite capable of making a silk purse of a sow’s ear.
On the plus side, Endgame is a good deal less excruciating than the work of contemporary audience-torturers such as Forced Entertainment. But the play isn’t ageing well. Although it cloaks itself in abstraction and ambiguity, it clearly plays on the Cold War anxieties of its day. It would be hard to argue that it is not set during a nuclear winter (although Beckett himself coyly did). Take away the nuclear anxiety and what have you got? A play about entropy. OK. Some great monologues. Fair enough. Some master/servant routines and the observation that “nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” Ahem.
There are less coherent plays from the period that seem more relevant now. Jean Genet is pesty at the best of times, but his ritualist/fetishist concoctions speak to us today more than Beckett’s stately literary horror-shows. The Maids may be overlong and perverse, but at least it’s a drag show. At least it calls for a nice rococo set.
Those of use who are involved in any kind of embodiment practice (any kind of work that seeks to connect mind, body and breath) will emerge from a Beckett play with a pretty clear idea of what the old fart’s problem was - namely a profound dissociation from the body. Hamm can’t stand up, Clov can’t sit down, and the two parents cower legless in dustbins. Sexuality is rarely touched upon and when it is, the dialogue shies away from it like a horse from a rattlesnake. The fifties was a time, lest we forget, when educated people generally subscribed to Freud’s belief that civilised man was cut off from his physicality and had no hope of reconnecting with it. Some of my older friends, alas, still believe this and always will.
Simon McBurney and Mark Rylance have shown sufficient genius to inject exuberant physicality into a play which takes a devillish pleasure in attacking theatre’s natural exuberance. I would pay to see this theatre company read the phonebook. But if you asked me to pay to see anything else by this playwright, I would want to know who was directing.
* * *
PS: On Wikipedia I read that a certain Theodor Adorno has written a book called “Trying to Understand Endgame”. This confirms my suspicion that the Beckett phenomenon, like Abba, is beyond parody.
Went to the Pop Life exhibition at the Tate Modern with my friend the lovely Michael (note to self: do my friends want to appear in my blog?) This was an exhibition of artists who have openly (shamelessly) subscribed to the Warholian notion that "good business is the best art". As usual the Warhol stuff was the best - Andy did it with such panache, and he created work that really looked good. The Tate had recreated Keith Haring's Pop Shop from New York in the eighties, and of course that was fun too, and of course Haring was brave and energetic and anarchic, but I sometimes worry that his work is yawny-dull. I once framed a Keith Haring print and hung it on my wall, but after a very short while I started to feel it was the least interesting thing in my flat. Also good was the Jeff Koons room - totally pornographic and very much the sort of thing one would like to do onseself if one was a visual artist, and ten years younger, and heterosexual.
There was also a hilarious video in which an artist called Andrea Fraser prostituted herself to an art collector: she charged $20,000 to have sex with him, and then sold the video as high art. What a magnificent scam! I would do that for considerably less. The video itself isn't quite as brave as it sounds: it's all shot from above, from a single camera with a wide lens, and the artist's face is obscured by her hair. The art collector isn't very good at sex - or maybe when it came to it he didn't find the transaction as arousing as he'd hoped. His thrusts have a ho-hum feel. As I drifted away from this marvelous exhibit (which under-18s are forbidden from enjoying) I pondered the pesty relationship between art and its older and more interesting sibling, pornography. When Jeff Koons exposes himself having sex, he makes sure he looks good: he goes to the gym, he calls in Cicciolina, he airbrushes the result. He does it like a porn-star would. Andrea Fraser makes the same bold move, leaping into the real-sex arena, but adopts, instead, the role of workaday hooker. Which is fine - but it seems like a bit of a missed trick. Far more fun if she had been taking him through an expert tantric roller-coaster ride and making him scream like a baboon and squirt onto the wall behind the bed.
On Saturday we had another reading of my new comedy Relax (which is due to go on in Croydon next March). This was a low-key affair at The Cock Tavern Theatre in Kilburn. Audience feedback confirmed my fears that the second act still isn't as funny as the first. Harrumph! There is only one rule for becoming a successful playwright, and that is: deliver a good second act. If I may be forgiven for thinking it, my suspicion is that the reason why my grandfather (who had a good dozen plays on in the West End back in the old days) wasn't as wildly successful as, say, Coward, was that, after his first hit Jane Steps Out, he never really delivered a second act that flew higher than the first. Baby playwrights, take it from me: an adequate second act is not enough. Lie, cheat, kill or steal - but fix Act Two!
And finally, on Gaydar today, a rousing rant:
"Please, no drama queens and mind games! If you dated an asshole and still think he was mysterious and exciting and you're still in love with him, please don't bother to contact me or to answer my messages..."
Amen to that!
Perhaps I should explain. Gay Love Spirit are currently conduction a two-year “training,” a series of eight four- to nine-day workshops over the course of two years. Each module has a theme: ground, sex, family, death... it’s all there on the website (see below). You sign on for all eight - et voila! it’s like being back in university again. This is the first training of this kind that they have done and I, Reader, am participating. My friends have asked me exactly what it is I am being trained for, and I have to confess I’m not entirely sure, although I have an inkling.
Gay Love Spirit support men (mostly, but not only, gay) in being both fully sexual and fully spiritual. That doesn’t sound like such an unusual proposition until you experience it. The actuality of what they do is extraordinarily poignant.
The training is taking place mostly in Berlin, in an excellent warehouse apartment the size of two tennis courts. I lived in Berlin for half a year when I was twenty-one, back in the old days when dinosaurs still stalked central Europe, and so for me this is a reconnection with my younger, more intuitive self. Back then I was aware that this kind of work was being done in this town, but it was to take me over twenty years to muster up the courage to participate.
GLS is not group therapy. We do not sit round endlessly talking about sex. The schedule is richer, stranger and madder than that. There is breath-work, movement, touch, meditation, celebration, ritual, dance, hilarity and the occasional brisk theoretical lecture which the lovely Kai and Volker call “Mind-Wank”. There are exercises around issues of intimacy, communication and relationship, but many of these are silent. Words are used, discussion is avoided. The focus always comes back to the body - the place where sex and spirit meet.
GLS is not a dating service. Of course, if you put forty gay men in a room and close the door for four days there is bound to be, at the very least, the occasional spark of attraction. But the atmosphere is surprisingly relaxed. We have two years in which to decide if we want to pair up; much better to cool it for now, to be open to everyone in the room, to enjoy the opportunity for a puppyish love-in. Most of us are (ahem) over thirty and are here because it has occurred to us that sex is not necessarily the most fun you can have with your clothes off.
I have been home for almost a week now, and have been processing. Here are some thoughts.
We are so used to believing that every human impulse springs from repressed sexuality that it may come as a surprise to realise that sexuality itself may be the repressed version of something else. The human body is a pleasure-machine. Feeling pleasure is what it is designed for. Not such a radical thought in itself, but here’s the rub: we assume that the body’s way of providing us with pleasure is through sex (with food, drink, drugs, jacuzzis, etc, providing back-up). But actually the human body is designed to feel orgasmic ALL THE TIME. Waking up, stretching and going downstairs to breakfast should be physically ecstatic - and would be if we weren’t so fucked up.
The pay-off of sex is the orgasm, generally agreed to be more fun than anything else in this life. But there is a way of merely inhabiting the body, merely being present, that provides a kind of physical delight so intense that you might as well call it orgasmic.
The sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (I am reliably informed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) divided the various epochs of Western civilisation into two main types. He said that during what he termed “sensate” epochs people regard physical pleasure as the measure of all things, whereas during “ideational” epochs people look down on the physical and strive for nonmaterial ends. Sensate eras are epicurean and utilitarian (one thinks of ancient Rome) whereas ideational eras emphasise abstract principles and asceticism (for example Gothic Europe). One can of course have both these types of culture existing uneasily side by side, as would be the case in America today, a land in which a school-kid might emerge from a creationism lesson and plug himself straight into Britney Spears.
Sorokin had a third term, ”idealistic”, for the rare cultures (perhaps “moments” would be a better term) that he saw as integrating these two diametrically opposed principles - that combined an acceptance of concrete sensory experience with a reverence towards the spiritual. I think the reason why I find Gay Love Spirit’s work so gripping is that it goes for this unusual synthesis. And I wonder: is it a coincidence that those well-known “idealistic” periods in history (the early Renaissance in Florence, Classical Athens) were times at which homosexual activity became not only acceptable but more or less de rigeur? Is homosexuality itself emblematic in some way of psychic wholeness?
I have no idea how many other people in the world today are doing this work. Are there godzillions of us waking up to the glory of it, all over the globe, zapped by strange evolutionary rays from Aquarian planetary alignments? Or is it just us in our warehouse in Berlin, with Joseph Kramer over in California providing online support?
Gay Love Spirit's lovely website is here
... here's something I saw while in the States a couple of weeks ago. (Just goes to show that everything depends on your point of view...)
Image: amusing picture apparently advertising a queer bed
I have just got home from the first module of Gay Love Spirit’s first-ever two-year training, an exhausting four-day workshop in a warehouse in Berlin. The theme was Ground. Perhaps when I get my mind back I will attempt to comment on the ineffable gorgeousness of it all, but for now I will leave you with this entry from my diary, written on the plane home:
Never before have my body and spirit been so reluctant to return to so-called “real life”. The GLS workshop ends and I make my way to the airport, accompanied, thank God, by a fellow participant, a handsome dancer, M. We toil through the Berlin undergound with our bags, sleep-deprived, over-excited and (in the best sense) profoundly disturbed. We are red-eyed and probably look deranged, having only an hour ago been naked (obviously), getting smeared with mud made from the combined earth of ten nations to the pounding of voodoo drums.
We get confused and rock up at the airport kind of late. My poor fragile spirit is as open as a flower. We progress through security and passport control radiating love to all the officials and asking them how they are. The airport was surely designed by a devil, because when we step out of passport control we find ourselves RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of the duty-free emporium, surrounded by harshly glowing bullshit. I feel physically sick. Aftershaves, whisky, cigarettes and chocolates all crowd in on me in a riot of falsehood and sterility. I mutter to M, “Get me out of here!” and lurch towards a gap in the merchandise. If we were still in the workshop I would request a hug or a massage - maybe a cuddle on a sofa with green tea and an apple. But this is not the workshop. This is EasyJet.
“I need a Schrippe,” I croak, looking about for signs of sustenance.
“A stripper?” says M. “What on earth do you need a stripper for?” - and I realise that he is as far-gone as me.
“Not a stripper, a Schrippe - it’s German for bread roll.”
We find a café of sorts. Rows of rolls swim before my bewildered eyes, each filled with something I would rather not attempt to digest. I find a salad in a clear plastic box. Nestling in the leaves I discover the cubed flesh of some tortured creature. On the plane, I plan my future life as a vegan.
We are successfully hurled through the air and come to land on British soil. Immediately my nausea subsides. I realise that four days of grounding work had connected me to the earth so intensely that my spirit recoiled in horror at the prospect of flight.
We live in overstimulated times. We live unnatural lives.
Cruising at 50,000 feet (or whatever it is) on my way to Los Angeles to work on a screenplay with the lovely Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. I’m reading Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which says every second of life should be devoted to expanding one’s consciousness, so naturally I fire up the in-flight entertainment system and select an Eric Cantona movie. That’s right - your trusty Psychodrome bloggeur carries on blogging when all around are collapsed under their BA blankets, fumbling for the Murine and coughing their germs into the stale, dessicated air.
Looking For Eric - and yes, I am going to review it despite having only watched half, because right now I need to write, and my needs matter - is not the sort of film I would normally glotz. It belongs to the genre of Brit-grit, albeit the comic end. It is directed by Ken Loach, which means that even if I watch it to the end, there almost certainly won’t be scenes of highly-made-up glamour-stars falling downstairs in scarlet Chanel suits. But this particular slice of misery has Eric Cantona in it which, like love, changes everything.
I’ve always adored the lovely Eric - not enough to actually watch a game of fotball, obviously, but enough to buy his book and hang his picture in my study. He is my favourite footballer of the lot, an implausible oasis of grace and charisma shimmering in the desert of footie-land. That he subsequently turned out to have both philosophical and thespian tendencies has been almost too exciting for a boy to bear. The perfect man walks among us. Surely God will spare this wicked world while Eric lives.
M. Cantona’s talent as a screen actor is fragile but may yet blossom gorgeously. My feeling is he is the Catherine Deneuve of retired footballers. The act is poised, dignified and mysterious, the staginess just enough to be fun. He’s actually less hammy than many “great” British stage actors turn out to be when they finally emerge from their trailers, ready for their close-ups.
For now we have to make do with this sublime creature in the unlikely setting of a zero-glamour council-estate drama of broken dreams and unexpressed emotion. (And don’t call me a snob: it is perfectly possible to make films set on council estates that are very glamorous indeed). Perhaps if we’re very good Santa will send us more Eric Cantona movies - maybe even ones with love-scenes! The thought is enough to make one ring for the flight attendant and order an urgent camomile tea.
They say that you should breakfast like a king, lunch like a queen and dine like a pauper. Well I'm not sure if I've got breakfast and dinner quite right, but I think I've got lunch more or less spot on.
You need to not watch an awful lot of TV to write one decent play.
There is a rumour going round that over at the Palace of Westminster they are stocking up on the tungsten lightbulbs they just banned, and you know what? it has the ring of truth to it. I guess they feel that it would be hard for them to run the country if they had headaches from those flickery fluorescent lightbulbs that the rest of us are going to have to use.
I remember maybe ten years ago, there was a hullaballoo about the EU allowing GM maize from the States to get into our food. A stern BBC newsman interviewed an icy Scandinavian MEP and asked her, “Would you eat this food?” She replied, without a blush, “Well that question doesn’t really apply to me, because I only eat organic.”
Having suffered not so much as a sneeze for the whole of 2009, I finally succumb to two stomach bugs in the space of fifteen days, and in between the two I bash my head in the shower and have to be glued together again in A&E. Misery, self-pity, disaster.
This morning I decide enough is enough and I see my GP, who prescribes me some pills (Domperidone) to control the nausea. I carefully read the accompanying booklet. The booklet warns that side-effects may include reduced sex-drive. This I find rather a fantastical proposition. How could one's sex-drive be any lower than it already is when one is crouched over the washing-up bowl, puking up one's lunch? Can you imagine a man in the throes of a fit of nausea doubtfully surveying the Domperidone packet and thinking, Well I'd really like to control this puking but I have a hooker booked for 3pm and I'll want to be good and hard for that...
It's 300 years since the birth of Dr Johnson. Anyone who was ever forced to read Rasselas will no doubt bear the man a deep-seated grudge, but we can still all enjoy being directed to the occasional gem in his dictionary. A recent one to come to light is the now largely obsolete term "to snudge", which Johnson defines thus:
SNUDGE: a verb, meaning to be idle. For example: "She snudged around the house until teatime."
It's great to discover a new word for something you've been doing for years. The word could be resurrected in order to dignify the concept of idling, much as the imported term "flâneur" has been used for many years to dignify the simple act of walking to the Post Office. I like "snudge" because it contains a subliminal echo of "sludge" and maybe even "slut". (Snail? Nudge? Trudge? Slope? Sneak? Drudge? Snot? Smut? - Oh, Anglo-saxon!) Snudging, surely, must happen in an untidy, dirty house, in one's pyjamas, and perhaps a food-spattered dressing-gown. And it should ALWAYS go on till tea-time.
For years I have crassly aspired to be a flâneur; I think now I shall be a snudger. Or snudgeur.
I’ve been feeling a little under the weather this week, so I think I’ll perk myself up by writing a slightly snide review of a DVD.
About three weeks ago I decided to have a gander at the 1982 Bowie vehicle Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, which I had never had the pleasure of viewing. It seems to me that, as I now know about 75% of everything there is to know about David Bowie, I might as well find out about the rest.
It took me three weeks to grind my way through this nonsensical confection, but to other pilgrims on the way my advice is, don’t give up. Persist and there will be rewards.
But first, the many down-sides: neither of the film’s two principal stars, Bowie or Ryuichi Sakamoto, should ever have been “put on the stage,” by Mrs Worthington or anyone else. Of course, a shaky grasp of the principles of acting shouldn’t necessarily be a problem in the movies, but if you are going to feature two preening pop-monsters (the kind that has an unhealthy passion for eyeshadow and blusher), it does seem odd to pop them into a downbeat World War II POW-camp drama. Of the two, Bowie shows more restraint on the Max Factor front - but only just. His foundation looks like paint and his roots are clearly showing in a number of shots. As for Sakamoto, who plays a sadistic prison-camp commandant, he is beyond drag. He sweeps around the jungle made up like what I presume to be the Japanese equivalent of a pantomime dame. Why didn’t someone say something? Maybe they did. Why didn’t he listen?
The film is not particularly felicitously directed; it comes across as an extended student piece made by a Jean Genet fan who is aware of the early Dietrich/Von Sternberg collaborations, alternately stylish and infantile. Culture-clash may be partly to blame. None of the Japanese actors can speak intelligible English - again, not a capital crime, but more problematically, the Japanese are acting in a completely different mode from the British: stylised, theatrical and, like Sakamoto’s make-up, not really suited to the cinema at all.
The script! - the story! - where does one begin? How does a film end up as absurd as this? Surely it didn’t start out that way? It’s based on a perfectly respectable novel. Where did the rot set in?
One suspects that the footage arrived on the editor’s desk and the extent of the car-crash was soberly appraised. One suspects that whole cans of film had to be binned because Sakamoto had hit the set that day in make-up so voluptuous that it was feared that even the most cowed provincial cinema audience might notice and openly give him the bird. One suspects that every single usable minute of Tom Conti’s performance, whether relevant to the story or not, was crammed into the final cut, because Conti was the only trained actor they thought to hire. As for the Bowie footage, it’s very borderline. One imagines the editor agonising over every frame: Can we get away with it? Will they swallow it? How silly does he really look? Is this good, good-bad or just plain bad?
Now for the up-side. It is greatly to everyone’s credit (chiefly Bowie’s, whose glittering name presumably got the thing bank-rolled) that this piece of over-ripe gay SM got filmed in glorious 35mm and released in mainstream cinemas throughout the world. It’s Sebastiane, but done on a proper budget, with pop stars and a soundtrack. (Evil commandant falls in love with beautiful, rebellious blond prisoner... buries him up to his neck in sand and cuts off a lock of his hair... etc...) When the film starts and you immediately see how bad it is going to be, you wonder why such an illustrious producer as Jeremy Thomas would ever have put his name to it. But then you get to thinking, Hell, maybe the guy has a sense of danger...
After a bit you stop being embarrassed by Bowie’s hamming and start to count your blessings. The guy is insane, sure, but is that such a crime? His schtick as a visual presence has always had its roots in the early days of cinema, in the faces of the great androgynous female stars - Garbo, Dietrich, Hepburn. He does have a shockingly expressive mug. His acting isn’t really acting and it isn’t really mime, but whatever it is, the holy madness flashes out ravishingly between the twitches and the mannerisms, transporting us to archetypal realms. We all know that he is the Man-Woman; but he is also the Victim-Bully, or what you might call the Bottom-Top. He has a poetic way of going beyond the duality and expressing the raw energy of the frisson in question. If you watched this film with the sound down you would get all the information you needed. In fact, it would make a lot more sense. Bowie and Sakamoto are Garbo and John Gilbert, swooning over each other in a melodrama in which the implausibility of the script is matched by the fantasticality of the visuals. How many post-1930 films are there in which one of the principals actually faints in response to being kissed by the other? Yet this is what we are dealing with. I guess that’s a reasonable response to a smacker from Ziggy.
Bowie was born too late - or perhaps just at the right time. He would have looked good huge on the silver screen opposite Garbo - but they would never have put him there. Deprived of his rightful Hollywood crown, our hero created a genre of his own by which to romp into our minds - glam-rock, no less, where drama is king and the human face its lovely queen. Post-glam-rock, after he had secured his earthly crown as the most glamorous singer who ever lived, our man got greedy and lunged at the movies, and it didn’t work out. But we forgive him. Good for you, Dave. You showed ‘em!
Most men look better horizontal.
Am wolfing down Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell’s Human Givens (see recent entry “A puke a day.”) Hot patootie and bless my soul, this is a book I’ve been waiting for for years!
Just as it has been prophesied that the whales and the dolphins will not be accompanying us into the New Age, it seems that time is running out for certain kinds of talk therapy, at least insofar as they are used to treat depression. This is a topic close to my heart because I am by nature depressive myself, although I would go so far as to say I seem to have got it licked these days. Get a load of this:
“Depression is an emotion that simplifies (regresses) thinking patterns which, in turn, encourages emotionally arousing introspection that gives rise to distorted (excessive amounts of) REM sleep... The excessive dreaming of a depressed person drains the energy they need for normal arousal of attention, leaving them unable to draw any sense of meaning out of their everyday activities...”
The authors go on, “Any form of counselling or psychotherapy that REDUCES the amount of emotional introspection a person is doing will help them. Any therapy that encourages and INCREASES the amount of emotional introspection they do will harm them. This is why such models as psychodynamic, gestalt, hypno-analytical, person-centred, etc, are contra-indicated for treating depressed people...”
What is more, “Some American hospitals that employed therapists using these outmoded models are now successfully being sued for large sums of money by the relatives of depressed people because the evidence that these approaches are ineffective, and even harmful, is so strong it stands up in court.”
Griffin and Tyrrell go on to devote a whole chapter of their splendid book to sane and balanced strategies for curing depression. Any depressed person should rush to their computer and order a copy immediately.
Today on Gaydar:
"I prefer guys who are:
Slim
No back hair
Dont smoke
Dont snore
Are uncut
Otherwise I am happy to chat with anyone interesting :-)"
Am devouring Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell's sublime Human Givens, a piece of cutting-edge and completely accessible psychology recommended to me by my wise friend Darren of Nottingham. This book has my vote many times over - a breath of fresh air and sanity blowing through an area in which it is all too often impossible to see the wood for the trees.
There is too much good stuff here for me to even scrape the surface, blog-wise. One of the core insights is that is is not thoughts and beliefs that create emotion (as cognitive therapy maintains) but the other way around: emotions give rise to thoughts. This is why so many varieties of talk therapy don't work: they don't deal with the part of the brain where the problem originates.
Griffin and Tyrrell are marvellously down-to-earth. They have the common sense to note that the first factor in any mental or emotional process must be the stimulus from the environment, and they point out that sometimes the best way to help a patient is to address just these factors. A client of Griffin's was a young woman with a critical and interfering mother-in-law. Every time the older woman visited, the young bride suffered vomiting fits. Griffin suggested to his client that, instead of running to the bathroom, she should vomit right there and then on the kitchen floor and then rush to her room, leaving her mother-in-law to clear up the mess. This had the beneficial effect of reducing the frequency of the mother-in-law's visits. You can't imagine Freud coming up with such an elegant solution to a problem.
Tax meat.
A prostitute is a person who chooses to have sex for money, and a sex-slave is a person who is forced to. As far as I can tell, prostitutes enjoy their work as much as anyone else. Just snoop about on the interweb and find any forum in which hookers offer each other advice and support - you may be surprised. The atmosphere is very pro-sex. (One nice piece of advice from a hooker to her sisters: “It’s OK to cum.”)
It would be surprising, on the other hand, if sex-slaves enjoyed their work. They are being raped, and someone else is taking the money. There is a quantity of difference between the two cases.
New Labour is a government that requires us to ask permission to play the piano in the pub, but does not ask our permission, or the permission of the United Nations, to drop bombs on women and children in our name. This government would like to prohibit us from buying sex - or, alas, from selling it. Most of us are too embarrassed to object - because prostitution is a crime perpetrated by men upon women, and we have decided to stop oppressing women.
Some of the answers to this nonsense are almost too obvious to bother with. There are plenty of male prostitutes. A sizable percentage of my gay male friends (about 25%) have turned tricks - that I know of. No women were involved - let alone oppressed. Another nice one to throw at the Puritans is this: what about the disabled? Should they be allowed to buy sex? A riddle like this is enough to make a Puritan’s head explode - the need to be nice to one group in direct conflict with the desire to be pissy to another. I am delighted to report that there is an organisation called TLC who connect disabled people with sex-workers, and they are busy embarrassing the government with their entirely reasonable demand that disabled johns (and johnesses) not be criminalised.
I have been reading Steve’s Taylor’s pop-anthropology book The Fall, and while it isn’t even slightly well-written, it can claim in its way to be rather an important piece of work. It says a lot of obvious things, but puts them together in a way that adds up to quite a tirade. His thesis is that the human race wasn’t always nasty and violent and irresponsible and unjust - it’s a relatively recent development, the result of an environmental catastrophe around 4000 BCE which caused a shift in the human psyche. Hunter-gatherer societies - the pre-historic ones and the ones that survive to this day - were (and are) innocent of warfare and patriarchy and social inequality and, last but not least, sexual shame.
Reading about the sexuality of tribal societies is refreshing. Women enjoy sex just as voraciously as men, and there is no sense of a woman’s being naturally more inclined to sexual fidelity or monogamy. There is no sense of one person, either male or female, possessing another, and although tribal people do sometimes marry, they will unapologetically go elsewhere for sex if for some reason they’re not getting what they want at home. Men are expected to give women pleasure in bed, and if they under-perform they are exposed to ridicule. Women commonly brag about their sexual prowess in much the same way as men have traditionally done in our world.
In other words, the kind of sexuality that men today are made to feel embarrassed about is not really “male sexuality” at all. It’s what we’d all like to do if only society were differently structured.
Perhaps you need to be a woman to speak out against this anti-sex crap. Certainly I have fond memories of the great Camille Paglia confronting a group of gormless women-against-porn demonstrators on the streets of downtown Manhattan, yelling at them, “Go to a museum! Read a book!” Her point was that these ideas have feet of clay: all that is needed is a little research and they crumble away. The mind-set that demonises prostitution is the very same mindset that teaches us to be ashamed of our bodies - yes, mm-hm, the mindset that thinks women should be circumcised and veiled. That’s the one. Women-against-porn and women-against-prostituion are expressions of the belief that human sexuality needs to be controlled. This belief came in with patriarchy and should go out with patriarchy.
It may be that gay people think these matters through more than straight people (those of us that think at all) because we can’t avoid them. Our bodies have agendas that a lot of people would like us to feel ashamed of, and we have to think it through and say no. But it’s not just about gay sex, it’s about all sex. Body-shame is the final frontier.
We have learnt that it is wrong to oppress women and members of other races, and we are listlessly conceding that it is wrong to oppress homosexuals. But not a lot of people are prepared to speak out in defence of prostitutes AND their clients. The only way a twit like Harriet Harman can think about the issue is by pretending (Queen Victoria-like) that prostitutes don’t actually exist - that there is no such thing as a woman who would willingly fuck for cash, and they are sex-slaves all. Depictions of hookers in the media tend to give us either the abject slave in the horror-brothel (as in Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises) or the comedy tart, an over-chirpy character who’s on an endless charm offensive to help us get over what she does for a living. What we don’t see is prostitution as a career-choice like medicine or the law. What we don’t get is hookers and hustlers who are intelligent, thoughtful, cultured, grounded. Sex-workers who have sane, ordered lives and who contribute to society. (Hookers, according to home office minister Fiona McTaggart, lead “chaotic lives”.) What we rarely get is the idea that a sex-worker could be saner than the rest of us, in the sense that an artist is, or a monk.
One of the most interesting sexologists I know of is Jack Morin. I first came across him while flicking through a big How-To manual for gay men. In it, there was a little Morin quotation that proposed the electrifying idea that ambivalence, far from being an obstacle to sexual attraction, can itself be erotic. It was an immensely liberating idea that enabled me to think all sorts of thoughts that I previously would have stopped in their tracks. I went on to get hold of Morin’s fabulous The Erotic Mind, and later found an essay by him in Kenneth Ray Stubbs’ excellent Male Erotic Massage. After this it was a slippery slope: I was soon googling Morin and excitedly ordering my copy of his bestseller Anal Pleasure and Health (which I heartily recommend).
Morin is not a great or even particularly elegant writer, but he knows his stuff. As a researcher and therapist he has been listening to people talk about their sexuality for many years. It’s worth persisting with his books, because here and there you will find insights that could change your life. In Anal Pleasure and Health he talks about how people sometimes use their sexuality to make up for feelings of inadequacy in other areas. You might have a couple, he notes, in which one partner is wealthier than the other. The less wealthy partner might present him-(or her-)self as insatiably sexy, and complain that the wealthier partner can’t keep up. The subtext is, “Look at me - I have all this sexual abundance that you don’t have!” It’s the sort of observation that may not strike you as particularly profound until you experience the truth of it in real life. Love and sex - that fatal combination! - come together to produce complexities and poignancies that are often impossible to decipher in the heat of the moment. Read Jack Morin and be prepared.
It has occurred to me that at some point in the not-too-distant future there will be arise a mental equivalent of vegetarianism - people will opt out of watching TV. If you think such a thing is unthinkable, go back a few years - say to about 1930 - and read what perfectly intelligent, even enlightened people, for example George Orwell, were saying about vegetarianism. It was considered both ridiculous and offensive: to refuse meat was to insult your host and invite social exclusion.
As some of us become increasingly aware that we are what we eat, and that we cannot, alas, rely on our leaders to supply us with nutritious food, it is logical to suppose that some of us might also notice that we are what we watch, and start to question the health benefits of indiscriminate glotzing.
I remember in the nineties I had a friend who lived in the country and didn't own a TV. I thought him rather pathetic, and pitied him when some juicy wave of hysteria broke over the nation (such as the death of Diana) because he was unable to get the full blast of it. I viewed him just as Orwell viewed the early vegetarians: why would anyone choose to exclude themselves in this way?
I now no longer have a TV license.
Gaydar, Gaydar, Gaydar!
Gaydar is a gay website where you meet other men for dates or - you know - weird sex. At first it all seems rather awful, rather harsh and unattractive, but after a while you get used to it. You realise it's just a space like any other. And you get to learn the language. You learn how to read profiles - the paragraphs in which (in the box on the left) men describe themselves and (in the box on the right) what they're looking for in another guy.
One of my rules is that I don't bother with anyone who defines himself or what he's looking for in negative terms. "No fats, no fems," is a pissy and pointless refrain that has echoed down the decades. OK, so you're a body-fascist with a repressed feminine side - fine - but you don't have to talk about it in public. Men try to dress their prejudices up in supposedly reasonable language. You come across stuff like, "Sorry, but Orientals just don't do it for me." Or, "If you're a screaming queen, well I'm sure you're a very nice person, but that just doesn't turn me on." What these men haven't considered is that it is quite possible to indulge one's prejudices (just by politely saying no to those one has pre-judged) without publicising them on the internet.
Today I found an absolute hum-dinger. In the "What I am Looking For" box, a guy had put:
"You should at least be Caucasian..."
I like that "at least" very much. Is it not a marvelously naive self-betrayal, implying a view of the races in which Caucasian sits at the top of a strictly hierarchical list - the sort of thing Hitler might have put, had he been a modern urban poufter? The implication is, "OK, you might have a soft spot for cheesecake and maybe you get a bit swishy after a couple of gin and tonics, but at the very least you should have the decency to be white!"
I am considering starting a collection of Gaydar Howlers. You could publish them in a jokey little book which people could read while defecating.
Was "Waterloo" a hit in France?
It is a soothing truism of New Age thought that the subconscious cannot tell the difference between a visualisation and a memory. Therefore positive visualisations have a positive effect on our psychology. But if this is so, then presumably the subconscious cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction - between, for example, what was seen on TV and what was seen in the flesh of real life. Which means, as Brian Oblivion observed in Videodrome, that television is reality and reality is television. I think this is quite a serious point.
Personally I don't watch a lot of TV, not because I dislike it, but because my subconscious takes it all too seriously. In my twenties I formed a rock band, released records, toured, wrote several novellas, gave parties and had a relationship, yet none of this was half as exciting as watching Dynasty. Recently I have been cautiously allowing myself to watch Rome, and it is having a similar effect. My real life can't compete.
What's the answer? The human mind is a pesky thing, a candle in the wind, restless, fickle, constantly in flux. People occasionally yell at me that I "should" watch more TV. I think not. It's hard enough staying sane while working one's way very slowly through Rome. If I plugged in my aerial and opened the broadcast floodgates I would be stark staring mad by the end of a week.
Above is a picture I took yesterday of a cup of fennel tea I was enjoying at my friend Fiona's house. As you can see, she has nice crockery. I think the photo came out rather well.
Image: my cup of tea
I am working my way through the complete box-set of Rome. It would take too long to enumerate the many reasons why I love this show. My mother, an erstwhile classical scholar, assures me it’s an inaccurate portrayal of the past, but I, in my ignorance, am convinced. I want to believe it. It’s decadent and it’s sexy and it has James Purefoy and Kevin McKidd.
Whenever I see Purefoy and McKidd play a scene together in Rome, all leather skirts and seething masculinity, I cannot help remembering that, as the author of Bedrooms and Hallways, I caused them to snog all those years ago in 1997.
Both of them are rather fabulous actors, for entirely different reasons. Kevin, I think, is the artist, the one who invites us to see right into his soul. Kevin is the one we love. But James - what can one say about James Purefoy? In his own mad way he is something of a national treasure.
I was slow to become a Purefoy fan, and I see now that my reasons were petty. When I did my Hitchcockian walk-on (as “Man At The Bus-Stop”) in Bedrooms and Hallways, I asked James if I could borrow his Murine to take the redness out of my eyes and he said no, explaining that it was unhygienic to share Murine. I didn’t entirely buy this, feeling that his real reason was that he wanted to look more handsome than me onscreen. Like the shallow person I am, I nursed a grudge for many years, refusing to accept the possibility that Mr Purefoy might be fabulous.
An actor needs material, and I think the lovely James had to wait a while for a role that clicked with his unique charisma. He is perfect as Mark Antony, a delirious blend of glamour and ego. He more than rises to the challenge - he positively fastens his fangs onto the challenge’s jugular vein. This is a performance that is both solidly macho and lurkingly camp, austere yet decadent, aristocratic and vulgar. He is entirely believable, and it isn’t quite clear how much of it is acting (always a good sign). We know he isn’t really Mark Antony, but we feel, well, Mark Antony could have been something very similar.
I think Rome is very well written and directed. I also think it benefits from its largely British casting. I don’t mean that the British are better actors than the Americans, just that casting works differently over here. The American enthusiasm for looking good means that their actors tend to all look the same. Rome has a fabulously kooky cast which, although sexy enough to hold anyone’s attention, is also imperfect enough to give an illusion of real life.
It has not escaped my notice that there is a tiny grain of irony in the fact that the British have been called in to portray those decadent, self-serving, greedy, bossy, ruthless imperial Romans. After all, the Victorian British behaved just like that, didn’t they? Surely one couldn’t believe that there was any resemblance between the ancient Romans and modern-day Americans!
“Why don’t you take out your Swiss Army knife and cut me - just a little?”
Reader, I am an admirer of the films of David Cronenberg. I remember vividly, to this day, seeing Videodrome in the Prince Charles Cinema in 1983, spellbound, terrified and aroused, knowing that, just as with the Rocky Horror Show nine years before, “Nothing would ever be the same.” I actually don’t like horror at all as a genre - I can’t see the point. Surely life is awful enough already? But Cronenberg is different. His brand is (was) stylish and profound. I want to say existential. Shall I say it? OK, I shall say it. Existential.
One goes through life and lines from Cronenberg echo down the decades: “Long Live the New Flesh!” “Don’t be afraid to let your body die!” “We live in overstimulated times.” ... It takes many years for the meaning of these films to filter through. Isn’t it the case that some works of art take a whole lifetime to understand?
A question that has often gnawed at me is, what exactly is the nature of Cronenberg’s erudition? What has he read, what does he believe and to what extent are his films laced with secret mystic/metaphysical subtexts? I have dabbled in mysticism since my twenties, but in the past three years have embarked on a more structured programme, and recently it has often struck me that the experiences and insights I am having are often rather Cronenberg in flavour. Like the woman in The Brood, I have embarked on a strange and life-changing journey. Like the victims of Videodrome I have found that certain practices result in the creation of a “new organ” in the forehead (in my case a third eye, I hope, rather than a brain tumour). Long Live the New Flesh? That is so Gay Love Spirit!
Today I came across a reference which I think settles the matter. Chuang Tzu, writing in the third century BC, said that he dreamed he was a butterfly, flitting from flower to flower; then he woke up and wondered if he was (then) a man dreaming he was a butterfly or (now) a butterfly dreaming he was a man. Fans of Cronenberg’s thundering 1986 remake of The Fly will of course remember how Jeff Goldblum, towards the end of the film, reaches the point in his transformation where he is “an insect who once dreamed he was a man.” The line, surely, is a direct reference.
So it seems our man must have spent at least some of his time on the mystic trail. It seems he is at least aware of Chuang Tzu, maybe via a modern Ch’an master such as Wei Wu Wei. The eighteenth-century Secret of The Golden Flower, a marvelously Cronenbergian text, would also be a hot contender, along with the traditions of Zen, Advaita and Tantra. This is the metaphysical fast-track which over the centuries has been reserved for sharper minds.
The power of Cronenberg’s films is due to the fact that they speak of an ultimate Reality beyond science and religion. This is a Reality which cannot be grasped with the logical mind; it can only be suggested by signs and symbols, poetry and dialogue. Like Shakespeare, Cronenberg has chosen to work with big, bold, melodramatic stories. Not for him delicacy, subtlety and good taste. In his films, people’s heads explode (rather a nice metaphor for enlightenment, no?)
The Fly is his grandest work: it has structure, it’s well-finished, and the script delivers its spine-tingling treasures to the accompaniment of one of cinema’s swooniest scores. Videodrome is the other masterpiece, but in an oh-so-different way. The film was made in a big hurry because finance suddenly turned up and Cronenberg was obliged to go ahead and shoot before he had really finished the script. Luckily, he was on form and he saved himself by constructing a story that was almost entirely hallucination.
Compared to The Fly, Videodrome seems mad, rambling and ragged, but perhaps the rushed nature of the production threw our man into a Zen state, resulting in his most metaphysically suggestive script. How many films make a coherent connection between kinky sex and spiritual awakening? (”Let’s open those neural floodgates!”) How many films comment so provocatively on television’s effect on mankind’s psychic apparatus? How many films make simple, clear English seem so slippery and mischievous? (”I am my father’s screen.”)
What I love about Cronenberg in his golden period is that he was very, very sophisticated and also very, very entertaining.
Of course it is tasteless to talk about politics, but these are desperate times. Today’s blog will be short and to-the-point, and I shall resist the temptation to get drawn into the quicksand of political mud-slinging that currently engulfs so many of us (the words “I always knew New Labour were a bunch of fascists” shall not pass my lips).
My point for the morning is this: politicians do not, on the whole, meditate. The poor things are rushed off their feet, they don’t have time. But this is a problem - and I’m not being entirely facetious. It is, I would humbly hint, more or less impossible to achieve any useful degree of self-knowledge without putting in some time on the old meditation front. The result is, we are being bossed about (and how!) by people who don’t know their arse from their elbow. We are being required to behave like obedient droids by people who, alas and alack, have not paused to reflect on the meaning of existence since they were fourteen.
Members of Parliament should be required to meditate. And when I say “required”, I do not mean “required” in the sense of “required to declare their expenses.” I mean forced. Upon arriving at the Palace of Westminster each morning they should be frog-marched into individual cells, kindly but firmly, by fit young Tibetan monks. The cells would contain nothing but a straight-backed (but comfortable) chair and, on a Philippe Stark occasional table, a glass of water and a small statue of the Lord Buddha. Our rulers would be frisked before entering the cell, and all printed material, pens, papers, mobile phones and Blackberries confiscated. The door would then be shut and locked for a full twenty minutes (half an hour for Cabinet Ministers).
Would there be soft New Age music playing? Would the scent of jasmine blossoms be wafted in through ventilators? I haven’t decided. But for twenty to thirty minutes a day they would be forcibly separated from their exciting lives as bosspots, and obliged to stare into the abyss of naked, unadorned consciousness. I would very much like to be present at Prime Minister’s Question Time on a day after such measures had been implemented.
Image: chest of drawers in my room
Well, I don't have any New Year's resolutions. But I am being very butch and efficient, starting as I mean to go on. Spent a couple of hours online today designing a new business card. On the front, my details, super-sober and straight. On the back, a fabulous old slogan that I saw on the wall of a chip-shop and photographed: in big, stupid, rock'n'roll lettering, "COME SAD - LEAVE HAPPY!" It reminds me of the freak-show-style cover of Diamond Dogs, where the paint seemed to be peeling off the walls. I like it because it's about serving up good food and it's also about showbiz. Plus there's a kind of red-light frisson, always very glamorous.
Actually I do have an ambition for the new year, and that is to get rid of this headache...
Image: come sad, leave happy
I have a hot tip for playwrights: try, where possible, to write about mad people. I have noticed that sanity is not terribly interesting onstage. I used to think it would be fun to have a mad person scampering across the stage from time to time. Now I go further: there should be no sane people at all. I am going through all my plays, improving them by re-writing all the sane characters as mad. You'd be amazed at what a lift it's given them. Suddenly the dialogue is taut, sparky and buoyant.
The insane aren't self-conscious. They're not afraid to change the subject, and they love talking about sex. They love having sex! They have fertile imaginations, always dramatising and sometimes even hallucinating. All this is excellent grist to the playwright's mill.
Of course it is tiresome when a mad person is surrounded by tut-tutting sane characters, doing their best to cure him. No, no, no. And we don't want a play set in a lunatic asylum. What we want is a group of people who are all mad north-northwest, and haven't noticed. No-one is on their case. They're just interacting - getting on with their lives. They have jobs, homes and partners. Now that's what I call a play!
Madness is more widespread than sanity. It is, if you like, the norm. Plays full of sane characters are ridiculous constructs. In England there's a tradition of sane, serious middle-class plays and they're never much good. You sit watching thinking, How sane! And then five minutes later you've forgotten every word.
... to the National Theatre to see Steppenwolf’s talk-of-the-town production of Tracy Letts’ very good play “August: Osage County.” Now you know I have sworn never to bitch about my fellow playwrights, but I haven’t made any promises when it comes to designers and theatre architects. This elegant, refreshingly retro, three-hour-long play (that’s three hours PLUS two intervals) was gripping throughout, and the time just flitted by. No sore bottoms or achy backs - we lapped it up. But we were lucky: we were in the fourth row of the stalls, and even from there, most of the actors’ voices sounded thin and wasp-like. It was partly the fault of the set, which, apart from being ugly, seemed to be trying to fill the cavernous space while forgetting to provide a sounding-board for the voices. But it was mostly the theatre. The Lyttleton is, we all know, a beautiful space, but there is just one problem: it isn’t really suitable for plays. Either they will have to start miking the actors or (when the next generation takes over, the one that is used to having sound piped directly into its ears) it will end up as a space for dance pieces and musicals. It would have been really good to have seen this feisty play in a much smaller venue. It’s an intimate family drama, for heaven’s sake, not Tamburlaine the Great. You came out feeling that you’d seen it, but you hadn’t. Or perhaps the feeling was that you hadn’t quite heard it.
But enough of bitching about our lovely National Theatre. The play was the thing. I’m afraid to say it has made me want to write something in three acts. Of course this is what you “don’t” do these days, but who gives a shit?
Image: The cover of Atomic
I am currently toying with Cathay Che’s 1999 biography of Debbie Harry, unimaginatively entitled Platinum Blonde. David LaChapelle, commissioned to do the cover, has come up with one of the very few pictures of the lady in which she looks frightful - but let that go. I suppose making people look bad is his thing.
Personally I wouldn’t trust anyone who didn’t get the point of Blondie, but then that’s probably just love speaking. Harry was the only female vocalist I ever idolised, and in fact the only female, more or less, who ever made any impression on me sexually. Which is probably why I decided on men. For a woman to turn me on, she would have to be unutterably beautiful, dressed by Halston, talented, funny, cultured, rebellious, thoughtful, kind, and have something strangely masculine about her sexuality. She would also have to have her own band, which would have to have Clem Burke on drums.
Cathay Che’s biog is choppy and journalistic but it comes from a woman’s perspective, which is how Harry needs to be appreciated. Che honours what Harry achieved visually, ie, as a beauty and style icon. It’s hard, looking back, to appreciate the effect that a performer’s looks had on her world. Harry looked so great you could hardly believe your eyes. She looked good in a way you’d never seen before, but now you saw it, it seemed the only way. Just at a time when Hollywood was ditching glamour, Harry came on super-glamorous.
Of course we’re talking about showbiz here, not just discussing who was prettier than who. Che relates that between her first band The Wind In The Willows and Blondie, Harry did something rather unusual for a wannabe rock star in the 70s: she went to beauty school. Sure she was prettier than Patti Smith (who famously snarled, “That woman should get the fuck out of rock-n-roll!”) but more importantly, she was better at make-up. So while Smith was doing her intense poetry/punk-rock thing, most of which you wouldn’t want to listen to more than once, Debbie was patiently constructing a face that would make half the men in the world cum in their pants. How could she get the fuck out of something she WAS?
History is full of surprises, and it is now the supposedly “natural” Smith who is generally felt to have been the fraud, while the more artificial Harry is appreciated for her authenticity. Indeed, you could argue that facing your public slathered in Monroe make-up (ie, in the mask of an archetype) shows more humility than getting up onstage as you are and expecting people to treat you like a star. Patti Smith retired from music in 1980, got married and left New York. The woman that she had wanted to banish from her rock kingdom was by this time globally idolised, and one cannot help a frisson of schadenfreude as one reflects that Smith must have been obliged to hear Debbie’s voice piped into the aisles every time she went to the supermarket. There’s a moral, or a movie, in there somewhere.
Now, Blondie’s career looks brief and fragile, but Harry deserves a lot of credit for following her instincts and making a series of bold moves. Her sensibility was always a very personal blend of fifties bubblegum and seventies disenchantment (what a treat!). Like the best people she was ambitious, but her ambition never exceeded her integrity.
Harry and her fellow Blondie-men took their obsessions, added their personalities and created a cocktail that they worked hard to bring to a high sheen of perfection. People bitch that they were a second-rate band. Not so: they were just a short-lived one. By the time they got themselves together musically they were already in a tail-spin, spoilt and confused by their own success. Parallel Lines (1978) is a little bit sanitised, a little bit naff at times, but Eat To The Beat (1979) contains about ten minutes of music that makes life worth living - a sound that came out of the blue, flourished for the space of just three astonishing singles, and then was never repeated or equalled since, by Blondie or anyone else.
The story has often been told how, at the height of her fame, Harry took a couple of years off to nurse Chris Stein through a life-threatening illness. By the time Chris was well again, there was no career to come back to. As John Waters put it, while Debbie was at Chris’ hospital bedside, fifty people stole her act and a hundred people stole her look. Blondie had invented New Wave, which was to be pop’s sound for the next ten years, and Harry herself had revolutionised female glamour (paving the way for She Who Must Not Be Named) but Blondie, ironically, was finished. And so the legend persists that Debbie gave it all up for love, which may be partly true, and may be partly why she herself is still so loved (while That Other Woman appears not to be loved at all).
But those were strange times and the world was changing fast. My own feeling is that Stein’s illness may have been a blessing in disguise. Blondie were already losing their way musically, and Debbie, although still looking best-ever, was past thirty-five (she is three years older than Bowie, as far as I can tell) and finding success “kind of gross.” Blondie had presided over pop music’s apotheosis - those glorious years up to 1981 - but the house of cards was about to tumble. Tell me, were there any great rock records - or even any great pop records - made after 1981? Do we count Adam Ant? Certainly by ‘83 the game was well and truly up. Live Aid happened in all its mind-polluting splendour, ushering in the era of Phil Collins.
Of course, much of Debbie’s great charisma lay in the way she took old-fashioned sex-doll femininity and added a new kind of punk-rock toughness, a resilience that implied she liked men but could survive without us. But there is a difference between resilience and ruthlessness, and it now seems to me that what made Harry the last great rock star was her vulnerability. After her, being vulnerable stopped being fashionable. We all pulled ourselves together.
The elephant-in-the-room of post-Blondie pop - the self-evident fact that is too awful to mention - is that we have sorted out the textures but lost the melodies. Why? Precisely because we have pulled ourselves together. Control, as a principle, is all very well if you want to construct the perfect beat, but melodies need to be snatched from the ether, and that requires a special kind of receptivity. People who are confused, people who are in free-fall, people who are not entirely in control of their destinies or even sure they want to be, tend to be the ones who write the best tunes. I sometimes think that the best pop careers have the pattern of sex: the climax is the collapse. Perhaps channeling a song like Union City Blue simply blows your circuits; perhaps it’s an orgasm from which you never recover.
In Shayla, Harry sings:
Green trees
Call to me
I’m free
But life is so cheap
You need to hear her delivery of it to get the full blast, but it does seem to encapsulate what the best rock stars had - a kind of independence, a moody outsider quality that is now extinct in the world of popular music. To be really cool, you have to be beyond considerations of success. In the seventies, some very cool people became successful. But after that, the world of success got a little crowded, a little dull, and the cool people moved on.
To the Tricycle Theatre, so see Sean Holmes’ production of Joe Orton’s Loot, one of my favourite plays.
Here’s the thing about performing a masterpiece - and Loot, hellish though it is, is such. You can get a great cast together and build a great set (and over-light it) and you can direct with detail and panache - but if your production isn’t pure genius, the viewer will leave the theatre feeling that the masterpiece has not been fully displayed. Of course, with work as strong as Orton’s there is little danger of the playwright coming out of it badly, but the bottom line can be a feeling of incompletion.
On Thursday night I left the lovely Tricycle theatre feeling, “Why?” What is the point of this hellish concoction? What sort of monster would subject us to two hours of angry, anarchic, surreal vaudeville nonsense on the subject of sex and death, with a plot that is all plot and yet no plot at all, and characters who are so hyper-characterised as to disappear in a blur of giddy one-liners? Yes it was a great production but it wasn’t a towering triumph. To be really strict, I would say that a production in which all five actors simultaneously corpsed at the climax (and were applauded for doing so by their silly audience) is not quite rigorous enough to scale the heights. To deliver a masterpiece you must have nerves of steel; if you have nerves of steel you don’t corpse.
When I was a whipper-snapper, I wrote my degree dissertation on the subject of Joe Orton’s classicism. And quite right too. Orton never became the playwright he was born to be, but with his three full-length plays, flawed as they were, he said more about what modern stage comedy could be than anyone else writing in English in the twentieth century. It is true that his work has that dry, impersonal quality that hardcore satire can have, and one sometimes wishes he would give one a break. Where is the warmth, where is the humanity, where are the group hugs? Where is the breathing-space? (Loot has complete, infernal unity of time: Act Two follows on directly from Act One). Compared to Pinter, Orton can seem arid: no gorgeous, long, actorly speeches here, no jauntily inconsequential dialogue suggesting the ennui of the alienated post-modern soul. None of that. Orton, in fact, gave us the opposite: all his dialogue is terrifyingly logical, all his plots obsessively crafted and resolved by ritualistically perfect endings. The murderess gets the loot and both the young studs; the policeman descends from the skylight in a leopard-skin dress. No-one else has come near to Orton's endings, perhaps because that sort of thing is not generally felt to be very post-modern.
Yes, he did it because he was angry, he did it to tease, but that is a pretty good reason to do something. He was working right from his gut, and he was way, way ahead of the game. His plays whisk us back to a desecrated version of our Victorian and Renaissance past, and then further back than that, right back to before plays were plays - when they were ritual goat-sacrifices and bulls being tortured in the ring. Watching an Orton play is a disturbing experience because the thing is so obviously hilarious, and yet all the time there is the nagging feeling that one isn’t really having fun. One is being deconstructed. One is staring into the yawning mouth of madness. Beneath logic, we are not logical.
Orton knew that we live our lives skating on very thin ice: a glitch is all it takes to send any one of us - or all of us - to prison or the loony-bin. His world is made up of people who don’t actually have any thoughts in their heads at all, but who just repeat things they have heard elsewhere, trying to provide a response to events. What made him appear similar to the classical dramatists was that he grasped the very radical point that there is really no such thing as an individual. In the middle of those individualistic old 1960s, Orton sensed that the revolt of the individual against society is, although necessary, an illusion, because ultimately we all share a mind. He was anarchic but he was also Zen, and it is the interplay between those two energies that make his plays ineffable. The scene in Loot in which the policeman beats up the young hoodlum seems, at first sight, to be a right-on indictment of police brutality. But actually it is more like a Punch and Judy show: there will always be sexy young hoodlums and there will always be a corrupt police-force, because that is how the human mind works. Our salvation does not lie in attempting to reform the police force: even if we succeeded in doing so, our minds would just produce fresh violence and injustice.
There’s a great line in the play, which I cannot accurately quote because I lent my Complete Orton to a Russian who never gave it back: “I’m not interested in doing good. There are organisations devoted to that purpose.” And that’s how radical Orton is. The line isn’t just about the abnegation of personal responsibility, it’s about the utter futility of attempting to do good of any kind until we have dealt with our own lying minds. And that is why watching Orton is, or should be, a somewhat sobering experience. He is one of theatre’s austerest voices.
On Thursday, Mum is taking me to the Trafalgar Studios, to see Imelda Staunton in Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane. I suspect that Sloane is not a masterpiece, but I am more than ready to be corrected on that.
Well, we went to see Entertaining Mr Sloane at the Trafalgar Studios, directed by Nick Bagnall and starring Imelda Staunton, and very nice it was too, except for the fact that Imelda Staunton didn’t show up and we had to make do with the understudy. The understudy was plucky, of course, but this was a serious, detailed, intense production, which meant that the poor woman couldn’t remotely match the polish of the rest of the cast. Afterwards, I wondered if we could get comps for another performance if we wrote a whining letter to the management, but I didn’t go for it, because in the end I couldn’t face sitting through the play again. Yes it’s fab, and yes it contains many deathless lines, but it’s also kind of grim. It’s like taking a protracted bath in repression, shabbiness and compromise. The remarkable thing about it is that occasionally those Orton epigrams flash out like (as they say) a stream of bat’s piss in the moonlight - and it was the epigrams that Orton was to take with him when he moved briskly on to his mature style - which was all epigrams and nothing else.
I note, in passing, that the current generation of theatre-makers are beginning to acknowledge the mystery and complexity of Orton. I saw Alison Steadman (whom I adore) hamming it up in Mr Sloane a few years ago at the Arts, and looking back, it was a lazy and boring production. I think that when a stylish playwright emerges, blossoms and maybe dies, a curious phenomenon occurs. People think they know what makes the playwright tick, and in the years following his blossoming they produce his work in a thoughtless pastiche of what they consider to be his style. Oh yes, just play it Ortonesque, you’ll be fine. But then a later generation - one that never saw the orginal productions or met the playwright - is forced to start from scratch, forced to engage with the text as if it were brand new, and the result is that complexities are rediscovered. For many years in London there was a lazy assumption that we all knew who Mr Sloane was, so all you had to do was go onstage and be Mr Sloane. But no, we don’t know who Mr Sloane is. It’s a mystery. It’s not enough just to wear leather and look sexy.
I have also dragged my weary ass to the Royal Court and dutifully watched a German play called The Stone (by Marius von Mayenburg), which was all about German guilt at having betrayed the Jews. This was followed, with fearful symmetry, by Caryl Churchill’s new “piece”, a nine-minute play-icle called Seven Jewish Children, which was all about Jewish culpability in Gaza. There were brief flurries of not-terribly-heated controversy in the foyer afterwards, and then we all went home. On the tube, I defiantly read Cole Lesley’s Life of Noel Coward.
When not whinging and whining about other people's plays, I have been writing some new ones of my own. I now favour the "potting-shed" method. First are the sketches: I have a collection of maybe eighty or a hundred, all bundled together under the collective title of "Amnesia". Every now and then I take an Amnesia sketch and turn it into a half-hour play. Of course, half-hour plays have little or no commercial life, but it is important to believe that they might have one - and hence Lovers From Hell. Then occasionally I take one of the half-hour plays and turn it into a full-lengther, which, after all, is all that anyone else is really interested in. At the moment I have three half-hour plays which I consider to be presentable: a half-hour version of Donut, another fuck-play called Planet of Women, and a gothic murder piece called Good Samaritans. I imagine them all staged together under some grimy freak-show title...
Back in the old days, I once recommended Interview With The Vampire to my friend Fenton, who duly read it and then told me, a little accusingly, that it had ruined his summer holiday. A decade or two later I felt the same way about Annie Proulx’s horrid Brokeback Mountain. Fenton and I are picky poufs: it is not enough for us that a novel should merely be about homosexuality. It has to be fun too.
To say that Interview With The Vampire is a homoerotic novel is an understatement. It is a poetic, if claustrophobic, fable in which the sexually damned (the homosexual) is represented by the metaphysically damned (the vampire) and the question is posed that some of us ask ourselves every day of the week: can two such fiends ever find love? Well, gay love, as we know, is a cutting-edge concern of our time, and Rice’s novel duly became a big cult. A testimonial by Sting appeared on the cover of the paperback and we all swooned to imagine it as a movie.
And now for the Hollywood bit: take a story that has resonated with large numbers of people and see if you can make a few bucks out of it - but don’t forget to excise everything about it that made it interesting in the first place. (I was once commissioned to adapt Robert Rodi’s cult novel Fag Hag for the big screen, but the producers told me to make the male lead less of a fag and the female lead less of a fag-hag). Our only consolation, in the case of Interview With The Vampire, is that everyone involved in the product - Anne Rice (who wrote the screenplay), Neil Jordan and most of the cast - came out of it looking super-ridiculous.
Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, surely the two least vampiric filmstars in the whole casting directory, spend most of the movie looking like drag queens and have no idea what to do with Rice’s stately, old-Europe dialogue (much of which appears to be written in iambic pentameters). For such a supposedly genre-redefining production, the make-up is not quite what one might have hoped for. Everyone staggers about under thick layers of pale pancake and powder, and the only person who looks remotely undead is little Kirsten Dunst, but that may be because she is a child actress, which is surely a type of fiend in itself. The film, thankfully, has one thing in it to keep us from stampeding for the fridge, and that is Antonio Banderas, who finally finds himself in a story whose ripely melodramatic sensibility he understands. He, at least, is fabulous, and gives us a glimpse of the movie this should have been.
The performance of Tom Cruise will presumably go down in film history as one of cinema’s pinnacles of camp. And as we unplug our DVD players and shuffle to the kitchen for our bed-time Horlicks, we ask ourselves, Was it really miscasting, or could the casting have been, dare we whisper it, all too appropriate? Whatever Cruise may be in private, his screen persona is a nervous, constructed kind of masculinity that is only sexy if you haven’t noticed (as millions, it seems, haven’t) how uncomfortable it is. Put him in a blond wig and powder, and his good looks deconstruct: the eyes are too big - not piercing but manic - and the mouth is frozen by its natural shape into a meaningless smirk. Ask him to speak “European” and “sophisticated” and he turns into a cross between our own Graham Norton and Julian Clary. Did Neil Jordan really bow to market forces, as is assumed, or was the poker-faced Irishman actually one step ahead of us all?
In the end, none of us can hide from sexuality. You can push it under but it’ll pop up again like a cork in a barrel of wine. We like to sneer at 50s Hollywood for de-gaying Cat On A Hot Tin Roof - how can you de-gay something that gay? - but only fifteen years ago, audiences sat through Interview With The Vampire without laughing. Much.
Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?
I have noticed that after having sex I tend to leave more litter. On the tube, I mean - in public places. I eat my lunch and leave the wrappers and napkins on the seat. I become, I suppose, more of a BLOKE. Blokes are creatures that leave a trail of mess wherever they go, while women and less blokey males sigh and tutt and clean up after them - us.
I know it's a trivial point, but on the subject of blokes: once, at my gym, the illiterate staff stuck a note up over one of the urinals:
"BLOKED"
Well, quite.
In The Week, this week, we read that a team of Italian scientists have discovered that hydrogen sulphide - the foul-smelling gas given off when eggs go bad - plays a key role in achieving an erection. Some of us might have worked this out for ourselves: there is a certain kind of boyfriend who, no matter how recently he showered, will give off a slight smell of sulphur just before ejaculation.
Sulphur was always traditionally the smell of the devil in the crazed Western mind. Surely this is an indication of the absolute equation, in that silly mind, between sex and "evil". Of course women have been demonised just for being women - for being gorgeous and sexy and putting ideas into a guy's head. But it's also worth remembering that a man's erection has been demonised too. Indeed there are still plenty of people who demonise the erection - many of them, I fear, women. I once had a (straight, male) friend who got guru-ised by a soi-disant female shaman who taught that the only acceptable way for a man to approach a woman was with a flaccid cock. My friend seemed to think this was perfectly reasonable.
Meanwhile, your not-so-trusty Psychodrome blogger would like to apologise for four weeks of blog silence. No doubt you have all (or should I say "both" - or just "you"?) abandoned me for other, more regular bloggers, who can be relied upon to keep up a stream of verbiage come what may. My excuse is that I have been writing a new screenplay. It has taken me approximately four weeks, and yesterday I printed it out and selected a title. The project (in my own crazed mind at least) is so hot that I shall say no more: subject-matter, genre, title - all must remain shrouded in thick fogs of mystery for the time being. Once I know something about its future I shall no doubt spill the beans with all due gusto.
In 1996 I was whisked from by humble Brighton bedsit (rent-boy on the floor above me, punters occasionally straying in) all the way to Los Angeles, business class, to hang out with successful people and work on my screenplay The Man Who Knew Too Little. During breaks in our script sessions, the director would mosey over to the phone and make a few calls to film stars. Eventually he landed a big one - Bill Murray - and a year later I was dragging my friends to the multiplex in triumph to show them how clever I was.
It was quite a coup, a real Hollywood movie, written by someone who up until that point couldn’t get arrested (I was turned down by The Bill, in fact). I had written precisely no TV, one radio play and one Gay Men’s Press novel. Most writers in my position would have up-sticks and moved to L.A. without a backwards glance. But I opted for the passive-aggressive balls-up that we know and love as England.
Part of it was sheer arrogance. I had always had a grandiose streak, had always believed that it was only a matter of time before the world bowed down and recognised my towering genius (this as I drifted around Brighton junk shops, omitting to put pen to paper). But part of it was instinct. I was appalled by Hollywood. There was an underlying feeling of disturbed sexuality that, as a hyper-sensitive sexual in-betweenie, I found excruciating. And it did not escape my notice that this was one of the less spiritual spots on the globe, for all its yoga classes and health food stores. Self-aggrandisement is, after all, the royal road to hell. It was hard to have friendships there. Even the friends I’d known from before, from the good old days, nice people from England and Italy, became prickly and back-stabbing when they got to Venice Beach (with a couple of lovely exceptions). Nothing is ever good enough in Los Angeles. As you sweep up the steps to receive your Oscar you are planning your suicide.
I came back to England and got stuck into Bedrooms and Hallways, which was filmed shortly after in a studio in Acton and on location around Notting Hill Gate, in the streets and parks where I grew up. Bedrooms and Hallways is probably a better film than The Man Who Knew Too Little, but it was a less expensive production with no global star in it, and anyway it was about queer stuff.
When I went back to L.A. one of my formerly nice Italian friends said, “What happened to your career?” I replied that, well, my second movie was about to come out. He said, “Bedrooms and Hallways doesn’t count.”
I am not anti-American by any means. My mother is half American, and part of the reason why I can occasionally produce good commercial work is that I have a mid-Atlantic sensibility. My problem is more a matter of feeling, well, precisely that: mid-Atlantic. I am caught between America’s “can-do” and England’s “can’t be done.” The English have a dreadful attitude towards cinema: most educated English people think that movies are a variety of pornography, necessary but worthless. If a street gets used as a film location, residents don't rush out to watch the fun and ask for autographs, they complain to the council. In intellectual and contemporary art circles it’s even worse. If you write comedy you command about as much respect as a bank manager. I live in London because I haven’t found anywhere else where they speak English that I can stand, but I have noticed that the people who work in the film industry here tend to huddle together, fearful lest subsidised artists sneer at them for their triviality.
The point of this bloggerie - for it does have a point - is that for many years I did not consciously know why I said no to Los Angeles. I knew that it was my instinct, but I had never translated that instinct into hard, cold insight. Today I came up with an answer: America is not the ideal place for irony, and in the end it is irony that makes good comedy. There is something about the tenor of life in the States, an underlying feeling of mania, that constitutes the wrong climate for irony. Irony is cool, lazy and of course entirely passive-aggressive. It is suited to grey, wet weather. It knows it will never get an Oscar and it doesn’t care. Americans are good comedians - currently, I think, better than the British - but seldom understated ones. It was this "faster, faster, faster, more, more, more!" complex that was a red light to me. I can't be funny in those conditions.
Oddly enough, although Woody Allen is not my favourite film director by a long chalk, he is the one whose screenplays I keep getting drawn back to. I like his idea of what film comedy COULD BE - regardless of whether or not his films, as made, live up to that idea. Woody differs from Almodovar is a crucial respect: Almodovar is a kind of film buff who, in his crazed way, is actually attempting to make the perfect film. Woody is more anarchic than that. He has noticed that there is a secret little core of stupidity right at the heart of the medium of film, and that’s what he works from. I like that.
I recently finished Cole Lesley's biog of Coward, and went straight on to read a late Coward play, Quadrille. It seems that one of the reasons why Coward's writing went off the boil in later years may have been that he read too much. This, at any rate, is Lesley's theory. Coward, who had managed to achieve global stardom as writer without having had much of an education at all, attempted in later life to improve his mind by reading copious amounts of "literature." It may have improved his mind, but it did nothing for his dialogue. Quadrille is stiff, formal and constipated - a shocking fall from grace for the man who thirty years previously had single-handedly rescued English stage writing from centuries of artificiality.
Personally I have always been a little suspicious of literature, although I can see the point of it and I do enjoy it, up to a point. These days I am beginning to think that, joking aside, it may be just as well for a dramatist to limit the amount of prose fiction he reads. The idea of drama, after all, is to capture the vernacular. Dramatists should be sitting in cafés, going to parties, hooking up with guys on Gaydar and buttering crumpets for elderly aunts. That is how they will learn great dialogue. Forgive me, but they probably shouldn't be reading - well, I'll mention no names.
Reader, may I share? My new screenplay went down like a lead balloon with my agent - which, for now at least, effectively consigns it to the junk-heap. One reels from the punch, then collects oneself and attempts to look at things logically. I am not a bad writer, and she is most certainly not a bad reader. In my head, a glorious, sexy, hilarious movie was playing. Apparently not in hers. In these cases, all one can say is that the movie that was playing in my head did not make it onto the page.
This can mean a number of things. It may be that one missed out some quite minor detail - did not specify, for example, that the heroine was dripping with diamonds as she sat down to dinner, or that the hero looked a bit like the young Woody Allen. Or it may be that whole scenes have been left out, huge great expanses of character development, acres of plot, a whole final half-hour that would have really made it fly. These are the concerns that bedevil the mind of the bewildered screenwriter.
What adds to the confusion is this incontrovertible fact: the movie that runs in your head is NEVER there on the page. A moving picture is not 95 pages of A4, comb-bound. It is a thing that plays on a screen. It has make-up, scenery and lighting. It may even have George Clooney. We screenwriters live out our lives in this disturbing twilight world between the pile of A4 and the glittering bauble.
But onwards and upwards! I am currently spending my time making preparations for a rehearsed reading of my new comedy Relax, which is the full-length version of my one-act guest-house farcelet Get The Guest, which played with some success at Oval House in 2004 and 2005. James Holmes and Nick Malinowski will be back, and will be joined by Chris Preston in the role of a fireman from the Isle of Man who only washes up after fish. Next week we cast the roles of the houseboy and the strangely enraged car-mechanic. Phil Setren will direct with his usual magic touch, and the excellent Tanja Raaste is producing the reading. If either of my blog readers would like to join us for the reading, he or she may contact me via the Contact page of this website. There will be no tickets, just voluntary contributions towards the cost of the reading (which turns out to be rather more than one might have imagined). These are anxious times. Let's all - RELAX!
ps: more details and a pic on the "Relax" page.
Reader, may I pontificate? I've had a headache all day and I think it might help.
Just viewed Christian Bale's performance in The Machinist, the one where he shocked the world by losing a lot of weight. It's pretty good - a sort of Twilight Zone/Jacob's Ladder bad-trip story about a guy who hasn't slept in a year. In the course of the film we find out why. Along the way there are nasty factory accidents, hallucinations in a fun-fair ghost-train ride, and the lovely Jennifer Jason-Leigh as a hooker. It's all ravishingly shot, and Bale is at his most baleful, really quite riveting to watch.
Much of the white-knuckle thrill of the film comes from watching the lovely Christian get thinner and thinner. I mean, he starts off shockingly thin, and then loses weight. He stalks about like Ridley Scott's Alien, his spine nastily curved and his chest all sunken. You just watch in horror, wondering how he managed to remember his lines while in the advanced stages of starvation. He is occasionally handsome, but for most of the time he doesn't look like Christian Bale at all. He just looks like an actor you've never seen before.
Bale is a Good Actor, and I think that's the point of this project - to put some clear blue water between himself and the likes of Brad Pitt. Pitt is good enough to get away with it, but you can't imagine him starving himself half to death all for the sake of a role. Bale wants us to know he's serious. OK Christian - we believe you!
I'm not much of a media junkie, but before writing this I did a little research into the strange matter of our Christian's accent. Yes, he's British, and yes, in early interviews he uses his normal voice. But then... Now the lovely Bale speaks like a proper person (ie, an American) when appearing as himself. I guess British is charming, but it's not the accent of a super-dooperstar.
Reader, I use Gaydar. Gaydar (for those of you living in Outer Mongolia, knitting and playing dominoes) is a gay “dating” website, a rather big one, that, despite not being shy about charging for services that its competitors provide for free, has achieved a kind of monopoly in the UK. And just the other day, Gaydar gave itself a facelift. Huge sigh of relief. For some years now, we have had to put up with absurd shots of laughing muscle-boys in swimwear whenever we log on - the sort of young man who, as Woody Allen once said of Playboy centrefolds, doesn’t exist in the real world. And these were images that, far from making you feel better, actually made you feel, insidiously, worse. This was what, supposedly, you would like to find in your bedroom - and never would.
Was it just me (it usually is) or did gay culture go through a period of being kind of naff? A rather long period, dare I say it. From the seventies right through till last week, it was assumed that dumb, smelly masculinity was enough. Wit, subversion, charm, playfulness - the qualities of the previous era of secrecy and swish - were still tolerated, but only as optional extras, never as the main course. But it appears that things really have changed.
The new home-page pictures on Gaydar are not focused on bodies, although the models are cute enough. They are SCENES. They are TABLEAUX. There’s the young chicken being ravished by two salty old(er) dogs. There’s members of two different branches of the armed forces making out, apparently, in a Parisian brothel. There’s a leather master, one of whose slaves, hilariously, is standing in the corner with his face to the wall. And none of it is taken seriously. The sets are super-contemporary, like the new bar at the NFT. Design is king - in fabrics, in clothes, in wallpaper, in graphics. My, what an improvement!
Thank you, Pierre et Gilles. Thank you, David Lachapelle. Thank you, Dieux du Stade. And a grudging thank you to Madonna.
Tomorrow is the first public reading of my new play Relax. The original cast of Get The Guest (the one-act play that I expanded to form Relax), James Holmes and Nick Malinowski, are back with us, and are joined by Liam Harris, Christopher Preston and David Alder in the three new roles. Liam Harris is quite a discovery. Early twenties and fresh out of drama school, with an elfin kind of charisma and an urbane, ironic poise that makes one think of Restoration comedy. And this is the guy who'll be playing the role of the sex-crazed houseboy who also does spiritual healing on the side. Fate is spoiling me.
I think it is important, when producing farce, to be careful about the sexual angle. Liam, God help him, has been given the gay-comedy equivalent of the busty blonde dolly-bird role, the sex-object that all the other characters fight over. When you cast a role like this, it's better to cast someone whose charisma says "Love me" rather than, too obviously, "Fuck me." Because that way the farce has poignancy.
A rehearsed reading is a strange beast. It's fabulous because there is a joyful sense of the impromptu - no-one expects anything to be perfect, which means that to some extent we can all relax. But also there is the feeling that there is so much that could be wrung out of the play, and time is too short. So I watch the rehearsals and have the tantalising experience of seeing the play come in and out of focus. It's like glimpsing the promised land from afar.
But these five actors are so good that when they hit the nail on the head - which is fairly often - it's hilarious. At least, i think it is.
I was wallowing in vinyl the other day and enjoying Iggy Pop’s fantastic 1977 LP The Idiot. Later I was enthusing to my lovely friend Thomas, a sometimes songwriter who is about ten years younger than me, and it transpired that he was unaware of the two great LPs Iggy recorded in Berlin with Bowie in the late seventies - the other being, of course, the excellent Lust For Life. So it seems that rock history, such as it is, must be put down in writing. Obviously it has been already, but this is my version, and my version counts too.
When punk happened in the mid/late seventies, the rock-stars of the earlier period were faced with the problem of how to stay in the game. The leopard cannot change his spots, and a rock star will always be a rock star, no matter how much he branches out into soul. Bowie went to Berlin, where he made three albums under his own name with Brian Eno, and also lavished two whole albums on fragile rock casualty Iggy Pop, Bowie contributing (as far as we know) tunes, arrangements and production, and Iggy doing lyrics and vocals and popping his face on the covers. The three Bowie LPs (Low, Heroes and Lodger) got the attention, of course, but it is arguable that the two Iggy ones were the real classics.
Working with Eno, Bowie re-invented the sound of rock so as to make it palatable for the new musical climate. These were thoughtful and innovative recordings that appeared, at the time, as a daring move for a commercial artist. But the Iggy albums were perhaps more daring. By drafting in the anal, brainy Eno to clean up his sound, Bowie was preparing for himself a new pop vessel in which to sail majestically into the eighties. The Iggy stuff was far less calculating - not neat and tidy at all. They are albums with almost no claim to being contemporary or fashionable or forward-looking, just the recordings of a bunch of rock desperados at the end of their tethers.
In Berlin, Bowie went to ground. Most of what had made him David Bowie before - the glamour, the colour, the playful deconstruction of pop archtypes - was jettisoned. The pose was no-pose. Alienation was the theme, and very nice too, except that it was less fun. Most problematic was the fact that he had to a large extent dropped his practice of speaking through masks. A mask is a thing that enables an artist to say or do things which, as himself, he wouldn't have had the nerve to say or do. As we all know, Bowie’s greatest mask was Ziggy Stardust, but actually he only ever had one mask, which was the mask called David Bowie, Rock Star. If you look at his output you will notice that he only created strong work while wearing that mask. There is a strong correlation between the amount of make-up he wore on his album covers and the quality of his work; there is also a sad feeling that when he wiped his make-up off, the genius came off with it.
Old-style rock was by 1977 so unfashionable that it would have been unthinkable for Bowie to record and release The Idiot and Lust For Life under his own name. They were presented as throwaway pieces, a foot-note to Bowie’s world-conquering career, just a little good turn that he did for a friend in need. So Iggy became Bowie’s mask. Iggy the nut-case. Iggy the loser. Iggy who blurted things out straight from his murky unconscious ("Mother was in my bed...!") Through the mask of Iggy, David was able come up with the songs that would later become his last decent singles. Any true Bowie fan listening to those Iggy records when they came out instantly recognised (with a pang of relief and nostalgia) a return to the quality of songwriting that had made us love David in the first place. Excitement! Drama! Style! ... MELODY!
Fast forward five years. It's the early eighties, and rock’s golden period is coming to a close, David needs to survive, and for this to happen he needs to sell records. Let’s Dance will be his most successful album ever, but also the one recognised by the inner circle of believers as the funeral of our hero’s genius. At the time, we were so appalled by his behaviour - piss-elegant suits, poufy hair, washing his hands of the past - that we hardly noticed that his version of China Girl was interesting. Now that the dust has settled we can give it another spin.
On his 1979 Lodger LP, Bowie had rehashed Sister Midnight (the first track on The Idiot) and made the mistake of supplying a new and less interesting set of lyrics. For his 1983 version of China Girl, another "Idiot" composition, he wisely kept Iggy’s words.
How strange to reflect that those genius, Bowie-esque China Girl words were written by Iggy! Did David drug him or hypnotise him into writing exactly what he, David, needed to be singing? One of the great charms of rock music, especially the brand cooked up by Mr B, is that it can give us the anodyne and the psychotic, gorgeously fused. Iggy’s version was ninety per cent psychosis (”It’s in the WHITES of my eyes!”). David shifted the mix a bit, toned down the madness and wrapped the whole thing up in a sleek pop package - and very nice too. This is precisely what we want from David Bowie: a pop song that, on closer inspection, is anything but.
Some things are so much a part of the landscape that we don’t question them. China Girl - number two in the charts! - saucy video! - thank you very much! But listen to the chords. Hiding behind the slick veneer is a strange, ravishing piece of songwriting. Most pop songs have a verse and a chorus. And most have a middle-eight or some kind of link section, where the song digresses from its pattern, maybe with an instrumental solo, to return to it later. Chine Girl has a verse, which is only aired twice, after which it goes into a middle eight which lasts to the end of the song. Musically speaking the chorus is the super-bland jingle that tops and tails the song (“Oh, oh, oh, oh - little China Girl!”) but it’s not much of a chorus, more a long-delayed musical resolution, a return to the major chord.
It was said at the time of the Iggy version that China Girl was a type of heroin, and certainly the lyrics support this claim. “I could escape this feeling with my China Girl... I could pretend that nothing really meant too much...” After the two jauntily banal verses (banal certainly if he’s singing about his girlfriend, a twisted joke if he’s singing about his addiction) the song takes that strange wrong turn into its endless middle eight. Iggy looks at his China Girl and “feels tragic”, like he’s “Marlon Brando.” Oh dear.
An instrumental interlude - we stay trapped in the middle-eight chords, a less-than-jaunty descending sequence - and then the shit hits the fan. Iggy (and/or David) stumbles into town, “just like a sacred cow”, experiencing a full-on Hitler hallucination: “Visions of swastikas in my head and plans for everyone!” I don't think David leaned over Iggy’s shoulder, took the pen from his hand and inserted those lines, but I do think the two of them were undergoing some sort of drug-trip mind-meld. If anyone in rock music was a sacred cow it was Bowie; and if any rock star suffered from a Jesus/Hitler complex is was him again, his classic albums awash with images of avatars and world-destroyers. But it gets better - or is that worse? The singer turns on his little China Girl in full abusive-partner style, hurling vague threats at her that bizarrely mutate into some kind of white supremacist rant: “I’ll give you television! I’ll give you eyes of blue! I’ll give you men who want to rule the world!” This part, surely, comes from Iggy: Bowie’s imagination has always been too icy to deal with the blood, guts and danger of relationship. That was why it was so shocking to see him, in the video, making goo-goo eyes at Geeling Ng. But look with what relish Bowie owned it when he eventually sang it himself. He changed the line to "I'll give you a man who wants to rule the world," - more science-fictional perhaps, and hence more plastic, but also, alas, more Hitlerian.
Finally, at the end of the song, little China Girl turns back into a drug: “And when I get excited, my little China Girl says... shhh...”
It wasn’t the first time that Bowie had made a hit single about being a junkie, but it was the first time he’d made one that laid his dark side so amazingly bare. Yes, in the extremes of his drug-psychosis in 1976 he had blithered on about Hitler being the first Rock Star and, just for good measure, been photographed giving a Nazi salute at Victoria station. Of course we forgave him: David is a nutter rather than a Nazi, and drugs can do that kind of thing. What is so fabulous is that this song, in the course of three sleek minutes of pop, tells the story of a loser-junkie’s psychotic episode and manages to capture some slight whiff of the tragedy and grandeur of that. When Iggy sang it it was magnificent, but not a lot of people listened. One of the great pleasures of Bowie is that he managed to peddle stuff like this to the global millions.
Iggy has always babbled of his undying gratitude to his "saviour" David, who scooped him up when he was at his lowest ebb and put him “back on the line.” But the Devil in Mr Jones also exacted a fee. Mr Bowie is to some extent a black hole, a hungry vampire who ingests those around him in order to survive. David gave Iggy so much, but he clawed the best of it back again when the well of his inspiration ran dry. Because, you see, success isn’t really sexy at all, at least, not to an artist. Losers are more glamorous, more romantic than winners, because they have authenticity. Bowie spent the seventies flirting with the glamour of the freak, the outsider, the junkie and the queer, and then got to the eighties and decided enough was enough. He was normal now - or, to be more precise, sane - and to prove it he was going to become a big old winner. But in becoming a winner he also became a blank, and so he reached back into the past, scooped up the best songs he'd written with Iggy and, singing through the mask of Iggy, had one last moment of gorgeousness.
The last part of the China Girl story is the most delicious. If you go to Wikipedia you will find, “In an interview by Kurt Loder, Bowie revealed that the motivation for recording China Girl was to help out his friend Iggy Pop financially, contributing to Bowie's history of support for musicians he admired.” In other words, now that his global megastardom was in the can, it was time for our man to retreat even further from risk-taking by letting everyone to know that it was Iggy, not him, who had written the song, and he wouldn’t have sung it at all had not Iggy been up a gumtree (due to “his struggle with drug addiction,” according to Wikipedia). God forbid anyone should think the song was about David himself! Thus, once again, pop’s Pontius Pilate washed his hands.
PS to the above: Why did Iggy's sacred cow "stumble" into town? Was it in fact a sacrificial cow, stumbling because it was on its way to the altar? This would make the image Greek rather than Indian - rock'n'roll as a Dionysian cult in which the star gets sacrificed for the amusement of the worshippers (the Ziggy Stardust thing). But as David was to say three years later, "It's no game." Rock'n'roll really is a dangerous art-form, in which few have managed to channel great work without some kind of self-immolation. Which great rock star has survived and remained great? Only one, Bob Dylan, who saved himself by retreating back into the folk tradition.
I have more to say on the subject. If rock’n’roll in its pure form is Dionysian, then as such it has no room for self-consciousness: it is intoxication, madness, sex and suicide. It is the opening of the neural floodgates, as Cronenberg would say, a dangerous shamanic trip which can blow the shaman’s mind. This mode of being is not one which one associates with cool or ironic detachment, yet such was Bowie’s achievement - to occupy the realms of madness while remaining, in one part of his mind at least, aloof.
You don’t choose to be mad and you don’t choose to be a loser - you just either are or you aren’t. You can, however, choose to become sane, and to some extent you can choose to win. But at what cost? Bowie made one very special album in 1980, in between his Berlin period and his final transformation into a dull megastar. It was called Scary Monsters and it is quite unlike anything else he ever did. It is intense, brilliant, relentless and more or less flawless. At the time, one critic aptly commented “Bowie has become a genre.” Yes indeed - perhaps it could have been so. This was rock music like you had never heard it before, mature and sublime.
Characters on the album go psychotic from heartbreak, are dogged by “the voice of doom”, get thrown into wagons, blind-folded, chained, stomped on, stripped, pumped full of “strange drugs”. They “jump into the furnace” singing the old songs they love. The LP contained the great single Ashes To Ashes, in which Bowie resurrected his very first mask, Major Tom, and exposed him, quite specifically, as a junkie. The video showed the astronaut hanging limply in his spaceship, hooked up to tubes that were presumably feeding him his smack direct (a video that was merrily played to the nation’s children on Top of The Pops). The power of this LP, in other words, came from Bowie’s reckless owning of loser- and victim-roles. For one very brief moment, he became an authentically tragic figure, a smacked-out clown on an existential beach, doomed to drown in the sea (death? the Unconscious? what’s the difference?). And I think the tragedy of Mr Bowie is that the moment when he found his genre was the moment when he threw it away. He could have had a long-lived greatness like Dylan’s. But, like so many of us in the eighties, he decided he would rather be successful.
I have been spending the last few days in a sensual swoon, recovering from Gay Love Spirit’s three-day massage retreat at the Earth Spirit Centre outside Glastonbury. Who would have thought that a simple massage could change your life? But then, nothing is quite as simple as it seems with the Gay Love Spirit boys. Their work goes straight for the jugular of the body-mind connection. To paraphrase Little Richard: You don’t need drugs; you don’t need LSD; Gay Love Spirit can take you higher than that!
As usual I am sworn to discretion. I may mention none of the participants by name. Actually I’m not even sure if I can name the teacher, a lovely sexologist from Holland who is about to be struck off his professional register for the crime of facilitating Gay Love Spirit workshops. What, in fact, can I say without instantly being arrested by the Pleasure Police?
The Earth Spirit Centre is a fabulous barn conversion in the hamlet of Dundon, all exposed stonework and oak beams, where the food is sublime. A certificate on the wall names them as Kindred Spirit’s retreat centre of the year. There are rooms in converted cowsheds. I slept in a caravan with clematis growing over it. The roof leaked a little, but when you’re happy you don’t care.
There were eighteen participants and two teachers. As usual, one goes through the old workshop patterns: the euphoria upon arrival, the descent into grumpiness on Day 2 (when you realise that it is not, after all, Paradise, just a bunch of men in a barn) and then, as the magic works its spell, the gradual shift into an altogether altered state of consciousness. Because you are sequestered from the world and the media you don’t notice the extent of the shift. It’s only when you drive back, stopping at motorway service stations and eventually re-entering your home and your life, that you realise you have been to Mars.
I had visions as I lay on that flimsy mattress, doing my tantric breathing and being worked over by my friend X (name withheld). I died and my corpse was washed and prepared for its funeral. I joined David Bowie on his hallucinatory Ashes to Ashes beach (we all have our own personal dreamtimes). I came back to life and went Arthurian, a spiritual warrior being prepared for the battles ahead. My friend, as he held me, became a blue crystal cave on the sea-shore, in which I was divinely safe. What does it all mean? Plenty, but nothing that can quite be put into words, let alone bandied about on one’s silly old blog. It added up to a feeling, a state, a body-mind place that was and is quite as real as anything in the “real” world.
What I am noticing is that there comes a point where the reality of the inner life becomes somehow more tangible, more palpable, than the reality of the world outside. A shift of gravity occurs. The inner imagery becomes what one lives for, and the outer events become more like... what? A weather-system. Wallpaper. They are there but they are not the main event. And at this point one’s priorities naturally change. Mental clarity may come as a side-effect. I’ll keep you posted.
From now on I will be posting new blog entries at the TOP of the page.
As to the entries already posted, I started reordering them in the new reverse order, but after several days of work I had only fixed half the page. So things are a bit mad. Who cares?
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