vanity fair: more gore than vidal

In the February edition of Vanity Fair the British-American author and polemicist Christopher Hitchens writes a piece on his former idol Gore Vidal, titled Vidal Loco. Anybody unacquainted with Christopher Hitchens -- who has debated triumphantly in the town halls of Pennsylvania and once had an epiphany in the middle of Wisconsin (doubly remarkable) -- can read a potted biog here.

I applaud Hitchens' anti-monotheism, his call for the end of the War on Drugs and his unapologetic alcoholism ("I drink because it makes other people less boring") -- which is the last heroic impulse if you're on the Eastern Seaboard of America -- but this graceless dismantling of his former colleague is as squalid as a cut-price handbag stall in an East End market. Once described as Vidal's dauphin and natural successor, the love affair between star and understudy ended in the aftermath of 9/11 when the former expressed the view that there is no proven evidence that Osama Bin Laden was the James Bond-style villain-architect of that catastrophe, and further that the American administration itself might have been implicated. Hitchens was a committed socialist whom effectively metamorphosed into a right-wing libertarian when he U-turned in swing-support towards aggressive, interventionist US foreign policy. Personally, I always thought that a neo-con was a socialist who got mugged.

He derides Vidal in a surprisingly bovine exposé of the decline from literary Leviathan to deluded  conspiracy theorist and Cassandra of the Republican Empire. Poor Gore, now an octogenarian with mobility problems, is an enemy of the Homeland who must be dispatched to Golgotha. It is a pernicious  and ultimate fan letter that only a true fan can compose. Hitchens may have eventually advanced to the salon of the New York cultural elite, but Vidal has spent most of his life around the upper classes of American society and if anyone is permitted to hint that the Senate does not really govern  the state, it is he. However, tellingly, his true pique is at Vidal's "very, very minor tendency to bring up the Jewish question in contexts where it didn’t quite belong". This may well be true but it does not amount necessarily to anti-Semitism. Hitchens zealously grasps at the tendril of being Jewish himself, which is understandable -- many Gentiles have coveted that claim.

While Hitchens acknowledges his mentor in some memorably dismissive quotes ("England is not a country, but an American aircraft carrier") he reaffirms his trenchant rejection of the Old Girl whom, evidently, he hopes will read this undignified execution with the words: "I have no wish to commit literary patricide, or to assassinate Vidal’s character — a character which appears, in any case, to have committed suicide."

Rather transparently, Hitchens reveals himself as Eve Harrington to Vidal's Margot Channing in All About Eve: the age-old conquest of the younger, somewhat less original ingénue who turns, viciously, against the one they cherished.

Mark Simpson interview with Gore Vidal: Gore Vidal Turns Off The Lights On The American Dream

quentin crisp: the mother ship

The British writer, author, commentator and absent grandfather of metrosexualité Mark Simpson has written an illuminating and -- to my mind -- very accurate psycho-bio on the pathology of England's most stateliest homo, Quentin Crisp. The blog entry can be read here. It is titled Quentin Crisp and Hurtian Crisp and delineates the difference between the real doyenne of the Black Cat Café and Hurt's portrayal of his sister-in-crime.

Hurt is heterosexual and brought a certain sexual charge to his depiction of Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, in the the same way that Terence Stamp was unforgettable in his role of the transsexual, retired performer in Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. Hurt confers a virility on Crisp that simply was not present in its real-life owner. He strides gaily through the streets of Bloomsbury, overburdened by bon-mots crafted  through years of self-internment, advertising his actuality to bystanders on suburban station platforms.  Tossing a slipper into the face of 1930s convention, Crisp is Genet in deeply mauve eye-shadow. One warms to him. But the Painted Sultana of Sodom had little to do with sodomy, or even sex. Crisp was determinedly "the only gay in the village" until the 1960s undid him. A living sculpture of high narcissism,  the scale of his emotional ruthlessness and detachment was boundless. Crisp would have survived even in ancient Rome. His unsentimentality sometimes ran to the cruel and the exotic. I think he was right about many things but his 'truisms' were also firmly implanted in the life lead unshared; a life that gave not an inch to either commitment nor compromise. And  a sink piling up with unwashed dishes that had reached the 'fish stage'.

Quentin Crisp was a Mother Ship to many British homosexuals in the 1970s who saw his biopic, The Naked Civil Servant, and in it the  reflection of their own circumstantial isolation at a time that neither understood nor barely tolerated homosexuality. It was the fiesta of a rouged passeggiata through the post and pre-war years of a bombed London.  His autobiography is fairly well written if sometimes exhaustive in the repetition of its daily, domestic accounts. The life-philosophy is grandiose and Wildean yet expounded within the small, amethyst cell of a slovenly, bath-robed typist who refuses to dust. That is not a pejorative term -- the internet has claimed us all as shorthand typists.

Crisp was an exhibitionist. An exhibitionist is not interested in group activity or collectivism -- his existence, his oxygen depends upon the uninterrupted monologue and an enraptured audience that is amused and shocked. Anyone with a flair for after-dinner entertainment knows this. Crisp allied himself with nobody. I don't think he would have been comfortable with metrosexuality, which would have robbed him of his martyrdom. Nor may the legalisation of homosexuality (and all the unisex hair salons that sprang up around it) have necessarily been good news,  de-throning him of his unique status. He needn't have worried -- Crisp went on to outlive a great many people who were born fifty years after he first over-buttered toast.
They really could have done with him in the Army -- his survival skills were second-to-none.

david hoyle: on the viennese couch

This is a short film made by Nathan Evans of the artist, painter and political activist David Hoyle having an informal yet intimate discussion with several guests about life themes -- including abuse, obsession, self-validation and how our history informs the inter-personal relationship we have ourselves and the outer world. This is first-class television. The interviewer enters into a truthful, non-judgmental dialogue with his guests -- willingly shifting his own viewpoint or opinion according to a received idea where he discovers mutuality. Sharing, in other words.  The interview format is now exclusively the exploitation of commercial product together with the promotion of the celebrity -- unrelated in any way to the purpose of a conversational exchange.

There are some real key moments here. The interviewee who openly admits that his mother was an homeless alcoholic of several years that lived in a telephone box -- quite an admission of honesty and a rejection of sentimentality that is stoic and inspirational. The woman who uncovers the tactics of certain therapists, stating: "I think that when somebody begins to chip away at your psychological strength, it's very easy to fall into a place of blaming yourself." Very true. And the young man who avoids "other people" yet discards his shoes, making himself entirely comfy on the couch in his apparently sociopathic, stockinged feet.

If only television was like this.

salvador dalí

This is Salvador Dalí starring in a French commercial for Lanvin chocolate in 1968. "Je suis fou du chocolat Lanvin!" Rather than seducing the audience with the brand, the approach here is instead to assault the viewer with a short but memorable pop/surrealist film.  Once you put Dalí in the frame it ceases to be about the product anyway. Angular, violent and staccato I cannot imagine this commercial appealing to French children -- there is something of the child-catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang about Dalí's appearance. Like Warhol he was an eccentric  celebrity whose artistic repertoire was expansive: films, photography, sculpture, fashion and television. An eccentric he was: in his early life Dalí was disinherited by his family when he refused to recant the inscription of a drawing he exhibited in Paris of The Sacred Heart of Jesus with the words:  

"Sometimes I spit for fun on my mother's portrait!"

Quite. He later claimed that he gave his father a condom filled with his own sperm and said, "Take that. I owe you nothing anymore!"

Although highly respected as a painter he was intensely disliked by some people for his attention-seeking egoism. Notably George Orwell who criticised Dalí for fleeing Spain at the outset of the Civil War, dismayed at his shifting political allegiance from communist and anarchist to that of franquista. But Orwell's socialism gave us nothing but dystopia,  hessian that irritated incessantly and a colour spectrum that precluded anything beyond a state symphony of grise. Communism could never have suited Dalí: he was too unharnessed, luxuriant and original in his appetites. It is said that an increasingly devout and catholic Dalí sent Franco telegrams in congratulation  on the signing of death warrants for imprisoned Republican fighters who had killed thousands of priests and nuns. The clergy was construed as essential allies to the Church, the Establishment and El Caudillo and the anti-monarchists wanted to purge Spain of its clericalism. Whether these were  fan letters or the manifestation of a dark and surrealist whimsicality is difficult to know.

Conversely, Dalí continued to praise the poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca -- who was openly homosexual -- when the latter's works were banned by the dictator's Falangist regime prior to his assassination in 1936 and not rescinded until many years later.
Lorca was also touched by a certain eccentricity according to the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges who recounted a meeting with the former in Buenos Aires at which he was left unimpressed. Apparently, Lorca repeatedly communicated his concern to Borges that a dominant figure in American life for him symbolised that culture's tragedy, if not downfall. And the figure ? Mickey Mouse. A visionary in early 20th century Spanish literature  and theatre, Lorca was obsessed and perturbed by Mickey Mouse.
That isn't surrealism, it's prophecy: Disneyfication.

Dalí was a genius, an enigma and an ungovernable octopus of contradictions who represents a nightmare to any biographer wishing to separate fiction from non-fiction. I do not think that Dalí was either capable -- nor interested -- in making such a pedestrian distinction in life. His realm was not simply fantasy, but the fantastical.

Certainly, he has shocked many people and even my eyebrows were raised at learning that during the late 1960s Dalí had an association with Brian Sewell.

Brian Sewell is a British art critic known for his conservatism, controversiality and outright rejection of political correctness. He once quoted that "only men are capable of aesthetic greatness" -- claiming that in women the desire to bear children transplants the desire to create exceptional art. More compelling are his adenoids coupled with a diction that makes The Queen sound like a Cockney flower girl. In his documentary, Dirty Dalí, Sewell states that he had a sexual affair with the painter that lasted over four summers. The "mutual confessional" as he puts it -- which is a quasi-religious, homophobic metaphor for sex -- consisted of Sewell laying on the ground, in a foetal position under the armpit of a figure of Christ, masturbating for the Master. Well, what's the point of being an artist if you can't construct and design your own pornography ? Surely, it's one of the few perks. What surprised me was not that Dalí excited himself while taking photographs of this improbable, Renaissance tableau but rather that he should stand over Brian Sewell while executing it. Referring to Dalí's continuing disappointment that Lorca was unable to penetrate him during the 1920s Sewell states:

"I observed that as some arseholes are tight enough to make emptying the bowels almost impossible, proper medical remedies have been devised and the following year took him the very instrument -- gift-wrapped as it were -- from John Bell & Croyden in Wigmore Street. An anal dilator. Dalí chuckled over it."

This is why I like Brian Sewell. He might be acerbic and anti-populist in his appraisal of conceptual and post-modernist art but he is never less than unpretentious and searingly truthful within the frame of his own viewpoint.
One of Dalí's greatest and perhaps truest pronouncements is this:

"All great people who realise sensational achievements are impotent."

I can recommend a visit to the Salvador Dalí museum and theatre in Figueres, which is a short trip north of Barcelona.  It exhibits the artist's largest collection of works including sculpture, three-dimensional collages, mechanical devices and custom-made furniture. Dalí is buried in a crypt in the basement of the building. 

photo of the day: 1

Allegedly, Sophia Loren occasionally holidayed in Blackpool. The internationally celebrated star of It Started in Naples, El Cid and Prêt-à-Porter apparently tired of the jet set of Positano on the Neapolitan Riviera, together with the constant attention she received amid the fawning entourage she had acquired. In Blackpool she discovered a destination where she could cast off the trappings of an high profile career and, as she commented in a brief interview with the Blackpool Gazzette, "finally let my hair down." She enjoyed the ambience, the evening passegiatta, the indifference of Lancashire holidaymakers to  box office royalty and the availability of quality iced creams which reminded La Loren of her youth in Pozzuoli.

She is photographed here, barefoot and carefree in a simple dress enjoying the sands of her favoured South Beach. The photograph is undated but appears to be early 1970s according to the hair length of the child in the red sweater to her far-left. Her attention is turned skyward: there is an enigmatic shadow on the sands in front of her which suggests either a mobile amusement ride for small children or perhaps an unusually large bird passing overhead. One imagines that her husband and constant companion, the film director Carlo Ponti who is absent from the scene, was most likely enjoying a nap at the venerable Imperial Hotel situated on North Promenade, a short tram ride away. Lovely.

architecture : first christian church, columbus

This is the First Christian Church in Columbus, Indiana originally known as the Tabernacle Church of Christ. It was built by the Finnish Architect Eliel Saarinen in 1942.

I am an agnostic but I love this building, which a fine example of mid-century religious architecture. It was, in fact, one of the first churches in the United States to be constructed in a modern style. I like its 'nordic' simplicity and clean lines.  It is built of brick, Indiana limestone with concrete details. The campanile is 166 feet tall and is unornamented except for a grid of semi-translucent plastic panels and a clock of metal numerals. To the west there is a large plaza or courtyard which once had a reflecting pool but due to maintenance problems was removed in 1960 and lawned over. To the front of the building stands a Henry Moore sculpture. The interior of the church is exposed brick and sanded plaster. The floor is carpeted. Charles Eames together with Eliel Saarinen's son, Eero, were commissioned to design and make the interior furniture.

I visited this church in the autumn of 1996 on a roadtrip from Florida to Chicago. It was a case of seeing an air-brushed postcard image and wishing to step into the scene. Columbus -- a city of 40,000 inhabitants -- is an architectural gem as during the first half of the 20th century it invited a number of prominent modernist architects, including I M Pei and Richard Meier, to erect their 'Brave New World' buildings there. There are no malls developed on the outskirts of the city limits as with the vast majority of American towns and small cities. In Columbus, Downtown is still vigorously downtown and the First Christian Church -- designated a National Historic Landmark in 2001 -- is zoned in a transition area between late 19th century / early 20th century homes and the business district.

edward hopper: western motel (1957)

As mentioned in my previous post, one of my favourite painters is Edward Hopper. Aside from an aesthetic appreciation of realism, he was an artist who lived at a time (and in a place) that was very dynamic, exciting and fuelled by an optimism for the future. Engineering -- the dream of Leviathan in steel -- soared ever upward to meet the true blue of democratic skies, spanning once unfordable waters and chewed up miles of prairie between its locomotive jaws so that the California Zephyr and the Commodore Vanderbuilt could glide onto the marbled Roman concourse of Union Station. With the automobile revolution Americans began to explore their own vast continent: bitumen adventurers in synthetic fabrics driving the wheel into a new and savage topography -- overnighting on atolls of neon and paleolithic airconditioning. Early to mid-century America.

Western Motel was painted in 1957, which is towards the tail-end of this era. The scale of the room is American. The window exagerrated in a gesture of modernism through which we see a prairie/desert landscape. Hopper strategically places his characters within the frame of the portrait to suggest a certain ambiguity or dualism: tension. It is as if we are seeing a subject just before or after a climactic event. In some of his paintings it seems almost as if the real action is just out of frame -- unseen. This is very cinematic. As with Gas (1940) featured here, the enquiring eye is lead beyond the character at the pumps of a rural gas station and deeper, inwards -- or is it outwards -- around the bend and into the darkness. I have name-checked him a lot in my blogs but I feel that David Lynch must have studied Edward Hopper in terms of composition. Again, it's the framing.

Hopper was often perceived as being a symbolist because the positioning and the expression of his characters often suggested an acute detachment. In retrospect it perhaps suggested an emotional and psychological distancing in a rapidly modernising world that would eventually herald a New World dystopia. However, Hopper's real passion was not symbolism but sunlight. Look at how the western sun hits the wall above the spartan motel bed. I'm sure he thought very hard about this: the intrusion of light.

The subject of this painting stares directly at the viewer: resolute, anticipatory, almost captive. The Buick parked outside -- and which seems to protude from her breast -- is as much an oceanic creature from the depths of the Mariana Trench as it is an automobile. A goggled-eyed green alien. This is why she is still waiting, the suitcases already packed. She is not, in fact, alone. It is not really the viewer she is focused on, but her husband who is photographing this tableau. He holds the keys to the car, mobility, freedom.

gowanus

Gowanus is an overlooked industrial neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York. It is bordered by Red Hook and Carroll Gardens to the west, Park Slope to the east and is characterised by the Gowanus Canal which, once a busy cargo hub, has declined in tandem with domestic shipping. The canal is heavily polluted and urban legend claims it as a Mafia dumping ground. A character in Jonathan Lethem's detective novel Motherless Brooklyn refers to it as "the only body of water in the world that is 90% guns." As other areas have become re-zoned for residential purposes, Gowanus maintains its identity as a district that continues to offer affordable work spaces to artists and individual businesses. A long-abandoned transit authority power substation in the area has been reclaimed and occupied by squatters and artists who oppose corporatisation by Wall Street. It sits on a site worth $27m but has yet to be re-developed because it's located next to the Russian-style environmental disaster of the aforementioned canal. I'm a libertarian and I believe that empty, abandoned buildings are up for grabs.

A local artist, Ella Yang, has produced a number of oil paintings depicting the urban landscape in and around the Gowanus neighbourhood. The two featured here are from a series titled "Representational oil paintings made in Brooklyn without Irony". Some of these works appeal to me because they offer up a certain romanticism in the way that beauty is revealed in the distinctly ordinary. Her style is American realism, and vaguely redolent of Edward Hopper, one of my favourite painters. For me, sometimes the seduction of a painting lay in its power to produce the wish to step into it. Depictions of urban settings: canals, wharves, warehouses, bridges and streets arrow-straight can have this effect on me in a way that a picturesque mountain pasture never does.