jamesmaker.com

'Autofellatio': Reading

2011-12-10T13:40:00.000+01:00

I'll be reading an extract from 'Autofellatio' at Gay's The Word bookshop in Bloomsbury, London. Thursday 5th January, 7PM-8.30PM.

http://www.timeout.com/london/gay-lesbian/event/247864/james-maker-autofellatio

Autofellatio - Reading in London

2011-12-10T13:34:00.000+01:00

http://www.timeout.com/london/gay-lesbian/event/247864/james-maker-autofellatio

'Autofellatio' wins Polari First Book Prize

2011-11-22T11:53:00.001+01:00

TIME OUT, LONDON.
22 NOVEMBER

The winner of the Polari First Book Prize was announced at last night’s raucous Polari literary salon’s fourth birthday party at the Southbank Centre, with the inaugural prize going to James Maker’s self published ebook ‘Autofellatio’. Paul Burston, Time Out’s very own Gay & Lesbian Editor who hosted the award, said ‘The judges felt that ‘Autofellatio’ stood out with its humour, honesty and heartfelt exploration of British queer life over the last 30 years. It deals with the hardships of growing up gay in a way that is witty, endlessly quotable and, above all, brave.’ James Maker urges all aspiring writers and novelists to ‘do it yourself, go out there and promote your work through Spoken Word. Anything might happen.’

Amazon: Friday 23 September

2011-09-23T13:09:00.000+02:00

Delighted to see that 'Autofellatio' is currently at #1 in Amazon's Biography (Gay & Lesbian) book charts.

'Autofellatio' review: The Independent

2011-09-23T02:13:00.001+02:00

Review of 'Autofellatio' by the indomitable Julie Burchill in The Independent.
'The pure joy of James Maker's bouquet of barbs.'

'Autofellatio' (Paperback) Update

2011-09-22T13:56:00.000+02:00

The book is now available through Waterstones online.

Launch party tonight, Thursday 22nd September at the Soho Arts Club in Frith Street from 7:00pm onwards.

Polari First Book Prize

2011-09-20T10:48:00.001+02:00

'Autofellatio' has been nominated for the Polari Book Prize shortlist.
Also link from The Bookseller.

'Autofellatio' (Paperback) Update

2011-09-17T10:24:00.004+02:00

The book is now in stock and available at Gay's The Word bookshop in Bloomsbury, London and also for sale through Prowler stores with branches in Soho, Birmingham and Brighton.

Online through BIFfib Books, Amazon UK, Amazon US, Amazon Germany, Amazon France and Barnes and Noble.

'Autofellatio' (Paperback)

2011-09-03T12:33:00.003+02:00

'Autofellatio' is now available in paperback for pre-order direct from BIGfib Books.

"Bloody Brilliant" -
JULIE BURCHILL

"Glitteringly epigrammatic, it's a glam-rock Naked Civil Servant in court shoes. But funnier. And tougher" -
MARK SIMPSON

"Pistol sharp, loaded with witty one-liners and peppered with Maker's scatter gun observations on life, music and the meaning of good hair" -
PAUL BURSTON

UK: http://www.bigfib.com/bfb-uk.html

Eurozone: http://www.bigfib.com/bfb-euro.html

USA/World: http://www.bigfib.com/bfb-usa.html

Appearance at Duckie @ The RVT.

2011-04-25T16:09:00.002+02:00

I'll be 'reading' from a chapter of Autofellatio, Elephant & Castle Boot Girls, at Duckie @ The RVT
on Saturday, 14th May. 21:00 - 02:00.

Hosted by Amy Lamé, with Disc Jockeys The Readers Wifes.

372 Kennington Lane, SE11. Nearest tube: Vauxhall

See website for details.

Autofellatio

2011-03-23T19:42:00.001+01:00

The updated edition of my memoir, Autofellatio, which brings us to the present day, is now on sale at Amazon.com (US customers, $2.99) and Amazon.co.uk (1.71 GBP.

It is downloadable in a variety of formats: Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Also available as Kindle for PC and MAC (to read on your computer, free application download on the book page).

In the more 'orthodox', and shrinking publishing world, writers, and especially unknown writers, now have a new platform from which to put out their work. Now, you can do it yourself. DIY, which for me, as a teenager during London's Punk era, is natural.
As for publicising your book, small, independent publishing houses do not furnish one with a PR team, in any case, and expect their authors to do all the 'donkey work', while taking 90% profits.

I see the ebook revolution as both democratic and empowering. Moreover, it has enabled me to 'give birth' to this particular baby, and move forwards with another project. Self-publishing for the first-timer can be fraught: you are the editor, the proofreader, the cover designer and co-publisher. It's a new frontier, but it means that books that fall into a 'niche market' -- which today means anything that will not automatically sell many thousands of copies -- may now be available and read.

amazon.co.uk
amazon.com

Guest Appearance in David Hoyle's "Slurry" at the RVT, London.

2010-09-20T11:56:00.000+02:00

Reading an extract chapter from Autofellatio: The Faux-Suede Parlour of Maitresse Desclaves

"Polari Goes Pope" at the Southbank Centre, London.

2010-09-20T11:52:00.000+02:00

"Autofellatio" now available at Amazon

2010-09-02T14:27:00.001+02:00

The first volume of my autobiography, "Autofellatio", is now available at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com for worldwide sales.
At the time of writing it is at #1 in the Amazon Kindle book charts, Biography & Memoir section.

It is available in various formats: Kindle, Kindle for PC (to read on your computer), Kindle for Mac, IPhone, IPad, Android and Blackberry.

The second volume will be published Autumn/Winter 2010.

travelogue: peterborough

2010-08-02T22:15:00.005+02:00

I had to renew my passport which necessitated a day-trip to Peterborough in Cambridgeshire (London couldn't fit me in until days after my travel dates). Peterborough calls itself a 'Renaissance' city and claims to be one the sunniest in the UK. Also, it has a sizeable Italian and Portuguese community. Sometimes, small cities that are off the tourist map and overlooked in favour of more recognised destinations can hold a pleasant surprise. I didn't expect campaniles and sun-drenched piazzas - otherwise surely we would all have ticked it off - but one travels hopefully and I like to keep an open mind.

Peterborough is the gateway to the Fens (La Porta delle Fenzini). Topographically, The Fens is a very flat place between two slightly undulating places, one of which is the North Sea. By contrast, The Chilterns offer almost Tyrolean high drama. It is a landscape at its best in winter, I fancy, when mist and fog descends, lending its Anglian monotony a diffused, ghostly watercolour mood. I noticed that a good many people there were large-boned, healthy and somewhat ruddy of cheek. The latter, not unsurprising, as they are buffeted by a year-round wind straight off the Urals, without an hill between there and Poland to slow its velocity.

The lady at Window 6, at whom I smiled lavishly while handing over my documents in the hope that she might fast-track me, returned my smile with a look of benevolence rare in a civil servant and told me that I could pick up my new bio-metric passport in four hours. Things To Do In Peterborough When You're Waiting For Your Identity. There is the 12th-century catedrale, a splendid example of Early English Gothic, and of which the city is justly proud. Unfortunately, it is surrounded by an example of 1980s style town planning: carbuncular, municipal; an unfathomable one-way system, a branch of Ethel Austin and the predictable attempt at European cafe culture in the form of a small, draughty plaza visited only by mackintoshed pensioners and bus fumes. I ordered a pesto and brie panini. Regrettably, it did not tantalise. Umbria receded and, with it, the promised memory of a distant summer, as I realised that its authenticity lay only in its wrapper.

Stamford. We will go to Stamford. Lying 15 miles to the northwest (20 minutes by car, 2 hours on horseback) Stamford is a gem of a town. Straddling a modest river tucked within the border of Lincolnshire it is a symphony of Regency Gothic - but with the volume turned down - and built in York stone. Unlike other pretty towns, Stamford is too reserved or sensible to Disneyfy itself with the confectionery of souvenir shoppes and themed experiences. There are some antiquarium book-shops (Treks And Palavers by Captain R.R. Oakley, My Vagina, Your Vagina by Dr. Hildegard Hanff), some nice places to buy scented candles and an antique shop. As everybody left this antique shop they said thank you to the Rugby-playing male assistant behind the counter. After years in Spain this strikes me as peculiarly English. What were they thanking him for? "Thank you for being so attractive." Or "Thank you for over-charging me, you devilish brute." We were going to pop into one of Stamford's pubs - which are all seemingly owned by a brewery called Everard's - but it's all non-smoking now, so one didn't see the point.

Back to Peterborough. Picked up the passport. Mission accomplished. Awfully big day out. Snored all the way to South Mimms.

gay marriage

2010-03-22T21:43:00.018+01:00

That more and more countries are beginning to recognise the rights of gay, lesbian and transexual people to marry, and that they be accorded the same rights as heterosexual citizens, is true democracy in action. Democracy is a subjective idea: it depends if we are talking about the democracy of The Netherlands, or the democracy of Bulgaria or Utah. For the LGBT community that would amount to the same thing. The majority of states in the so-called progressive Union prohibits same-sex marriage. But we have known, for a long time, the disparity in equality even in First-world countries.

I'm a libertarian: my view is that every citizen who pays taxes should be equal under state legislation. Right down the line. Even, I feel, that we should all be allowed to carry guns (if necessary). If we can't rely upon a government that assures it can 'protect' us, and people are victimised with few rights to defend themselves, I agree with it. That gay men and women should have to petition their governments, pleading their case as equal citizens, is revolting and an affront to fundamental humanitarianism. What constitutes love & partnership ? And who should judge it ? There are heterosexual couples who live in miserable marriages that end shortly in high battle and vodka-fuelled, expensive acrimony. There are gay couples who, unfettered by the constraints of law, the responsibility of children or the chess problem of divorce, enjoy long partnerships. And they can often walk away from a shared bridge-loan, if not a lovingly reformed domicile, without legal reprisals.

Divorce is growing. Marriage, in the main, is not really working for many people. Our expectancies of partnership is often sabotaged, even prior to picking out a jaundiced lemon for the bridesmaids, by the sheer force of advertising. It is the marketing idea that somehow, we can always do better. Hence, picking up your partner's discarded underwear and popping them into a quick spin-cycle becomes something of a deal-breaker. Basically, people watch too much television and identify with the impossibly air-conditioned lives of its female protangonists (often forensic psychologists who live, somehow, mortgageless in Vancouver.) Well, some people have survived wars to be together. Passion. Perspective. Even the best of relationships need a certain amount of work and compromise. Life is in flux and we all change and evolve.

I understand the viewpoint that the LGBT community should petition rights to marriage under the Church. It is the religious & political system one lives with. Even into the 21st century. However, one is emulating a dying institution. Why not have relationships that may include other people ? Relationships that open-up and expand the ideal of the heterosexual model ? I imagine that is a difficult idea, because for many people it kills the notion of romance, and of exclusivity, which we are extremely attached to.
But the fact is, most probably within 50 years, the idea of marriage will be over.

Classic Rock » Blog Archive » Cult Heroes: James Maker

2010-02-05T16:57:00.001+01:00

Classic Rock » Blog Archive » Cult Heroes: James Maker

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the day i decided to stop being patricia

2010-01-18T16:57:00.026+01:00

The Day I Decided to Stop being Gay is an article written in today's The Times by Patrick Muirhead. Patrick Muirhead is a former homosexual and BBC employee who had a Damascene experience in a Home Counties barber's, and decided that after twenty years of gay internet dating he was, in fact, heterosexual. Indeed, I believe that the archiving of one's own online photo galleries, alone, is the shift without end. Additionally, he had himself reborn as an helicopter pilot. Boy's Own stuff.

The world gives praise that Mr Muirhead has finally rejected his 'abnormality', as he puts it; escaping the debauched clutches of the homosexual underworld in time to pursue his innate and long-held desire to meet a nice girl and become a father. "For 20 years, my life took a track that stifled the fragile stems of a family man that wanted to emerge." How awful, and one can sympathise, but it presumes that life leads us -- submitting one to the serial, stark terror of a thousand gloryholes against our express wishes. Did Mr Muirhead possess no dominion over his own desires and lifestyle choices ? Why did he not simply log off and give heterosexuality a chance ?

He discloses to The Times readership: "...I was once pursued in a subterranean gay haunt by [a prominent homosexual rights campaigner.] Scantily clad, he was quite resistible."

Subterranean: it conjures up the image of Mr Muirhead as a terrified dolphin hunted by the ultimate, dead-eyed predator, The Great Gay Shark. (Eeek!!) Perhaps it was that which was his true Damascene conversion. Mercifully, he spares us any further dispatches from the Sargasso of the sexual outlaw: "You would simply not believe what I have seen and done. You would not want to know."
No we don't, dear. Men are such beasts aren't they ? But you swam and you swam until you reached the safe shores of Venus ! Out of the murky depths and into the Light !

I wish Mr Muirhead every success in his new life and look forward to reading a follow-up piece after he meets Miss Right. Unless she is entirely self-absorbed, the delicate question of where Mr Muirhead's penis has been for the past twenty years is likely to arise over the carry cot pages of the Argos brochure.

I suspect it is not heterosexuality that Mr Muirhead craves -- he just wants to be average.
Paradoxically, it is the only original quality in this confessional.

vanity fair: more gore than vidal

2010-01-16T14:52:00.030+01:00

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

2010-01-13T20:08:00.027+01:00

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

2010-01-12T23:06:00.006+01:00

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.

maggi hambling: scallop

2010-01-08T16:30:00.004+01:00

Maggi Hambling CBE is a British figurative painter, portraitist, sculptor and printmaker whose work is represented at the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate Collection and the V&A among other public collections in her native UK and abroad. Her most recent exhibition, a resounding success that garnered very positive, enthusiastic reviews was a selection of silk-screen prints made of her friend, the ebullient and memorable jazz & blues singer, critic and writer, George Melly. In 2003 Hambling was commissioned to produce a sculpture in memory to the musician-composer Benjamin Britten and the result is an almost 4-metre high scallop in stainless steel. It is installed at the beach in Aldeburgh, Suffolk close to where Britten lived and worked.

Hambling refers to Scallop as "a conversation with the sea". The scallop signifies the ear through which we discern the myriad sounds of nature and the turbulent, untameable power -- and chorus -- of the sea. Therein lies the origin of music and songwriting: it is the attempt to create order from chaos; to heighten our perception of the wonder that surrounds us; to make it manifest in quavers, minims, keys and notes; to represent the power of the natural world -- and the unquantifiable -- as a sound or shape or form that is meaningful to us. It is as if the messages of wind, wave and marine-life are amplified through the heart of the shell to the listener. I think it's rather beautiful how the symmetry of this monument is interrupted and broken -- rusted by the elements -- because it reminds us that everything must travel the road to eventual decay and non-existence. This is not depressing at all, but rather conveys the vigourous actuality of life, of wind and sea.

The inscription at the top of the scallop, "I Hear Those Voices That Will Not Be Drowned" are taken from Britten's opera Peter Grimes that was based on the writings of Suffolk poet, George Crabbe. Here is a short film made by the BBC in which Hambling discusses Scallop and the North Sea.

salvador dalí

2010-01-07T18:31:00.024+01:00

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

2010-01-05T17:32:00.004+01:00

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

2010-01-04T20:07:00.006+01:00

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)

2010-01-03T20:32:00.013+01:00

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

2010-01-03T14:25:00.013+01:00

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.

1.1.2010

2010-01-01T22:05:00.025+01:00

A thank you to all those who have visited my blog since its inception in September, and an especial one to those who have actually returned to it. Obviously, I realise that a blog based on an enthusiasm for swede and a discussion on the minimal hair length before one may attempt a ponytail is a niche readership.

I would like to wish everyone an interesting 2010.

Nobody seems to be sure what this decade is called. I imagine it's the "Tens" or perhaps the "Teens". In any case, I don't think that centuries really get underway until you reach the Twenties. I greeted the New Year in bed watching films and drank half-a-bottle of wine. And felt quite happy to do so. (The flu lingers and I cancelled the party I was scheduled to give.) This coupled with a worrying trend of rising at 7AM in the morning yet not feeling tired means, I think, that I am now officially quite old. I was always convinced I'd die on stage in a freak accident -- at some point in my thirties -- struck in the temple by a flying shoe at the Cambridge Corn Exchange. However, here I am, 50 in October.

I download films illegally online. I watch them and then delete them. If there's a particular one that merits repeated viewing, which is rare, I'll buy it from Amazon. Also, some friends are kind enough on occasion to send me films. That is one of the things I miss: being able to go to HMV or Virgin to re-file their racks. Of those that I've seen through 2009 -- although not necessarily of that year -- some have been very good:

NOTES ON A SCANDAL :
Judi Dench as a Machiavellian lesbian, teacher and compulsive diarist who fixates on and plots a life with oblivious, doe-eyed, middle-class Bohemian colleague Cate Blanchett. My sympathy went with Dench. A park bench scene between Dench and Blanchett contains these immortal lines in reference to the former's prior quarry, Jennifer:

"We were quite chummy for a while but, poor thing, she rather unravelled. She became alarmingly deluded."
"Did she go to hospital?"
"No. She got a job in Stoke."




GOMORRA :
Based on the bestseller by Roberto Saviano who is now in permanent hiding, five stories intertwined of individuals whose lives are touched, if not destroyed, by the Camorra of Naples. Very real. Three Coins In A Fountain it isn't. Won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film of 2008.

O' HORTEN :
A retired Norwegian train driver faces old age and loneliness (yes, a pattern does emerge) but decides to take a few life risks. Entering a family's apartment via scaffolding and sitting next to their sleeping child all night is certainly one of them -- but no, he isn't a nonce, he's just odd. Also ends up in Oslo city centre in red patent high heel shoes and drives around the streets blindfolded with a new and interesting friend he found sleeping in the snow. There is a quiet charm about this film.


NIGHT OF THE SUNFLOWERS :
Set in rural Extramadura in southwestern Spain. A teenaged girl is found murdered on the outskirts of a village. Six overlapping characters: a predatory salesman, some geologists and a couple of    feuding neighbours are offered up as potential suspects. Intricate.

A word on Almodóvar's BROKEN EMBRACES. Sumptuous homage to 1950s film noir. Beautifully photographed. Interesting plot that gradually uncoils and reveals itself through flashback. However, as with Talk To Her and Bad Education, anyone looking for Almodovar's trademark humour will doubtless be disappointed. The reason is, all three films centre around male characters and Almodóvar is a dream of a scriptwriter -- for female actors. While Broken Embraces is dazzling, the celluloid never quite catches fire.

midwestern gothic: wisconsin death trip (2002)

2009-12-30T21:26:00.015+01:00

"Writer/Director James Marsh's first feature, Wisconsin Death Trip, is an intimate, shocking and sometimes hilarious account of the disasters that befell one small town in Wisconsin during the final decade of the 19th century. The film is inspired by Michael Lesy’s book of the same name which was first published in 1973. Lesy discovered a striking archive of black and white photographs in the town of Black River Falls dating from the 1890’s and married a selection of these images to extracts from the town’s newspaper from the same decade. The effect was surprising and disturbing. The town of Black River Falls seems gripped by some peculiar malaise and the weekly news is dominated by tales of madness, eccentricity and violence amongst the local population. Suicide and murder are commonplace. People in the town are haunted by ghosts, possessed by devils and terrorized by teenage outlaws and arsonists.

Like the book, the film is constructed entirely from authentic news reports from the Black River Falls’ newspaper with occasional excerpts from the records of the nearby Mendota Asylum for the Insane. The film also makes use of the haunting black and white photographs taken by the resident portrait photographer of Black River Falls at the end of the 19th century. The film unfolds over four seasons and certain characters feature throughout the film as their criminal behaviour lands them in the newspaper again and again. Mary Sweeney, a cocaine snorting school mistress with a compulsion to smash windows -- The Wisconsin Window Smasher -- who frequently runs amok in the area. Another eccentric is Pauline L'Allemand, a mildly famous opera singer who gets washed up in the town with no means of support and becomes increasingly demented. (I have visited western Wisconsin and this state of affairs could be termed a 'default setting'.) A 13 year old boy who murders an old man for no apparent motive and then engages in sporadic gun battles with a pursuing posse. All the while, buildings are being torched by an hyper-bored teenage girl, a diptheria epidemic devastates the town’s infant population and all manner of strange suicides are reported in great detail.

Presiding over the chaos of the newspaper stories and providing a linking device for the intricate screenplay is the character of the newspaper editor. The stories from the newspaper are narrated by award-winning actor Ian Holm. Director James Marsh notes “the newspaper was run at the time by an Englishman called Frank Cooper, so Ian was a perfect choice for us - his voice conveys an incredible range of moods - incredulity, moral indignation, sly humour - while remaining both authoritative and soothing."

Wisconsin Death Trip was made over the course of two years by a small documentary crew working with a very tight budget. The film was shot on location in Wisconsin, in each of the four seasons, using existing historical sites across the state. All the actors in the film were recruited from open casting sessions in Wisconsin - most are non-professional and many had never acted at all before their appearance in the film. A great many scenes in the film were improvised, often in sub-zero temperatures, thus the discomfort and bewilderment shown by the actors is usually genuine - and shared by those behind the camera."

pharmaceuticals, shopping malls

2009-12-30T11:07:00.009+01:00

This Christmas Eve I departed from my usual wan indifference towards the season's festivities and wrote a completely over-the-top status marquee on Facebook wishing everyone a "groundbreakingly positive", "marvellously superb", "unbelievably incredible" 2010 -- only just stopping short of "so uproariously funny that you'll spend most of the year on the toilet, urinating with mirth". Payback. That evening I came down with a particularly virulent flu and spent the following days bed-bound with a high fever. The fever has passed but now I have an Industrial Era cough. I mention this because it occurred to me while taking various medication how much I like the design of pharmaceutical packaging. I suppose that, generally, people are too ill to notice, but I like the minimalist layout together with the unusual names -- Cinfatós, Bisolgrip, Fumil Forte -- and the pantone colours of mustard, forest green and cerise that evoke the 1960s and 1970s. The design of pharmaceutical packaging has not really changed very much through the decades.

It was 23C here yesterday so I was determined to get out of the bedroom -- which at this point was interchangeable with that of Thora Hird's -- and get some fresh air. The partner and I drove through the Albaida valley whose tourism moto is "Disfrútala con los cinco sentidos" (Enjoy it with your five senses). A bit of a tall order as I have no sense of taste or smell at the moment. We reached the coast at Gandía and drove south to the comparatively new, and enormous, shopping mall at Ondara. This centro commercial has British high street outlets and even an English bookshop stocked with vastly over-priced, TV tie-in pictorials and a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Jamie Oliver next to an hillock of themed recipe books. But that is what publishing has come to mean nowadays -- very few people are interested in a finely crafted novel with impeccable character development. Also, there aren't any pictures, so there's nothing to emulate.

I forget what it's like to see British people in groups. What struck me was the vague look of annoyance of certain women as they glided past me on the down elevator, and the expression of resignation -- if not ennui -- in their partner's face. But then some of us are designed to annoy and others designed to be annoyed. There were a few sightings of the long-term expat female: fifty-something, deep perma-tan, vigorously bottle-blonde, kohl-lidded eyes, could get quite nasty in an argument.
It really could have been Milton Keynes. I was glad to get out of there.

I'm going to the barbers, on the principle that a haircut makes one instantly feel better.

quentin crisp: an englishman in new york

2009-12-22T21:43:00.010+01:00

John Hurt reprises his role as Quentin Crisp in the soon-to-be released and somewhat unimaginatively titled An Englishman in New York. Following his portrayal of Crisp in the British television's outstanding biopic of 1975, The Naked Civil Servant, this second slice of Crisperanto charts the Sultana of Sodom's subsequent relocation to the New York of his dreams, the intial fêteing by early 80s Manhattan celebrities both uptown and downtown -- two distinctly different scenes at that time -- and his fall from grace as a potential LGBT mascot after making the notorious "AIDS is just a fad" declaration. While (unintentionally) cruel and unfortunate, it surely ranks with "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" which is commonly misattributed to Queen Marie-Antoinette. Soon after, he finds his natural -- and even employable -- station in life: reviewer and cineaste.

I have not seen this film yet but have spoken with someone who has seen the preview. Crisp is the buckle-slippered, effete historian (well, he was in his 70s) disseminating his immediate surroundings like an anthropologist from a bygone epoch: floor-bending HI-NRG, amyl-nitrate and the emergence of gay 'clones' -- The Gingham Borg -- in yellow construction hats, raunching it up in a fiesta of technicolour hankie-flailing before the curtain began to fall. There was no Great Dark Man. But there was a Great Dark Disease. And Hurt should know -- he played one to startling effect in Alien (1979).

However, what irks and rings untrue in this depiction of a deflated Crisp in his later years is the 'revelation' that he habitually sent cheques to Elizabeth Taylor in contribution to her AIDS foundation. Whilst charity is always commendable, this has to be a constructed Hollywood fiction to redeem Crisp to an alienated LGBT audience -- with whom he had very little in common in any case -- eliciting a sympathetic re-appraisal of an eccentric and inconvenient Bohemian who was not 'Winfrey-friendly'. Box office. But, America loves redemption. A revolting habit, in my opinion. Thus he is 're-made'. Crisp was always candid even to the point of self-ruin and his stoicism and his truth -- if not survival -- lay in a complete rejection of sentimentality. I believe that takes immense strength. Essentially it is this, not the maquillage and the ballet pumps that transformed an itinerant, penniless and un-pensionable Chelsea queen into an international cause-cèlébre.

felíz navidad / bon nadal

2009-12-22T16:06:00.011+01:00

Last week, Siberian winds swept over the Pyrenees and down into Iberia, plunging us into sub degree temperatures -- minus 20C in the Sierra Guadarrama north of Madrid -- wind chill factor advisories and carnage on the roads as testosterone wrestled with black ice. The palm trees and the mountains were very photogenic, but town was a disaster: broken pipes, cracked marble, vehicles swerving into each other and the occasional urban avalanche as snow slid off pitched roofs, burying valiant pedestrians. This was an annual event until thirty to forty years ago, so there is quite possibly an argument for climate change. The señora who works in the estanco, the cigarette kiosk, is convinced it's the French.

"¡ Un viento siberiano !"

[Scowling] "¡ No ! Es un viento francés."

I know virtually nothing about climatology but you need only cross the sierra from southern Valencia into northern Alicante to see the evidence that something is indeed happening. Here we have green mountains -- some forested -- rice paddies, orange and lemon groves and the ability to produce almonds, apricots, apples and green vegetables. Over there they may only cultivate olives, and in small number. The land is parched and sandy: the only flora you are likely to see is aloe vera growing by the roadside together with the odd, ejected garment. Why anyone should decide to divest themselves of their underwear on the A-31 southbound is a provincial mystery, unless there are darker connotations.

It's the desertification of Spain, gradually reaching northward from Almería and Murcia which, in large part, is a North African landscape. In the townhouse urbanisations thrown up to accommodate the discounted Spanish dream of northern European settlers the idyll is rather spoiled in summer by the directive of water conservation. In some areas the water supply is turned off at eight o'clock in the morning and is not reconnected until early evening. Thus, the image of sauntering onto one's terrace in turquoise pedal pushers to a breakfast of fresh bread and conserves is replaced by the post-dawn bickering -- either side of a bathroom door -- that is the battle of essential toiletry.

"Will you come out of there ?"
"In a minute."
"I haven't got a minute, it's 7:59."

Christmas is almost upon us. In Spain it is a one day event after which, sensibly, we can all go back to our lives. It is not the month-long tyranny of uninterrupted retailing that the British have to endure. To my British compatriots: I sincerely hope that you depose your Prime Minister next year. That someone so unsuited to the international stage, and with the charisma of a butter-fingered, junior book-ledger clerk at a small savings bank should be at the helm of a G8 country is an undiscussable embarrassment. Gordon, I ask you.
I don't really do New Year's. A few drinks with friends. For me it is now a time more of reflection than the whooping Lambeth Walk -- mouth agape, party hat cocked at a rakish angle -- that segues into the infinitely depressing Auld Lang Syne.

If I don't post here before, I wish you all a prosperous and interesting 2010. If, for any of you, life has become a little humdrum I'd like to suggest a simple yet sometimes effective daily variance. Where you might habitually turn left -- turn right. That's how I met Fenella Fielding.

autofellatio: serialisation of chapters

2009-11-06T02:56:00.011+01:00

Due to unforeseen circumstances at 3:AM Press with whom the publishing of Autofellatio was contracted - developments in a broad sense which were not connected to my book, or to me, we have decided to anull the contract. Therefore, I am going to serialise a few chapters online at a dedicated blog while I look for a literary agent and publishing house. Update to follow soon.

philippe grandrieux: sombre

2009-11-03T05:04:00.027+01:00

Philippe Grandrieux’s Sombre divided the judges at the Locarno Film Festival where it was first shown in 1998. It generated controversy and an official declaration on the part of the panel:

"Half of the jury would like to call attention to Sombre. Our jury split between those who were morally offended by the film and those who saw a purpose in its darkness, and in the strength of its mise-en-scene and images."

Grandrieux’s work encompasses several cinematographic areas: film, documentary, video art and experimental television. He is inspired by the early film theoretician Jean Epstein - whom Luis Buñuel once assisted - the German expressionism of Murnau, Robert Bresson and the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, a rationalist and ‘heretic’ who paved the way for the 18th century Enlightenment. Grandrieux has worked in close collaboration with the French Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) since the 1980s: his mission is not simply to expand the boundaries of film, but rather to transform them. In challenging the central tenets of orthodox film theory, or philosophy even, he hopes to reinvent the language of film – and how we respond to it.

How so? Sombre, Grandrieux’s commercial film debut is a good example. The narrative of Sombre concerns a rather diffident serial killer in Jean (Marc Barbé) who roams the autoroutes of France to asphyxiate women. On one of his Michelin sorties he meets Claire (Elina Löwensohn) and appears to fall in love with her. She is infatuated by the seeming and powerful charisma of his remoteness, detachment and quietness. In truth, although his paraphilia and his murderousness gives him a certain exotic complexity he is, in fact, quite boring. Boring in the sense that his life-force and his energies hinge upon a singular, preoccupational theme: murder. As his next intended victim begins to fall in love with him it poses a real bluebottle in the Clarins dilemma for the serial killer, because the snuffing out of his prey is contingent upon objectifying them. Intimacy may only come during the final act. If it intrudes beforehand, the ‘act of communion’ which is the killer’s distorted expression of love and of power – his ‘transubstantiation’ - is null and voided. And that is the real theme here: transformation.

Grandrieux wishes to transform our perceptions through the experience of watching images on screen. Our experience. This is nothing new. Many a graduate film student who passes through the gates of Beaconsfield Film & Television School or the New York Film Academy harbours a similar ambition. Thank goodness some still do - because a majority are interested solely in commercial Hollywood filmmaking that will 'play' in Peoria, Illinois, whose box office receipts are calculated by nimble fingers that have never known nicotine. Thus, hopefully one is advanced to the sphere of the American Express Platinum Card and the comforting diesel-sonnet of Westinghouse airconditioning. Now, more than ever, it is all about money.

Transformation: Grandrieux is at the opposite end of the spectrum to the pop-corn ‘feel good factor’. The theme of his films orchestrate to visceral effect the rebirth of its protagonists through desires which have broken through the dams of compulsion - and the logical constraints of society - to achieve their end. Whether it is Jean or Claire in Sombre - a stygian, Gitanes-infused psychotic and dystopic love story - or the similarly doomed couple in his later film, La Vie Nouvelle which is a meditation on the desire that must incorporate personal ownership. The message is clear. Grandrieux is interested in cinema, but he is more interested in your ‘insides’. He wants to vibrate your kidneys, knot your intestines, short-circuit your sensory systems and return you to a realm that is like the unknowing, primordial fearfulness of childhood. He wants to radicalise and deliver the audience from being a passive voyeur – or someone who merely wishes only to be entertained - to becoming physically and psychologically involved by his films. The ‘explosions’ take place not only within the frame of the camera but, in his design, they expand and reach beyond the metaphysical constraints of the screen and head directly for your synapses. Depending on your reaction, this is either a search and destroy mission or a sensual love letter.

Grandrieux’s films are about sensuality, in the literal sense. He wants you to experience a cinematic orgasm. He wants to tickle your clitoris and your hippocampus - suspending you between a certain ecstasy and fear; to position you between apprehension, joy and ‘death’. Moreover, he wants your abandonment. The exquisite balance and the play of shadow and darkness that characterises his films reveals light as the essence. Light may only exist through the prism of darkness. The world is in a permanent solar eclipse. When light comes, it illuminates a small detail that gives you an important clue. The hymn of texture leads one to a conclusion. Grandrieux lingers, and he adores. This is all a form of lovemaking. Much of Sombre is slightly out of focus, and it was a deliberate treatment in transmitting the disorganised mind-set of its main character Jean, who may have seen the world in precisely that way. It can frustrate because you cannot always discern what exactly is happening.
Sombre - which I first saw on the seventeenth floor of a Shepherd’s Bush high-rise flat while a midsummer Floridian gale rocked the building – succeeded in frightening me. The reason? Intimacy. Proximity. There are certain films that one should watch in a darkened room, by oneself. They are engineered to be viewed exactly under those circumstances. Cinema that is not meant to be seen at the cinema.

Grandrieux has been compared to David Lynch. The comparison is based on the idea that both directors believe that once a masterful mood is created - and where it is delicately sustained - by itself it is enough to carry a film. Narrative is a secondary consideration. I agree with this. Italian neo-realism prepared us for it. Sub-narrative can interrupt the flow of communication. In the 21st century where nothing really matters anymore, where there is no past nor future, and where we diligently update our status marquees on social networking sites – we may only be startled by effect. In cinema, atmosphere and mood may sometimes take precedence over story-telling. Narrative becomes irrelevant as the viewer is absorbed and reacts, consciously or subsconsciously to what he or she witnesses. In actuality, through cinema we ascertain a certain truth through dream, abstraction and in the decodifying of that which has passed through the retina and into the mind. It is a kind of plasma screen biblicalism.

Grandrieux has used sound design to great effect. Sound design is important. Soundscape is fundamental in shifting and pitching the mood of the viewer. It can move and unsettle you with its overtone; it precipitates and scores key moments; it contextualises and enrichens the experience. While Lynch creates his filmic dreams, blurring the division of the surreal and reality, reaching the digital-video apotheosis of Inland Empire - which is undoubtedly one of the best films made in the early 21st century – Grandrieux uses a similar technique but in an inverse sense. Physiognamy. It is not out there, it is within. It is all about you. Surrealism is now the refuge of those who are happy to endure ordinary life and and the repast of circumstantial television novellas. That is what surrealism has come to mean. We are now beyond surrealism.
It is ‘old hat’.

The largest question in this century might be "What is reality ?"

et prononça ce mot: almería

2009-10-27T02:37:00.009+01:00

The pure energy and excitement of this song affected me when I first uncovered it in a secondhand record shop in London's Soho in 1982. It made me want to live in Paris. How many songs make you want to relocate ? In my case, several. The classical strings, the brass and the chorus. Bir Hakeim: the overground metro thundering over the Seine. He wrote it for Brigitte Bardot after their affair had ended. It was recorded in a studio in around 1968 when, amidst the student protests that sent volleys of Molotov cocktails up the Champs Élysées, Charles de Gaulle sought refuge at a German air base and watched as metropolitan France gradually moved from a conservative tradition to a more liberal morality by force of its young populace. Across La Manche, the Swinging Sixties were well under way, dazzling the world with dramatically raised hemlines, rediscovered Mondrianism and an overdose of Vanessa Redgrave. France was not particularly fashionable in the late 1960s. But I like this video because, even in its monochromatic and crude visual effect typical of the time; its attempt at startling diversion - nevertheless it captures the message of the singer through stillness. Stillness. The Gauloise fogged inertia of a smoking, poet protangonist who wears very nice shoes and does not give a fuck. That is a lost art. He does not perform before the camera - the camera performs for him. Serge Gainsbourg.

A chaque mouvement
On entendait
Les clochettes d'argent
De ses poignets
Agitant ses grelots
Elle avança
Et prononça ce mot :
Alméria

avant garde alliance: party political broadcast

2009-10-20T10:40:00.003+02:00

marianne faithfull

2009-10-20T10:32:00.001+02:00

"Do me a favour, don't put me in the dark" sings Marianne Faithfull in her best Dickens good-time girl. Ex-resident of Ormskirk, habitué of so many rehab clinics and now Baroness Sacher-Masoch courtesy of her paternal great-great grandfather is infamous as much for her drug dependency and her relationship with Mick Jagger in the mid-1960s as for her music and acting career. Now aged 62, I believe she is never more at her best. Two years living on the streets of Soho in the early 1970s - she slept on a wall (I would like to visit this wall) - and an addiction to heroin and cocaine caused a severe laryngitis that altered the pitch and the timbre of her voice forever. An indignant Sunday Times newspaper journalist once wrote that she had "permanently vulgarised her voice."

As if this were a bad thing.

Nobody wants to hear the convent-educated Marianne of "This Little Bird" - we want the raw expression and emotionality of someone who has track-marked themselves out of the possibility of continuing addiction, who has lived without telephone, electric light and curling tongs, and whom has recorded this song.

It is taken from the Broken English album released in 1979, although I didn't hear it until the summer of 1982 while in Paris. Adapted from a poem written by the poet and playwright Heathcote Williams and set to a 4/4 tango rhythm it is a mistresspiece of sexual jealousy and poisonously barbed spite. It caused a certain controversy. A female using the word cunt, let alone in popular song, is an act of transgression and it simply isn't on, don't you know.
I cannot imagine any another artist being able to deliver this song with such conviction and unsentimentality. Of course, Ms Faithfull has lived it. Some of the lyrics are explicit - this is quite possibly the very first rap song - yet when expressed with such cracked candour, authenticity and glorious weltschmerz, 'profanity' is not profanity at all. It is poetry.

madrid

2009-10-13T22:37:00.017+02:00

Last weekend I went to Madrid. It was my 49th birthday and I was determined not to spend it sat in an orthopaedic armchair looking out of the window, smiling benevolently at children. So I went to the travel agency to book train tickets with RENFE. I waited 30 minutes while someone who'd come into town on his tractor was trying to negotiate a refund on a Mediterranean cruise because his entire party came down with food poisoning while the boat was still actually docked at Barcelona. But cruises aren't really about travelling. Cruises are monumental all-day buffets with Naples slipping past, unnoticed, in the background. Eventually, when I was served, the assistant - a brittle young woman, a Nazi in a company cravat - responded to my request for train tickets as if I were asking her to arrange a fully inclusive, smoking holiday to the Moon.

"We can book the tickets, but we can't print them out. They have to be posted from Valencia", she explained, as if I were seven.

"Then why am I standing here?"

In other words, I can book them on the internet and print out the tickets on A4 paper -- but she can't, and she's a travel agent.

Madrid is a different animal to Barcelona. It's resolutely continental: sat on an high plain with slate in place of terracotta and not a palm tree in sight. An inferno in summer, Siberian in winter. It is a northern city. The outskirts reminded me of The Bronx. Blocks of austere, functional social housing retreating to the horizon; six-lane avenues criss-crossed by motorways and overground train lines; smog. I think that when Madrid rapidly expanded in the 1960s and 1970s they must have looked to America for the model of how it should be done. It does not look European, or even particularly Spanish. The centre of the city is Beaux Arts and Art Deco splendour; its streets teeming with Castilian and South American faces; its metro evokes Hispanic colonialism: Buenos Aires, Tetuán, Cuzco, Colombia, Guzmán El Bueno. If you have seen his films, it's almost impossible not to think of Pedro Almodóvar when one is there because he has immortalised, and satirised, Madrid perfectly.

My stay was brief and I decided to visit the contemporary art museum, Museo Reina Sofía, which had an interesting exhibition of the British architect Richard Rogers, complete with scale models of his past and future projects. I can understand why people get excited about scale model architecture because it always appears so utopian and fantastic. Far better than real life. Saturday evening I had an excellent, three-course meal with half-a-bottle of Rioja for only 8 euros at an unpretentious, small yet welcoming restaurant in the Chueca called El Comunista. It was packed with Madrileños and I believe I was the only non-native Spaniard in the place. The women on the adjacent table looked at me with bald curiosity to see what I was going to do with my bread basket before the first course arrived. I pour equal amounts of olive oil and vinegar onto the side-plate, then sprinkle it liberally with pepper. I then break the bread apart and use this as a dip. I think it's an Andalucian custom, because they don't do it in Valencia nor in Castille. It is a ritual of the lone diner, because you can't pretend to reorder the contacts list on your mobile phone forever while waiting for an adequate flan.

On Sunday I visited the Jardín Botánico and afterwards went to the Retiro park and drank coffee while reading the colour supplement of El País. My neighbours - an English couple in their fifties who evidently worked in Madrid - were lunching with visiting friends. In Spain there are two lunches: the first one between 10am and 11am (almuerzo) and the second one between 2pm and 4pm (la comida). He droned on from arsehole to breakfast time about some tedious aspect of middle management strategy while his partner, a confection of low-lighted streaks and a top that was far too décolleté for her particular station, chirped away about shopping possibilities. Anyway, she was careless with her coleslaw and they were dive-bombed from every direction - in two seconds flat - by an army of urban sparrows, consequently deserting their table in a Thames Estuary panic.

It was Tippi Hedren.
It was Almodóvar.

Madrid did not fail me.

un año de amor

2009-09-30T23:52:00.029+02:00

The first film is by an Italian singer called Mina (Mazzini) who was a dominant figure on the charts of her native country during the 1960s and 1970s. She was noted both for the agility of her soprano voice and her image as an emancipated woman. Here, in 1965, she sings the original song later performed and popularised by Spain's Luz Casal. The subtlety of the original lyrics - adapted by Casal - is a more sensual evocation; more essential because its naked passion wears an highly inflammable post-war peignoir. Passion, in pre-1980s Spain, was not merely discouraged by El Caudillo but in some cases a prosecutable act. People could not throw parties without first informing the Guardia Civil a week beforehand. Crowds potentially breed insurgent behaviour. And the spontaneous dancing of homosexuals.

Mina is intense, memorable and strikes some inspired profile poses that remind one of Françoise Hardy and Sandie Shaw's early Epic label days, as in the rare mono experience of Long Walk Home. Mina's relationship with the camera is interesting in the way that she distances herself from it with silhouetted privacy and a certain stillness. (Stillness, in cinema, is always the key.) The head slightly bobs in a way that tells us that she was once the doyenne of late night Milanese coffee bars, but she is within the song. Most artists never do this - it goes entirely against their nature. As anyone testifying to the sight of Mick Jagger trying to occupy a square-kilometre of stage, simultaneously, will tell you. Mina was a good actress, and an Italian amante who challenged the Vatican with her dyed blonde hair, smoking habits and taking up with married men. She was banned from the Italian airwaves, yet her popularity prevailed and the RAI had to make a U-turn.

In the second film we see the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's representation of this popular song as performed by Miguel Bosé in the film "Tacónes Lejanos" ("High Heels").

Recordarás estos días felices

Recordarás el sabor de mis besos

E intentarás en solo momento

Que significa un año de amor

This is contemporary Spain and the tranvestite or drag queen has publicly reclaimed the sentiments and the experience of this song as her own. In this clip Bosé playing the character of Letal performs the song to Marisa Paredes (as Becky de Páramo) in the vertically-enhanced image of her as his idol as she appeared in the 1960s. His stylistic interpretation is far more provocative than the original Páramo would have been allowed to be. She approves. Enjoys it, even. If that were someone's impression of me, I'd probably buy the next round of drinks and throw in some chicken-in-a-basket.

The drag queen is often construed as parody - and some are - but I don't see it as always being the case. The drag queen, who has been with us since possibly before the dawn of time, is not always an highly crayoned - and padded - interpretation of a genetic female. Some drag queens are neither "male" nor "female" -- but a force majeure. They're the ones we remember.

The Spanish word for transvestitite is "travesti" - which comes off like "travesty". In Spanish "parodia". Parody. Therefore, technically, and according to Latin, if you're a drag queen you are - by virtue of definition - incapable of originality. This might well be the circular conundrum of the Venetian crossdresser. While Latin is a very solid language it sometimes smacks of inflexibility.

autofellatio: 1976

2009-09-28T22:57:00.019+02:00

“Ahora expuesto como un arquitecto de engaño transparente, me retorcí en ébéniste jacobino cuando el Doctor Friskney comenzó a recitar mis cartas al Sr. Potter.

“Querido Sr. Potter

Lamentablemente, James no podrá asistir a la escuela durante una semana porque ha sido diagnosticado por el doctor de impétigo avanzado del labio inferior que, como sabrá, es muy contagioso.”

Sra Maker.”

“Querido Sr. Potter

El impétigo ahora se ha extendido rápidamente al labio superior y sus environs [alrededores] inmediatos. La pomada se le aplica tres veces al día, pero durante este tiempo, lo sentimos es poco aconsejable permitirle que vuelva a la escuela al menos durante otra semana. Estámos preocupados por su nariz.

Sra Maker.”

Mi madre preguntó: - ¿Qué significa 'environs'? –

Imprudentemente, me reí. Tres pares de ojos se fijaron en mi con una mirada glacial. Era la segunda reunión con el principal de la escuela primaria que yo asistía. Odié cada ladrillo que construyó aquella escuela y, recíprocamente, esta me odió a mi. Tenía que viajar en dos autobuses y dos trenes por una red de transporte desintegrada para llegar hasta allí.

El Doctor Friskney fue un incordio, con callos del tamaño de granadas que insistió en invitar a su hija desconcertada para atender a pruebas de deportes. Ella tenía una ambiopía, así que el bádminton competitivo tuvo que ser una verdadera lucha para poder disfrutar. La cosa era seria: una infracción más y me deberían haber expulsado. En los seis meses anteriores decidí a apartarme un tiempo de la prisión de máxima seguridad

que me educaba y pasé mis vacaciones viajando en un tren de cercanías. Como las parcelas de suicidio de Selsdon cedieron el paso al desierto de Betjeman, pasé las horas atiborrándome del chocolate barato, leyendo a Jacqueline Susann y Radclyffe Hall.

- Tengo otras nueve cartas - dijo Friskney, dirigiéndose a mí con una mezcla de la desaprobación y la diversión astuta de alguien que sabe que te tiene pendiente sobre

el abismo.

- Evidentemente, eres un cuentista. Estudiarás latín para el próximo mes -
Latín. Yo prefería trabajar en la cadena de producción de una fábrica de alpiste, separando las cáscaras, a memorizar las declinaciones de una lengua muerta.

La primera vez que estuve expulsado fué debido a que puse en el torno - durante la clase metalistería - el pelo de un admirador de Alice Cooper, con ayuda de John Galliano, adolescente que más tarde hizo la causa-celebre de la alta costura Parisiense. Esta acción fue provocada, no por el hecho simple de que el chico rechazó escuchar a "Frankenstein" por las New York Dolls, sino también porque su pelo era más largo que el mío. Consiguientemente, todos los alumnos que asistieron a clase de metalistería fueron obligados a llevar una redecilla por cortesía del Consejo de Educación. La vista de treinta alumnos que luchaban con aquella complejidad elástica era divertidísima, y yo fuí el Enemigo Público Número Uno hasta el día que me la marchaba.

Además, hubo un incidente cuando Galliano visitó al capellán escolar en su oficina en el primer piso para hablar de un asunto espiritual. Subí a un adyacente saliente estrecho de la ventana, andando atrás y adelante – y detrás de la cabeza del capellán – como si yo fuera un comprador indeciso. Cuando Friskney anunció esta nueva ordenanza de

seguridad de la etapa en la asamblea comencé a reírme sin control y fuí escoltado fuera, o mejor dicho arrastrado a la fuerza por dos soldados de infantería cristiana – uno de ellos el que yo había seducido un año antes en el campo de estudios de la escuela en Gales.

Sin embargo, se me ocurre que en mi escuela cada alumno tenía, y probablemente todavía debe, ponerse una redecilla por mi obsesión agresiva de las New York Dolls.

Esto, considero que es mi contribución a la guerra de Punk.

En un sentido fuí al menos salvado, en que nadie había adivinado el hecho que a menudo bajaba del tren en Forest Hill, antes de llegar a mi casa, para quedar con mi novio recién estrenado. Dave tenía veintiséis años y era instalador de moquetas. Naturalmente, tenia

permiso de conducir. Yo he nacido para ser pasajero, ya que no soy un motorista y esto es mi primer requisito en alguien que desea ofrecerme la amistad. Estas citas secretas, que duraron casí un año, fueron estrictamente ilegales por su parte y si las hicieran salir a luz pues seguramente habría sido detenido con el placer de su majestad.

Me gusta aquella frase: implica que la Reina británica saca la satisfacción a la vista de la gente que encarcelaba. Una vez me llevó a Putney como asistente - otra ausencia del registro escolar - pero tropecé con un rollo de Axminster que se desplegaba, embistiendo de cabeza hacia una vitrina de cristal atesorada. Milagrosamente, yo salí ileso aunque su dueño aullaba de pena, inútilmente tratando de reparar dos piezas de una copa flauta de su 25 aniversario de Boda.

Me mandó sentarme en el coche y jugar con el encendedor. Nosotros rompimos cuando lo descubrí besando alguien más en el cuarto superior del pub de Green Man en la Calle de Great Portland. Lancé mi Gin-tonic en su cara y me marché, ampliamente protegido por el séquito de las Elephant & Castle Boot Girls. Siguió el enfado y trató de chocar contra nosotros con su Vauxhall Viva, subiendose al bordillo en una tentativa de matarme. Sabíamos tener pasión en aquellos días.

El verano 1976 hacia una ola de calor. Los pavimentos de Londres chisporrotearon con un calor desconocido desde que el Rey George V se tiraba pedos en el trono, ocasionando una plaga de hormigas volantes que abundaron en ejércitos por las grietas, entre las losas. Asfalto horneado y ablandado. Cada día fue un día perfecto para secar las ropas en las cuerdas de Brixton y fueron adornadas con un technicolor de pantalónes acampanados y chalecos tiernamente personalizados. Reggae salía por los altovoces de los coches a todo volumen, vibrando los riñones de los peatones que pasaban. Los afros se multiplicaron cada vez más altos para desafiar a la gravedad, cada exponente compitiendo hacerse el Ejemplo Fino. La piel negra manó en minishorts amarillos ácidos que languidecieron en el capó de un Ford Capri. Al pasar por las viviendas adosadas no fumigadas que una vez fueron magníficas, muchachas fumaban, reajustando su pelo sin parar. Los estéreos resonaron por ventanas abiertas con el sonido de las Sex Pistols: visceral, violento e implacable; las guitarras neumáticas que atestan los oídos de oyentes confiados con el equivalente de audio de polla dura. En la radio, "TVC15" por David Bowie - alucinógena y disparatada - combatía por cobertura radiofónica y la civilization con Maureen McGovern y "The Continental". Estuve presente en el nacimiento y en el entierro de la discoteca.

Los sábados marcaron la peregrinación por la King's Road en Chelsea que fue, si no el nacimiento de Punk, pues su Broadway. La juventud suburbana y semidislocada entraron en tropel aquí de todos los puntos cardinales para hacer compras en su mercado de ropa, arriesgandose en el templo santo de Vivienne Westwood - la boutique Seditionaries - e impresionar a los contribuyentes burgueses de Sloane Square con su despreocupación, nihilismo y sus imperdibles. Pero sobre todo vinieron para ser vistos. Pienso que el clamor popular de punk era más una revolución suburbana en vez de una que se originaba desde el centro. Aquellos que vinieron de la periferia o del quinto pino de una experimento socialista y de la bancarrota necesitaron la rebelíon más que nadie. El punk fue un movimiento de música pero sin política, a menos que pienses que la anarquía sea un sistema de creencia, y esto quedó en nada después de tres años, se acabó.

Sin embargo, el Punk nos dió una herencia importante: alguien podría formar un grupo. Incluso yo. La actitud era todo que importaba y para ser un músico ya no se requirió que entendiese como tocar un acorde de tercera disminuida. No se puede adivinar a qué se parecería el paisaje musical hoy si la Revolución de Punk nunca hubiera sucedida. Seguramente, Rap - que a mi parece el equivalente de Punk en el árbol genealógico - nunca podría haber sido inventado. Una metáfora moderna corporativa para el Punk sería los Vikingos que vuelven para despojarnos de nuestra cretona, convertiendo nuestras sensibilidades atrás a la sencillez y el funcionalismo, y era de tan gran alcance como la reconquista sueca de los 1980.

Vagué por la King's Road en mis sandalias plásticas, bolsos de Oxford y camiseta Ramones con Tony. Tony era un chico anglo turco que compartió mi entusiasmo por David Bowie y T Rex y a quien encontré como un amigo de la escuela primaria. La anglicanización de su nombre de Tahir le quedó bien porque parecía como un Tony Curtis jovencito. Era ligeramente más corto que yo, un poco más rollizo, de naturaleza alegre y con un sentido del humor penetrante. Vivió en Ilderton Road con su madre temible – al encontrarla ví por qué el imperio otomano se hizo tan poderoso. Fuimos buenos amigos y holgazaneábamos en la tienda de cuero ubicada en el mercado de King's Road que era frecuentado por punks, gays y fetichistas.

Los propietarios eran un par de teatreras que tenían cuarenta años y conocidos como Sr. y Srs. Fenner. El Sr. Fenner era masculino en el estilo gay de San Francisco: bigote, pelo corto pero saliendo del mostrador a revelar chaparreras de piel. La Sra. Fenner era una marica de mucha pluma y la primera persona que encontré que fuera 'genéticamente afeminada'. Para algunos, la vida es vivida como un esbozo de comedia prolongada del que ellos - y nosotros - son incapaces de escaparse. Sobrepeso y permanentemente sin aliento, se martirizó con la trombosis de vena profunda. La personalidad había sido rendida hace mucho tiempo al objetivo del entretenimiento público. Cada oración pronunciada comenzó y se terminó con exclamación - que es enormemente fatigoso, sobre todo para el oyente. Sin embargo, era la matriarca y consejera a los abandonados y mohicanos que no compraron nada pero se tendieron sobre la mercancía como vivas decoraciones.

Sus primeras palabras dirigidas a mí fueron:
- ¡¿por qué es tan interminable mi castigo?!

Una pregunta que prohibía contestar como claramente adoró cada minuto insoportable de ello. Sentí como si estuviera atrapado en la fila delantera del circo del miedo: hipnotizado por una cobra de la marioneta cuyos ojos no podían ser acomodados por sus cuencas.

- ¡Trombosis a mi edad! Solo tengo 35 años! Nunca sabrás la agonía! -

Hizo una pausa al susurrar a una costurera itinerante belga llamada Yvette que trabajaba detrás de una cortina pesada que la escondió de la Oficina de Extranjeros. Entonces, inclinándose a través del mostrar se me confió:

- ¡ No digas nada al Sr. Fenner pero no sé cuanto podré yo seguir así ¡ ¿puedes tú explicarme por qué es tan interminable mi castigo? -

No sé que fue del Sr. y Sra. Fenner, si fueron arrastrados por aquel contagio horrible de los años 1980 que nos robaba tantas lumbreras de la moda, o si abrieron una tienda en el Castro, no hay contestación. Lo que sé es que el mercado ya no existe. Los punks comenzaron a dispersarse antes de desaparecer totalmente, retirándose al lugar de dónde vinieron para hacer una nueva generación de padres. Aquellos que siguieron luchando la batalla se murieron de sobredosis, se quedaron calvo, o avanzaron en un medio de comunicaciónes que rápidamente globalizó el mundo.

El otoño llegó con tormentas impresionantes. De repente, las sandalias plásticas que una vez me aseguraban viaje a través de Londres se deshicieron. El primer trimestre entró en el calendario y llegó 'Disco Mysticism' en forma de canción implacable de Abba: “Dancing Queen”. “Dancing Queen” no es simplemente una canción, sino una tiranía y un implemento de tortura muy eficaz.

- Tu eres la reina del baile, joven y dulce, sólo cuarenta y seis años -

Ya comenzaba el último año escolar.”

© James Maker 2009

English version of this chapter extract available here.

can artists create art by doing nothing?

2009-09-25T20:49:00.025+02:00

“I like living, breathing better than working,” Marcel Duchamp famously declared. “My art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral; it’s a sort of constant euphoria.”

Andrew Gallix, editor of 3AM Magazine, founder of the boutique publishing imprint 3AM Press and lecturer at the Sorbonne in Paris wrote an article for the Guardian, reproduced at his blog, titled "Can Artists Create Art By Doing Nothing?"

My thought is: Absolutely. Some artists should not create at all, thus leaving us with - and I can express this better in Spanish - una sabrosa de la herencia incumplida. To be an artist and yet to produce nothing is the exquisite state-of-being for the true aesthete. And the audacious. Life takes precedence over canvas and parchment. Live. To produce nothing requires endless resources of self-discipline. It is the practice of not creating a work that is anything less than exceptional. To position oneself at such a point is not, in my opinion, a form of supreme laziness - it is an act of love and of homage. You might compare it to being forever on the verge of orgasm without ever consummating it because the arc of release will not be magnificent enough.

Of course, there is a superb vanity in actually promoting works which one has not yet begun to realise - and which may never be realised. But then titles, ideas and the execution of a prècis may captivate an audience in a way that its accomplishment might always disappoint. It is salon cock-teasing; enigma.

I would argue that, as awards are given out to people who have exemplified themselves in the field of creative arts, there should be a category for those who have not produced any works that year - in acknowledgement of an aesthetic humanitarianism towards their readership or supporters. Discretion. This might seem chimerical, but if you have ever laboured through the leaden syntax of alcoholic prose crafted by a writer in the throes of domestic crisis and sentimentality, you might reconsider. Tracey Emin, the British artist of Deptford fame was less relevant - overnight - once she became comfortable with Egyptian cotton and never again had to worry about her council tax bills. That is what success does. It can separate the artist from his or her work.

mugbook

2009-09-25T14:06:00.009+02:00

MySpacers sometimes become three-dimensional. Author with Joao Mugeiro, Portugal 2009.

Facebook promotes itself as a social networking tool and is an highly successful global enterprise. Rather like MySpace but perhaps more personal. For example, you cannot pre-approve comments by friends posted to your Wall. So one must be a little careful with people in case, logging in with your first coffee of the morning - the facial expression vaguely expectant and beatific - someone has daubed:
"JAMES MAKER IS A CUNT".

Disappointingly, on Facebook one cannot customise or crayon one's homepage with a vermilion sidebar or select a fancy font for your Notes page (Facebook's blog). It's dry, corporate, unrelentingly verdana and does not facilitate artists - as MySpace does.

Facebook, in practice, is not really about social networking or connecting. Its growing purpose is to archive oneself online. There is nothing wrong with that. We're all copy-typists curating our own photo galleries, posting status marquee updates and participating in applications that test one's adeptness at identifying the sleeve of a 1980s UB40 album. However, you use these applications at your peril, because one's failure to answer correctly is immediately dispatched as a pop-up notification to everyone on your list. In the generic sense of the word it is meant to be fun - like chain emails that contain 'hilarious' cartoon images and multiple exclamation marks - but in truth it is degradation and continuous horror. Due to the cross-fertilisation of family, friends and contacts it's an effective tool in monitoring somebody. Spying. I prefer to compartmentalise my life. In other words, to be selfish.

Popularity is arithmetic. A Facebooker who has collected an excessive tally of friends in the frenzied attempt at self-validity is naturally more fascinating, more socially mobile than you. Converse to the spirit of Facebook I enjoy de-friending. Diminishing my friend base. It is one of the few pleasures this social networking tool offers. In truth, you are purging people for whom you exist purely as a unit of their cyber-narcissism. But also it is a way to exercise pòwer over one's dominion. Ex-friends have flipped through their online rollodex of face thumbnails - all 850 of them - and fired off an email baldly demanding:
"WHY DID YOU LEAVE?"
Caprice.

I plan to leave Facebook at some point because its overall effect is encouraging me to become less available. With a little effort I might even reach the ecstasy of becoming unavailable.

The definition between virtual relationships and orthodox relationships is being redefined by random communication, accessability and the democracy of the internet. In principle, I think it is positive because its nature is essentially libertarian and grants greater individual freedom. On occasion, 'real' friendships can be forged through MySpace and Facebook; that is, people whom go on to become three-dimensional. It's very last century but nothing quite beats uncorking a bottle of wine and having a good old face-to-face natter.

camille paglia

2009-09-24T16:03:00.016+02:00

“Male homosexuality, pushing outward into risky, alien territory, is progressive and – overall - intellectually stimulating.”

Camille Paglia - Italianamerican pagan and cultural iconoclast strongly identifies with gay men. To the extent that she is often attracted to them - from the perspective of a gay male. Professor Paglia has been upturning conventional thinking in academe since her collegiate youth in Upstate New York while writing Sexual Personae - her fearless, illuminating expedition into Western culture. She’s also a huge fan of Madonna. Her office at the University of Arts at Philadelphia is distinguished by two features: a Babylonian erection of books and a colour photograph of La Ciccione in a bustier that could compete with America's nuclear deterrent.

The nemesis of white, upper-middle class feminists and Suzanne Vega aficionados alike, Paglia rejects French Theory - Foucault knew fuck-all - that constituted the lit bateau of 1970s feminism, instead embracing Nietzsche's postmodernisn and divorcing herself from what she perceived to be that school’s increasingly anti-male ideology. She was instantly unfashionable. Banished to the Siberia of the academic, it took her twenty years to return.

Believing that feminism has led men into becoming contemporary eunuchs, Paglia wants to reclaim masculinity to reinform the political correction we have arrived at today:

“We want a hard penis. We want masculine vigour. To men I say: ‘Get It On!’ To women I say, ‘Deal With It!’

Well, one doesn't want to be strapped into a time machine and shot backwards to an age of archaic, Sicilian machismo but neither does one wish to see men in American Tan tights all the time. She expresses a desire to "restore the penis back to its former position of centre-stage." I know a few people who would gladly put in free overtime to help Ms Paglia with the hydraulic crane. They are all female.

She was universally upbraided in the furore surrounding her comments on date rape:
“The uncontrollable aspect of male sexuality is part of what makes sex interesting. And yes, sometimes it can lead to rape in some situations.”

I think what alarmed people was the declaration that men's penises somehow possess an unrestrainable autonomy that operates independently from the will. In some cases, it does. Moreover, there was a widespread misapprehension that she was condoning rape. In truth, she was defending the quintessential freedom of women (or men, for that matter) to wear a micro-skirt, to get drunk and to hitch a ride in Ted Bundy’s Volkswagen Beetle - providing they acknowledge the risk and accept the onus of personal responsibility in doing so.

If contemporary liberalism has been untruthful to women about the world - and about men - Paglia volubly reminds us of that fact. She examines gender, sexuality and feminism through the prism of art and cultural history, as set forth in one of her best books, Sex, Art, And American Culture. On popular music she notes that even Greek Tragedy never gave full expression to the Dionysian impulse - the uninhibited, irrational and orgiastic self - until rock’n’roll squeezed into its first box-fresh leather catsuit. That’s something you’d rarely hear within Viognier-sipping intellectual circles. Further, here is a woman who unselfconsciously namechecks Hitchcock’s The Birds and Proust in the same breath.

Sound bite queen, 'outlaw' polemicist, some of her best work is while extemporising over the telephone - possibly going into raptures over Keith Richard. The fraternity and the media is undecided as to whether La Paglia is an inspired tour guide or one of the great intellectuals of the late 20th century. What is certain is that she is one hell of a Motormouth Maybelline.

fellini: roma

2009-09-23T22:38:00.029+02:00

Federico Fellini's Roma (1972) is for some, one of his more 'difficult' films. It is a film made by a director in his sixth decade and, therefore, at the age when a significant minority of men desert their wives and off-spring to take up with a younger model - in a convenient town flat - in order to re-assert their virility before the onset of prostate complications. Fellini did not do that. He made Roma.

Roma, while bearing all the hallmarks of the Fellini language of neo-realism - satire, luxuriance of imagery, the surreal, the baroque and a John Galliano-style fantasy procession of haute couture whore-noviciates - is rooted in a lamenting, romantic nostalgia. A coda for a post-war Rome that had ceased to exist in the years following his initial arrival there as a child from Adriatic Rimini. It is an arrivederci to the 1960s and lays the runway carpet for the coming of the more uncertain, 'gender-confusion' age of the 1970s. In point of fact, the only people who profited by that decade - apart from Elton John and prog-rock musicians who amplified finger-cymbals to an audience of thousands - were effete, high street unisex hairdressers who worked on their toes while providing lavish compliments.

This poster image in its deliberately crude black and orange pantone features not one of the film's main characters but instead an uncredited actress whose celluloid appearance lasts less than thirty seconds. Anna Maria Pescatori. But those seconds in which she imprints the screen with her conviction, defiance and weltzschmerz as a prositute on the Via Appia is electrifying. Bella bruta straordinaria. She is the Roma of the film and represents the defiled Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia, Wolf-mother to Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of that city who were fathered by the God of war, Mars.
It is entirely fitting that Fellini elected Pescatori as the poster-star of this film. On no account would you want to mess with her.

I have never been to Rome. Which is strange considering I have a long-held love of that città aperta - both in the imagination through its cinema and in its history as the center of an empire. A realm without which an European civilisation would never have arrived at pesto -infused opulence, central heating and very fast, red cars.

hubert selby jr.

2009-09-23T16:05:00.096+02:00

Available on DVD is a documentary film titled It/ll Be Better Tomorrow [sic] about the American writer Hubert Selby Jr. who died in 2004. It is narrated by Robert Downey Jr. and features interviews with Lou Reed, Ellen Burstyn and Henry Rollins. Selby is best known for his 1964 novel Last Exit To Brooklyn which is a compendium of six stories, which may be read individually or as a whole, set in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn in the 1950s. It is a breathtaking work of transgressive fiction that is as convulsively beautiful and tender as it is brutal and visceral. In storytelling the lives of prostitutes, drug addicts, transvestites, gangs and sailors (some of whom Selby knew personally while working as an itinerant) Last Exit To Brooklyn is authentically epic - by virtue of its uncompromising humanity - in the modest scale of its characters. It is written in Selby's own idiosyncractic style which, composed in stream of consciousness, dispenses with grammar. Apostrophes and quotation marks are absent - dialogue is transmitted in upper-case - giving the narrative a frisson of urgency, like a missive being smashed out on the Remington from Hell.

Originally published by Grove Press in America, who also published William S. Burroughs and Henry Miller, the British rights to the manuscript were acquired by Boyars and Calder. In 1967, they were defendants in a successful obscenity trial brought against them by a Conservative MP outraged by the 'profanity' and the 'degenerate behaviour' depicted within its pleasing Pop Art jacket-cover. There is delicious satire in that people who monopolise the airwaves in vein-necked protest - the lips pursed in surburban pique - are sometimes the very people who enjoy being beaten to within a dint of faint in a latex mask by Great Aunt Edith's hairbrush. Morality is infinitely subjective.

Selby has published several other books: Requiem for a Dream (1978) which, like Last Exit to Brooklyn, was adapted into a major film, together with The Room (1971) - which he cites as his 'darkest work' - and The Demon (1976). For most of his life he battled heroin addiction, depression and health problems that related from a lung operation to cure tuberculosis. The literary establishment obstinately resisted any formal acknowledgement of Selby - notwithstanding his exceptional contribution to modern literature - but if one may be judged by one's supporters and fans - he was a Great.

the high heel manifesto

2009-09-22T12:02:00.010+02:00

Author at home.

In a 21st century world where the issue of sexual equality is still far from attaining its goal - especially in the developing nations - those at the political forefront of this campaign see its advance as a social and economic question. While undoubtedly true - because we know that sexual politics is not a burning debate in the sub-Sahara - I feel that this approach is not yielding the desired effect as swiftly as it might. Part of the problem is democracy itself. Change is often predicated upon the galvanisation of one group who appeal repeatedly to the other until it reaches the upper echelons of government, or a court of human rights. This is, of course, correct - but it is also prolonged and tedious.

People are often united by a shared endurance. In Britain, as the heavens rained Luftwaffe bombs, complete strangers would prepare each other an omelette, escort one through unforeseen child-birth and, importantly, provide the harmony to your baritone of The Man I Love Is Up In The Gallery. The British are never at their best than when on the operating table. So if one wants to effect social or political change in a timely manner, it is logical to devise a situation where people may free associate through a common experience.

To this end I would suggest that a National High Heel Day is inaugurated. I believe that the 'totalitarian' forcing of men into high heel shoes for one day of the year would - literally - elevate everybody while representing a stylistic means to social progress. A catalyst, perhaps, that would also remind the complacent and the chauvinist what it is to live life a little dangerously - as many women across the planet already must. In any case, many heterosexual men covet the high heeled shoe, so why shouldn't they be availed the opportunity of becoming an exponent themselves ?

As the National High Heel Day approaches husbands, boyfriends and fathers countrywide would receive a notification requiring them to attend a designated shoe store to be fitted with a 5-inch heel patent leather court shoe. There would, obviously, be exemptions. Anyone with a mobility problem would be able to call an Appeals Hotline which I - at no cost to the tax payer - would be prepared to supervise myself. Defaulters - anyone intentionally defying the spirit of this national holiday, or indeed caught running away in sports trainers, would be accompanied back to a participating stockist and forced into a Defaulter Special: a 6-inch heel, winklepicker slingback.
There is always room in the world for spite.

In my opinion, and contrary to the notion that such a plan would in fact anger construction workers and door-to-door salesmen, I think it would engender unexpected acts of positive, individual expression and impromptu abandonment in commuter train carriages. Naturally, there would be a few broken necks, but compared to the potential advancement involved, this is small beer.
Surely, it's got to be better than standing earnestly outside the Houses of Parliament - in a perpetual drizzle - stitched to a placard ?

anti-social

2009-09-20T16:13:00.029+02:00

Theoretically I have lost two potential new friends because I'm an unrepentant smoker. But then an association with anyone who projects their caring, informed - usually middle class - values on you is not offering friendship, but a conditional acceptance. That is if you wish to be accepted into a politically-correct social gulag. I have to come despise 'well-meaning' far left- wingers as much as far right-wingers - they are the same breed: authoritarian zealots.

I smoke because I enjoy smoking, even in the knowledge that it may probably kill me. I have always believed that certain flourishes, gestures and the execution of a point, the bon-mot conclusion of a topic is enhanced by the curling plume and the saeta of sensual exhalation of smoke. It is romantic. It is not about being clever - cleverness is for the mediocre. In any case, the Anglosphere can no longer grasp this aesthetic, yet it bore so many stylists and 'drawing-room acrobats' in the last century and beyond. The French - whom heroically have always refused to countenance imported ethics - do.

I was at the coast a short while ago to attend a fiesta and was introduced to two friends of a Spanish friend of mine. We were dining at a table in a restaurant where men were puffing away at the bar. It was affable enough to begin with: the exchange of inconsequential pleasantries that prelude what may or may not become a chemistry, a connection. (Rarely so - they're fanatical about coffee and I don't do coffee after midday.) Until I took out my lighter and packet of Fortuna. The atmosphere changed instantly. I may as well have placed a pack of playing cards depicting zoophilia on the shared vinyl geometry of the table-cloth.

The woman, a librarian in her fifties, henceforth spoke only in valenciano - which I do not understand, as neither do many Spanish - while assiduously holding eye contact. Eye contact is pointless if there is no comprehension. The male friend gave me a short sermon on the evils of cigarette smoking - while I lit up - stabbing the health advisory on the front of my packet : "fumar perjudica gravemente su salud y la de los que están a su alrededor". [Smoking harms you and those around you.] "Why do you smoke?" he finished, interrogatorily, when an adequate soup arrived.

As we all sipped, I asked him, in the most off-hand manner possible, "What do you think about when you're masturbating and about to cum?" Spoons hovered in mid-air, eyebrows arched and lips receded as, pop-eyed with incredulity at my casual intrusiveness, he stuttered, "I - I - think that is a very personal question!"

"Yes, but no more inappropriate than yours."

Some people.....

monstersexuality: jeffrey dahmer

2009-09-20T12:56:00.023+02:00

Originally published in 1999 by Pure Magazine who invited me to write an essay on serial killers.

"It was just an incessant, never-ending desire to have someone, at whatever cost. Someone good looking...really good looking...and it just filled my thoughts all day long."

Quite.

In the closing hours of July 22, 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer, a 31 year-old gay man and factory worker, began a long confession. The confession - delivered in a colourless and mechanical monologue - led police to charge him with the murders of seventeen young men and boys. For Jeffrey Dahmer the odyssey was over. For the media and a tectonically-shocked Milwaukee, the drama was about to unfold around a TV dinner.

Two miles distant from the interrogation room in which Dahmer was being held, the county forensic unit was in the process of painstakingly cataloguing the evidence and the debris of a secret life that had spiralled ever downward into fetid, violent fantasy. Dahmer's apartment on North 25th street resembled nothing less than Giotto's vision of hell on the wall of the Scrovegni chapel at Padua: a gallery to the fallen; a glorious, visceral depiction of devils feasting on the intestines of angels.

Necrophilia and cannibalism were an important component to the crimes.

The police discovered two freshly killed corpses in the bath-tub, a freezer stuffed with internal organs and a refrigerator containing the decapitated head of a young man. The bedroom closet revealed four human heads, seven skulls, two complete skeletons and an ominous fifty-gallon drum awash with acid which testified to the dismembered remains of several males.

What leads men to kill – not once - but repeatedly? In my research for a proposed documentary on Jeffrey Dahmer’s descent from seemingly unremarkable, middle-class origins to a catastrophic dénouement I interviewed various people who knew him. Their collective description offers up the profile of an ordinary, polite, reserved loner. Someone you might meet once and have difficulty recalling. A dissembler, socially passive and utterly lacking in any kind of mutuality. In other words, boring. These qualities lent him an anonymity that allowed him to murder in his very own community without arousing suspicion. Serial killers are rarely cocktail party raconteurs.

Psychologists and criminologists believe that the capacity to kill addictively is developed through a process whose factors must all be present before a person can become truly dangerous. Their opinion is that our behaviour is determined by both genetic and social factors. Some people are born with genes that give them a predisposition to aggression and violence. For people with a predisposition to violence, traumatic events in childhood such as physical and sexual abuse or neglect serve only to intensify that tendency. Having not developed the coping mechanisms necessary to deal effectively with those issues, they fail to reach emotional maturity.

Serial killers are, by their very nature, emotionally retarded. Raised in a thoroughly middle-class rural American setting, Dahmer’s parents were undemonstrative in their affections. His father, a devoutly religious research chemist was rarely at home and at the brink of divorce with his mother - an often bed-bound depressive who left the family home, taking her younger sibling when Dahmer was aged seventeen.

This can lead to dissociation. Distrusting, insecure and seeking to protect himself the boy suppresses his feelings toward those around him. This begins to preclude the possibility of developing meaningful relationships with other people. Fuelled by rage, low self-esteem and loneliness he retreats into a world of comforting fantasies where he is in control. For fledgling serial killers the issue of control becomes the major theme in their lives. The friendless, young Dahmer would roam the neighbourhood looking for road-kills which he would eviscerate and attempt to reconstruct; enjoying both the power and the control that this activity brought him and, perhaps, subconsciously seeking to earn the approval of his chemist-father.

While his peers might have fantasised about the school’s cheerleaders and baseball jocks, a teenaged Dahmer happened to masturbate whilst [unintentionally] thinking about the dissection of the foetal pig in biology class, or the dead dog he had acidified and deconstructed. Thus, as these thoughts intruded upon him, he inadvertently conditioned himself to become aroused by that imagery. Unusual, certainly, and the mystery of how we develop our sexual responses - aberrant or otherwise - is not entirely solved. However, since it isn’t imaginable that there is such a thing as, for example, a foetal pig fetish gene; a latex brain lesion or a high heel hormone, we know that our sexual response is not something we evolve biologically, it is something we learn.

In the course of adolescence, the mingling of desire for control and an emerging sexual need creates an appetite to act out newly emergent fantasies which, unrealised, will become increasingly more violent and specific. As Dahmer sexually matured the focus of his stimulation shifted from the compliance of inanimate creatures to the compliance of inanimate people.

Inevitably, for the serial killer, fantasy becomes more beloved, more cherished than reality. Immersed in this world, it was an eighteen-year old Jeffrey Dahmer who, finding himself alone one summer’s night at the family home in rural Ohio, took his first steps towards madness. He took his father’s Oldsmobile for a spin and picked up a hitchhiker. Back at the house they drank beer and lifted weights until his guest made motions to leave. For Dahmer, his fantasy was over before it had begun. He bludgeoned the hitchhiker to death and took him to the crawlspace beneath the house where, over the following days, he had sex with the corpse before disposal.

During his confession thirteen years later, Jeffrey Dahmer stated that he believed that if it weren’t for that one impulsive night, the other sixteen murders may never have occurred. I would somehow doubt this.

Having flunked both high school and college, his newly remarried father enlisted him into the US Army in the hope of reforming his son’s diffidence. When Dahmer was discharged for continued alcoholism it was agreed that he should relocate to his grandmother’s home in Milwaukee to start afresh. There followed nine years of comparative tranquility where, as argued by the defence at his trial, he made a monumental effort to rid himself of the compulsions that continually surged up into his mind, threatening to upturn that relatively peaceable existence.

In his Herculean struggle to satisfy his urges and quash his murderousness, his behaviour became progressively odd, then dangerous. He stole a department store mannequin upon which to vent his expression before moving on to gay bathhouses, where he would drug patrons in order to have congress with their unconscious bodies. When this practice became inconvenient to him, he acquired his own apartment where he developed a modus operandi of approaching young men with the offer of cash for photographic modelling. On returning to his apartment they were swiftly drugged with sleeping tablets as a prelude to strangulation.

Potential serial killers seek out specific kinds of pornography and literature to contain or supplement their compulsions. Dahmer, however, used material that, apart from pornography of a very conventional nature, might otherwise have been innocuous. He would repeatedly watch segments of The Exorcist III; The Return of the Jedi and Hellraiser: Hellbound - all scenes where a powerful person is exercising force over another - before venturing out to find a victim. Interestingly, the document that has most inspired and influenced the imagination of serial killers is the Christian Bible; specifically the Book of Revelations with its wild, apocryphal imagery.

It should be noted here that serial killers are defined by theme rather than sexual orientation. Dahmer may have been deeply conflicted about his homosexuality, but it was his paraphilia which actually drove him to murder. Paraphilia is, in simple terms, an obsessive fetish.
[Advisory: unpleasant details]

Dahmer’s paraphilia was characterised by necrophilia: he desired to exert complete control over a totally compliant partner, an object of pleasure; by partialism (he would later use the decapitated head of an individual both as a tool to masturbation and as a remembrance of the victim); and, significantly, he was stimulated by the appearance of glistening viscera. In every instance, his victims were opened up from neck to groin - revealing the chest cavity - into which Dahmer would insert his erect penis and ejaculate among the inner organs. For him this particular activity represented nothing less than the ultimate expression of power.

The chasm between violent fantasy and actual murder is wide. A potential killer might use facilitators to distort the division between the imaginary and the real. Facilitators such as drugs or alcohol remove his inhibitions, smother any residual moral resistance and opens the dams of compulsion. Dahmer, Dennis Nilsen and John Wayne Gacy - all drank heavily in order to summon the capacity to kill. His compulsions steadily intensifying toward explosion, he acts.

Murder produces in the serial killer the feeling of being; it is the moment he most feels himself to be alive. For many serial killers, the act of murder is a gross distortion of the act of love; they are recreating the act of communion in the only way they know how. However, the release brought forth by murder is short-lived and fleeting. It is followed swiftly by those feelings contingent upon addiction. Intense feelings of loneliness, sadness and calamity envelops him again. Paradoxically, the act of murder reinforces the original trauma in the perpetrator. He falls back into ever more urgent and familiar control fantasies, the further use of facilitators, and a renewed drive to murder. It is cyclical and inescapable.

Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist attached to the University of California at Los Angeles summarises the dilemma:

"Once an individual has started to kill repetitively for sexual purposes, he is sustained in that activity by the failure of each event to satisfy him. The fantasy is, if he can only get it right, he won't have to do this anymore. But, of course, its never good enough. The reason it's never good enough is, the truth be told, an orgasm is pretty much an orgasm and it just isn't going to get any better".

Between 1988-1990 Dahmer committed eight murders. In the months leading up to the mid-summer of 1991 the killings had rapidly escalated to seventeen. He had hardly disposed of one corpse before creating another; they were, quite literally, piling up. Neighbours were, not unnaturally, beginning to complain about the unusual smells and the whine of electric sawing emanating from his apartment, and his alcoholism led to him losing his job through excessive absence. However, by this point, his logical and moral compass was incompetent and, despite an impending eviction order, his only recourse was to go out and find another person to kill.

Entrenched in his desperation to keep somebody and motivated by the terror of abandonment, Dahmer experimented with the possibility of neutralising the autonomy of his victims: to create a zombie. This delusional plan took the form of drilling a hole into the brain of an unconscious victim through which muriatic acid was injected. When this unsurprisingly resulted in the death of its unwitting subject, he experimented with the notion of temporarily reanimating the corpse for lifelike effect by substituting a live electrical wire through the same opening. Again, however delusional, it indicates that he was endeavouring to prolong the stasis of his victims so as to effect a solution to the all-too-brief course of murder, decomposition and disposal.

It was also during this period that Dahmer experimented with cannibalism. The origins of cannibalism stretch back to the beginnings of human history and its significance is not related to nourishment in the ordinary sense. Cannibalism is an issue - and these themes recur - of control and power. By ingesting parts of the victim, the killer is symbolically asserting his total dominance over that person and, in so doing, emphasising his power or 'superiority' over them. Jeffrey Dahmer consumed body parts as a means of retaining that person within him. Effectively, the person became a part of him.

The Milwaukee Police Department gathered a large collection of polaroids that Dahmer had taken of his victims. One photograph shows what appears to be fried biceps on a dinner plate, a bottle of mustard placed incongruously to one side. Others were more talismanic in their composition: two complete skeletons with the head, hands and feet still fleshed and intact, arranged in a vertical position between which stands a low table supporting four human skulls.

This was the beginning of a shrine which Dahmer had hoped to complete. The purpose of the shrine was to furnish himself with a place where he could sit and feel comfortable and, perhaps, attract a greater, darker force from which he might obtain power. In this aspect, notwithstanding the sheer destructiveness of the project, the erection of the shrine can be construed as a kind of spiritual quest.

Surprisingly, only 2% of serial killers are found insane. At his trial, Jeffrey Dahmer was found sane. This returns him from the realm of the 'monster' where, by nature of his actions, we might safely distance him, to the realm of humanity. Furthermore, he was not diagnosed as suffering from any mental disease or illness. It was the court's view, therefore, that he could have conducted his behaviour to the requirements of law had he chosen to.

Given the perilous predicament he faced shortly before the time of his arrest and his refusal to address a disastrous situation, it suggests that the possibility of choice had eclipsed him. One gains the impression of a disorganised and frenzied individual whose mind is held in the grip, and being controlled by his compulsions. Had Dahmer been possessed of a logical, functioning mind he would surely have gathered his wits, exercised his free will, disposed of the evidence and, consequently, improved his chances against capture.

Speaking of his former client, Gerald Boyle, Dahmer's defence attorney expressed to me the view that current medical opinion was unable to satisfactorily attribute definition to his client's mental status. The law in Wisconsin where he was tried, as in many other places, does not presently recognise that a person who is, in fact, mentally ill may work by logical means to achieve an end characterised by all the hallmarks of madness.

In practice, this means that the vast majority of serial killers are incarcerated in prison where they are not required to submit to further psychological evaluation. Secured within a hospital environment, it would avail medical experts of the opportunity to study them in the pursuit of advanced knowledge, and, hopefully, help to prevent the serial killers of tomorrow falling through the system undetected.

On a broader note the West, with particular regard to the United States, is apparently experiencing a growth in the phenomenon of serial killers. By the formation of the Union in the last century, the United States had already established a society and culture that openly tolerated and encouraged aggression and violence as a courageous, appropriate means of achieving ends. It continues apace. An armed society coupled with an entertainment industry that continuously emits violence-glorifying messages has generated the highest per capita homicide rate in the developed world.

Moreover, anthropologists believe that as the United States exports more of its entertainment product to the emerging markets of the developing world, we may begin to witness a higher level of social violence with, subsequently, an increased incidence of serial killing. Personally, I doubt that it is as simple as that. The FBI estimate that at any one time there are at least ten active serial killers operating within the United States who are presently undetected.

harmony korine: gummo

2009-09-20T10:43:00.014+02:00

"I'm a product of America
From the malls to the prisons
Cold Metal - it's in my blood
And in my attitude": Iggy Pop

Autumn 99 saw the release of Harmony Korine's latest film, Julien: Donkey-Boy. Made under the aegis of the Danish collective Dogme 95. Its manifesto adheres to certain creative tenets to ensure a new kind of honesty and purity in filmmaking. This includes filming in natural light, dispensing with artificial sound, shooting scenes in chronological sequence and using hand held cameras. For Korine, motivated against the mediocre, formulaic milieu of American cinema, it signifies a liberating departure from the elitism of that genre. Starring Ewen Bremner, Werner Herzog and Chloe Sevigny Julien: Donkey-Boy is an unscripted, improvised story concerning a schizophrenic teacher and a school for the blind. Reviews are mixed. He explains his embryonic assault on the values of mainstream cinema :

"Cinema, as Herzog says, is still a form in its infancy. Like a baby where the first leg is sticking out of the uterus. It's like we're only just plopping out of the womb and already our sensibilities are jaded almost beyond repair. In a sense, my whole approach is fuelled by anger [at the denigration of this century's most powerful art form."]

Artist, photographer and novelist, in his short yet incendiary career Korine's iconoclasm has largely engendered controversy rather than captivation. His first international foray was as writer of Kids. Directed by Larry Clark, Kids follows a promiscuous teenager unknowingly living with the HIV virus on a safari of unprotected sex with innumerable partners. It's an ambitious attempt to characterise the enervated, amoral gestalt of adolescent inner city New York kids; dispassionately recording them as they smoke heroin, copulate and gangbang.

Its release predictably caused a furore in the far right Republican lobby of America which accused Korine of exploitation and depravity, leading its distributors Miramax almost to the point of withdrawal. In truth, the origins of Kids can be traced back to the American teen movies of the late 50s whose spirit served a similar yet less-provocative purpose: Kids is a hardcore cross -fertilisation of High School Confidential and Warhol's My Hustler and is, ultimately, a very moral film about unsafe sex and the spread of HIV.

Landing the Critic's Prize at both the Venice and Rotterdam film festivals, Korine's first directorial effort is set in his hometown of Xenia, Ohio - themed here as a tornado stricken dystopia in the Rust Belt.
Gummo is a coruscating montage of Wild America's feral, aimless, K Mart- bound youthdom. We're journeying into the inverse world of the Great American Dream. We've ventured down the crooked road to Weirdsville before, except that with Korine it feels like a genuine visitation.

In contrast, the contorted biology of Cronenberg's metanarratives or Lynch's preoccupation with the dualities of American society are intrigues of dark fiction. Korine is American Verité to their American Gothic. His dispossessed exist entirely within a recognisable landscape. If Korine is indebted to anybody it is to the European auteurism of directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Korine employs no theatrical exposition in the traditional sense and little in the way of a linear narrative. Xenia, Ohio doesn't need metaphysics, drama or tornados - it's already been bombed. Its citizens are irretrievably lost and perma-adolescent. Adults are inattendant - unless you count the boozed up bunch of armwrestling shitkickers who demolish their own kitchen furniture when their 12-pack runs dry.

So, Things To Do In Xenia When You've Got No Future:
gluesniffing; drowning cats; disconnecting life support machines; tap dancing in the basement and - gluesniffing. The incongruous or unusual becomes normality through recurrence. Certainly, one is gazing upon garden variety mid Western nihilism but, refreshingly, Gummo transfixes and fails to descend into longeur. Amid the realm of Death Metal, Satanism and mindbending vacuity there are episodes of unflinching tenderness, rendering this an intensely human film. And a remarkable one at that, for it is a skill to both repel and inveigle the audience simultaneously.

In a scene of unforgettable pathos, an adolescent prostitute with Down's syndrome awaits clients from the incongruity of her toy-littered, bubblegum pink quilted bedside. Korine appears in one vignette himself, seated on a couch with a physically stunted black male whom he attempts to kiss while recounting the emotional severance of his mother. He resolves: "I'll die on this couch with you." A proclamation of love which, in that Ishmaelite society, is as despairing as a suicide note.

The appearance of Bunny Boy is, possibly, a metaphorical Korine. Variously playing the harmonium, skateboarding and frolicking with Chloe Sevigny, he appears to be a free radical against the prevailing barbarism until, in a parody of queer-bashing, he is symbolically slain. He reappears - Lord of the Flies style at the close of the film triumphantly holding aloft a rain-sodden, dead cat.

If Todd Solondz taps the vein of dysfunctionality to reveal the erosion of family, convention and society in Happiness - a counterpart to the exquisite ennui of Ang Lee's The Ice Storm - Gummo is more a search and destroy mission on the post nuclear family. If Solondz draws from the reel-to-real school of the chronically dyspeptic Woody Allen, Korine hails from the party monster domain of James St James' Disco Bloodbath.

Korine has been charged with wilful indulgence and, while undoubtedly true, that same indulgence is exonerated by realism. Besides, indulgence can be a superior quality. Interesting, because if the encumbrance of drama is in discovering the truth of things, both Gummo and Kids paradoxically grasp it with ease. The storytelling of big budget Hollywood, regressing ever further towards Gumpification, appears disinterested in the exploration and the cognisance of that quality, instead pushing us towards expectancies that are patently unrealistic.

Why should we be interested? Because we need experimentalism more than ever. Korine's transgressive films concern themselves with the world of the disenfranchised. They might be unsettling or violent but I prefer his denomination to the carpetbombing catholicism of Jan de Bont or Paul Verhoeven. He, at least, stands for more reality and more accessibility within the industry.

He represents an Anti-Hollywood.
Which is good.
For Hollywood.

This essay is published in 3AM Magazine, Sept 09.

chelsea hotel

2009-09-19T23:36:00.014+02:00

This is a clip from the BBC documentary programme Arena, made in 1981 on the Chelsea Hotel in New York. It is probably the most famous hotel in the world and was once the residence of Brendan Behan, William S. Burroughs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gore Vidal, Quentin Crisp, Patti Smith, Herbert Huncke and Andy Warhol's Factory superstars - among other luminaries. Herbert Huncke - bisexual hustler, hobo, thief, drug addict, jailbird and author of the searingly authentic The Evening Sun Turned Crimson - is one of my favourite writers. He was living across the hall from my room at the Chelsea Hotel while I was staying there in 1994. He rarely left his accommodation and I never met him, although I knocked twice. There is a myriad of accounts and stories surrounding the Chelsea and its denizens, but the one that I like most is of the male guest who once telephoned down to reception in the early hours of the morning:

"This is Room 622. I've just been beaten up, pissed on, raped and robbed."

"...And you enjoyed every minute of it."

Click.

It opens with an interview with the world's then oldest man, the painter Alphaeus Philemon Cole, who lived there until his death at age 112. The BBC interviewer shouts:
"WHAT'S WRONG WITH MODERN ART?"
Entirely reasonable question.

There is a rare segment of America's first self-proclaimed homosexual rock star, Jobriath, filmed prior to his death from an AIDS-related illness and whom Elektra Records - at significant cost - promoted as the new David Bowie. America was not ready - it still isn't - and Jobriath reinvented himself as a cabaret performer. He lived in a black pyramid on the roof of the hotel. How this particular arrangement came about - not least the architectural question - is possibly more of an enigma than its illustrious inhabitant.

Also there's a segment of Williams Burroughs and Andy Warhol having lunch with an highly excitable Victor Bockris who confides to camera:
"The tension here is pretty weird. Andy Warhol is wearing a pair of headphones which he hasn't taken off."

dirk bogarde

2009-09-18T00:48:00.044+02:00

Over the better part of a decade I have read all of Dirk Bogarde's seven volumes of autobiography. I never meant to, but his later career in European cinema interested me as did his recount of life at Le Pigeonnier, the property he and his partner renovated and farmed near Grasse in southern France. As a young actor during the 1950s he became rapidly successful as a British matinee idol, starring in a number of highly inconsequential romantic comedies - as did Rock Hudson in America - entrapping the nation's sweethearts and moistening their post-war, pubescent vaginas with his boyish complexion and guileless, sexual naiveté. Closet homosexuality is advantageous to such a position because that niche relies upon the unsustainable notion of availability and single status -- at least in the minds of the toffee-chewing ticket-holders of the theatrical stalls.

When Dirk Bogarde exceeded his sell-by date as a Rank star, abandoning a mini-skirted Britain in the throes of 'social revolution' and a working class that changed the landscape through an unforeseen capacity to write catchy songs and lift hemlines - he was hopelessly stiff and uncastable - Bogarde escaped an encroaching Greater London for the perfumed hills of Provence. And that is where his life as an artist really began. He penned his biographies, along with a few novels (not his métier), and starred in some important films: The Night Porter, Death In Venice directed by Luchino Visconti, The Damned and Fassbinder's Despair. Occasionally, he appeared on British television chat-shows and was reliably brittle, irascible and contrived. But then the experience of baggage reclaim in Britain's airports is enough to alienate anybody.

What is remarkable is that, in reading these volumes of autobiography, the man with whom he shared forty years of partnership, Anthony Forwood - who was also his personal manager - is consistently referred to as Forwood. Even upon Parkinson's and a mercifully timeful death. Forwood. Never Tony, as he was known affectionately within their wide circle of actress-friends and family. Forwood: cook, valet and chauffeur. And, of course, cocksman.
To Anthony Forwood's ex-wife Glynis Johns, Bogarde was, to all effects and purposes, 'the other woman'.

Bogarde never writes about his love for the man in his life. Instead, he chronicles his passion for, and his marriage proposals to, the French actress Capucine. Capucine declined his proposals: she was smart enough to know that an alliance with someone who is both a queen and a fan is not a marriage, but a pseudo-lesbian fantasy based on taffeta. (Although that never stopped Liza Minnelli.) Bogarde's concealment of his true nature as a 'power bottom' knew no bounds - even when he long ceased to be relevant. In the olive press at the end of the garden in which a quiet, contained hysteria tapped away at the Remington, Bogarde was locked in the life-wrestle, in the latent desire to ultimately reveal himself - to himself. It took seven volumes. And even then, he had a complete inability to be candid, though his readers had long-since deduced that he was homosexual.

Honesty eventually arrives with greying follicles, the feeling of obsolescence, confusing municipal signage and the bi-focal attempt to divine the ingredients of an ordinary comestible. But then many people whom do not require bi-focals cannot read life's instructions either. After Forwood's death Bogarde relocated back to London and wrote A Short Walk From Harrods (which might more accurately have been titled A Short Walk From Peter Jones), living out his days alone - or as a spare pair of trousers on the Holland Park dinner circuit - bewildered and far from what had become his native France.
Life can be a nasty business.

death in the afternoon

2009-09-16T14:16:00.020+02:00

("The Naked Truth - Bullfighting is Cruelty")

La Corrida de Toros is not considered a sport, but an art. An highly aesthetic ritual of technicolour and drama where the matador is poured into priceless brocade and coloured tights - his testicles so constricted and pronounced by the cut of his high-waisted pants that the world is his proctologist - to skillfully and manfully face the beast. The brightly coloured bullfight costume (gold and red is the preferred combination) is known as Goyesca and its style comes from the period between the 16th and 18th centuries when only noblemen could fight. As it became more popular, ordinary people entered into the corrida as a means of attaining social status through national 'heroicism'. Simply, the matador was a Pop Star. This is why the anti-bullfight protest lobby has made little impact in banning what it sees as the systematic and barbaric slaughter of an animal for the purpose of entertainment.

I think it can be said that in the Spanish psyche exists a preoccupation with death. Contrary to the northern European fear of eventual - or sudden - expiry, the Spanish attitude to death is almost Arabic in its passive fatalism. Death is not merely inseparable to life, it is vital to it. So much so that I maintain that the national 'sport' here is neither football or bullfighting, but overtaking other drivers whilst on the brow of a hill. The road accident rate is appalling but when an Hispanic male straps himself into the cockpit of his Seat Córdoba it is not motoring - it is a mission. Machismo.

This unconcealed attraction to death is not borne of a particular bloodthirstiness or brutality but rather it is an enthralled curiosity that might be compared to the experience of intently watching one's partner as they abandon volition in the midst of a toe-flexing sexual orgasm. Surrender and release. That, in any case, is how I interpret it.

I have never attended a bullfight and have no desire to do so. Not least because the outcome is always certain, and the bull may never win. They are screened on national television on Sundays and one observes how, on occasion that the matador is out-manoeuvered and tossed about the air with a horn impaled in his coccyx, the cameras close-in on the bloodshed and his agony is detailed time and again in slow-motion playback. I have been to a bull-run, where they are freed from the corral to thunder through the streets, young men running ahead of them, and witnessed a goring. A rather overweight man's buttocks were repeatedly charged at against the door of a pharmacy. Unfortunately, they were closed at the time. As he banged on the security grille, crying "Help me! Help me!" everybody just stood and gawped. And I, too, watched in fascination, captivated by afternoon violence.

Perhaps a part of me is becoming Spanish.

ex-pat life

2009-09-15T16:58:00.010+02:00

There is a variety of groups, clubs and societies here in Valencia formed by British immigrants and retirees for fellow countrymen and women. I dislike the word 'ex-pat' because it suggests that to leave a sink estate in Acton for a maisonette with a partial Mediterrean sea view is necessarily unpatriotic, if not unreasonable. Many of these social clubs are really little more than an excuse to heavily inebriate onself, gossip and - if possible - pick someone up. We have the El Cid Bowls Club, the Jávea UFO & World Mystery Discussion Group, Costa Swingers, the Ayora Valley Arts & Crafts Club With Brian & Pamela (trios with anyone who fancies it) and, of course, Alcoholics Anonymous. Looking through the local English newspaper I see that yet another club has been unleashed: The North Costa Blanca Poetry Group.

Now, I appreciate that the world is a better place for having poets in it, but I honestly can't think of a worse way in which to pass an evening: people reading their poetry - to each other. It summons up an image of the school playground, walking up to some witless innocent, arms crossed and announcing "You know my friend over there? Well she wants you to read her poetry." I've dabbled a little myself but never allowed it to get out-of-hand. Besides, my efforts were so hopelessly characterised by the metaphorical, depthless abyss of the mind that I once cleared a room in precisely thirty seconds. Now, of course, I'm on Facebook - but have solemnly promised to leave at some point.

About two years ago I was invited by the editor of a bi-monthly English-language newspaper to write a column for them. I suggested an Agony Aunt page under the auspices of a 50-something, female divorcee from Stoke Newington called "Dear Pat..."

"Dear Pat

My husband is obsessed with saving money and it's really getting me down. We've been here for three years now and the cardboard packing box that stored all my silver is still being used as a coffee-cum-dining table. Any suggestions? Yvonne in Oliva."

"Dear Yvonne

Well he sounds like a right boring old tight-fisted git. Nick his wallet while he's fallen asleep in front of the telly and go buy yourself a big, f***-off table. And a brand new wardrobe for the summer, because by the sounds of it you're probably desperate by now for a new bra. If that doesn't work, crown him over the head with a paella pan and clear out."

"Dear Pat

Like yourself I'm a divorcee in my fifties. The problem is, I'm finding it very difficult to hook-up with people. I consider myself to have quite a bubbly personality, always cracking jokes, I'm fairly active and not ready to give up on a bit of fun just yet! Ha-ha. Maureen from Dénia."

Dear Maureen

I'm not surprised you haven't met anyone - you sound revolting. BUT, if you really want to meet people why not dress yourself up in a pair of lemon hotpants and a really snazzy, eye-catching top, go down to your local football club and volunteer to be their mascot? Alternatively, you could shoplift - that's a guaranteed way of meeting new people."

It didn't last very long. The editor - who had not an iota of humour - was horrified and pulled it. Shame.

eraserhead

2009-09-15T01:01:00.015+02:00

David Lynch's 1977 Eraserhead is a kind of modern Gothic horror film. It is a film of very few comparisons whose origins quite possibly lay in German cinema of the 1920s: the contrast is radiant light and stygian shadow; reality and dream become enmeshed; its themes are encoded. It is a 'difficult' film which, nevertheless, forces one to enter into its seeming indecipherability. I interprete it as a meditation on bed-sitter existence. Considering the number of people (and students) who have known hypothermia in the nation’s bed-sitter lands, one is intrigued as to why Eraserhead didn’t enjoy a more universal popularity.

For me, it has a cosy appeal. I enjoy industrial landscapes and I feel at home in black & white. When it was released in the UK in 1979 I went to see it one Saturday afternoon in an unheated theatre close to Baker Street. We were an audience of two -- me and a female student who’d travelled all the way from Hampshire. We chatted afterwards. She was messianic in her praise of the film but, unfortunately, peppered every sentence with the word 'mega'.

"That was mega-weird wasn't it? I mean, really mega-dark."

This habit became exhausting after five seconds until I, too, began prefacing every noun with 'mega'. Whereupon she immediately shut up and went back to Basingstoke. (This is quite a good ploy for avoiding boring people or unwanted sexual attention. Out-creep The Creep.) Miraculously, and in a remarkably cruel stroke of fate, our paths crossed several years later when I spotted her slightly ahead of me in an airline check-in queue on a flight bound for Athens.

"Will that be smoking or non-smoking?"

“You can sit me anywhere you like, but not next to her, because if you do, I’ll have to kill everybody on this flight.”

Say that nowadays and you'd be immediately handcuffed and transported to a holding centre where, by virtue of having made a small joke, one is locked into a shared cell - and the amorous advances - of a hulking, mega-sociopath called 'Cuddles'.

"Babes....?"
"Not tonight, Cuddles."
"Babes.....?"
"Not tonight, Cuddles."

life imitates art imitates life

2009-09-13T14:09:00.010+02:00

As a child -- I began life as a child -- I used to save up my pocket money, which was never quite earned because my reaction to running an errand was never less than extreme reluctance, and take myself out to lunch. The luncheon venue was the Wimpy Bar in Southwark Park Road. For non-British readers, the Wimpy Bar is the proto-1950s UK burger restaurant chain that offered plush red vinyl seating booths, Brave New World wall murals and served its fare on crockery. With cutlery. These establishments were typically staffed by Cypriot-Turkish emigres. Often, a childhood friend accompanied me - she stretching-out a cup of coffee while I tucked into the 'International Grill'. How a quarterpounder , a frankfurter, two slices of bacon, a fried egg, chips and a slice of tomato can be termed international is a culinary and marketing mystery.
I once tried to go à la carte but it caused pricing headaches.

The reason I recall that beloved spot of the pre-teen 'gastronome', situated in the northern reaches of Bermondsey, in a dark and forgotten corner of South London, is that it seems to have metamorphosed into a location for modern cinema. It appeared in Nil By Mouth (1998) directed by Gary Oldman where a character is punched in the head immediately on exiting the restaurant (this would have happened countless times when the cameras weren't rolling), and again it appears in David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises (2007) in a scene where Viggo Mortensen as a Russian Mafia member negotiates with Naomi Watts and Sinéad Cusack for the return of an highly incriminating diary that documents the misery of an imported Ukrainian prostitute. Exactly where my paper napkin was once placed. Fancy.

the spanish gardener

2009-09-09T12:06:00.031+02:00

With the blistering hot weather here which has seen temperatures regularly climb into the low 40ºs my partner and I have been doing some repairs out on the terraces. Terraces sounds rather grand, as if I were living in the midst of a Malaysian rubber plantation. Rather, the lower and upper roofdecks of our townhouse. Given the temperature range here (Mediterranean mountain climate) houses expand and contract with the seasons, so Michaelmas is synonymous with a bucket, plaster and a trowel.

In years past I never had so much as a window-box, so it was to much surprise that I became a zealous container-gardener, humping bags of earth, manoeuvering pots and actually allowing wasps to interact with me without flying into a St Vitus dance. It started four years ago with a small, terracotta pot of geraniums and has now reached the stage where I am effectively banned from garden centres. "One more pot and that roof is going to collapse."

The Spanish hardly ever use their roof spaces - they avoid the sun at all costs, living in blind-shuttered rooms with the electric lights on. Thus, ours has become a little nature reserve for local wildlife: butterflies, carpenter bees, swallows, bats and a couple of local cats. Moving a container away from the back wall to re-plaster a crack, out crawled a spider which, given its size and girth, could almost be considered a member of the tarantula family. One's natural reaction is to run indoors and pour oneself a stiff drink while deciding what to do next. However, this being Spain, one must simply leave nature to take its course. So we went indoors, poured ourselves a stiff drink and talked about something else.

It reminded me of the time I was at a friend's party in West London. I was introduced to a Finnish couple. He was a Heavy Metal guitarist and film-maker who stood at about 6'5" - 196 if you're metric - and she was a costumier. Her name was Tanja. Born in the Karelia region near the Russian border, her appearance was quite striking - almost vampiric. Cheekbones like unscaleable bluffs, a powder-white face, crimson lips and long, Carnelian hair severely drawn-back into a ponytail. As we were talking I noticed what appeared to be a large British house spider crawling into view from the rear of her floor-length purple cape, and settling on the decorative detail of her shoulder-pad.

"By the way, I love the spider, that's a really nice touch."

She froze. "What spider?"

"Oh, it isn't your pet?"

*Finnish proverb: "Life is uncertain, eat dessert first."

poster series: 1

2009-09-07T21:08:00.071+02:00

This is a still and promotional shot for a Japanese-made gangster (yakuza) movie from I think, the late 1990s. I believe it is titled Silent Town but I can find no entry for it at the film directory website imdb. Originally I was going to use it for the cover sleeve of the single Born That Way [track] but could not trace the copyright owner. It's rare nowadays that a poster or promotional picture alone inspires one to see a film, or buy a record, but in my opinion this photo is intensely stylish - impeccable - and, of course, one is confronted with a cigarette. Good Heavens. (An heroin addiction is far more socially acceptable and infinitely more economical, given the eye-crossing expense of draconian government taxes.)

David Lynch's artwork tends to have the same effect on me; notably 1997's Lost Highway Great poster. A möbius strip of a film (two parallel realities that share the same time-line) that helped to prepare us for the William Burroughs-style cut-up method exposition of INLAND EMPIRE. Whoever edited that film must surely now reside in a gated community in south Florida -- the locks being this side of the railings.

[Actress] "But I thought I was a blonde Canadian movie star with lesbian tendencies living on Mulholland Drive?"

[Director] "You are. But you're also a brunette with a slightly-altered fringe, living on a Warsaw housing project with four human-sized rabbits and an aged grandmother who is partially obscured by an home-made aquarium."

[Actress] "Of course."

To digress a little, Mr Lynch is not content merely to cut-up narrative but delights in snipping away at his characters. Which is something that most of us with any imagination do in real life. If you have not followed the arc of Lynch's directorial odyssey it can be a disorienting and, by the credit roll, a potentially unrewarding experience to view his later films -- notwithstanding the immaculate cinematography, Angelo Badalamenti's subterranean soundscapes and the wondrous moments that leave you in no doubt that you are witnessing first-rate cinema. One might crave an explanatory booklet that details who became whom - but that would vanquish mystery - and David Lynch is nothing if not an auteur of Mystery.

And a great poster artist.

antidote to metrosexuality

2009-09-06T13:00:00.014+02:00

On the basis that we are all unique, it has to be said that not everybody is in love with the idea of metrosexuality, with the increasingly concentric direction of gender lines, not least the scramble to the bathroom cabinet to claim the exfoliant and the eyebrow pencil first. Some people might actually prefer clearly defined sexual roles, separate shoe-trees, the freedom to prepare pastry and to occasionally throw oneself lavishly around a fully-upholstered bedroom in a pique of 1950s-style passion. In the cinematic portrayal of relationships of that era, which necessarily hinge upon drama, interpersonal themes oscillate between abandonment and human bondage; the harmony of ample refrigeration and attempted murder -- there is no such thing as shared domestic tasks, modest bungaloid happiness or flicking through a retail catalogue together over the soft-centre menu card of a box of chocolates.

Here is a marcel-haired Patricia Neal in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead -- inescapably hostage to her hormones (note the eyes tinged by a desirousness at the point of madness) after having been contaminated by Gary Cooper's awfully strong, American mid-century pheromones.

david hoyle

2009-09-06T11:23:00.009+02:00

David Hoyle is an artist, performer, painter, 'gender terrorist' and political and social commentator resident in both Manchester and London. He is perhaps best-known (at this time) for his remarkable, themed appearances at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in South London. Mr Hoyle is an unquantifiable force who can neither - to the uninitiated - be pigeon-holed as either Drag nor Stand-up. His diatribes against injustice, discrimination, apathy and the temple of consumerism are contrasted and balanced by a profound commitment to humanitarianism. In short - truth. Mr Hoyle can also be stingingly funny. Recently he has made some short films, one of which, the moving and contemplative At Home With David Hoyle (above) won the Outrate Online Short Film Festival award of 2009. Below is a clip from one of his performances given at the RVT in May of this year as part of his Dave's Drop-In Centre residency: an open-to-all therapy forum.

rupert everett: red carpets and other banana skins

2009-09-05T09:26:00.018+02:00

I've just finished reading Rupert Everett's 2006 memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. Regardless of whether one appreciates Mr Everett as an actor or the films he has appeared in, his autobiography is well-written, refreshingly candid and, at times, very funny. In his Dionysian disregard for either propriety, convention or in taking anything - and anyone - too seriously, one finishes this book liking its author. How can one not warm to somebody who freely yet unrepentantly admits to being "a complete cunt" ? One notable anecdote is a lunch/audition with Orson Welles where, over-awed by the occasion and in stark terror of the Great Man, Everett's voice becomes a falsetto, giggling uncontrollably like a vicar's wife as Welles' pooch repeatedly takes mementos from his ankle from under the table.

'Do you know Roddy McDowall?' I asked carelessly.

Orson looked at me with a cruel sneer.

'It depends what you mean by know,' he said.

'After all,' he continued, 'the acolytes of Sodom wanted to know the angel of the Lord, and they got zapped.'

'Right', I said, and that was the end of that.

photocentric

2009-09-04T18:53:00.015+02:00

My friend, Kathryn Bailey, who resides in Toronto has an interesting photoblog over at Wordpress. She, also, seems to like grain silos. I very much like her architecture and cityscape shots, many of which possess what I would call a certain 'masculine virility'. There is a feeling of newness here and a quality that is uniquely Canadian. Science meets Engineering meets Industry meets Art. Do visit.

helmut newton

2009-09-04T03:58:00.041+02:00

This photograph is from the Helmut Newton "Big Nude" series circa shot in Paris 1979/1980. I have always loved this foto and had it framed, resting on the narrow yet mercifully unelaborated mantelpiece of the flat I rented in Peckham, South London during the early to mid 1980s.

That period was a time of economic depression, tidal waves of protest, political and social upheaval together with an upturn in footwear radicalism. The fact is: a depression era often leads to buoyant artistic creativity. The view from the kitchen window is often partially blocked by the top-knot of a sovereign-ringed slum mum, negotiating a crack deal - but the radio is lively.

I like the strength, the defiance and the bravura of the model in this foto. Regard the stance: one could almost mistake her for a transexual, which is natural because transexuals never undergo the rigours and the trauma of gender reassignment in order to simply become laundromat attendants or bus drivers for the partially-limbed. Neither are they happy with anything less than a 5-inch heel. They are, for the most part, Über-women. All of Helmut Newton's models are 'über-women': iconic and unobtainable, or might be obtainable if you can penetrate that professional, highly plastic veneer of gloss.

For me this photograph symbolises a beautiful and potent image of a person who seems to know exactly who they are (unlike many western heterosexual males who inhabit a sexual dystopia), where they stand (literally and metaphorically) in the world, and whom is probably un-reprogrammable and quite unyielding in their natural essence.
Simply, it represents Power.

projecte fotogràfic

2009-09-03T20:42:00.042+02:00

I have posted to Flickr some fotos I took recently in the Comunidad Valenciana (southern Valencia province) where I live. One of the themes that attracts me is a kind of urban 'disintegration' where the new has yet to pave over the past. I like decay and rot, it can possess a mesmerising, visceral beauty that a good pair of cheekbones and a detached, Arctic countenance never can.

The past is rapidly being eradicated in a global re-zoning frenzy where one may no longer indicate the true geographical scene of his or her first attempted molestation or indeed, upbringing. This is not borne of a fetish for the Past, but rather that in my view not everything that is New is necessarily a bonanza to be celebrated. The 1960s taught us that : you cannot stack survivors of the Somme into vertical living. It seems to me that anything that has existed for longer than ten years is now immediately ear-marked for demolition and re-born as a car park adjacent to a multi-level shopping experience.
Nowadays everything must be marketed as an 'experience' that will surpass your expectations. It often does - downwards. The only fate worse than actual, human suffering is the relentless and unbearable pressure to enjoy oneself. Which can be considerably more painful than sciatica. Similarly, the erection of a luxury residential building that promises both a lavishly air-conditioned lifestyle and a new skin care regime that will instantly revolutionise your social and sexual prospects.

Other themes: I like architecture, signage and graffiti. And grain elevators, the original 'cathedrals of the prairie'. I think the latter can be attributed to repeated viewings of David Lynch's "The Straight Story", a film I loved. I knew Wisconsin for a short period of time. On New Year's Day, 2000, I took some New York friends to see it at a theatre in Union Square. Afterwards, in the foyer, I was addressed with undiluted disappointment. Retrospectively, I can understand it - people don't want to look at tractors, especially when they still have Ecstasy in their system.

I do not photograph people because I use a cheap digi-cam and I believe that almost everybody - there are exceptions - is entitled to decent lighting and a bit of Hair & Make-up. In any case, this is a rambling introduction to a rather average photo gallery.

I'll add more to the slideshow soon.