Psycho

2012-01-20T11:14:00.001Z

Flash, bang, wallop . . .

Bang goes Kodak. Two thoughts etc . . .

One Think Cunard and White Star Line. With the early 20th century success of their Atlantic passenger lines, they thought they were in the boat business. When actually of course they were in the people-moving business. So when long-distance flight became possible, they kept on with their ships and, eventually, disappeared as businesses.

Two I was actually looking to buy some printers yesterday. One, to trial. Maybe three or four more if that one did the job. So I did a little online research. Conscious that the real cost of printing - particularly if you need, as I do in this case, to print a lot of photos - is the ink, I was taken by Kodak's regular boast that its inks were cheaper than anyone else's. So I checked out all the reviews I could find.

The Kodak printer of choice seemed to be the one called Hero. (Yes, I know I should have set my own alarm bells then but I didn't.) I scanned the reviews and they seemed to be pretty damn positive. So I decided I might well buy one. I went to Amazon to start the process. Then I saw one bad review and it said: actually, you know what the worst thing about this printer is, that it is really not very good at printing photos. So I went back over the other reviews and I saw lines like: well, yes, it is really good but the photo-printing is not what you hope for, particularly from Kodak etc etc

So I cancelled the order and will switch to Canon. Let's see how that goes.

Which is an object lesson in company decline and failure. As Xerox developed the personal computer (mouse, icon interface etc etc), then let Apple steal it, so Kodak developed the digital camera then hid it, in case it cannibabilised its own business. Instead, it got eaten by the Japanese.

So, I guess, the moral is this. It's better to eat your own leg and survive than let someone else eat it for you. I'm sure it says that somewhere in the Bible or Koran.

Actually, one more thought. People are always saying Britain should do more manufacture. I'm not sure about that. Manufacturing was a blip in the national history. Mostly, we've been traders. An obvious choice given our geographical position. And traders are, by nature, wide boys (and girls). They go where the action is, shamelessly. Trading is never out of fashion. It's subject to technological change, true. But, at its best, most purest, it is quite uninterested in either the object being traded or the method of trade. Cash is the king in this realm. Always. So . . . while I'm not exactly standing up for bankers and incomprehensibly complex derivatives trading, I do think there is a question here somewhere. And another one: if there is not something in what I'm saying, why does our pantheon of national heroes include Francis Drake, Arthur Daley and Del Boy Trotter?

PS I will put up the sleeve notes for the Xmas compilation. I decided to make them longer than I first intended. I'll be posting them one a day, starting early next week.

2012-01-06T12:49:00.003Z

Eve Arnold (1912-2012) RIP

The great Magnum photographer has died just short of her 100th birthday. Here is an article I wrote about her a couple of years ago.

PP_May10_EveArnold

PS If you want to read more of my writings, on photography in particular, there are more in scribd. Try here. I'll be uploading more in the near future, including old pieces on a variety of subjects — though not music. For my music pieces, you need to go to rocksbackpages.com.

Tomorrow Those promised Xmas music sleevenotes

2012-01-05T11:13:00.000Z

On the twelfth day of christmas . . .

Family. I'll be untypically emotive. Years ago now, I remember reading someone who, when asked which was more important, health or wealth, said: neither, it's family, because when you're sick or broke at least there is support around you.

I'd add friends but, basically, it's true, isn't it. Few of us prosper without family and friends. In a meaningful sense, that is – which does include financially. Unhappiness is not just a product of not making your way in the world, it's also a reason. Unfair, I know, but . . .

I've been blessed, I guess. I have family and I have friends. Quite a few people occupy both categories. So . . . Xmas and its twelve days?

Well, over the break I read a piece by Ian Jack in the The Guardian in which he pointed out that London over Xmas has now become the kind of family place it used to be. Leaving aside the fact that in my area the exodus to second houses is so notable that you could have a half hour kip in the middle of the road, that is certainly true. Further, he added that the break has become a kind of retreat where families get to spend time with each other, across the generation. Some use the opportunity to fight and relive old wounds, I guess. But not everyone.

In which light, I can report that, over the break, my time-spent included . . .

* family outing to Billy Elliot matinee (young cousin is in the cast)

* Xmas dinner (cooked with my daughter) for a baker's dozen — on Boxing Day, it's a family tradition, leaving Xmas Day itself free for, well, nothing

* dinner with a couple of friends in Cornwall, one of whom I probably won't see for a while as she's heading off east to interior design junks (honestly)

* not one but two football matches with my younger son

* takeaway curry round our table for a dozen family or so

* a formal sit-down meal at a cousin's which I missed because of a bad cold - but got to eat takeaway the next morning

* a nuclear family meal on Xmas Eve

* giving phone cooking advice to a friend when the leg of lamb (an odd Xmas dinner choice, I know, but tradition isn't what it was, clearly) got left in the freezer by mistake and dinner was due in four hours - they say it was the best lamb they ever ate so maybe I stumbled on a new recipe

* brunch with cousins at their house in the far reaches of the known world (Bury St Edmunds)

* a friend's birthday party in his brother's pub

* a New Year's Day party at a friend's

* a completely private New Year's Eve – another family tradition

* picking up my elder son and dropping him at the airport - and, because of Luton's parsimony, having to pay a pound each time for the privilege

* more, probably, that I've forgotten about

And so that's your lot, folks.

Tomorrow (or perhaps the day after), I'll post the sleevenotes for my Xmas music selection.

2012-01-04T07:01:00.001Z

On the eleventh day of Christmas . . .

A walk along the Thames at Mednenham. There's a long, flat stretch between an old, now disused ferry point and the locks below Henley. It curves slowly.

I've walked it in sun and gloom and cold – though not in the rain, it's true. I've shared the early morning with caravanners and watched a stunt flier practise in a sharp blue sky, rolling and tumbling. I've done the whole walk without seeing anyone else. And I've walked back through the fields when you can't see past the crops and when the earth has been cleared for the winter.

It's a completely humanized landscape. There is no trace of what might have been there before our ancient ancestors moved in. But still, in the way the whole of the Thames Valley does, it has a deep, sharp sense of, well, nature. Not the real thing, of course, but certainly the 'real' thing – and that, being a human, is what I'm after. Reality is for animals. 'Reality' is what us princes want and cherish.

PS It's also possible that my thoughts and feelings are coloured and shaped by the fact that my father spent the war based at Danesfield House – which still forms an impenetrable riverside barrier at one end of the walk. It was the base for aerial reconnaissance intelligence. He looked at photographs, in pairs, and turned them into maps. I should think my parents walked this walk, a decade and more before I was born. When the fliers would have been practising for a different kind of show.

Till tomorrow . . .

2012-01-03T12:24:00.002Z

On the tenth day of Christmas . . .

Valerio Spada's Gomorrah Girl. A photobook. A chronicle of a death in a southern Italian ghetto. Two visual narratives physically interleaved in one book. In a time where the book as object is clearly changing dramatically, Gomorrah Girl is something that could not exist in any other form. A Kindle, it could not be.

It was put together by Dutch designer Sybren Kuiper. And that is a not insignificant factor in its triumph.

It won a prize. But, not to show off or anything, I'd bought it some time before that. I was writing a piece about photobooks. This piece (which you can download if you want, as a pdf) . . .

PP Jul11 Bookshelf

Writing the piece, I became increasingly enamoured of a new wave of almost handmade and almost self-published photobooks. All are, of necessity, limited editions. This was one of the ones I bought. It was in an edition of 500 and came out early last year.

And that's another reason to think about it. I paid 30 Euros for my copy. That edition sold out. Then, recently, a second edition was published, at 39.50 Euro. That, too, has sold out. A copy of that second edition is available on Amazon.com for 150 dollars.

If I can't have Gomorrah Girl, then I'll have Happy Birthday To You, made in psychiatric units by Anouk Kruithof. That cost me 20 Euros, I think. That did well, too. There don't seem to be any copies around. Last time I looked one would cost you more than 150 dollars.

Now, I'm not suggesting you (or I) buy these books for investment. They are objects that are worth their own existence and a place in your/my place. Nor will all such books rise in value. And you are also providing an income source for artisans/artists whose photography work was ceasing to do so. Be a patron. Buy now. Buy several. Enjoy them. Maybe make a few shekels.

And if it can't be a self-published book, then I'd have Simon Norfolk's most recent work on Afghanistan, in which he paired (well, kind of) his own photographs with a 19th century record of the benighted land, made by John Burke. There was a (great) show at the Tate. The lavish pale light of the images set up challenging duologues with the original black and whites — orthochromatic, so the colour representation was quite different from our modern panchromatic world. Afghanis, for one, appear far darker than they are - technical considerations inducing ideological outcomes.

The book is even better. The portraits make sense, to me, in a way they didn't in the gallery. There are more pictures, too

Till tomorrow

2012-01-02T17:09:00.000Z

On the ninth day of Christmas . . .

A kebab roll at Lahore.

Just off the Commercial Road. Once upon a time it was the tiniest of takeaway joints. These days it's all dressed up and getting bigger every time I go there. It's now even got frontage on to the Commercial Rd.

Things don't change, though. The takeaway kebab rolls (lamb, minced and herbed, with salad, wrapped in circle of bread) are an eternal. For £3.50.

Sometimes I eat there, too. There are marbly surfaces. An open kitchen. All male staff, cooks and waiters. Big TVs on every wall, mostly with football playing. My friend Paul who has subcontintental history and knows about these things tells me it's just like the real Lahore, a little bit of Pakistani life in east London.

The social mix is a delight, too, particularly on Friday nights. City dealers, getting drunk on byo booze. Essex families (Gavin & Stacey alikes) driving up against the rush hour flow. Mix and match Asian/English families where one woman will be in an A4 skirt, with her breasts hanging out and another will be wrapped in black. Strict Muslim families where — I've seen this with my own eyes — the beard of a pater familias shouts at the waiters to take the cutlery away before they will sit down.

Or maybe I'd go for a falafel at Marco Polo, a Lebanese cafe on Marylebone High St - my regular breakfast after early morning visits to the dental hygienist. (You don't want to turn up with bits of toast in your interstitials, now, do you.)

Till tomorrow . . .

2012-01-02T10:55:00.004Z

On the eighth day of Christmas . . .

The Social Network. Among from the all the many reasons to applaud it, three things . . .

One Its yellowy colour overall. Despite two viewings of the movie, I'm not sure quite what the meaning is. Despite having written a piece for Hungry Eye magazine on this subject, I'm still uncertain about it. Perhaps uncertainty is yellow. Perhaps yellowness evokes uncertainty. I'll let you know when I've got the answer. Maybe it'll arrive in the next post.

Two It didn't feel like 'film'. Most movies, even good ones, have tricks and rhythms that feel so familiar, that are so familiar that you exist in a state of predictive nostalgia. (Which is something I'm working away at in another context, pop songs.) They have soundtracks that insist on doing your feeling (and thinking, too) for you. The Social Network doesn't do that. It has the rhythms etc not of life, of course, but of 'life', at least.

Three Written by a TV guy. There are loads of great things on British TV now. Funny stuff. Documentary stuff. Sports stuff. Historical drama stuff. But the contemporary drama stuff is complete bollocks. Even the stuff that is good is terrible. Maybe the producers and writers and directors should consider having a look at The Social Network.

Till later today . . .

2012-01-01T12:30:00.002Z

On the seventh day of Christmas . . .

(To catch up, I'm doing two a day.)

A pint of Dark Star Hophead. I know it's traditional and cringe-inducing for ale to have names that sound like Bill Bailey's hair looks. So I do have a problem with a brewery whose name evokes (or invokes even) the Grateful Dead and an ale with a weedy (ho, ho) pun of a name.

But it's fabulous stuff from the most successful new brewery in England. (Thank you, Gordon Brown, for your untypically canny tax break incentive for small brewers.) I'm not the only that rates it, either. See here.

Though from Sussex, it's become a London staple. It's what I order in pubs - if it's there. Which is how I came to realise how high I rate it. You can't get it or anything like it in the bit of Cornwall I spend some of the year in. Heligan Honey or Doom Bar just aren't the same. Though Tribute, if it's cold, is its own joy.

Where would I drink it? At my friends Kirk and Paul's place, Tapping the Admiral. Or perhaps at the Southampton Arms, with its 'Ale Cider Meat' sign. Or maybe the Euston Tap — there really aren't many neo-neo-neo-Classical pubs. (Or tube stations — including, as I discovered yesterday, Brent Cross.)

If this makes me sound like some beer bore, just for you I'll get a bit pretentious about it and say it is a fine citrus flavour (American hops, I think, if I was told right). In fact, I'll go further and say it has the air of pomelo . . .

See you soon.

2012-01-01T12:00:00.003Z

On the sixth day of Christmas . . .

(Running a bit late, I know. Blame a cold.)

A Man With Two Guvnors. I saw it at the National a few months ago. There is little to add to the rave reviews. A couple of things, maybe . . .

One Setting it in Brighton in the 1960s and linking it to Carry On films etc gives a real tangible sense of the immutability of human concupiscence. From old Italian stuff to post-Graham Greene Regency seaside hows-your-father to, well, the National Theatre.

Two Like all great comedy, it is tragedy turned inside out. Thus flipped, it could be considered as, well, perhaps a Brechtian drama about the inherent dialetical contradictions of mercantile capitalism — Threepenny Opera, with fewer gags (ha ha). Or, as an emodiment of Kleinian theory — a case study of continuous (and finally productive) oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.

Joking aside . . . actually, I'm not really joking. I've always thought jokes are more serious than serious stuff. That's why so many great stand-ups are such coke-head psychos (if their attitude and material is a good guide). To paraphrase Woody Allen on sex. Q: Is comedy also nasty and violent? A: Only if it's done right.

For my psychoanalytic studies, I wrote an essay which took The Importance of Being Earnest and unfolded its narrative back into its real rather than dramatic order. This produced an Oedipal tale, with a backstory of spousal abuse. It was respectably received, too. No one told me I was taking the piss, anyway. Which I perhaps was, a bit. But also most definitely wasn't.

Plus a little something for football fans. Well, fans of football commentators.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/front_page/16368728.stm

2011-12-29T20:02:00.003Z

On the fifth day of Christmas . . .

Salut les Copains box sets. Two volumes.

When I was young, really young, fifteen etc, my friend Mick Lee's sister who was eighteen and at Queen's Belfast was really into things French. And therefore so were we. We wore Newman cord jeans. And we read Salut les Copains magazine.

Years later, I discovered that Salut was the basis for The Face. At the time, though, we just thought it was a cool teen magazine.

It was only recently, though, that I learned that Salut les Copains was also a radio show. Someone pointed me in the direction of two four CD collections. I bought them. It's a fascinating world. French teenage 1960s pop, half-looking at the UK and the US, half-looking at its French self. So it's the echt Booker T and the MGs followed by a local version of The Lion Sleeps Tonight etc etc. Lots of Petula Clark. Lots of ye-ye. One of the sounds of my teenagehood. I file them next to my Rhino girl group collection which came in a hatbox - the campest thing ever manufactured.

PS When I looked up the hotlink for the box sets, I discovered that there is now a third set. So you know what to get me – and yourself – for next Christmas.

See you tomorrow . . .

2011-12-28T11:05:00.003Z

On the fourth day of Christmas . . .

A train ride from Exeter to Totnes. It's the most wonderful journey, running down the Exe estuary then along the coast — right next to it, then up the Teign estuary. Less than thirty miles in all, I think. I'm entranced by it every time I take the train to (or from) Cornwall.

You start out in this wonderful calm, flat seaside place, then turn right on to a section where the train runs in and out of short tunnels, bang next to the sea, separating the towns/villages from the briny. In wet, wild weather, the waves break over the train. Finally, you head inland up through the most mild-mannered of riverscapes – a few bobbing boats, a wooded hillside on the far bank.

Everyone goes quiet for most of the journey.

Here is a small film of it. Warning: it's very amateur, far from the best film, with too many shots of the inside of the carriage and not including anything from the Exe estuary. It does, though, describe itself as a record of the second best rail journey in Britain. Which is the best, though, it doesn't say. Maybe St Erth to St Ives.

PS I also did a gorgeous train journey in Israel this year, taking the old, French-built line from Jerusalem down to the coast. The station is in some odd part of Jerusalem, the original station on the east (Palestinian) side of the old city having been closed for years. The first half hour of the journey is a slow meander down a narrow valley, crossing and recrossing the river. I guess it must have been the old historical route into the city. It's certainly not the quickest. On some of the corners, I reckon you could get out, pick some flowers and cut across in time to get back on the train again.

Till tomorrow . . .

2011-12-27T12:58:00.002Z

On the third day of Christmas . . .

Bruce Davidson's Subway, a reissue of a 1986 original (by Steidl, reliably gorgeous photo and art books). A memory of a New York so different it's hard to realise it's only a couple of decades ago. Look at the graffitied subway cars and think: how come? well, how come and why did no-one remove it? it wasn't because they thought them beautiful . . . it was a kind of social stuckness, an inability to wrest control of the environment.

The more you look at the pictures, the more you realise how smart they are. Davidson is describing a world that he knows is terrifying. He got mugged doing it.

Like everyone else I know who knew the city in that time, it's hard not to feel, well, not nostalgia but a sense of change so sharp as to have its own pain. It was frightening, dirty, threatening, dysfunctional - particularly on the subway at 3.30 in the morning. Yet . . .

PS1 Below, you will find my interview with Davidson from earlier this year. You can download it as well as read it onscreen.

PS2 I also think it's highly likely that it will sell out, sooner rather than later, and therefore hold its value, maybe even increase. But more of investing in photobooks for fun and profit on another of the twelve days . . .

See you tomorrow . . .

PP_May11_BruceDavidson

2011-12-26T11:22:00.000Z

On the second day of Christmas . . . the partridge but not the tree

I know the bird thing is meant to be the first day of Christmas but somehow I got it in my head that the twelve days start on December 26. I was wrong, of course.

(The truth - the embarrassing truth - is that I took that Boxing Day start from iTunes. That's when you start getting free stuff from iTunes that you might or might not want. Today is some Coldplay stuff. I've downloaded it and will listen to it, just as I listen to Coldplay stuff again and again - without ever being able to remember I've listened to it.)

So, let's say yesterday was the first of my twelve days and so I gave you a list of what I think you might want to listen to this season. And today . . .

That partridge. Pheasant, too. And woodcock even. Everyone should eat them. The perfect meal for these straightened times. Honestly. That's not just from a comfortable north London perspective.

I always liked to eat game but it's only recently that I realised just how cheap it is. I was buying a couple of pheasants in the local farmers market (please, no correspondence about the absence of an apostrophe in farmers - that solution is as good as any). I saw I was only paying six quid or so for a brace - as we gamers choose to refer to a couple/pair/two. That is certainly cheaper than a decent chicken. I'm not talking organic, that's so much hogwash. But I am talking about a bird that hasn't been subjected to extreme rendition and then kept, for its thankfully all too short life, in avian Guantanamo.

Partridge are little pricier and woodcock even more. But still . . . these are bargains. (Though not if you buy them in, say, St John's Wood High St where they stick the arm in and price them up to six quid each. My guess is they make in the region of four pounds fifty profit a bird. Nice region, to paraphrase De Niro in Midnight Run - or rather George Gallo who wrote the movie.)

So . . . high-protein, low-fat, free-range and cheap. To the purchaser, anyway. A friend of mine who 'shoots' tells me the 'real' cost of these birds is maybe thirty quid. That is what it costs 'guns' in 'syndicates' - love the gangster language, don't you.

Again then . . . not just good for you and the bird and cheap but also subsidised by the rich and gun-happy among us. Not just a trifecta but a quadrafecta. A quintafecta, if you reckon game tastes as great as I do. Even if you don't like game, you could always consider eating it as an act of class revenge. Take that, you wanker banker, you could say, as you slice off some nice rare pheasant breast or scoop some lentils out with your junipery partridge.

So, as Swift was kind of on the right track when he proposed eating children as a solution to the Irish famine, if he were around now I think he'd join me in suggesting a resolution to the current unemployment and obesity thing. Another paraphrase: qu'ils mangent du perdrix.

Oh and sprats, too. You can feed a family of five on a kilo of those.

But, I hear you say, I don't know how to cook game. Here's the secret. There is no secret. You put the birds in a hot oven for half an hour. You take them out. Sure, you can do other stuff. Add salt and pepper and some herbage. Protect the breast with bacon or foil. Leave them to sit for five minutes. But that'll do. Heat, eat.

With? Lentils or barley. Same thing. Boil and drain will do. Add salt, pepper, fried onion, diced carrots/celery, thyme or other herbs, stock - even better.

Sprats? Dust in flour. Fry in oil. Take out. Eat. Add lemon juice, paprika or dip in mayonnaise.

Food and recipes, that's just what you need today of all days, right?

See you tomorrow.

2011-12-25T10:23:00.002Z

Songs for the day

Here are this year's seasonal songs — Hannukah as well as Xmas. If you are on my emailing list you will have received a link to download all the tracks from my Dropbox folder. If not, post a comment with your email address and I'll send you a link.

There will also be sleeve notes posted here sometime between now and the new year.

1 Silver Bells Doris Day
2 Frosty The Snowman Jan Garber Orchestra
3 Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer Mambo Billy May
4 On The Rooftop Gentleman Auction House
5 Must Be Santa Brave Combo
6 Merry Christmas Polka The Andrews Sisters
7 Boogie-Woogie Santa Claus Mabel Scott with Les Welch
8 Hey Santa Claus The Platters
9 Back Door Santa Clarence Carter
10 Please Come Home For Christmas Charles Brown
11 I Saw Three Ships Don Dixon
12 Silent Night The Miracles
13 Cold Dark Night Sam Phillips
14 Joy to the World Kate Rusby
15 Happy New Year Beverley
16 New Year's Eve Tom Waits
17 Last Christmas minuteman
18 The Chanukah Song Neil Diamond
19 Jesus was a Dreidel Spinner Jill Sobule
20 All I Want To Do Is Shag For Christmas The BellRays feat. Lisa Kekaula, Tony Fate and Bob Vennum
21 Jingle Bells Bing Crosby

PS If you want more Xmas etc songs, go here. My friend — well, friendly acquaintance — Bill Adler has done an Xmas CD (and before that, a tape) for years now. As a New York Jew, it was his way of making sense of his wife's mid-Western family Xmas celebration. This year, I'm particularly taken by Byron Lee and the Dragonaires' Winter Wonderland Reggay and Reuben Anderson's Christmas Time Again, both mid-1960s Jamaican. The second is on a wonderful green and yellow label — a proto Island Records one, I think.

Next up Starting tomorrow, Boxing Day, I will, as promised, be posting my twelve days of Christmas. Stuff I like. Presents I would have bought myself. Etc etc. First up, yes, that partridge in the song . . .

2011-12-13T11:40:00.002Z

Another career development

Having appointed myself the Premier League haircut reviewer (of which more soon), I decided not to stop there and give myself another reviewing job. My new beat? London (mostly) theatre audiences.

So much attention is paid to the play and the players but what about the payers?

Why not give them a review of their own? Marks out of ten, even.

And so to the Young Vic, the other night. The play? Something about a Dane, if I remember right. Couldn't make up his mind. Had problems with his dad. His mum, too. Oh, and his uncle.

Anyway, it was the end, more or less. I hope I'm not giving the game away when I tell you the Dane was dying. It's that kind of play. He was dying in the arms of his pal and his pal wasn't taking it well.

When, suddenly, there was the most terrible sound. The kind of thing you might expect an actorly actor to emote at the moment of death. Only it wasn't. It was a member of the audience.

He'd nodded off and now, at the final moment of the play, he'd started snoring. Well, not just snoring. The biggest, loudest, frighteningest noise. Like he was dying. His head fell back. The noise got louder. The actors paused. I was looking straight at them. They felt like laughing but knew they didn't dare so much as entertain the thought. They paused some more, in a kind of rictus of not-laughing. Then they wondered if he might be dying and, being actors, they thought: how will that play?

While they were considering an entry in their memoirs, I was wondering how quickly I could get it on to my blog. Or should I tweet it. Then I remembered Stephen Fry was in the audience and he'd probably tweeted it already.

The snorer's companion jiggered his arm. He kept snoring, ever louder. She shook him hard. His head fell forward. For a flash, the audience decided he was dead and waited for the shout: is there a doctor in the house? Or perhaps: is there a funeral director?

More terrible noises, fluttering arms movements and, eventually, a return to something like conscious - without, it seemed, his having any idea at all of what had just happened. He might not have died but his female companion looked mortified.

The actors took it up again. They didn't corpse. But one of them quickly became one. They both knew, though, that however good they'd been that night, the audience would not remember them but the man who almost snored himself to death.

2011-12-03T11:04:00.001Z

Bits & pieces, eight

When I finished my course, I also thought about what I would miss. One of the things that came straight to the front of my mind was coming out of Goodge St tube station early on Saturday mornings, always into an empty Tottenham Court Rd.

Mostly, in my memory anyway, it was bright and sunny. I still can’t figure out why it was so meaningful to me. A promise of hope and potential, perhaps.

Whatever . . . it also made me think of this . . .

2011-12-02T07:41:00.001Z

Bits & pieces, seven

Just a short note letting you know . . .

One I've redesigned this blog a little, giving all you lucky people a chance to buy my book – in a way that gives me a small kickback.

Two If you haven't learned this already directly from me, I have taken to tweeting and will be creating an alternative advent calendar by sending out a select (and hopefully offensive) fact from my book Filthy English every day till Christmas, at least. My intention is to send it around nine-thirty in the morning, just in time for you to read it on your way to the pithead (or office, perhaps) and retweet it to one of your many, many, many fellow twits. (Help me, please, have I got my terminology right there?)

Three I have added a tweet button here, plus more buttons that will enable you to follow this blog and get updates every time I post, instead of having to wait for my occasional reminders. Come on, you know that's what you've been waiting for.

Next (tomorrow) London WC1

2011-11-30T10:25:00.002Z

Bits & pieces, six

When I finished my masters, I meant to write something about the Wynne Godley story — how he was appallingly treated by the analyst Masud Khan and how that scandal was dealt with by the psychoanalytic establishment and what meaning and resonance that story still has. But I didn't do, did I? So here is his obituary, which tells some of the story anyway. It's an important tale and there's more here.

PS In case you're wondering why one of those links takes you to a piece of ecclesiastical sculpture, it's because his head was the model for one of the figures.

2011-11-30T07:50:00.004Z

Bits & pieces, five

Something (fairly) silly? (But perhaps don't bother if you have no interest at all in either football or childhood's bestest imaginative construction toy.)

2011-11-28T10:09:00.004Z

Wonders of the modern world: what young(ish) people do with my (our) past

I was at a show last night — Florian Lunaire. It was in a big room above a pub in Essex Rd. It was excellent, as it happens. (Apart from anything else, he has a song called Forever Young. I always approve of songs which share their title with another very famous but quite different song. I'm thinking of writing my own Roll Over, Beethoven — or Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or Hit Me Baby, One More Time.)

But the show itself is not the point. The point is the music that was played before Florian went on. It was, as far as I could tell, old. When I say old, I mean old. I don't think I heard anything newer than the early 1980s — when not many other people in the room were even so much as born.

The tune I particularly noticed was Prince Buster's Madness. Now that is from 1963. At least. Maybe it's even older. It certainly sounds like it is. So it pretty much pre-dates the Beatles. I probably first heard it at the Tunbridge Wells club I spent nights at it in 1968 or so. They'd play lots of ska and bluebeat and soul. I'm sure that was one of them. But . . . it sounded old, even then.

And now they are playing at a show for today's young people. Which leads to all kinds of thoughts about nostalgia and its meaning for us. And its inconstant handmaiden, authenticity, too, of course. Which maybe I'll get into some time. But for now, just one thing . . .

I did the maths. That tune is, roughly, fifty years old. For me (and mine), an equivalent would be that when I was at the Tunbridge Wells club, the warm-up music would have been from World War One. Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag. It's a long, long way to Tipperary. My old man said follow the van and don't dilly dally. Boiled beef and carrots, that's the stuff to do you well. Any old iron, any old iron, any, any, any old iron. Etc etc. To a crowd of young men and women in Ben Sherman button-downs and French crops. Possibly not. Probably, in fact.

2011-11-27T12:21:00.004Z

Bits and pieces, four

When, last year, my old (in both meanings, at least) colleague, Murray Sayle died, I wrote a short memory of him — which I was then asked to read at his London memorial. I didn't think, though, to share any of his wonderful writing with you.

Recently, I found this piece by him — which I didn't even know about. It's a great short sample of his work. One of the smartest things you're likely to read about John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

I might post links to more of his work but, meantime, I'd say it's worth searching out these bits and pieces . . .

One His take on Bloody Sunday, effectively suppressed for thirty years or so. He was there on the spot and, much later, gave evidence to the enquiry. If his conclusions haven't been entirely vindicated, the piece still has resonance.

Two His take on Tiananmen Square. A quite different view of how many were killed and what the demonstrators were on about. An interesting perspective at this time of worldwide Square Dances.

Three His documentary about North Korea, done with the great photographer Elliot Erwitt.

Four His revisionist history of the Vietnam War — where he was a reporter.

Five His version of the atomic end to World War Two — which I helped with, in the smallest of ways, by editing the British version, for the Mail on Sunday's Night & Day, down from the New Yorker original.

http://www.jpri.org/publications/occasionalpapers/op18.html/ murray sayle article

http://www.jpri.org/publications/occasionalpapers/op18.html murray sayle article

2011-11-26T11:05:00.005Z

Bits & pieces, three

I bumped into someone I hadn't seen for a while the other day. He's an acquaintance, I guess, rather than a friend but I've known him a really long time so those things start to blur a bit.

Anyway, I hadn't seen him for long enough to be surprised when he told me had a two-and-a-half year old daughter. (He's not young, either.)

Her name? 'Clemmie,' he said, then added: 'Well, actually it's Chlamydia.' A beat. 'A memory of how her mother and I met.'

For once in my life, I was silent.

Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he was joking. I don't know.

I do know this, though. Years ago, he happened to mention he knew De Niro quite well. I didn't believe him, frankly.

Time passed. He called, late one Saturday. 'Bob's in town,' he said. 'Those two attractive young black women friends of yours . . .' Actually, he didn't say that. He used their names but that's private. The rest was true. His meaning was clear. So was Bob's, of course.

What do you mean? What are you thinking? Nothing happened. Of course, it didn't.

Which, in turn, reminds me of a moment at passport control at JFK in New York. I was with my daughter who was then thirteen or so and, in dress-style terms, passing through — there's no polite way to put this — her 2nd Avenue hooker period. A4 skirt. High stack heels. Boob tube top. Chewing pink bubblegum.

'May I have your wife's passport, too, sir,' said the passport official.

'That's not my wife. It's my daughter,' I said. 'What kind of man do you think I am?'

'We get all sorts here, sir,' he said.

2011-11-25T09:59:00.002Z

Bits & pieces, two

Interviewer Were you a good violinist?

Interviewee I was very so so. And, that's giving me an edge.

The point of this bit (or piece) is, I guess, the identity of the interviewee. It's lyricist Hal David, worked with Burt Bacharach, mostly. Wrote these opening lines: 'Every day I wake up, before I put on my make-up . . .'

Now sing the interviewee's words to the tune of those lines from I Say A Little Prayer. They almost fit, don't they. Not exactly but close, in beats and rhythm.

The point? That the wondrous ability David had to write lyrics that sounded like real speech was, it seems, rooted in his own speech rhythms. That's why those lines from I Say A Little Prayer are so wonderful. No matter how often I hear them sung by Aretha Franklin (or Dionne Warwick/e), they always sound like she is finding that thought as she sings the words — that neat trick that only really on-the-money actors can do on a regular basis. I'd always thought that was mostly down to the singers. Now I think I'd have to say it was already there in the lines written.

PS If you hadn't guessed it by now, I'm working on something about pop music — not just lyrics but the whole deal. It's a big thing. I've got lots of stuff about lots of songs. And I'm trying out some of the thoughts etc here.

Next up Another bit (or piece) but not about music that time

2011-11-24T10:55:00.001Z

Bits & pieces, one

I have a file of notes of stuff and links I thought to put on this blog. Somehow, for various reasons, they don't always make it on. So I've decided to put them up, one a day, till I've run through them.

They're all brief. They're often stupid. Sometimes, they are no more than a link. And, by and large, I'm not giving context or explanation or analysis. I'm leaving that up to the space between your ears.

Think of it, perhaps, as an online version of Sir John Soane's Museum — an external manifestation of the stuff that floats around between my ears. It'll probably tell you more about me than mere fine writing ever could. Not that you might like what you find.

Anyway, whatever, I start with a quote which I found quoted by someone else. I forget who. The point, I guess, if there is one, is to figure out why I might feel the need to quote it.

Or just laugh.

So, here goes . . .

Fowler The Mathematics of Plato’s Academy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Second Edition. 1999. 'Part of every literate person’s intellectual baggage, along with the second law of thermodynamics and the principles of relativity and indeterminacy, is some version of the story of the discovery of incommensurability by Pythagoras or the Pythagoreans…'

See you tomorrow . . .

2011-11-14T15:04:00.003Z

A punk burial, slight return

After I posted the bit about Tom, I sent a link to a friend who immediately passed it on to Tom's brother Jimmy — who, of course, was in Lost Trios and actually performed the song. And Jimmy replied almost right away and here is his reply . . .

It's not true that Tom wrote the line "shove me in a plastic bag and leave me on the pay-ver-ment-ah" (not street). It could be true that he laid claim to it, but the lyrics for this particular song were penned by Bob "Bob" Harding. Tom did actually give me a line when I got stuck on a lyric for another Alberto song "Dead Meat" and he supplied "eat your sister by mistake".
All the best
Jimmy

Which leads to two possibilities . . .

One, my memory is faulty.

Two, Tom's was faulty, perhaps florid.

Take your choice

2011-11-14T10:33:00.001Z

Chronicle of a punk death foretold

Reading an obituary of the pop writer Tom Hibbert (who I worked with and edited for a while), I found myself remembering a conversation with him.

His brother was in a band called Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias. In 1977, they released Snuff Rock, an EP of punk parodies — when barely any punk singles had actually come out. There was a track on the EP with a line about ‘when I’m dead, just put me in a plastic bag and leave me on the street’.

By way of doing that bonding thing we all do with people, I told Tom how funny that line was and how proud his brother should be of it.

‘That was my line,’ said Tom.

I didn’t remember that when he died. I didn’t go to his funeral — not close enough for that anymore. I do, though, wonder if anyone quoted it. And if he was telling the truth about its authorship.

2011-11-10T10:38:00.004Z

Haircuts of today, number three

Fashion is, of course, the reverse of fish.

That is, while fish rot from the head down, fashion works the other way, from the bottom up to the head.

In this case, of course, that means Stan Kroenke. As Arsenal’s big boss (he owns the biggest hunk of shares), he has clearly been influenced by the fashion decisions of his ‘employees’. Certainly in the hairdressing department, anyway.

Or is it just me that reckons it’s a syrup?

2011-11-07T11:12:00.003Z

Haircuts of today, number two

Well, actually, whatever it is, it’s not the number two of skinhead world. It’s true that it could be seen as a number two at the edges. And some have suggested that the middle section looks like a different kind of number two, left there by a passing flying bird.

I guess it could also be seen as some kind of mix of a flat-top and a Mohican. (Or is it a Mohawk? I get them mixed up.) In fact, I think it looks more like a landing strip — in the women’s beauty parlour sense. Maybe he had his wife/girlfriend’s beautician do it.

Two more things.

One I do wonder how much they talk about hair in football dressing rooms. Has it taken the place traditionally occupied in footballers’ empty afternoon by visits to snooker halls, turf accountants and, in the days before afternoon pub opening, drinkers?

Two Frimpong announced he intended to dye his hair pink if Arsenal beat Chelsea. But he doesn’t seem to have done so. Now, I’m no shakes when it comes to tweet’n’twittering but I did find a few things in that world.

* A message from, all people, Lord Sugar.Frimpong new hair style you should try @piersmorgan will suit you.’ No I can’t make sense of it, either. Then I don’t watch The Apprentice. Maybe it’s written in code.

* A picture of Frimpong with a pink stripe on his head, looking like one of his auntie’s slippers has flip-flopped on to. It looked like it might be a fake.

* A note from Frimpong26AFC — which I guess is the man himself. It says: ‘My mum said if i go pink she will disown me I’m really sorry i need somewhere to sleep can’t have me on the streets now can we.’

And I think, aaah, how sweet.

Next in this chain The big boss’s do. (Not the one you’re probably thinking of, though.)

2011-11-02T11:24:00.003Z

Haircuts of today, number one

It’s a job that needs doing. So, even though the pay’s not great, I’ve hired myself to do it. As of today, therefore, I am the Premier League Haircut (and Hair Extensions) Correspondent.

My credentials? Hours spent at Arsenal. No more than that really. Historically, Arsenal players have been well-known for their timidity when it comes to hairdressing. Presented with the choice between a barbers or boozer (or bookies), they would choose the latter for their haircut.

Tony Adams etc would, I think, only have gone near a hairdressing salon if they wanted to borrow some money from the wife. Okay, David Seaman was an exception, with that ponytail of his. I saw him (and his ponytail) close-up once. He was driving to the match, in his Aston Martin. And I must say he looked fine. I did, though, see him on TV last night. He was being a complete pundit. And the ponytail has gone. I said a prayer of remembrance.

These days, though, Arsenal players have taken to setting the pace in the hairdressing area. For a long time, my favourite has been Bacary Sagna’s. On the menu — ha, ha — of greasy spoons, there used to be a dish — ha, ha, again — called The Lot. It may still be there for all I know. Now I guess it’s called the Full English — or, as I saw in an upmarket(ish) Newlyn cafe, The Very Hungry Man’s Cornish Breakfast.

And I think that’s how Sagna got his do done. Asked what he wanted, by his barber (or hairdressing consultant, perhaps) what he wanted in the way of hair modification, he replied: ‘The lot.’

And so he got cornrows, plaits, extensions and colour — plus, most likely some other stuff you can’t see unless you’re really close. The lot. I found myself wondering where he has it done, how long it takes — and how much he pays. But I couldn’t find out, despite trawling the internet for, oh, seconds.

So now you know what to ask for next time you’re having your hair done. The lot. Or not.

Next up Emmanuel Frimpong’s hair: some history and an opinion

Next week I become Official Haircut Correspondent for the EU

2011-10-31T11:38:00.003Z

Wonders of the modern world, number eleven, Bushey Park

Actually, the reality is more striking — by far — than this rather bad picture. It was a mid-late autumn afternoon in Bushey Park. I'd never been there before. Apart from anything else, I always thought Bushey Park was in Bushey — Watford-way, that is. But I found myself round Bushey Park way the other day and decided to walk to Teddington Station via the park — which seems to be vast.

There was a warning on the gate about how I couldn't go in there because there would be live guns firing. Then I realised that only applied to the weekend nights. Then I remembered something about there being too many deer in the park and how they needed to cull them. (And I, being me, wondered what their meat would taste like. And where you could buy it.)

But nothing prepared me for this. A stag with a full set of antlers, having an afternoon nap less than ten metres from the path. When I raised the camera to take the shot, it was even better, in fact. There was a bird wandering about all over the stag. I thought the deer was a corpse, in fact, till an ear twitched and the bird flew off.

I'm sure Bushey Park regulars are surprised at my surprise but, well, you don't expect to see this kind of thing in a London park. All kinds of other things, yes. Things which are illegal in many parts of the world, including inner London, yes. But a fully antlered stag, no.

For once, I feel innocent.

2011-10-22T16:21:00.001+01:00

Me and Philip Glass

More than twenty years ago, I found myself at Philip Glass’s house. Philip Glass, the composer, that is — though he wasn’t there. I was in New York for a piece about David Bowie.

He’d just started his Tin Machine venture and had given me pretty much the worst interview I’d ever had from a major pop star. He’d decided that Tin Machine was a band and that he was only a member of the band. Therefore, he wouldn’t do any more talking than the rest of the band. They, of course, had nothing of interest to say — and probably even realised they didn’t. He, while being one of the best interviewees in pop, came on like one of them — teenage, inarticulate, musicianly.

It’s a long time since I looked at the piece I eventually wrote but it’s possible that I used no more than half a dozen sentences from the interview.* The piece needed to be several thousand words long. It needed an appearance of depth, at least. So I had to think of a way to fill it out — hopefully with fat and flesh rather than padding.

The Tin Machine show was at a theatre on the Lower East Side. At that time, the area was at the most extreme of its paradoxes. Crack heads all over. Literally, you crunched as you walked the streets sprinkled with used crack vials. But also still the remains of the district’s previous incarnation as a first stop for eastern European immigrants. So there were still the hot bath places (shvitzes?) and kosher delis, both milk ones and those with jugs of schmaltz (chicken fat) on the table. And there were also what we would now call hipsters living there — some of whom had been there since the 1970s when it was just rough rather than dangerous and some who’d just moved in to take advantage of the cheap rents and thrills. Nor was it that long since the Tompkins Square riot — a tiny, weenie local rumble which acquired quite lunatically elevated mythic status.

So I figured I could write a piece about slumming and downtown and how David Bowie fitted into that and how Tin Machine was his own version of slumming — an artistic pretence. But then, of course, I’ve always liked artistic pretence, thought it’s often more honest — or rather, truthful — than a posture of honesty, which is so often just pretence. Anyway, I’m sure you get the idea.

Which is how I found myself in Philip Glass’s house. He lived in the very heart of the Lower East Side crackfields. A friend was a friend of his I called and, although, he wasn’t there, his wife graciously agreed to talk to me and invited me over for tea at her house. She told me about the area and what it was like and how she saw it. It was smart, of course, and far usable than anything David Bowie said. So I put it in the piece.

I knew I’d need to thank her, though — effectively. I’m sure I took a gift of some kind — a physical one, that is. But I can’t remember what it was. I do remember the other gift I took, though. It was a joke. About her husband. This is the joke:

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Knock-knock, knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Knock-knock, knock-knock, knock-knock?

Knock-knock, knock-knock, knock-knock, who’s there?

Philip Glass.

A somewhat show-offy gag in some circles, true. But already an established winner in my tiny repertoire of jokes — I guess I only told them to people who knew who Philip Glass was and what his music was like. So I was worried his wife would have heard it before. But she hadn’t. And she loved it.

Now, the other day, I was listening to a Marc Maron podcast. One of his guests was Ira Glass, the NPR broadcaster, the one who does This American Life. I knew he was Philip Glass’s cousin but I’d forgotten that. He told a story about his wife drunk-dialling PG at 3am then forgetting about it entirely. Then he told the PG knock-knock joke. My PG knock-knock joke. And Marc Maron had never heard it. And he loved it. And the crowd loved it. And I decided — with no evidence apart from the fact that if a toppish-line comic like Marc Maron hadn’t heard it before, then not many other people in the US can have done — that Ira must, therefore, have got it from his cousin’s wife. Who got it from me.

I can’t even admit how pleased I felt.

* The PR was pissed off at me about this and, later, told me so. Much later, he phoned me to say he’d re-read the piece and re-thought it and realised that, under the circumstances, my piece was more than fair and, well, he was apologising. A gracious act. Not unusual among PRs in my experience, in fact. By and large, PRs were better behaved and more moral and more fun people than journalists — notably so, in the case of the upmarket dailies. That PR deserves a credit, by the way. His name is Alan Edwards.

2011-10-06T13:53:00.001+01:00

Steve and me

The death of Steve Jobs only just appeared in this morning’s papers and I’ve not read any of the obituaries or comments so I’ve no idea if I’m saying anything original or it’s already a cliché.

I’ll head straight to my conclusion. The fact is, I feel better for Steve Jobs’ death. Liberated, almost. Maybe now, I can escape Apple jail. Maybe I’m alone. Or maybe there are lots of us.

I’ll explain.

The first time I ever saw an Apple computer was sometime in the 1980s. I fell in love. It was in a producer friend’s home studio. It not only did the things I’d dreamed computers would do when I was a kid in thrall to Dan Dare and his future. It did them in a cool way I hadn’t even dreamed of. It was like Dan Dare had somehow had a side career in, say, a rock band.

Which, of course, was both kind of the truth about Apple. And kind of the shtick. (Which is, again, of course, where this story is eventually going.)

I decided right away that this was the computer I wanted. Till I could have one of these, I’d rather struggle on with my IBM Selectric — itself a dream machine, which made a noise like an assault rifle as you typed, turning the act of writing into a cousin of urban warfare. I still miss that noise.

(The machine itself is in a cupboard, along with its predecessor, an Olivetti Lettra 32, the portable choice of real war correspondents. Maybe I should have them buried with me. Or, as I want to be cremated, burned. I wonder if you’re allowed to do that.)

So I never bothered with Amstrads or shit like that. I waited till the price came down far enough for me to be able to afford one. Which, eventually, it did.

But, before that happened, Steve Jobs had already entered my life, revolutionised it even. I just happened to be around, in a position of relative responsibility, on the first magazine in the UK to move to Apples and what was then known as ‘full-page make-up’. It was, believe it or not, Punch, that repository — and butt — of old jokes.

So, overnight, I became something of an expert on Apples. That is, I was one page in the manual ahead of most everyone else. Soon, very soon, I was hired by The Guardian — mostly on account of this Rizla-thin skill — to help it reinvent itself for the 1990s. Difficult to believe as it may seem from this distance, but it had been hit hard the arrival of the Independent five years earlier — and still hadn’t figured out what to do. (This is not unusual at The Guardian. It is currently clearly foundering financially — dropping £30 million a year, while still paying its editor a few monkeys short of £500,000 — and pushing for accountability on executive salaries in other businesses.)

Anyway, as a result of this I became a true believer — an Applostle, perhaps. And, eventually, by semantic process, an Applostate, maybe.

As a fan, I proselytised for Apple, telling anyone who’d listen how superior an operating system it was to the clunk world of PCs. I also, for a while, had access to a NeXT machine — the test-bed for many of the great things that appeared on Apples, too, once Apple had brought Jobs back into the fold (and bought out NeXT).

Eventually, I stopped talking about it, coming to believe, I guess, that if people couldn’t see the difference with their own eyes, they certainly weren’t going to hear it through their ears. I never swayed from using Apples, though, even when the build-quality of their software tested my resolve to its limits.

Skulking around in the back of my mind, though, was something new, some kind of reserve. That was the real reason I became more reticent.

And the source of that reserve I realised was Steve Jobs — though that took even longer to realise. First of all, I became embarrassed at my own applosticity. An Apple computer was, after all, just another product. How could I have an emotional relationship to it? (I know, I know, that’s the story of modern capitalism but we all like to believe we’re different, don’t you.)

I started to see smugness and entitlement in Apple users — though never in myself, of course, ha, ha. Next, I read the court judgment on Apple vs Apple. It’s a fascinating piece. Long, though. Essentially, to my mind, the evidence all tilted the Beatles’ way. The Jobs lawyers presented a case of such casuistry that they could have as well been arguing over angels and pinheads. It was the kind of case I would have made up if I was having a laugh.

But they got away with it , for one simple reason. Or, rather, one simple person. Neil Aspinall — who ran the Beatles’ Apple. His evidence was such that there were only two plausible alternatives. One, he was a complete idiot. Two, he was pretending to be a complete idiot.

The judge — clearly a highly competent man — fell victim to the reverse Dunning-Kruger effect. That is, his own competence rendered him incapable of seeing others’ incompetence. He decided Aspinall was a liar rather than an idiot. The truth is, he was the latter. He had no idea of what was going on, no understanding of computers etc etc.

I was, though, more or less repulsed by the approach of Jobs’ lawyers. I know lawyers are meant to be devious etc but I just couldn’t stomach this for some reason— probably because it made me feel an idiot for ever having been a believer.

Then I went into an Apple store and, fuck it, it felt like church. If I ever do have to go into an Apple store, I have to breathe myself through the experience.

The last straw — see how emotion brings clichés to the fore of my brain — was seeing one of Jobs’ presentations. They were like — and here we go into the inexorable relationship between length of posting and likelihood of a Third Reich analogy — a Nuremberg rally. I sometimes think what I loathed most about the couple of the I watched was Steve Jobs clothes. That and the fact that — although he had made great computers — he seemed to be a quite loathsome human being, self-satisfied, arrogant etc etc. The fact that everyone there seemed to love it was even more distressing.

I guess that’s what happens when you fall out of love. You fall into hate. One projection replaces another.

2011-09-09T10:23:00.001+01:00

Wonders of the modern world, ten . . . When dinosaurs roamed north London

Other places have gnomes in their front gardens. Primrose Hill has dinosaurs.

It reminded that the great ice age stopped at Finchley Road station. Honest. Back then, there was a great ice cliff, a couple of miles high – half way down where the platform is now, I think.

One day I’m going to walk that boundary — where the ice stopped and the dinosaurs began. (Okay, I may have got my pre-history a little messed up there. But . . .)

Which leads me back to Freud . . .

I hear that Lucien — sorry, Lucian — Freud’s nephew Matthew is moving into the area, following in his great-grandfather’s steps. Elsworthy Road was the psychoanalyst’s first home in exile. Matthew isn’t living there, though. From what I hear, he’s on the other side of the park. Not exactly where Sidney Bechet or Roger Fenton lived but not far. Nor from where Sylvia Path killed herself.

I think of Matthew Freud’s forebear, Edward Bernays. He was the son of the marriage between Sigmund’s sister and his wife’s brother. Vienna-born, Bernays emigrated with his parents, becoming a true New Yorker — a top-dollar pitchman, the PR rep for the Wilson government, Lucky Strike cigarettes and, later, anti-smoking campaigners.

He either did invent both the phrase ‘public relations’ (a replacement for the word ‘progaganda’, made unpalatable by German use of it in WW1) and the practice of public relations — or, by claiming he did, Bernays convinced everyone he actually did it, even if he didn’t. Now that’s what I call public relations, volume one.

Just the kind of thing that it looks like Matthew Freud’s in-laws could do with right now, I find myself thinking.

2011-09-01T10:23:00.002+01:00

Lucian Freud and me, part two

One Yes, I know I spelled Freud’s first name wrong in the previous posting. I realised that before I posted it but decided to leave it in because I always seem to spell it wrong. I don’t really know why.

It’s not that I don’t know I do it. The only possibilities I can think of are that it’s because I have the spelling stuck in my head from the singer John Lucien. Or even Jon Lucien. Or it’s just a — wait for it — Freudian slip.

Okay, but if it is a slip, what does it reveal? The only think I can think of is that I link his name not with its real, classical Roman forebear — the satirist Lucian, probably — but with that familial derivation of Lucien, from the Latin lucius. Which, suitably for a painter, comes from lux, Latin for light. Which leads to . . .

Two In the aftermath of Freud’s death, my local paper had a reminiscence from an ex-lover. (That’s the kind of gossip you have to put up with in your local paper if you live round my way.) She said that her name for him — others used it, too — was Lux.

Three I had a thought about Freud’s nudes — most of his recent work, after all. What is so unusual (and to my mind original) about Freud’s nudes is their almost complete disconnection from/with sexuality. And whether it’s honest enough to own up to it or not, a lot of nude painting is some kind or other of sexual desire.

Not Freud’s work, though. Which, given the way he carried on, is a bit odd. Worthy of remark even. A renowned real-life skirt-chaser who doesn’t even seem, in his painting, to lust after Kate Moss — who I have seen in person and she really is gorgeous.

So? So there is something plain and ordinary and quotidian about his nudes. They’re not nudes even, really. They’re nakeds. And what I thought is this: there is something about them that reminds me of simple basic photographs of ordinary people, naked — ie not pornography or its ten-bob cousin, erotica.

And I found myself thinking of WW2 camp photographs — the violent intrusions of Nazi pictures of camp inmates etc. How this was another degradation. And I found myself wondering if at some level, conscious or unconscious, the banal demoticness of Freud’s nudes/nakeds is, in part, a way of reclaiming ordinary naked humanity from the grip of Nazi violence.

Which, surely, must have had a place in his memory. He was born in 1922. Hitler came to power in January 1933. Freud saw the Reichstag born — and was ‘excited’ by it The same year, his family moved from Berlin to St John’s Wood. Five years later, in the wake of Kristallnacht (Germany) and the Anschluss (Austria), his grandfather and his family joined them. (He long refused to show his paintings in Berlin and to this day there has never been a show in Vienna.)

Given what then came to pass, he must certainly have seen in those Nazi photographs a future of his own that never came to pass. And by painting the way he did, he kind of stole those horrific images back and reclaimed them — or rather what they showed — for their rightful owners. Their subjects, that is. All of us, by extension, perhaps.

PS After I’d written this but also after I’d put up my first Lucian Freud post, I was contacted by someone I know a little — little enough, in fact, not to know that she’d been painted by Freud. She was pissed off at me for spelling the name wrong. I hope she’s unpissed by my explanation.

Some distraction?

One I was in Cornwall for a bit, caught the riots. See here . . .

Two 'My nose and ass/They're both big/I use hot sauce on my lox and bagels'

2011-08-24T07:41:00.003+01:00

The liberation of Tripoli considered as a catwalk opportunity

All wars of whatever kind have always had a strong fashion element. Hence such things as: grunts decorating their helmets in Vietnam; the adoption of the keffiyah by both middle eastern terrorist/liberation movements and as a western university uniform; the occasional pop star falling into a pit of embarrassment and vacuity when challenged about their claim that the Nazis were 'cool'.

The Libyan uprising, though, seems to have taken war-fashion to a new level. I can't help myself noticing the dress code of the rebels.

With the advent of effective long-distance rifles in the mid 19th century, warriors abandoned their previous battlefield finery. Out went feather plumes, red jackets, striped trousers and - a personal favourite - the pelisse, a fur-trimmed jacket that cavalry men (there were few, if any cavalry women, I'm assured) wore slung over one shoulder but never actually put on. In came olive drab, sensible boots and jackets with lots and lots of useful pockets. The only time modern troops get to dress up properly is when guarding the Queen or the Pope or something.

The rebels have upended this completely. They go into battle dressed up as if for a night out on the passegiata. No worries that their blue and white hooped polo shirt might make a target for enemy snipers. No, they seem set on cutting a bella figura. They really do offer a full range of well-chosen sports wear for the would-be liberator. They've mostly gone for the white trainers option, too.

I particularly like watching out for the football shirts being worn. I've seen a lot of Barcelona ones but my favourite was a Manchester United away shirt — complete with number 10 and 'Owen' on the back. If football is war by other means, here war is football by other means.

I was left with a question, though: what about the regime forces? Where are their fashionistas?

Then last night I found myself watching Newsnight or somesuch and seeing old footage of Gadafi. I'd long cracked the gag that the way he dressed these days, it was hard to tell him apart from Carlos Santana — moustache plus loose, brown outfit and unusual head-covering (for male pattern baldness reasons, I suspect).

But I'd forgotten just what a fashionist he'd been over the years. He had his Michael Jackson phase — peaked cap and military tunic, lots of excessive gold frogging, dark glasses. And as I watched Newsnight, I saw him in his 1980s phase — pale blue trakkie. He looked like a Scouse scally on his way to a pre-Heysel Liverpool away match in Europe. (Or were Michael Jackson and the scallies copying Gadafi?)

So maybe the rebels realised that as, in the end, all military victories can only be successfully secured by concomitant social victories, therefore when going into battle the choice of shirt is at least as significant as NATO air support, maybe more.

Plato: When the texture of shirting fabric changes, so the walls of the city shake.

PS When my friend Paul published a big magazine article on the fashion aspect of terrorist groupings, he got into terrible trouble. Here's hoping.

2011-08-09T10:45:00.002+01:00

The dietary requirements of the average north London rioter . . .

The smashing etc time reached to within a few hundred metres of my house, to Chalk Farm station. I was expecting more damage, I guess, but all I could see was broken fronts — all now guarded by calm policemen — on Evans cycles, Sainsbury's mini store and this, the local Domino's pizza.

Notice that the sushi place next door was left untouched. As was Marine Ices over the road. And even the Marathon kebab bar — though the some of the clientele there really wouldn't take kindly to their consumption patterns being disrupted.

So . . . just Domino's Pizza, please — the chosen dinner of rioters. Perhaps even now, in Ann Arbor, the owners are thinking of that as a slogan. You are, it was often said, what you eat.

PS1 I was there because there was an online call for people to help clear up this morning. It was needed, I'm pleased to say. It had already all been cleared up, by the council, I should imagine.

PS2 Perhaps I should have guessed that: I was woken up this morning by the council street-sweeper doing the kerb outside my house.

2011-08-08T10:17:00.004+01:00

Art appreciation

One evening, two openings.

One, in Camden Town, near Mornington Crescent. Part of the London Street Photography Festival. Photos taken of people on buses — who didn’t know they were being photographed.

I think: Walker Evans taking secret pictures on the New York subway. I think: this would be illegal in France because of their privacy laws. I think: I shall take a photograph of the photographer with his photographs. He’s the blur, obviously. Time passes.

Two, in Kentish Town Road, at the Zabludowicz Collection.

I see a golden urinal and think: it’s nearly a century since R Mutt took the piss.

Eating and drinking reviews

Street Photography two bars, Ketel vodka (sponsor), either truly horrible special cocktails or neat on ice; nothing to eat.

Zabludowicz one bar, waiters and waitresses in black and white, wine, beer, espresso machine coffee; tea-cup sized portions of Polish-ish food (esp potatoes).

2011-07-31T15:10:00.001+01:00

Lucien Freud and me, part one

Not an a obituary or an assessment of the newly dead painter, just a recounting of an encounter. Well, one and a half encounters. Or maybe one and one-tenth.

I did once have a conversation with Lucien Freud. I can remember exactly nothing of what was said. I can, though, remember its tenor and ending. (I’m sure that says something about memory — both mine and in general. But this is not the time or place to consider that. I’ll maybe come back to it some time in the future. If I remember. Boom, boom.)

It was in the mid-1990s, in a then newly fashionable (in certain circles) bar/club/restaurant, Green Street in Mayfair. An alternative (of sorts) to the Groucho, it was — as you’d expect of somewhere favoured by Freud — a louche establishment. The chef was Peter Gordon, the pan-Asian gay New Zealander later in charge of the Sugar Club etc. Regulars included Toby Young, Jay Jopling and the whole YBA crowd.

One night, my friend Tim and myself found ourselves alone at the bar ordering a drink when Freud appeared next to us. I’d seen him there several times before. He’d put good energy into convincing another friend’s girlfriend to have lunch with him. I have two memories of what happened next, either of which might be true.

One, she agreed, he propositioned her, she was upset, her boyfriend was thrilled.

Two, she declined, her boyfriend (possibly knowing what was in store) persuaded her, she went to lunch, he suggested she pose for him (and propositioned her), she declined both offers, her boyfriend (probably thrilled by the prospect of a kind of post-modern troilism with Lucien Freud) was upset and tried to convince her to change her mind but failed.

I’d never stood so close to Freud or seen him outlined against a wall. He was tiny, I remember thinking. Astonishingly vulpine and beautifully suited. Exactly the kind of aged man you’d expect to be still propositioning young girls — he was then in his mid-seventies.

So Tim and Lucien and I talked a bit about whatever. Then the owner of the club emerged from somewhere, came over to us and greeted all three of us warmly. Then he said to Freud: ‘Lucien, I see you’ve met my friends Tim and Pete, a pair of the finest journalists in London.’

At which point, the laws of physics were ruptured. Freud disappeared in front of our eyes. He was there and then he was not there. There was no stage of transition. In the face of journalistic enquiry, he had, quite magically, de-substantiated. Why? Well, a general desire for distance from journalistic enquiry — bordering on distaste for journalism and journalists.

Oh, how conflicting it must have been for him to have enjoyed himself chatting to us then discovered we were the enemy. As it happens, neither of us had any designs beyond a chat and wouldn’t, I’m sure, have repeated anything in print — at the time, anyway.

He didn’t, of course, disappear from existence. I remember seeing him at the club, in fact. But we never had another chat.

The one-tenth of an encounter was not long after the first. It was outside the Cafe Rouge in Kensington on a Saturday lunchtime. I was eating with my friend Paul. Perhaps Freud was eatint there, too. All I remember was that he became upset about something. I have two memories of what it was, both probably false — another rejection by a young woman or a betting slip torn up and thrown down.

Whichever it was, what I do remember is that he launched himself into his car, a vintage Bentley, I think, of some distinctive colour — deep blue or perhaps powder blue. He span the wheel, u-turned in the face of oncoming traffic and disappeared up Kensington High St in the direction of Hyde Park.

This time, I didn’t see him again. Ever.

Next part two of me and Mr Freud

2011-07-25T09:58:00.001+01:00

Hackety hack

Last autumn, an American friend, a US TV news man in London, told me I should read the New York Times article on what was going on at News International. You won’t believe it, he said. It’s really serious, much worse than I realised. You really should read it.

I didn’t. I kept meaning to. But I didn’t.

Then the other day, I did. My friend was right. I should have read it before. It tells the story clearly and directly and devastatingly without ever spoiling its pitch by joining the Guardian on its high horse cantering across the moral high ground.

Read it here. It’s long, really long, but worth it. In a fun way.

2011-07-20T11:25:00.001+01:00

2011-07-19T12:02:00.004+01:00

Things change . . .

It’s the cliché of anarchism (etc): if voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.

Well, here is a good, clear of example of how voting changes . . . graphic design.

For something I was writing, I looked up government approaches to music education. Without realising it, I downloaded not, as I thought I had, two contemporary reports, but one produced under the current government and one under the former.

Here’s the old (new Labour) cover . . .

Here’s the new (coalition) cover . . .

Striking, no?

Old (new Labour) a large image, shot on 21mm (I think) lens, adding (rightly or wrongly) drama, with (as always in the last government’s publications) an ethnic minority (as per new Labour usual, a young ‘black’ person); a two-colour title, with the words unaligned (in builder’s terminology, ‘on the piss’); a subhead aiming at inclusion but begging a question (more music than what? more people than who?)

New (coalition) consciously sober title (it says what it does on its cover); conscious, perhaps archaic capitalisation (‘Government Response’ rather than the less stentorian ‘government response’); blue colour (an indication of coalition balance?); a seemingly pointless shadow rectangle with a grid pattern which perhaps hints at an underlying mathematical response to music (for better or worse)

It doesn’t stop at the cover, either, of course. The difference continues inside.

The new (coalition) document opens with a quote from Plato and includes this sentence: ‘Music is an enriching and valuable academic subject. Research evidence shows that a quality music education can improve self-confidence, behaviour and social skills, as well as improve academic attainment in areas such as numeracy, literacy and language.’

The old (new Labour) one aimed, among other things, ‘to develop a world-class workforce in music education’. Workforce, world-class — how quaint and early 21st century those words now seem. It included this statement from the then Arts Minister, Estelle Morris: ‘It's about everyone with a love of music coming together to create the soundtrack to young people's lives.’

Then love, everyone, soundtrack, coming together, young people.

Now research evidence, self-confidence, improve, academic subject, social skills, attainment, numeracy, literacy.

Plus ça change, plus ça change.

Plato (him, again) wrote: ‘Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the laws of the State always change with them.’ And, it seems, vice versa.

2011-07-05T12:38:00.004+01:00

Wonders of the modern world, number nine

A sign of summer (and neighourhood ethnicity statistics). Some look for swallows. In my part of north London, I look for parking spaces. The other day, I was driving south on Gloucester Avenue towards Camden Town and realised I could have my pick of maybe twenty spaces – which means there are now more Americans living in my neighbourhood than even the number of whole house rebuilds going on would indicate.

When the roads become clear and the parking spaces start becoming become free and easy, then I know summer is really here. It means the Americans have begun leaving. ASL in St John's Wood has closed till September. The mothers have taken their children home across the Atlantic to their mothers for the summer – while their investment banker (mostly) husbands sweat a few more weeks alone in the city.

Where the cars go, though, I've no idea. Maybe they put them into storage for the summer. All I know is that it will all be even clearer by the end of next week, when all the private schools will have closed for the summer. Then, the traffic is so light, you could have a half-hour kip in the middle of St John's Wood High Street.

It's always a shock when I go to another bit of London in late July or August. There are cars on the street. And people. What's wrong with them? Don't they have second homes to go to?

2011-06-20T10:42:00.005+01:00

What is so funny about (What’s so funny ’bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?

The other night, I went to see Nick Lowe play, at the Royal Festival Hall, as part of Ray Davies’ Meltdown thing. (The first time I saw Nick Lowe play was as one of Kippington Lodge in Tunbridge Wells Assembly Rooms — or perhaps the youth club hut in Sparrows Gree n.)

He played (What’s so funny ’bout) Peace, Love and Understanding. (That’s the ‘correct’ title, by the way. No question mark, apostrophised ‘about’, variable use of upper and lower case. I just checked the original album sleeve.)

Of course, he did. He’s always played it, in living memory anyway. I’ve heard him play it in all kinds of different ways and in different places in the set. That night, he played it in the middle of the show, throwing it away almost but also fitting his approach to it that night. With his small band, he cast it as a simple matter of a few coherent facts. It is a truth universally acknowledged . . .

It hasn’t always sat there in his set — or in other people’s. Though I can’t recall him ever using it a barnstorming finisher, others certainly have played it that way. It’s one of those songs which contains multitudes — or ways to sing it anyway.

There is, I’ve come to realise, a whole long story about its journey from a piece of irony in 1974 (or, more precisely, an honest statement/heartfelt plea masquerading as irony) to a rant in 1978 (Elvis Costello) to a money-spinner in the early 1990s (Curtis Stigers’ cover on the Bodyguard soundtrack) to Nick’s own quiet solo performances (prayer-like sometimes) to its emergence as a quite unironic anthem in 21st century America (a left-leaning thing in the wake of the Iraq invasion, in particular).

So . . . some listening and watching . . .

One Elvis Costello goes bluegrassy country. It’s the second song in a two-part medley.

Two Elvis Costello tears it up, on Independence Day. A Brit succouring Americans?

Three Elvis Costello brings on Nick Lowe — acoustically, in Tokyo.

Four Nick Lowe goes Latinate — putting the clave in Kimmel.

Five Elvis Costello’s floppy hands on a beach — the original single version of his.

Six Elvis Costello does it star-style, with a Dylan and a Deschanel, among others. And two drummers, a father and daughter pairing.

Seven Elvis Costello introduces a visionary version by the handsomest man in show business (and Nobel-prize possibility).

Eight Bruce Springsteen and friends, in New Jersey, I think. In wobble-vision, from the loge.

Nine Brinsley Schwarz, the original, sound-without-vision. Ironic or not?

Ten A Perfect Circle, an American band on a 2004 anti-war trip — with suitably antiphonic images.

PS1 If you didn’t get an email link to my Peace & Love Dropbox, filled with other and more versions, let me know, either by email or posting a comment.

PS2 The one version I haven’t been able to include anywhere is Bill Murray singing it in Lost in Translation. A favourite, for many reasons — not least the disappointment and distaste on Murray’s face when he failed to win the Oscar for his performance. Which he probably deserved to win — if any lineal link can ever be drawn between the words ‘deserve’ and ‘Oscar’. So if you’ve got an mp3 or somesuch of it, I’d be obliged.

PS3 Another take on peace, love and understanding, courtesy of Tom and his Bernelli.

2011-06-15T11:39:00.003+01:00

What I did at half-term, part two

So . . .

So this was the story the storyteller (at the pagan wedding, on a west Penwith hillside) told about why we ‘toast’ people . . .

Long ago, when giants and monsters roamed the land . . . Actually, he didn’t say that or anything much like it but what he did say did have that kind of Arthurian vibe. What he did say that was that once upon a time . . . Actually, he didn’t say that either, but he did set it in a semi-mythical past.

He did say: people used to put a piece of toast in a glass of wine then hand it around for everyone to drink; and when they had done this, the person being honoured would eat the toast.

When he told this story, everyone (myself included) went: ah-ha, so that’s where the word toast comes from, how come I haven’t wondered about it before, now I’ve got an answer to a question I’d never even posed. A truly shared moment. Honest.
Then, being me and in possession of an online Oxford English Dictionary account, I looked it up.

Ah. This is what I found . . .

A figurative application of toast n.1, the name of a lady being supposed to flavour a bumper like a spiced toast in the drink.

See the Tatler, No. 24, of 2 June, and No. 31, of 18 June, 1709, in both of which toast is explained as a new name, upon the origin of which ‘the Learned differ very much’. No. 24 says that ‘many of the Wits of the last Age will assert’ that the term originated in an incident alleged to have occurred at Bath in the reign of Charles II, 1660–1684. No. 31 is silent as to the incident, and gives the account cited below.

No. 31 is a citation from a piece by the man who, more than any other Englishman, invented journalism (and whose name was taken for a pub near my house — till very recently owned by friends of mine), Sir Richard Steele.

1709 R. Steele Tatler No. 31. K8 Then, said he, Why do you call live People Toasts? I answered, That was a new Name found out by the Wits to make a Lady have the same Effect as Burridge in the Glass when a Man is drinking.

There is another citation, in which the more modern meaning is given — the one in which it refers to the act of drinking, rather than a young (or not so young) woman.

1746 H. Fielding True Patriot 21 Jan. 1/2 A Toast, which you know is another Word for drinking the Health of one's Friend or some Person of Public Eminence.

So . . . a toast to the storyteller for his tall story.

2011-06-09T13:17:00.004+01:00

What I did at half-term, part one

A first for me: a pagan wedding. It wasn’t actual pagans getting married, of course. It was a couple of artist-craftsman (and woman) friends of mine, in their garden on a sunny day in the hills of west Penwith. Still, I thought you might like to know what you’re letting yourself in for if you get invited along to a pagan marriage bash.

First, there was no sacrifice, either human or animal — even though there was something of a three-legged altar made out of large granite stones. (It usually earns its keep as a garden table.) I can’t pretend I wasn’t disappointed. Where is the spirit of Edward Woodward when you need it?

Second, there wasn’t actually a pagan priest running the thing from behind a hooded cowl, with a staff of correction in her hand. Rather, it was a part-timer whose day job is storyteller. It did help, though, that he looked (and dressed) like Steve Martin in The Jerk — or a more benign version of Brad Dourif’s pentacostal preacher in Flannery O’Connor/John Huston’s Wise Blood.

Three, there was an ancient (well, probably) saying something like ‘What once was, shall ever be’. (Something like that anyway.) It was engraved on a glass goblet, hand-blown by a friend.

Four, a toast was drunk by all from this goblet — which contained white wine and a bit of dry toast (rapidly getting soggy). The story-teller then got us to pass this round and all have a sip. He told us this was an ancient ritual*.

Five, there was no Whitney Houston I Shall Always Love You or anything similar. (Nor was there any Yvonne Fair It Should Have Been Me.)

Six, there was a ‘hand-fasting’ thing where their teenage son (this was a modern marriage) wrapped a strand of three coloured ribbons (white for cloud, green for earth, blue for sky — the pagan bits kept coming). Thus bound, they left the ceremony for a bit — with their best man and maid of honour so I don’t think it was a sex thing, though who knows? Then they came back, said some stuff to each other about how wonderful the other one was and how lucky they were to get married. Then the storyteller (kind of) pronounced them married. (The real legal thing was a couple of days before in a registry office.)

Seven, there was a gorse kissing sprig. (See picture.) It was a reference to a song with a line about kissing only being in fashion when the gorse is in flower. (Gorse is always in flower.)

Eight, we all had our picture taken inside a frame hung from a tree. See picture.
Nine, there was a vicar there. He was a good friend of the bride’s late mother. He began one of his bits with the phrase ‘If there is a god . . .’ Who can not love the Church of England, a religion which, where others have ritual, has jumble sales? For the record and census purposes, I’m a North London Jewish-ish (through marriage) Catholic atheist - and, to steal an old Nik Cohn line, not untypical of the sort.

Ten, it was all excellent.

* Knowingly or unknowingly, he wasn’t telling the truth. In the next posting, I’ll give his version. And the OED’s. You can take your choice.

2011-06-08T10:27:00.004+01:00

What I did on my (Easter) holidays, part six

I went to the city that took my name . . .

2011-05-11T07:11:00.005+01:00

What I did on my (Easter) holidays part five

This is a picture of a Druze village street in northern Israel. Why did I take it?

What would you think of it if I said a bomb had gone off there five years ago? And that it was the bomber's home town?

And what would you say (or think) if I told you I was playing at being either a new topographicist or a Becher, messing around with imbuing neutral landscape with existential dread?

What would you think if I invoked the hoary old paradox that I always lie?

2011-05-04T12:38:00.009+01:00

What I did on my (Easter) holidays, part four

Two pictures of two walls, no more than a hundred metres apart.

One of an impressive but uncomfortably triumphalistic image on the walls of Jerusalem's Old City.

One of an impressive piece of what Ruskin called 'honest repair' - from a shopping mall wall. An old building was taken to pieces for reconstruction. Each brick and stone were numbered. Then, when it was put back together, the numbering was deliberately left in view. (I used the basic Photo Fix on my Sony Ericsson phone to sharpen up the colours a little.) The building was by Moshe Safdie. It's the smartest shopping mall I've ever seen.

2011-05-04T12:24:00.005+01:00

What I did on my (Easter) holidays, part three

On Saturday night, I was invited to what I was told (by a non-Christian) was an Ethiopian music event. I found myself on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, deep in Jerusalem's Old City, right in the middle of the Ethiopian Holy Fire ceremony.

Every Christian lot has a bit of the Holy Sepulchre. Catholics, Copts, Orthodox, Armenians etc etc: they've all got their little bit of the place to themselves. (There's no Lutherans or Wee Frees of Scotland, of course. It's a Protestant-free gaff.) The Ethiopians got the roof. There were thousands of them crushed in there, parading and dancing. All dressed in white robes, all holding candles. The last time I was in a crowd that packed was at the old Boothen End at Stoke City. They were far, far, far calmer. Far less boozed up, too. And way less smelly.

I have never been anywhere which felt so like I was in instant danger of being trampled to death. But nothing happened. As one of the Ethiopian Christians said: 'This happens all round the world every Easter. And no-one has ever been injured.' It's enough to turn you into a believer. Not that there's any chance of that with me. Thank God.

2011-05-04T12:09:00.001+01:00

What I did on my (Easter) holidays, part two

Then . . .

I followed the parade up the hill till we reached the last of Christ's stations — outside the old church on the hill top. There, I took a second picture. Again, it reminded me of other Good Friday parades — a time when all young women in possession of their youth and hope get dressed up in hope of attracting a man of their dreams.Things never change. I'm sure it's a mid-Spring ritual that far precedes the arrival of Christianity, whether Maronite, Catholic or Other.Notice the carefully tended long hair and the modesty rules — bare legs or arms would have been unacceptable but tight, tight jeans (and high heels) are fine. One religion's dress codes are so often another's moral outrage.

2011-05-04T11:44:00.019+01:00

What I did on my (Easter) holidays, part one

As someone who once found themselves, unknowingly, in Bethlehem on Christmas Day, it should have been no surprise to me that I chanced across a Maronite Christian Good Friday parade in a village near the Lebanon border. I took this picture of the parade — very similar to the ones in long-ago Ireland and my memory.Then . . .

2011-04-17T12:06:00.005+01:00

Wonders of the modern world, number eight . . . The pubs of Penzance

A mid-week mid-morning at the Seven Stars, Parade St, Penzance. Like sign, like boozer. The Penwith take on the gastropub concept. Behind the gate is the covered smoking area — bigger, nautrally than the pub itself.

By the way, Parade St is not a place for a parade. It's barely a street. More an alley with pretensions. Anorexics have to breathe in if they pass in it.

Some fun?

Nick Lowe and his Kippington Lodge were probably the first pop group I saw live — they were the local band. Go here and you'll hear Nick talk about that band — and an evening in a Manhattan broom cupboard with a Keith Richards freshly sprung from pokey. Lowe's anecdotalism has been described — by him, I think — as mile-melters, ie they make long journeys pass in bliss. I listened to this podcast while walking round the park with my dog. If anyone spotted me laughing out loud and gave me a wide berth, they will now know the reason for my public amusement. (PS It's Word podcast 168.)

2011-04-06T05:56:00.004+01:00

More pod

Another podcast I’ve been listening to is Freakonomics, a spin-off by the two guys who wrote the book of that name.

It’s a series of magazine pieces in the tradition of American public broadcasting — like Radio 4 etc, only friendlier and even more determinedly liberal.

The idea is that it’s economists’ take on the world — outside and beyond the world of economics, that is. The one I listened to most recently posed the question: does it really matter at all who is president of the United States? The answer — you guessed it — seems to be, no, not much. It has an interesting time to getting there, too.

Some diversions . . .

Laptopistan

A youthful dodger on drums and a swinging bass player who would become a swinging snapper

Also . . .

An article of mine in The Independent about Wayne Rooney's swearing

2011-03-25T11:18:00.006Z

Now that's what I call a review . . .

This was spotted, by Iain Aitch, on the shelves of Waterstone's in Finchley Rd.

Some fun while you're here?

1 Life before Blondie

2 Elvis Costello without glasses

3 And with

Next up Another podcast

2011-03-25T11:02:00.003Z

I pod, you pod, they podcast

I’m probably well behind the loop on this but I’ve recently become a big fan of the podcast What The Fuck. I load it on to my phone and listen to it while walking the dog etc. If you see me laughing to myself with those black wires hanging from my ears, that’s why.

It’s done by an American comic who I’d never heard of before, Marc Maron. He’s been around for years and is now in his mid-forties. He’s had the divorces, the drug habit, the alcoholism and all that classic comic stuff. He’s angry and twisted and bitter and worried and self-hating and self-doubting. Imagine Woody Allen without pretension and without being a pain in the arse.

The show is just him and another comic, mostly. They talk for an hour or so, sometimes even two hours. I find it fascinating for two reasons.

One, the content and the quality of the conversation. He and the comics — most of whom he knows, if only a little — talk openly and in great detail about their lives. (The language and subject matter is not for the knock-kneed but then you could guess that from the podcast title.) If you ever thought it was a cliche that comedy comes out of pain — painful childhood, in particular — this is proof that cliches are cliches because they’re true.

Two, the relentless detail of the conversation. Not about that emotional stuff. Interesting as that is, it’s not exactly unique. What is special about WTF is its focus on comedy. It delineates and dissects the world of American comedy — stand-up, radio, sitcoms, sketch shows — with fabulous detail. It’s always fascinating to hear the real deal details of a profession. And this is presented by compulsive talkers and explainers and joke-makers. Smart ones, too, all of them. I must have listened to twenty or so shows now. Only another 50 or so to go. Sorry, that’s all, folks, go to go pod.

PS I also had a look at and listen to some of the stand-up performances of Maron and his guests. I was less impressed. Stick with the podcast.

Also Some science for you

Next up Another podcast

2011-03-24T11:08:00.002Z

Wonders of the modern world, number seven . . . Samuel Smith’s pubs

Yes, that’s right, a pub chain.

The other week I was taken for a drink by an American cousin. He told me his favourite beer was Samuel Smith’s. I vaguely remembered that the Swiss Cottage pub was a Sam Smith’s house. I also vaguely remembered being invited along for a drink at a Sam Smith’s by my fellow students on my MSc course — and that it was oddly cheap, which is why they chose it, I guess.

So I found myself in the pub that’s marooned in the middle of the gyratory/urban race oval at the south end of Finchley Rd. And fascinated. So fascinated that I paid a return visit the other Saturday afternoon to meet up with one of my oldest friends.

What’s so fascinating about Sam Smith’s pubs? That everything is Sam Smith’s. Not just the beer and the lager and the stout but the soft drinks and the hard liquor, too. Even the crisps and nuts are Sam Smith’s. A kind of integration, vertical and horizontal, that you just don’t see in that trade anymore — though obviously you do in food outlets like, say, Pret A Manger.

It feels almost Soviet or Stalinistic in its consistency and lack of choice — as I pointed out to the eastern European barman, to his amusement and agreement. My friend asked for a packet of Uncle Joe’s nuts.

Imagine a world where socialism had got its act together — cheap, good beer and chilli nuts for all! That’s a Sam Smith’s pub. Not very exciting and full of cheap-date alcoholics, of course. But you can’t have everything.

There’s a suitable touch of puritanism, too. Mid-1950s era decor — dark, fake wood panelling, that kind of thing. No music or one-arm bandits or TV. In fact, now I think of it, the Sam Smith’s pub remind me of two other things.

One, the old Yates wine lodges. Not so much the London ones — which were full of people like me drinking the excellent cheap champagne. Nor the classic Liverpool ones, full of students on the Blob and stuck into the cheap Aussie white (wine, Jim, but not as you know it — think sherry . . . ish). Rather, the ones that had a counter where you queued up with a tray like in a cafeteria. You’d tell them what you wanted — which might include a cup of tea, Yates having been founded as part of the temperance movement. Then you’d pay for it at a till point. Municipalised socialism with a sloshed smile.

Two, George Orwell’s imaginary pub, the Moon Under Water — a name now taken and used (perhaps abused) by the Wetherspoon chain. Wood panelling, warm beer, no music or dancing, conversation. Municipalised drinking with an ernest frown.

I even thought up a slogan . . . Sam Smith’s: it’s as if modern capitalism never happened!

Then I wikipedia-ed Sam Smith’s and discovered that it’s not at all socialist in intent but tight corporate branding — and they took the music out because they didn’t want to pay the PRS levy. Oh, well.

PS While I was there, a ten-or-so-strong group of mid-late twenties came in, all dressed in bobble hats, big glasses and red-and-white striped tops. Where’s Wally, I asked, of course. You tell me, they said, we’re looking for him. They were on a pub crawl along the Jubilee line — on a Saturday when it’s suspended for rebuilding. How English a weekend hobby outing is that? Another wonder of the modern world, I’d say.

Next up What the fuck? (And what the fuckericans.)

2011-03-10T11:28:00.003Z

Origin of the World, an extended footnote, part four

Terrified by the death and destruction in besieged Paris, Wallace moved back to England and took his collection with him. (The family had also previously returned to London, briefly, during the 1848 uprising.) Things were never much good again for him. His marriage soured. He became depressed and listless to the point where, although he kind of intended to bequeath his collection to the nation, he could never quite stir himself to do it. It was eventually done by his wife, a Frenchwoman, who never quite got round to learning English.

His son - who was a French army officer during the siege - broke with him and returned to Paris and his four illegitimate children, by a woman 'of the theatre'. Wallace is reported to have said: 'Mon Dieu, est-ce que nou n'aurons jamai fini de bâtards?'. Good God, will there ever be an end to bastards?

Father and son died without reconciling. Wallace did, though, himself acquire a young man as a secretary, then adopt him. It was Sir John Murray Scott, Vita Sackville-West's father.

So who was Richard Wallace then? Well, the surname was his own choice. He switched to it, legally, from his given surname Jackson, in 1842, having himself rebaptised in an Anglican church in Paris. (By which time, he already had a seven-month-old son by his mistress, Julie Castelnau - who he later married and stayed with, after a fashion, till his death.)

His father? Well, one idea is that it was not the fourth Lord Hertford but the third - Mie-Mie's husband-back-in-London. One account describes that Lord Hertford as a man who 'begat more than one illegitimate child and who acquired across the years a very unsavoury reputation.'

Another theory - and this is the one in the Dictionary of National Biography - is that he was, in fact, Mie-Mie's son. Which would have made him the half-brother of the man who was - to most accounts, anyway - his father.

Whatever, it's hard to imagine that Wallace didn't have a look at Khalil Bey's Courbet. It could have ended up in Manchester Square.

Next up I’m taking a break from Courbet etc to ask: What’s so funny about (What's So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding?

2011-03-04T09:41:00.003Z

Origin of the World, an extended footnote, part three (with not just one but four footnotes of its own)

Back to Sir Richard Wallace . . .

I'll get to his paternity in time but there is also doubt about his mother. The likeliest candidate was a woman born Agnes Wallace, a descendant of Scots independence leader Sir William Wallace. Born in 1789 - to a friend of Lord Hertford's - Agnes married a Mr Bickley, bore him a couple of children, then ran off to Brighton, where she hung out with soldiers. In particular, with the 10th (Prince of Wales's Own) Regiment of (Light) Dragoons (Hussars). Which is where she would have met the future fourth Lord Hertford - he was an eighteen-year-old officer in the regiment (and ten years her senior). By now she was Agnes Jackson - though there is no record of a Mr Jackson. Or of any dalliancing between Agnes and that Lord Hertford.

There was a child, though, and the guess is that when Agnes returned to her husband - by whom she would go on to have two more children - he didn't want her illegitimate son. So Agnes took him to Paris and left him with her hussar friend's mother.

The boy and Mie-Mie became close. He called her aunt. She called him her beloved nephew. He grew up something of a playboy, running up tabs and bills he couldn't pay. Though declining to buy Richard a commission in the navy, the third Lord Hertford did pay off his regular debts - £100,000 over two years*. He also took him on as his secretary - on £1,000 a year. He was responsible for the art collection and making additions to it. In 1865 alone, he bought 34 pictures, spending a million francs**. All that armour in the Wallace Collection was mostly his choice.

He also bought some art for himself. And got into debt again - speculating on the Paris bourse. Lord Hertford wouldn't pay his debts this time, told the lad he'd have to auction his collection. Which he did and . . . Lord Hertford bought his best five paintings. Which, of course, Wallace ended up inheriting back. Not that he knew he would. When Lord Hertford died in 1870, just as the Prussian guns were threatening Paris, the fact that Richard Wallace was the heir came as much a surprise to him as it did to the cousin who inherited the title and a couple of estates but not the cash to support them.

He was, surprisingly, something of a hero during the 1870-71 siege of the city, putting his inheritance to immediate charitable use. He spent perhaps £500,000 on medical relief and arranged for the care and repatriation of the 4,000 British exiles caught in the city. For a while, he was 'the most talked about man in England'.

For which kindnesses, he had a boulevard named after him. It's near La Défense, on the north west of the city itself, just beyond the Péripherique. A pleasant, tree-lined street with an iron-railinged park, it's considered 'the Champs-Élysées of Puteaux'. George Simenon lived there 1936-8 and — a fan website informs — there are several scenes set there in Maigret novels. Wallace was buried, in the family tomb, in Père Lachaise.

His mark is still there all over Paris proper, too. Those black cast-iron drinking fountains, with their maidens-in-drapery caryatids, they were commissioned and paid for by him. Known as Wallace Fountains, there are still 66 of them around the place. There's also one outside the Wallace Collection in London. Oh, and Brigitte Bardot has one, too.

* In current terms? Well, if you take just inflation as a measure, it comes out at about £7million. But if you take it as a percentage of GDP, it comes out at nearly £150 million***.

** As far as I can figure out, there were at that time roughly 25 francs to the pound. So, using the same formula as above, that would today equate to either £2.8 million or £60 million. Given current art prices, that seems really cheap - it wouldn't even get you four major Freuds or Bacons.****

*** How could he afford it? The family had large estates, producing big rents - £60,000 a year in 1841.

**** Apropos of irrelevance, as an editor, I once arranged for an art review to be tweaked so we could use the headline 'Bacon and two Freud eggs'.

Next up 'Mon Dieu, est-ce que nou n'aurons jamai fini de bâtards?'

2011-02-28T06:08:00.003Z

Origin of the World, an extended footnote, part two (with a footnote of its own)

Again, it's more complicated than that. Whoever Sir Richard Wallace was, that's not what it said on his birth certificate. He was born Richard Jackson, in London, in 1818 - and, in later life, often said he didn't know who his father was. We do know, though, that he arrived in Paris in 1925 and was moved into the house of the Countess of Yarmouth, the wife of the third Lord Hertford - ie the putative father of Sir Richard. This Lord Hertford, by the way, as well as being a libertine, was the son of the mistress of the Prince of Wales - the future George IV, that is. (There's a picture of Lord Hertford's mother in the National Portrait Gallery collection. Her full name was Isabella Ingram-Shepheard. She has very big hair.)

Known as Mie-Mie, the Countess of Yarmouth/Marchioness of Hertford - the wife of the third Lord Hertford, that is - was herself the illegitimate daughter of a former dancer (or perhaps an Italian marchesa) and, it is said, the Duke of Queensbury. Known as 'Old Q', for the giant letter on the side of his coach, the Duke's entry in the Dictionary of National Biography describes him as a 'sybarite and politician'. A cartoon of him in the NPG captures him at his two favourite pastimes. Titled 'Quiz-zing a filly', its caption describes him as 'rake and patron of the turf'. Another NPG cartoon calls him 'the old goat of Piccadilly'. He was supposed to have a 'harem' in his Piccadilly house - see orientalism peek over the bannister.

Or perhaps Mie-Mie's father was the Satanic Hellfire Club member George Selwyn. Both Queensbury and Selwyn certainly thought they were her father and both left her big money in their wills. Or perhaps her father was Selwyn's butler - who didn't leave her big money.*

Mie-Mie was a contraction of her given names, Maria Emily. Estranged from her husband, Mie-Mie had lived in Paris since 1802 - eventually in the Rue Taitbout apartments that Khalil Bey would later take. French Wikipedia: 'In the nineteenth century, the Taitbout street is where the rich financial lodge their courtesans.' (A Google translation, not mine.) A one bedroom apartment there will currently set you back €1800 or so a month.

In his madness, George III said he'd like to take Mie-Mie as his mistress - she was, of course, the daughter-in-law of his son's mistress. While in Paris, she had another child. As Lord Hertford was back in London, it is unlikely he was the father. That was probably Casimir de Montrond, a French diplomat who is said to have first coined the aphorism 'Mistrust first impulses; they are nearly always good.'

It's beginning to make sense, isn't it, why all these titled English chose to hang out in the relative anonymity of Paris.

* While the Wallace Collection may once have been, well, discrete about its origins, it now trumpets them. In October 2010, it hosted a lecture entitled 'The Scholar and the Star: The Wit, The Rake and the Italian Dancer's Daughter'. Selwyn was the wit, Queensbury the rake and Mie-Mie the daughter.

Next up Wallace, man of art — and drinking water

2011-02-15T11:29:00.000Z

Origin of the World, an extended footnote, part one

As I was saying before I interrupted myself . . .

But first, be warned that this tale is only tangentially connected Courbet's Origin of the World. Hence the post's title/headline. If you're not interested in the comings and goings of the English aristocracy, you might want to skip away now. On the other hand, I'm not generally that interested in that kind of thing and I did find myself drawn in.

Think of it as an intermezzo - a kind of the link between Courbet's painting and the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square. It's just one of those intriguingly complicated family stories that are irresistible but don't really lead you anywhere. Not anywhere clear anyway, just somewhere interesting: to a family which has been described as having pursued 'art with great dedication, while leading the most confused and odd private lives.'

The art collection that we know as the Wallace Collection was started by Lord Hertford - the Lord Hertford who died in 1870, that is. His non-noble name was Richard Seymour-Conway. In an 1843 probate action, 'he was exposed as a libertine and a constant consort of prostitutes.' This then was the man who let rooms to Khalil Bey.

He, too, liked pictures - and also had distinct, not to say peculiar, tastes. His collection was put together according to an idiosyncratic - if all too human - paradigm. He would only buy pictures he found 'pleasing'. Or rather, of subjects he found 'pleasing'. He wouldn't, for example, buy any pictures of old men. So that was quite a few Rembrandts out.

But the Wallace Collection (ie the one in Manchester Square) was set up by Sir Richard Wallace. Generally said to be Lord Hertford's illegitimate son - but I'll be coming back to that general belief - this Wallace was also employed as his lordship's secretary. A secretary in the older sense, that is - as in secretary of state. He looked after Lord Hertford's business affairs, in particular what has been described as 'the finest private art collection in the world'.

Next up Family affairs, including those of ‘the old goat of Piccadilly’

2011-01-31T11:13:00.001Z

The delight of alleys etc

One Further to my posting about Billy Fury Way in West Hampstead, a friend who knows wrote to tell me that it used to be known as Spider Gang Alley in the 1980s. It was where skinheads with a spider web tattooed on them would hang out and ‘waylay unsuspecting folk and ask for a 'loan' when their supply of glue ran out’.

Two My Occitanian connection tells me of a Salubrious Passage. He says it’s a little back road by Swansea Docks. I say it’s a suggestive line from an Ian Dury song.

Three I discovered there’s a Potteries Path near Billy Fury Way. I must have a look.

Next up Bastard sons and drinking fountains

2011-01-26T14:12:00.003Z

The story of Courbet’s Origin of the World, part seven

I finally found a picture of the man who commissioned and paid for Courbet’s Origin. There’s no date on it but it looks like it was taken around the time of the picture. There’s no photographer’s name on it, either, so it probably wasn’t by Auguste Belloc, who took the picture that Courbet based his painting on.

It’s not the original image, I’m fairly sure. I also have a very grainy photocopy of a far grainier original — in which Bey’s hand is on the left. So it’s probably been flipped. The curtain has been moved, too — and retouched to green. Which is the colour of the curtain with which, it’s said, he concealed his painting. The colour of Islam, of course. Théophile Gautier described Bey’s collection as ‘the first ever to be formed by a child of Islam’.

So we have a Muslim — in contradiction to his religion’s eternal ban on representational art — collecting the most modern versions of representation. ‘A magnificent gallery of pictures despite the law of the Prophet which forbids the representation of figures,’ L’Artiste magazine commented in January 1868 — when Bey’s collection came to auction, with the introduction to the catalogue written by Gautier.

In particular, of course, Bey’s magnificent gallery contained one image which represented something which had never before been represented in a public form — well, semi-public. Then he hid that representation with an abstract representation of his own religion — which notably sought (seeks, come to that) to forbid it.

One could read that symbolic act as a deliberate irony: the curtain itself as an enactment of Islam’s censorship of the human (or godly) form. An irony which was, in turn, compounded by the picture’s title, itself a challenge not just to Islam but to all religions — all of which, in my experience, posit far less visceral origins of the world.

If that makes Bey sound like a conscious radical, he was — certainly in his politics. ‘While in Paris he had been planning the extreme liberal reforms which he felt had to be put in effect if the Ottoman Empire was to be preserved . . . a constitution and an egalitarian regime,’ according to the fullest account I’ve found of Bey and his art, a 1982 piece by Francis Haskell in the Oxford Art Journal.

In Paris, by the way, Bey lived near the new Opera. He would, though, have departed the city — to become the Ottoman ambassador in Vienna — before the ink was spilt on the La Danse sculpture (then expended on it by newspapers). He rented rooms from Lord Hertford whose own gallery of paintings became the Wallace Collection — housed in the former family town home in Manchester Square, London W1.

Actually, it’s more complicated that that . . .

Next up A break from Courbet and a one-shot return to alleys etc

2011-01-24T10:09:00.009Z

Through the dark alley-ways and passages of London*

I like an alleyway. Well, you do if you live in a city. Knowing the alleys is one of the ways you distinguish yourself from — okay, can make yourself feel superior — the out-of-towners.

I like the fact that I can walk most of the way from Marble Arch to Tottenham Court Rd station without touching Oxford Street. It makes me feel I know where I am.

Yesterday, I found a new alley. Two, actually.

I’d heard of one of them before but found it quite by accident. It runs from Finchley Road down the side of Finchley Road and Frognal railway station. Despite having lived not far away for a very long time, I’d never walked down it (or up it) before.

It’s called Billy Fury Way, named for the Scouse popster born Ronald William Wycherley — whose Sound of Fury 10-inch album should be in every home, if only for the cover picture.

Why? Again, I’d forgotten but it was the oddest of reasons. Someone — who knows who — realised/decided that there were alleys which didn’t have names. Which meant . . . the police couldn’t record crimes committed there. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I know you’re dead but there’s nothing we can do. You can’t just die nowhere. Therefore you can’t be dead. Evening all.’

So it was decided to name the local alleys. Billy Fury? Because he recorded at the nearby Decca studios — now the base for the ENO, I think. So: West Hampstead, the rockabilly connection.

The alley? Long and dark, with no way out most of the time, but a wonderful short-cut, with trainspottery views on both sides. The whole of the side wall is painted a dramatic black, giving it a distinct threatening air — not unsuitably for an alley, I guess. They’re not meant to be warm, sunny and welcoming. On a fairly busy Sunday afternoon, I had it all to myself. It emerges almost opposite West Hampstead north London line station.

Cross the road, past the Thameslink station — such a small locality, so many stations — and there’s the second alley. This one runs down to the bottom of my friends’ house. I’d walked this one before, several times. But now it has a name, too. Black Path — from, I guess, the black-painted wall motif which continued on from Billy Fury Way. Fantastically prosaic, too.

Which got me thinking of two things . . .

One, daft street names (and signs). In London . . . Crooked Usage (in Hendon) and Amen Corner (near St Pauls). In Truro, Squeeze Guts Alley — there’s one in Whitstable, too, apparently. In St Ives, there’s a Teetotal Street and a Virgin Street — yet it still manages to call itself a holiday resort.

Two, London and songs generally. Here a couple . . .

Ray Davies. I’ve seen it written that the Krays liked this so much they asked — well, you know what I mean — the Kinks if they could manage them. But that can't be true, as it wasn't written till the 1990s.

* A line from the Ray Davies song.

While I’m about it, here’s a picture of the house next to my gran’s. That’s it on the right — it’s not me going in, though. Once uncle and his family lived next door. Another the next house along. A cousin next to that etc etc. The house straight ahead is 97 Evering Rd, Stoke Newington. That’s where the Krays killed Jack The Hat McVitie. (They lived a few streets away, in Cazenove Rd, so it wasn’t much of a journey home for them.)

Caetano Veloso ‘I cross the streets without fear . . .’ What sounds dumb and cliched isn’t. Veloso was in exile here from the Brazilian military dictatorship. ‘A group approaches a policeman. He seems so pleased to please them.’ I moved (back) to London the year this song came out, 1971. To my shame, I never even noticed Caetano Veloso moved in, too.

And finally, thinking of songs and London and alleys, some Sondheim . . .

‘There's a whole in the world like a great black pit
and the vermin of the world inhabit it
and its morals aren't worth what a pin can spit
and it goes by the name of London.’

(Just asking, Mr Sondheim, but where can you buy a spitting pin?)

Next up Back to the Origin of the World

2011-01-13T13:10:00.000Z

Courbet’s Origin of the World, sixth part

Not that we can be at all certain about where Bey kept Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde - or if it's true, as is generally said, that he kept it hidden behind a green velvet curtain. In fact, we only know anything about the painting's early existence because of a couple of passing references in contemporary accounts. Which does, of course, confirm one thing - that it was hidden, elided, shielded from public view.

If such prudishness seems surprising for the supposedly licentious 19th century Paris of our understandings, that's a reflection of our lack of understanding. It's true that this was the first heyday of the can-can - then a working-class dance of sexual directness, legs lifted high in a pre-knickers world.

Yet Napoleon III's Second Empire was not a liberal place. (That and some of the other facts above and below come from Rupert Christiansen's Tales from The New Babylon: Paris 1869-75.) The Marseillaise was banned - yes, that one, the one they sing in Casablanca. It had been outlawed for fifteen years or so and wouldn't be unbanned for a couple of years more.

When La Danse, a sculpture of naked women was put up outside the new Opera house, outraged attackers sprayed it with ink — and railway companies offered special, cut-price return tickets to suburbanites anxious to see for themselves the terrible, terrible havoc ink can wreak on naked young female flesh (well, stone).

The tensions that were pulling French society in two directions were there in one of the two near-contemporary accounts of Courbet's painting. On the one hand, there was Ludovic Halévy in his memoirs. 'A nude woman, without feet and without a head. After dinner, there we were, looking and admiring . . . We finally ran out of enthusiastic comments . . . This lasted for ten minutes. Courbet, he never had enough of it.'

On the other hand, there were the less-enthusiastic comments made in a late 1870s attack on the Commune by right-wing journalist Maxine du Camp. This is what he wrote . . .

'To please a Moslem who paid for his whims in gold, and who, for a time, enjoyed a certain notoriety in Paris because of his prodigalities, Courbet, this same man whose avowed intention was to renew French painting, painted a portrait of a woman which is difficult to describe. In the dressing-room of this personage, one sees a small picture hidden under a green veil. When one draws aside the veil, one remains stupefied to perceive a woman, life-size, seen from the front, moved and convulsed, remarkably executed, reproduced con amore, as the Italians say, providing the last word in realism. But, by some inconceivable forgetfulness, the artist who copied his model from nature, had neglected to represent the feet, the legs, the thighs, the stomach, the hips, the chest, the hands, the arms, the shoulders, the neck and the head.'

It’s not that accurate a description of the picture, though, is it? It’s true that there are no legs, feet or head in it. But there are certainly thighs, hips, stomach and a touch of chest. My guess is either du Camp never actually saw the picture and so was relying on a second-hand account or when he did see the picture he couldn’t, so to speak, see the wood for the bosky grove. Maybe he was shocked into only being able to see one thing. Maybe he was only interested in one thing.

By the by, I see no visual evidence in the picture of the orgasm that he alludes to either. Then, according to Rupert Christiansen's book, mid-19th century (male) France was stupefiedly fascinated by its new-found discovery, the female orgasm - to the point of cataloguing its supposedly different manifestations in thin and fat women.

Next up The Turk loses his chemise . . . and his femme sans culottes

2011-01-10T10:06:00.003Z

Wonders of the modern world, six . . . Cheese and its link to international terrorism

An Israeli cousin, a young woman, who had just spent a couple of weeks with us, flew back the other day. My wife gave her some cheddar to take back for her parents. For some reason, she packed the cheese in a board game she'd bought here, War on Terror. 'Stunning satire,' said the Guardian — not the kind of comment I've ever seen on, say, Cluedo. My wife warned her against the putting the cheese there. 'They might think it's explosives on the x-ray,' she said.

At the Heathrow check-in desk, the young cousin found her luggage was a little overweight. So she removed the board game and took it with her in her hand-luggage. At security, they stopped her. Of course they did. They were worried the cheese was explosives. They didn't like the board game, either. They decided it would worry other travellers. They might think she was a terrorist herself.

Oh, yes. Your average mad bomber spends his last flight playing War on Terror — which comes with black balaclava masks, with the word 'Evil' on them. (It's so hard to play, by the way, that if George W and Osama BL had started it on 9/11, they still wouldn't be finished.)

So security took the game from her and put it on the hold. For free. So now we all know how to get free extra baggage allowance. Put everything in a bag marked Terrorist or somesuch.

Next up Back to the story of a blue-glassed Turk, a column-smashing French painter and a headless young woman. Bottomless, too. Well, not literally but in the sense of reverse toplessness. On the other hand, I guess you could say she was bottomless in a metaphorical sense, too. That is kind of the point of the painting.

2011-01-09T14:03:00.008Z

Un conte d'un con et de M Lacan, épisode cinq

By all accounts, Bey kept his Origine hidden in a secret cabinet - or back room or bathroom/toilet. My guess is that it’s the last. Though I’ve not found the French original text, my guess is that the word used is cabinet — short for cabinet de toilette. Which phrase was shorted to cabinet in French — and to toilet in English.

Which was? Not a toilet in the English sense, nor a cabinet in the English sense, nor what we think of today as a bathroom etc. It was a room where you made your toilette — washing, getting ready etc. That is, an equivalent of an English dressing room, with a washbasin — and a bidet, I guess.

Cabinets could be quite grand. This one, in a painting by Lobre, has a fireplace and a decent-sized art collection.

(There's a lot more to the picture, by the way, including a young girl leaving the room. But for some reason I can't manage to upload the whole image.)

This one is Louis XVI’s.

This one, by Bonnard, has a woman in slippers, a day bed and the usual spectacular Bonnard wallpaper.

(Bonnard really liked painting in the cabinet/toilet. He even did a naked self-portrait sitting at his sink, facing his mirror. You do find yourself wondering where he put the easel and paint pots.)

And here is the one used by Napoleon III’s wife, Princess Eugénie, in the 1850s. I should imagine Bey’s cabinet was at least as lavish — if not as, to re-turn a phrase of Alfie’s, poncified.

Next up A quick break from Courbet for a true story about the wonders of modern airline security checks.

2011-01-08T16:20:00.001Z

Un conte d'un con et de M Lacan, part four

Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde was painted to commission, for Khalil Bey, a Turkish diplomat and gambler with a taste for paintings of unclothed women. He also suffered from some kind of eye ailment and so wore blue spectacles, a fact much commented on by gossip columnists. He was a big figure in Second Empire Paris, big enough, in fact, to rate a passing mention in Stephen Frears' recent film, Chéri, from Colette's novel about an ageing courtesan - which is set nearly half a century after Bey's heyday.

It's possible that Bey and Courbet met at the funeral of Proudhon - the first man to call himself an anarchist and who came up with the phrase 'property is theft'. (Well, of course, what he actually said was: La propriété, c'est le vol!) Courbet was a social radical, set on depicting life beyond 'bourgeois' propriety and reinvigorating French painting. Along with Manet, he was the first shapers of our modern visual world. He painted giant, life-sized paintings of workers and peasants and naked women.

It was his impulsive politics that was finally to undo him, though, rather than his pictures. At the height of the Commune, set up by radical Parisians in the wake of France's collapse in the face of Prussia's 1971 invasion, Courbet was the main advocate of the column in the Place Vendôme which commemorated Napoleon I's achievements. For which, in the counter-revolutionary aftermath of the Commune, Courbet was sentenced to six months and fined 500,000 francs (500, according to Wikipedia). So he fled to Switzerland where he died, of the drink, aged 58.

I’ve no idea how much that was in 2011 euros but, by way of comparison, I’ve seen the price Bey paid Courbet for L’Origine quoted as 25,000 francs It was far from his only purchase. Bey was a major collector — and inspirer — of contemporary artists, many of whom would lay the foundation for Paris’s emergence as the world centre of art for the next half-century at least.

Over three years or so, he bought 124 paintings, including six by Delacroix. He also commissioned Ingres' Bain Turc and Courbet's Le Sommeil (Musée du Petit Palais, Paris) - in which Jo Hiffernan is also supposed to be one of the two sleeping women, the dark-haired one on the left.

According to his - excitable - obituary in the London World, he also pressed tea sets on women he met - 47 in that three-year stretch. A seduction technique, I assume. It must have worked sometimes. His mistress, Jeanne de Tourbey was previously mistress of Prince Napoleon. (I assume the similarity of his and her surnames — Bey/Tourbey — was coincidence, though possibly remarked upon by gossips.) When people talk of the courtesans of late 19th century Paris, it’s her they mostly have in mind.

She is generally described as 'the illegitimate daughter of an illegitimate waitress' - which sounds like the title of a Danny Kaye song and makes me, at least, wonder how you might distinguish between legitimate and non-legitimate waitressing.

Napoleon arranged for her to be given a polish of education by his friend Sainte-Beuve, a leading literary critic, who is also said to have been responsible for introducing Bey to Courbet. Thus polished, she married a comte, becoming comtesse de Loynes. Once free of the comte, she set up a literary salon, the model for Madame Swann's in Proust's big, big book - which I haven't read, of course. Later in life, she became a fervid reactionary, a leading anti-Dreyfussard and a major funder of Action Francaise — in time, a major backer of the Vichy regime. There is a painting of her in the D'Orsay. She looks trouble.

The first recorded reference to Courbet’s painting as L'origine du Monde is late, very late — 1935, in a piece by a Courbet scholar It’s generally said, though, that the title was Bey's idea - as was, perhaps, the small size of the canvas, quite unlike Courbet's usual giant paintings. All the better to conceal it.

PS My Occitanian correspondent Richard pointed out that there was a typo in the heading for the last couple of Courbet postings. I actually meant to write ‘conte’ — story or tale, in French. In fact, I typed ‘comte’ — French for count.

And . . . well, and here is a sentence from my book, Filthy English. ‘It is claimed that English counts were renamed earls because of their titles’ homophonic closeness to the word.’ The word, of course, was cunt.

Next up What a Turk hides in his toilet

2011-01-07T09:51:00.000Z

Une comte d'un con et de M Lacan, le troisième

It's often said that the model for Courbet’s painting was Joanna Hiffernan. The lover of James Whistler (and others), Jo was an Irishwoman with long, flaming red hair - which, yes, does conflict with the colour and texture of the hair we see in the painting. She is, though, certainly the woman in both Courbet's La belle Irlandaise (Portrait of Jo) - which is in the Met in New York - and in Whistler's Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl - in the National Gallery, Washington.

But in truth, given the evidence before your eyes, Jo is an unlikely candidate. An improbable one, in fact. Rather, the painting's extreme, 19th century realism - hyper-realism before its time, even - is not just an extension of Courbet's general pursuit of the real and everyday. It's clearly photographic in composition, tone, colour balance, size even - it's far, far smaller than Courbet's usual giant canvases.

More than that, there's a photograph that is a more-than-fair candidate for its, well, origin. It's by one of the first photographers of pornography - or, at least, of naked female bodies, with the aim of awakening male (and perhaps female) imaginations. Though he traded under the name Billon, he was in fact the Auguste Belloc, the great, innovatory photographer of mid-19th century Paris. He photographed the great and good of the Second Empire. He invented the wet collodion process - which Sally Mann has recently re-put to good purpose photographing her children naked.

(The reason we know Billon and Belloc were the same man, by the was, is because the forward-looking but statist French state had decided that photographs should have the same copyright status as paintings etc. So photographers established their rights by sending copy prints to a national agency - which held them in store, whether they were of great men's bearded faces or young women's unshaven vulvas. Oh, and there is no link at all between Auguste Belloc and his near namesake and fellow photographer of unclothed women, EJ Bellocq who captured the pre-First World War New Orleans brothel world that gave us jazz, probably, and Jelly Roll Morton, certainly.)

The particular image that Courbet most likely used as a basis was one of a series of hand-coloured stereoscopes. There is the same pale-skinned, generously haired young woman, the same headlessness and rumpled white linen and a very similar pose. It's true, though, that Courbet removed the stockings and added breasts — well, an edge of one.

It was the mid-1860s, photography had only been around a few years and already there was both colour and 3D. (I'd have put an exclamation mark at the end of that sentence if I didn't have a lifelong aversion to their, inevitably cheap, excitement.) The first photograph of a (clothed) human was taken in 1838. In 1860, a police raid on Belloc's stock netted 4,000 erotic images. As so often, the desire to satisfy human desire is a motor for invention. Now, if only we could find a way to monetise it sexually, the solution to global warming would be round the corner.

Next up A Turkish gentleman makes a proposition to a French painter.

2011-01-06T11:13:00.001Z

Une comte d'un con et de M Lacan, part deux

First a recap. This is the second in a series of blogs about - or, at least, occasioned by - a painting by Courbet, L'Origine du Monde. I've been planning - or, perhaps, threatening - to write about it ever since I learned that the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had been the painting's last private owner.

I can't remember when I first indicated I was intending to write something but it was long enough ago that the material I accumulated to the point where I realised it was not so much a potential blog as the basis for something more - though quite what I still don't know, which is why I'm blogging it now. C

It was certainly long enough ago that my Anglo-French correspondent Paul jogged my typing elbows by sending me his Christmas greetings on a card featuring the painting. It's the second biggest seller at the giftshop in its current home, the Musee D'Orsay. (The biggest is Renoir's Bal du Moulin de la Galette, I think.)

How big has it got? Well, looking at what I’ve written so far, it’s far, far longer than a couple of blogs. I’ll break it up and post one new section a day over the next week or so. It could be as many as ten postings, I reckon. A whole of blogging, I know, and the final posting will, I guess, be about why so much writing.

If you want to read the whole first part, it's here. If not, you might like to know that my thoughts about the Courbet were rejogged by the comments of a Greek art critic who referenced the painting in his comments on a gynaecologically inclined photographic portrait, entitled My British Wife, which is currently on show at the National Portrait Gallery.

So . . . (this is where it originally — ha, ha — started) . . .

I can't remember where and when I first saw Courbet's L'Origine du Monde. But I can remember what I thought. And I think most people thought the same kind of things.

One I was struck by the wit of the title - not at all what you expect of a French painter.

Two I thought it was a modern painting - perhaps a work by a late 1970s American or German hyper-realist.

Three When I saw the name Courbet on it*, I decided I must have seen it before, that it was part of the established canon of western nudes. Only it isn't - or rather wasn't when I first saw it. I was quite wrong about that. Though now on display at the Musée d'Orsay, in the same room as another picture that shocked 19th century Paris, Manet's Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe, it's only been there since 1995. Most of its life it's been cloistered away — which is mostly

Four It was a really odd painting, poised between realism and pornography - deliberately, I guess. And then, of course, there was its subject matter . . .

Five Its title is, I guessed, was related to the Latin saying, inter faeces et urinam nascimur.

* On the label, not on the painting itself. It is unsigned and undated.

Next up In time, a return to Freud (and, in Hamlet’s phrase) country matters. But first, a return to 1860s Paris.

2010-12-25T19:03:00.004Z

Music for (your) pleasure, a Christmas bonus

Most Christmases, I send out a CD compilation of Christmas (etc) tracks. This year, I decided to go fully electronic and distribute it via Dropbox. If you're on my blogmail list you should have had a link message. If not email me (or leave a comment) and I'll link you up . . .

Whichever, whatever, here is the tracklist for the seasonal compilation, name of Christmash . . .

1 Santa Claus Is Coming to Town Bill Evans

2 Swinging For Christmas (Boppin' for Santa) Tom Archia

3 Gin For Christmas Lionel Hampton

4 Christmas Swing Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli

5 The Christmas Song Dexter Gordon

6 The Christmas Song Vince Guaraldi

7 Santa Claus Is Coming To Town Paul Bley

8 White Christmas Bobby Timmons

9 Winter Wonderland Bobby Timmons

10 White Christmas Earl Hines

11 Winter Wonderland Chet Baker

12 Winter Wonderland Allen Toussaint

13 Jingle Bells New Birth Brass Band

14 Jingle Bells Featuring Ed Calle, Arturo Sandoval And Jim G

15 The Christmas Song Gene Ammons

16 My Little Drum Vince Guaraldi

17 We Three Kings Of Orient Are Sergio Salvatore

18 O Tannenbaum (Oh Christmas Tree) Jesse Davis

Next up That long-promised next part of le comte de M Lacan and le con de Courbet

2010-12-23T07:00:00.003Z

Music for your pleasure, number seven

Finally, in this short series of my Theme Time Radio Hour writing, is something I wrote for the Ace magazine about the second volume in the series . . .

Imagine, for a moment, that you've lost your entire memory. You've forgotten everything you once knew about life and the world. Or maybe you're a Martian in possession of a good spaceship and in want of a wife on Earth.

In either case, imagine further that you are handed a copy of Theme Time Radio Hour with your host, Bob Dylan - Session 2 and told: let this be your guide. How will you do? What will you learn about life, love and the world? Will its 49-tracks - from many decades, places and genres - teach you enough to strike out on your own?

Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker cover (March 29, 1976) imagined the 'View of the World from 9th Avenue' - that is, through the psychogeographical prism of uptown westsiders. The partiality of its vision is its truth. Here we have something similar: a View of the World from Studio B of the Abernathy Building. (Call me sceptic but I do sometimes wonder if that location actually has a zip code or phone number.)

What do you learn if you let Bob Dylan show you how the world looks out of that studio window? And how might that partial view measure up in practical terms? How much useful information will it give you about the physical and psychological environment of that big world out there that is currently a total blank to your cerebral cortex? (I'm guessing a little here, to be honest, about the details of Martian brain structure.)

Here is what I reckon you'd learn. Some of it, anyway - even the best of guide books leave you work of your own to do. Think of this as a top ten fact about the world as viewed from the Abernathy.

1. Human beings like to have sex with each other - and with each other's partners. This causes problems, sometimes to the point of violence (Loretta Lynn's Fist City), murder even (Porter Waggoner's Cold Hard Facts of Life).

2. Love is a complicated thing (Laura Lee's Separation Line, Jo-El Sonnier's Tear-Stained Letter, James Brown's Three Hearts In a Tangle, BB King's Walkin Dr Bill, The Dirtbombs' Your Love Belongs Under a Rock, Lucinda Williams' Changed The Lock).

3. Chickens have a special significance, particularly at celebratory events (Wanda Jackson's Let's Have A Party). They also choose to spent at least part of their time in trees (Mississippi John Hurt's The Chicken).

4. The French pass their early mornings pondering whether to wear a red or a blue sweater. Or, to be more specific, that's how young Franco-Tunisian women of the mid-1960s spent the first part of the day (Jacqueline Taïeb's 7 Heures du matin).

5. Cigarettes are both a central fact of night-time life and a contra-indicator to marital stability (Joe Maphis and Rose Lee's Dim Lights, Thick Smoke and Loud, Loud Music, Red Ingle's Cigareets, Whusky and Wild Wild Women).

6. People change their names, sometimes to somewhat silly ones (Sun Ra's Rocket Nine Takes Off For The Planet Venus, Swamp Dogg's Sam Stone).

7. Inter-generational conflict has an inevitable quality to it but it is also one which changed somewhat in the late 1950s (Mose Allison's Young Man's Blues).

8. If you're after bagging a big, stripy cat or two in the subcontinent, you could pick worse guides than the man from Toronto whose starlight years were the two in the mid-1920s that he spent working in an alcove of the New Princes Restaurant, Piccadilly (Hal Swain and his Band's Hunting Tigers Out in India).

9. Women are human beings of many parts, not all of them always the ones they were born with (Archibald's She's Scattered Everywhere).

10. When it comes to satisfying a man, you should not underestimate the attractions of a limp wrist (Charlie Feather's One Hand Loose).

Frankly, as catechisms go, I've come across worse guides to the many meanings of life, love and chickens.

Next up I finally get back to M Lacan and the comte d'un con

2010-12-20T09:34:00.002Z

Music for (your) pleasure, number six

And here is something general that I wrote for the first Theme Time Radio Hour compilation . . .

What, I wonder, do we dream of when we dream of Bob Dylan? And, more intriguingly, what does Bob Dylan dream of when he dreams of us?

This is what I think: he dreams of a small boy called Robert who lives in a small city, an industrial centre in a rural landscape. It's a nowhere town that was once called Alice but had its name changed when an enormous hole was dug where its new name used to be. That giant hole was - and still is - the biggest of its kind in the world, an open-cast iron mine.

It's a place that seems to doze on the periphery but is, in fact, also surprisingly at the heart of things. When Robert was growing up, it had the most lavishly appointed high school auditorium in the whole country. He played there, in a rock and roll band.

It's the head point for the drainages to three great seas, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. Swim up any of the great rivers of the eastern United States (Canada, too) and it's where you'll end up, like a salmon returning to spawn.

It's where the Greyhound Bus company was founded and headquartered for many years. It sits between the two great spinal cords of the continent - to the west, the eternal geographical one, the Mississippi River, to the east, the old national one, Highway 61.

Here, young Robert took in all the musics that swam to him up all those rivers, that spilled out of all those long-haul buses, that drifted up the great natural wonder that the Cheyenne called Big Greasy River - and the first European to see it called the River of the Holy Ghost.

Blues and folk and country and R&B, that's what Robert's dreams were made of. And I think he had a dream of a radio dee-jay out there somewhere, distant enough to be mythic, close enough to be real. This dee-jay would play records for Robert and his imaginary friends. He'd link song with song, mixing and matching and combining and recombining them. It'd be a bridal outfit of a radio show: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. And the dee-jay would tell stories to go with the songs: about them, inspired by them, around them.

In dreams begin responsibilities, wrote Delmore Schwartz, poet, drunk, Lou Reed's teacher. And so Robert eventually became his own dream, hosting Theme Time Radio Hour, week in, week out. Last time, I looked there had been 69 shows. I've got them all in my iTunes and so, whenever I shuffle-play, I'll always hear Bob Dylan's voice, reading me a Robert Frost poem or making one of those wry digs he makes every time he plays a Beatles track. It's strange: one of the most elusive of performers now shares his thoughts with me on an almost daily basis.

Theme Time Radio Hour is the mix-tapes collection we've all dreamed of making. It's both a taxonomy and a topography of 20th century popular musics. Not all of them, it's true. There's no Charles Trenet, say. No Abba, either. But Grandpa Jones is there. Jack Teagarden, Charles Mingus, the Donays and the White Stripes, too. The show is always as happy to let songs collide and divorce as it is following them up the aisle or encouraging them to cuddle up in bed together.

Dylan (and his collaborators, I guess) approach 20th century pop the way 18th century naturalists figured out how tomatoes are related to tobacco and where swallows go to in the winter. Making sense of things nearly always involves categorising them somehow.

As these things do, it started with life's basics, things like Weather, Mother, Father. And it's pretty much stuck with the everyday: School, Sleep, Food, Tears. It's addressed life's two great certainties, Death and Taxes - though not yet the third, Nurses. It's travelled a bit: Tennessee, New York. It's even found space for a little product placement: Cadillac.

Roger Armstrong (and his collaborators, I should imagine) have taken this great, ongoing taxonomic and topographic project and refined it down into an elegant precis of the original. A taxonomy of a taxonomy, a topography of a topography. I found myself thinking about something I was told only recently: that any chip of any diamond will always be a mini-version of the whole diamond, a microcosm of all its glories.

So this double CD, too, takes and shakes the everyday world, raising all kinds of new questions and notions along the way. Listen - carefully or lightly, or both - and you find new thoughts on something as old and universal as the Heart (show 41, Billie Holiday's Good Morning Heartache) or the potential erotogenic symbolism of Musical Instruments (show 37, Dinah Washington's Big Long Slidin' Thing) or the bibbity-bobbity relationship between family life, heredity and alcoholic Drink (show 3, Mary Gauthier's I Drink).

Then there's the two versions - one black, one white - of Pistol Packin' Mama (show 25, Guns). They got me thinking afresh about what really is one of pop's oddest megahits. It had a 15-year run as a scene-maker, from around the time the time the world went to war to the time Elvis went into the army. Maybe there's another song recorded by both Bing Crosby (plus Andrews Sisters) and Gene Vincent (plus Blue Caps). I never heard it.

If it weren't for the jauntiness and accordion of Al Dexter's original, I'd have realised long ago that it's a pop musical parallel to the same period's film noir, with the same anxieties about women's new place in a new world (and the bedroom). Personally, I see Joan Crawford in the lead, reprising her role in Mildred Pierce, only with a blam-blam-blam in every hand, as Dylan put it in John Wesley Harding.

A fast dance tune about sex and violence, drink, guns and girls that ends with the singer's murder. If you can't find your own dreams, schemes and themes in there somewhere, I doubt you're human.

Plus A little seasonal story-telling

Next up What does the world look like through Bob Dylan's eyes?

2010-12-17T07:16:00.003Z

Music for (your) pleasure, five

This one was the very last track on the first volume of Ace Records Theme Time Radio Hour compilations . . .

25. ROADRUNNER (TWICE)

(Jonathan Richman)

THE MODERN LOVERS

Home Of The Hits LP HH 1910 76) 4.03

From Show 18 “Radio”

Roadrunner is one of the most intriguing songs in all pop history. It looks backwards, to the Velvet Underground's three-chord Sister Ray - the riff is the same, only minus one chord. It looks forward, to punk - the Sex Pistols played it, early on, and recorded it, late on.

It appears to be playing with irony - a hymn to 'the modern world' has to be a gag, right? But I don't think it's actually meant to be ironic. I think Jonathan Richman means every word of it, really does love Massachusetts and the modern world, if in a Jonathan Richman way.

It's a road song yet, of the many songs about specific roads - Route 66 etc - it is surely the only one about a by-pass. Not just any by-pass, though. Route 128, which loops around Boston, was 'the first limited access circumferential highway in the US'. It opened in 1951, the year Richman was born, in Natick, less than five miles to the west. Like London's M25, it's evolved, over time, to become half ring-road, half metaphor.

As home - and connecting ribbon - to generations of computer and software companies, it's developed a whole other imaginative life as an adjective, a synonym for 'hi-tech'. In other words, Route 128 really is the modern world. What sounded like - and still sounds like - a naïve projection was, in fact, a fairly accurate prediction of our future. Out of the mouths of babes and Jonathan Richman.

Next up A trip up river, to deepest Minnesota

2010-12-14T06:51:00.007Z

Music for (your) pleasure, four This is something I wrote for the first Theme Time Radio Hour compilation, back in 2008.

TOMMY GUN (Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Nicholas Headon)

THE CLASH

CBS 6788 (1978) 3.15

From Show 25 “Guns”

I'm not sure if I was there when Tommy Gun was cut but I was there when the Give 'Em Enough Rope sessions were just starting, in a deconsecrated church in west London, with war films projected on the studio wall. And I was there when they were finishing, too, in an office block in mid-town Manhattan, with three studios running simultaneously - one each for recording, overdubbing and sequencing. New York and London, war and grandiosity: the story of the Clash. One of them anyway. Nostalgia is another.

The Thompson gun was the very first hand-held machine gun, developed in the aftermath of WWI. By 1978, it had long been a museum piece. Once upon a time, though, it was the the Depression era rum-runner's Chicago typewriter, the rat-tat-tat of the St Valentine's Day Massacre. It was John Dillinger's chosen weapon. Baby Face Nelson's and Pretty Boy Floyd's, too. That's why Joe Strummer wrote a song about it. It was a gun with history and meanings: romantic, sexy ones.

Like so much about the Clash, Tommy Gun seeks to have it both ways - and manages, it mostly, too. It's a violent song about the horrors of violence. It knows how much fun shooting and killing people is - in our secret thoughts anyway. But it also knows how terrible guns and death are in reality. Its power and meaning distills from the tension between those two tragically incompatible thoughts. Oh, and from Topper Headon's drumming, too.

Next up Jonathan Richman's journeys through the outskirts of Boston, Mass

2010-12-14T06:33:00.005Z

Music for (your) pleasure, three For this third sample of my writing from Theme Time Radio Hour, I tackle the world's greatest dancer . . .

17. THE WAY YOU LOOK TONIGHT

(Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields)

FRED ASTAIRE with the Oscar Peterson Group

Clef MGC 1002 (1952) 2.58

From Show 78 “Night”

To explain the exquisiteness of Fred Astaire's voice, best start with his legs. The clearest view is in The Barkleys of Broadway - he and Ginger Rogers dance in kilts. His legs are so, so thin - the stuff of chopsticks. They were that way for a reason, though: his exceptional physical balance and grace. You and I need muscles. He got by on air. His singing was the same. Light to the point of non-existence, it was a speech-like expression of a deep, subtle understanding that the meaning of a great show tune is in the dance between tune and lyrics. And this is one of the greatest. Debuted, by Astaire, in the 1936 movie, Swing Time, it's become an untypically rueful wedding song standard. This version was cut in 1952 in Los Angeles, at loose, lengthy studio sessions with a cool jazz sextet led by Oscar Peterson. The music is by Jerome Kern, a German Jewish New Yorker who fell in love, one summer night in 1910, with the landlord's daughter at the Swan, Walton-on-Thames. They lived the happy-ever-after life of a Broadway hit. The words are by Dorothy Fields - Jewish, from New Jersey and not so lucky in real love. But an exceptional love song lyricist - notice the internal rhyme of 'warm' and 'for me'. When Kern first played her the melody, she left the room to cry. 'I couldn't stop, it was so beautiful.' Love, pain, tears. Death, too. Good or bad, every marriage ends in tears.

PS If you want to hear this song (or any of the others I've posted about), either post a comment or email and I'll send you a link.
Next up The Clash and their Chicago piano

2010-12-14T06:14:00.002Z

Music for (your) pleasure, number two

So, for the second of my writings for the Theme Time Radio Hour compilation, we move from the modern Manhattan of 14th St to the eternal hope springs of gospel . . .

16. THE BLOOD (LC Cohen)

THE ZION TRAVELERS

Dooto 602 (1960) 2.06 From Show 80 “Blood”

Pressed for my religious affiliation, I tend to reply 'North London Jewish-ish (through marriage) Catholic atheist' - and, to steal an old Nik Cohn line, not untypical of the sort. As such, I feel as qualified to comment on matters sacred as the merely worshipful - more so, perhaps, not being distracted by faith*.

Founded in Los Angeles in 1944, the Zion Travelers worked steadily but never made the headlines. Though The Blood sounds like it could easily predate Hymns Ancient and Modern, it was actually made in 1962, for Dootone - the label that Earth Angel built. LC Cohen, manager and lead tenor, sings/shouts/wails/testifies: 'Weeeell, bloood, running warm, aaaargh-uh-h, o Lord, in your veins, wooh.' What's he on about? And what is it that a non-Bible-basher like me can find so moving - irrefutable, even - in such unchecked sky pilotry?

My guess is it's because it's a kind of Rothko painting for the ears. An essentially abstract piece of work that floats on the boundary of consciousness - where the inchoate begins to be represented as language. Such expressions of a universally shared sense of the ineffable are pop's half-secret core: from Clyde McPhatter's opening cries on Billy Ward and His Dominoes' The Bells to Lorraine Ellison's despair between 2:42 and 2:54 of Stay With Me to the piano sound at 1:06 (and again at 2:09) on Abba's Mamma Mia.

* Not that I have anything against the religious. I have a cousin -a successful lawyer - who believes in fairies but I still let her drive my car.

Next up Fred Astaire's wedding song.

2010-12-13T11:33:00.002Z

Music for (your) pleasure, number one

One of the other things in my life . . . I help out (a little) on the Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour compilations put out by Ace Records — and my old friend Roger Armstrong. Among other things, this time round, for the third volume, it involved such burdensomeness as dinner at Moro. It also involves my writing about music — something I don't do that often these days.

Each album is a double with forty or fifty songs that Dylan played on his show. There is no Dylan voice on there. (Actually, there is one tiny, tiny snatch of him and I'll provide a reward to anyone who can tell me where it is.) There is a really extensive booklet for each album — and now a cardboard slipcase to hold all three albums. If I didn't already have it, I'd command you to buy it for me this Christmas. (So buy it for someone else instead. You won't regret it. The range and quality of the music is astonishing. The latest one has Jerry Lee Lewis singing as Iago in Othello. Can pop get any better than that?)

I've written a few bits for the sleevenotes etc now and thought you might be interested in them. I'll be posting one a day till I've finished them (then get back to Lacan's con). First up is Laura Cantrell's version of 14th St. If you don't know the tune, post a comment or email me with your address and I will send you a link to my dropbox which will enable you to fetch it etc. So . . .

21. 14TH STREET (Emily Spray) LAURA CANTRELL

Taken from the album “Humming By The Flowered Vine” Matador LP OLE 651 (2005) 3.16

From Show 83 “Street Map”

A song about boundaries and borderlines - crossed, uncrossed and uncrossable - sung by Laura Cantrell, a Nashville emigrant to New York whose biggest champion was an Englishman, John Peel. It's a pinhole view, she said, of 'the moment when you see someone you're obsessed with - and decide whether it's worth it to say hello or stay safely in the background.'

Love and not-love, desire and rejection: they couldn't have a more evocative setting than the broad crosstown street which is not just the unofficial divide between uptown and downtown Manhattan but an interzone between the ancient and modern worlds. It's where the city's rigid street grid plan begins. It's where they put the barricades on 9/11. Originally, it was - as Bob Dylan put it on Theme Time Radio Hour - 'the old artery of Manhattan'. By the 1970s, it was meat-packing joints, gimcrack shops and dangerously louche gay sex clubs - The Anvil, The Toilet, The Manhole. These days, it's upscale fashiony.

The song's writer, Emily Spray, lived on its eastern reaches in its crack low-day of the late 1980s/early 1990s. 'It's quite literal. I had a crush on a guy who was unavailable and I used to run into him on 14th street and have this emotional experience. I could tell he enjoyed my attraction to him and played with my feelings a little. From there came the song.' With, at its core, a borderline never crossed. And a heart-rending shard of psychogeographical word-play - 'not counting the blocks between you and me'.

Next up The Zion Travelers' ecstastic religiosity

2010-12-09T10:08:00.004Z

Un conte d'un con et aussi de M Lacan, part one

First to the National Portrait Gallery*. A couple of months ago, I was writing a piece on 'sexy vs sexist' for Professional Photographer. (I write a monthly column for the magazine, on a legendary photographer. Here's one on Robert Frank. I'll put a fuller list in a future posting. I also write longer pieces.

As part of that sexy vs sexist piece, I sent out an email to all of you on my blogmail list. (If you want to be added, post a comment or email me.) It contained links to various photographs and asked you to rate them as sexy or sexist. As I hoped and expected, the responses were thoughtful and widely varied. One man's urge to goose is rarely another woman's desire for a gander. And, most strikingly, vice versa.

Among the images - and, in a way, the thing that made me think of doing the email - was a photograph that had been shortlisted for the National Portrait Gallery's Taylor Wessing portraiture prize. Titled My British Wife, it is . . . well, I'll quote from the piece I wrote . . .

'a portrait by Greek photographer Panayiotis Lamprou, of his real wife. Unnamed, she is sitting in the sun, at an outdoor table. Behind her is a half-open Mediterranean blue door. Beside her is a cooking pan, with a little food still clinging to its edges - an omelette, we are told. She has finely shaped eyebrows, an aquiline nose, grey-blue eyes and a wide, pale pink-lipped mouth. Her hair is tousled and falls messily over the top of her halter-topped sundress. You can see a light touch of hair in her left armpit. She sits, looking directly at the camera/viewer, her legs apart, on a chair cushion almost the same colour as the door. She has no knickers on.

She also has no pubic hair - shaved, I guess - and a notably expressive vulva. Context and intent aside, it is the stuff - the raw material, anyway - of pornography. Or, at least, what is usually meant when people use the word, pornography. Certainly, the NPG was worried enough about it to crop the picture in half for its website, turning it into a plain and almost unexplicable image of the top half of an attractive young woman.'

So, when invited to the press show, I made sure I went. The picture didn't win. It was a runner-up**. The photographer was there - though not his British wife. I talked to him briefly but his English (not fluent) and my Greek (non-existent) weren't really up to a meaningful conversation, particularly in a room where everyone was acting as if there wasn't something notably notable about the convergence of the image of his wife, him and a shuttle of artsy journalists.

I did think of asking him: how's the wife? But I wasn't sure the humour would translate. He did, though, hand me a leaflet, the press release for his picture, written by the art critic of the Greek broadsheet Kathimerini. It's a not unthoughtful piece, if marked by the rhetoric of art-speak and Mediterranean journalism - 'condensation of beatitude and lightweight materialism'. It describes the picture as 'a rather delicate, unpretentious requiem for femininity, a reminder of the self-esteem of the naked body before the fall and sin . . .' Myself, I think that's a naïve, unhistorical approach - once the fall has happened, it can't be unfalled, so to speak, its tragic irrevocability is the trade-off we made for self-knowledge. But still . . .

Its writer continues: 'but also a reminder of the admiration of a man towards a woman, a prompt to the classical work of art of . . .' I should have seen this coming but didn't . . . 'Gustav Courbet, The Origin of the World.' And then, of course, he references this painting's last private owner, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He poses a question: can we accuse 'Lacan for voyeurism, the man who changed the course of psychoanalysis and modern thinking'? He clearly thinks not. I'm not so sure.

I've been thinking about Lacan's ownership of that painting for some time now but had somehow never quite got round to posting the blog about it that I intended to write. Ever since I'd learned that he'd owned the picture, I'd been intrigued by that fact. I already knew the painting but . . . well, there was something odd about his ownership. It was, apart from anything else, such a, well, French thing to do.

I wondered how that had come about and looked it up. It's a story. I'll tell it in the next blog or two.

* Site of one of the world's great escalator journeys. (For some years, I have been making a small collection of them.) It begins in the modern day and takes you back to the 16th century.

** Nothing was said but there had been a similar picture in the show a few years ago. The differences are notable, though.

Meanwhile, a little French? (I knew the song already but found this video because it’s in the new Martin Scorsese film, a documentary about Fran Lebowitz.)

Next up Some music writing of mine, occasioned by the arrival of Theme Time Radio Hour Three

Soon Part deux of this conte (in which a Turk tempts a desperate man)

2010-11-12T06:42:00.003Z

Wonders of the modern world, number five . . . the sound of no-hand clapping

It was the Sarah Kane play, Blasted, a revival at the Lyric, Hammersmith. I’d not seen it first time round, probably put off by the reviews which described it as needlessly violent and juvenile.

It’s now fifteen years later. Fifteen years. The same gap as between, say, Elvis’s first hit — or Look Back In Anger — and Pink Floyd’s sixth album - or Last Tango In Paris. Or Anarchy In The UK and Madonna’s Blond Ambition.

It’s a great play, I decided. Of course, it’s violent. Then it was the time of the Balkan civil wars - it’s almost a struggle now to recall how staggeringly violent they were and how shocking it was to have something happen quite so close to, well, Primrose Hill.

It is, of course, clearly marked by Beckett and Ionesco and Albee etc, blah blah. But it is also a very funny play. More than that, it’s a comedy of manners, very English, almost traditional. A couple in a hotel room with a man who wants to have sex and a younger woman who doesn’t and the man ends up — inadvertently and amusingly - short of some of his clothing. As my friend Gerry who was with me said, it’s a kind of Brian Rix farce.

I found myself thinking of it as Noel Coward with — if my Nadsat is still with me — a touch of the old ultraviolence. A couple in two different hotel rooms, playing out the not always pleasant realities of romantic entanglement.

Which is why it’s so funny — in this production at least. Tragedy is, of course, my splitting a finger nail. Comedy, though, is a man (a journalist, a tabloid writer, a buffoonish parody of one) who has . . .

* bitten his girlfriend’s vulva till it bleeds

* been buggered - on his hotel bed - with a pistol by an Irish-accented terrorist (who now lies dead beside the bed)

* eaten the leg of a dead baby (having disinterred the infant from its onstage grave)

* had both his eyes removed — for the terrorist’s snack, I think

. . . and who is standing up to his chest in the baby’s now-emptied grave. It’s raining on him through a hole in the roof, too.

See what I mean about farce. As Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest can be seen as an antic inversion of Oedipus Rex, so this play is inside-out Ray Cooney. Comedy played as tragedy.

Anyway, to continue, standing there, buggered and eyeless, having feasted on unroasted baby, in the pissing rain, he opens his mouth, pauses, then says ‘Thank you’. The human comedy. The precision of the line — and its truth.

I was, though, the only one who laughed - as I suspected I might be so I muffled it somewhat.

Anyway, that’s all by the way of preamble to what happened next - to the reason for this piece. What happened next was . . . nothing. Complete quiet in the audience. Complete darkness onstage. Complete quite onstage. And so on. And on and on and on and on. The sound of no-hands clapping.

I was delighted. At last, I realised, I might discover the answer to a question I’d posed to myself but never got round to asking of someone who might actually know the answer. The question is this: how does the clapping start at the end of a play?

Most of the time, of course, it’s not a question. The final line is delivered with the duh-duh-duh of a joke’s punchline. Or everyone knows the ending anyway. You know exactly where you are when, for example, Fortinbras announces: ‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot.’

Sometimes, though, it’s not clear quite where you’ve got to in the play. Is it a pause, a very long one, or is that your lot? I saw Sondheim’s Into The Woods in the park this year and, never having seen it or heard it in full before, I wasn’t at all sure if the end of the first half was the end of the whole thing. I wasn’t the only one, either. My friend Dorothy who was with me felt the same thing, too.**

So the lights dimmed on Blasted and the buggered journalist was, presumably, still there in the dark hole, getting wetter and wetter. All was silence, though.

No one clapped. No one stirred. (Perhaps it’s relevant that it was a Saturday afternoon matinee. Perhaps not.) The silence went on for thirty seconds, then more. A minute, I’d say. Then more, more. Perhaps even two minutes. Then rustles. Then the faintest of, well, not laughs exactly, amusements perhaps.

I’d always assumed — on the basis of absolutely no evidence at all — that the ushers were instructed, under these conditions, to start the clapping. Clearly, I was wrong.

Still more silence. No clapping anyway. Just the sound of people starting to turn round for a check on the house or whisper, not quite quietly enough, to their partner.

Then, finally, it came. The first clap, from someone over to the left of the balcony. And everyone joined in, of course. And the curtain rose and the cast of three — buggered, wet, dead, eyeless etc — stood to take the applause. Even they were smiling. Laughing almost.

* A knowing parody, perhaps, given that both her parents were journalists. But then, for that reason, perhaps not.

** Mr Sondheim himself was there that night, too, as it happens. I saw him at the interval, with a drink being brought to him. Astonishingly, given the obsessiveness of Sondheim fans and fanettes — fanosexuals, too — no one else seemed to notice him. I couldn’t bring myself to go over and tell him about the wonders of his rhymes.

I’ll regret it. I know I will. I bumped into the great TV writer Jack Rosenthal at a party and didn’t tell him about the wonders of his gags. He died not long after. I still regret my inaction, shamefully.

Why didn’t I do something? In Rosenthal’s case, I think because I was worried he’d say something like: which of my plays do you most admire? And the thought of that prospective question emptied my brain of the tiniest detail of his work. Well, all but the title of his Barmitzvah Boy — and that’s not enough to sustain a conversation past its opening sallies.

Next up A visit to the National Portrait Gallery (and maybe the story of Lacan’s con).

2010-11-05T18:42:00.004Z

Wonders of the modern world, number four

There, on a council estate, in the bit of north London which has stopped being Camden Town and has not quite become Kentish Town, there, just off the main road, slap in the middle of that estate, is a crazy golf course. It's an official one, with all the tricky little holes and tunnels and slopes you get in a seaside amusement park. It even has a sign on it, saying something like: this golf course is for the residents of this estate and their guests.

A crazy golf course on a council estate? I stretch to even imagine the meeting at which that was discussed and agreed. What was said? Could anyone keep a straight face? Did they say things like: swings and roundabouts are so 20th century! Or: it's a narrative which addresses the middle-class hegemony of golf. Or: nothing is too good for council tenants, they deserve a crazy golf course.

I guess that I could, of course, call up someone at Camden council and ask them but, frankly, I'm happier with my musings than I might be with the facts.

I walk past it fairly often and I've yet to see anyone playing on it, though. I've always fancied having a go but the problem is there is nowhere to rent golf clubs for it. Now there's a business opportunity going begging.

Meanwhile . . . Cheap flights

Next up The story of Lacan's con (enfin)

2010-11-04T10:37:00.003Z

Wonders of the modern world, number three

'Clayton initially lost his place in the team to the more adventurous and flamboyant Eddie Clamp of Wolves.' I read that line in The Guardian's obituary of Blackburn and England right-half, Ronnie Clayton. It was written by Brian Glanville – who, as it happens is a the grandfather of one of my son's best friends and the ex-father-in-law of a friend of mine.

I can't make up my mind what I most love about that sentence. Is it the word 'initially'? Or is it that it's about a football player called Ronnie Clayton? Rather than, say, Amine Linganzi or Benjani Mwaruwari. Or is the charming dislocation between the phrase 'adventurous and flamboyant' and the name Eddie Clamp of Wolves?

Next up Golfing in Camden Town

2010-10-28T11:36:00.004+01:00

Wonders of the modern world, two

The Guardian has a section/sidebar in which an ‘expert’ reviews or reflects on a work that relates to their occupation. So . . . there was a saleswoman on Death Of A Salesman.

She didn’t like it, I think. She wrote: ‘Sales is about personal development: it’s about being self-motivated and growing as a person, or peopled won’t believe in you.’

She wasn’t that keen on Willy Loman, either. ‘Willy’s problem is his personality or lack of it.’

If only, I found myself thinking, Arthur Miller were still alive to have his greatest character explained to him so . . . unusually?

Meantime . . .

An instrumental and some dancing.

The first of the three before eight, as mimed three decades later. Or: the other thing Orwell missed out on in Wigan. (The first being not finding the pier.)

2010-10-26T12:05:00.004+01:00

Where was I?

Oh, yes. In Exhibition Rd, heading north towards Hyde Park and a talk at the Royal Geographical Society — I’d never been there before.

It was by the analyst Ron Britton and it was entitled Between Brain and Mind? I had no idea of the meaning or significance of that question mark at the end of the title before the lecture. And I was no wiser after the lecture. Obviously, it was about the relationship between physical structure etc and consciousness etc. But, basically, as he had no interest in the former, he had nothing to say about its relationship to the latter.

The only point I really took away was his distinction between comprehending and understanding. That is, in a way, a version of the second two-thirds of the Confucian maxim: I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand. He used the phrase ‘getting it’. I got it

I remembered a bit about Ron Britton from my course, but not much. He was a Kleinian, I remembered. And he’d written about Wordsworth’s early poetry — the Prelude and Ode: Imitations of Immortality. These poems are, as you might guess if you’ve read them, big in the analytic world.

I quoted him in my dissertation, in fact. I could repeat what I wrote but I won’t. You wouldn’t like the language. I’m not sure I did. The gist, though, was that he came up with a smart idea about how art was arrived at/created: by a continual feedback loop between the two Kleinian ‘positions’ — mental states, that is. I’m not sure if it’s right — or even necessary — but it’s smart and fun.

Which his lecture wasn’t. It rambled. It missed the point. It ignored the subject of the title. It asserted where it should have argued. It went on and on.

I dozed a little, I must admit. So it’s possible that I missed the good bits, though I doubt it.

There was a good bit during question time, however. Someone from the audience challenged his lack of interest in — and understanding of — neuroscience. He — and his fellow panellist, Peter Hobson — took umbrage, albeit in a very academia-ish way, smooth and accepting.

Essentially, they asserted their position: that neuroscience offers nothing of interest to our understanding of mind. That is, of ourselves. Psychoanalysis: that’s the thing. Of that, they are certain. Of that, they sing. True believers.

It’s a row I’ve seen before. In fact, it’s the row going on in psychoanalysis at the moment. In one corner, the neuropsychoanalysts — led by Mark Solms, a South African who also makes wine. In the other, the traditional Kleinians — led by Rachel Blass who, being a suburban New Yorker, also, er, whines. I heard a debate between the pair of them and it was great fun. The Blass position was completely assured in its own logic. It was like Labour activists’ view of the Conservatives. Essentially, she couldn’t credit her opposition with a brain. There was an air of Prime Minister’s Question Time about the way she argued — fabulously well and completely convincing but, ultimately only in the moment.

To me, for what it’s worth, the neuropsychoanalysts seem more, well, measured. An odd choice of word, perhaps, but the one that came straight to mind. They seem more worldly, less propelled by their own logic.

Significantly, there seemed to be very few psychoanalytic heavy-hitters at the evening with Ron Britton. There were also, to my eye, no non-white faces and far more women than men. Is now the place to mention that there is a theory — a suggestion, anyway — that the reason psychoanalysis’ wider social influence has declined is related to the increasing number of women in the profession?

No, don’t hit me. There is an argument to be made. I will come back to it, too. Soon. Well, in time.

A little reading for the early evening . . .

2010-10-24T13:00:00.003+01:00

Wonders of the modern world, one

Saturday morning, early, on Primrose Hill, with my dog. Bright and chill and damp.

A handful and a half of middle-aged men (mostly) crawling up the hill, in a very strange way. A younger man with an Australian accent is shouting at them (not at all angrily). ‘You’ve got to get under the barbed wire. You’re being shot at. So keep your arses down. ’

Next up What I got up to on a Friday evening in Exhibition Rd.

2010-10-22T15:55:00.002+01:00

Psychoanalysis, a slight return

To Exhibition Road on a Friday afternoon, in mid-October.

I was invited so I went — to a preview of a show at the Science Museum. Entitled Psychoanalysis: The Unconscious In Everyday Life, it is small, tenderly curated and intelligent.

It’s just off the main entrance, up a flight of steps. The light is low — giving a sense of the couch and the consulting room. A fine and private place.

The show’s title gives little indication of the contents or approach, though. It is, in fact, a collection of objects which exemplify and dramatise psychoanalytic thought and concepts. So there is stuff from Freud’s room — predictable in essence but given depth by the accompanying exploration of their significance by psychoanalyst David Bell.

An interruption to myself. David Bell is a funny little person, with a beard which perhaps contains a nest or two. He once nearly ran me over, on his bike, as he emerged, inattentively, from cycling through Waterlow Park. He certainly, absent-mindedly, didn’t see me. He always, always, always wears a sleeveless sweater, whatever the weather — which, of course, makes him look like an overgrown schoolboy from the 1950s. Which, I suppose . . .

Anyway, he was scurrying around the show at the preview, explaining things and herding people the way he does. He is also a wonderful speaker, a true believer whose views of psychoanalysis — as the central organising subject of human thought, effectively — are made acceptable — if not true or entirely believable — by his wit and eloquence. Though not charm. I doubt if anyone has ever accused him of that.

Other stuff in the show includes toys — as used to analyse children, by Margaret Lowenfeld and Betty Joseph. Basic idea: children aren’t capable of talking coherently about their inner life — ie via free association — so analyst gets them to play with toys and then analyse the deeper meaning of their play.

There are also drawings made by Melanie Klein’s young boy patient Richard. Pictures of Spitfires and Messerschmidts shooting and burning — it was war time. There are Winnicott’s squiggle pictures. Basic idea: analyst draws squiggly line on paper, child extends it, analyst explains meaning of child’s squiggle. (Put like that, it can sound daft. But I’m not sure it is. In fact, I’m sure it’s not. If we can’t find meaning and emotion in the shape and rhythm of a line, we would never visit art galleries and Picasso would have been out of work straight away.)

And there art works. One is directly sexual. Of course it is. It’s by Tim Noble and Sue Webster — YBAs, famous for their rubbish pieces (description, not judgment). There is an electronic piece. Of course, there is. It’s Arnold Dreyblatt’s The Wunderblock — a tablet screen which displays a paper of Freud’s which compared the way memory works to the child’s toy known, in German, as a Wunderblock. In English, a mystic writing pad — you write on it, you see what you’ve written, you lift the wax sheet you’ve written and it’s all gone. On Dreyblatt’s the text is electronic, speeding and drifting past, constantly rearranging and re-emphasising itself. Unfortunately, it’s the one thing in the show which isn’t well described or explained.

There is also a gorgeous Grayson Perry pot — his wife is, of course, an analytically inclined therapist. There is a ‘Cabinet of wish fulfilment’ — votives and pieces of tattooed skin from the Science Museum’s own collection. (You can imagine the justifying explanation by the curator who collected them, can’t you. Come on, he or she would have said, there’s bound to be a show someday when we’ll need a few ancient small carved penises and hands. Trust me, there will.)

What’s most intriguing about the show, I guess, is its concreteness. Psychoanalysis is the most cerebral — or, perhaps, most mental — of disciplines. It’s about words — silences and gesture, too, but mostly words. This show gives it, I suppose, body.

And, having spent an intrigued and distracted hour at the show, I wandered up towards Hyde Park for the next of the day’s distractions.

But that’ll have to wait for the next posting. Tomorrow. Probably.

2010-09-26T16:27:00.001+01:00

Murray Sayle

January 1,1926 to September 18, 2010

Aw fuck it. More death. Another friend.

Like most people, I read about the great Australian journalist Murray Sayle’s death on the obituaries pages. I knew he was ill, of course. He had Parkinson’s. His wife Jenny had let me know and told me he was no longer at home but a little way away, in a nursing home.

Even the giants stumble and fall.

We worked together in the 1990s, when I commissioned and edited him for Night & Day, a Sunday supplement for the Mail on Sunday which was intended as an upmarket alternative to YOU Magazine — which, in going downmarket, had lost its lucrative, uptown advertisers.

I think Phillip Knightley* introduced him to us. Or rather us to him. We paid well — very well. And smart, fast, elegant and entertaining magazine writers are always much harder to find than all but those who’ve had to find them realise. I spent my days (and nights) making pig’s ears into, well . . . something better than dog’s dinners. (A good deal of editing time is spent unravelling and mercy-killing bad writers’ cliches and incomprehensible, mixed analogies.)

Murray was — with Phillip — one of the best. Although I knew the name and work, I didn’t know the breadth and range of his interests, life and appetites. He was a delight to work with. I loved his enthusiasm — not just for his own stories but for other people’s, too, and for technology. He was the first person I knew with a portable hard drive. On visits to the office, he’d plug it into a spare computer in the subs’ room and away he’d go, working his copy over and over. The subs considered and treated him like some kind of eccentric uncle. For me, he was one of those substitute fathers you pick up along the way — someone you can learn new stuff from.

I can’t remember all the stories he did for us but I remember a piece about female priests and several book reviews which weren’t really reviews but wonderful, brief essays.

In particular, I recall working with him on a shortened version of his New Yorker piece about the atom bombing of Japan. The original was, according to The Australian, his ‘greatest piece of sustained reporting’. Like all his work, it was full of odd but resonant details. I learned so much from him. He turned journalism into something approaching a sensory experience.

And I remember our lunches, of course. Not particularly alcoholic by Fleet St standards but certainly long. Murray liked to talk. God did Murray like to talk. Theories, observations, anecdotes, thoughts, gags spieled out of him. No quiet mouse myself, I think I may have contributed the odd question.

Gradually, through his spieling, I found out more about him. About his early years, working on a Murdoch paper. He was assigned to looking after the young Rupert when he first arrived in the office — or maybe that was Phillip Knightley’s job. I met his wife, Jenny — and spoke to her a lot on the phone when Murray was out and about somewhere.

I learned about his years in Japan. I’d been there, on a job, a few years earlier and had been told to look him up as he was the one who would make sense of it for me. I didn’t — too unconfident, I guess. I should have. Always generous with his opinions, he gave me answers to all the questions I’d had in my head ever since my visit.

Why, for example, do the concierges at Japanese hotels persist in giving you directions to places when they clearly have no idea where they are? A simple matter of face, explained Murray. That was the answer to a lot of my questions — though his answers were longer, far more detailed and always entertaining.

I learned about the wonderful documentaries he made with the photographer Elliot Erwitt — I’ve still got the wobble-colour VHS copies he made for me somewhere. I heard about his famous expenses claim, for a piece of sailing equipment — ‘money for old rope’.

I didn’t learn, though, that he’d also climbed Everest, crossed the Atlantic single-handed, unearthed Philby in Moscow and found Che Guevara in the jungle, like some modern day Stanley.

When I left the magazine, we kept in touch, via email, card and even the occasional phone call. He came over to give evidence at the Bloody Sunday enquiry. He’d written a report about it for the Sunday Times, claiming it was a deliberate assault by the British army. It was spiked and he resigned from the paper. You can find the piece and his later reflections on it for the London Review of Books. It’s worth reading — as is everything he ever wrote. (Though I’m not as keen as others on his Fleet St novel, The Crooked Sixpence. He told me it wasn’t very good and I think he was being as honest as ever.)

Annually, for the Chinese (Japanese?) New Year, a special Murray postcard would arrive. The format was always the same but it was a wonderful format. There would be Murray and his family — who, judging by their expressions, were actually fond of their father — posed, artlessly, in front of some object or place that he’d chosen to represent that year. If I remember right, for the year of the rat, the Japanese family Sayle shared the frame with Mickey Mouse. For the year of the cock, they were sat in front of a branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

I looked forward to them and wished I could think of something similarly witty to send in return. I kept them all — though I can’t put my hand to any of them right now. Then one year, the card didn’t come. I guessed, correctly, that he was ill. Then he was dead. I’m not the only one that will miss him.

* Phillip and Murray went way back. They were at school together, I think, in Sydney. Murray came to London first and when Phillip followed, he got him a job. They worked together at the Sunday Times. Phillip’s wife, though, was not so keen on Murray and the way he dominated any conversation. He was barred from their house. I think someone told me that Murray was the model for ‘the great bore of far-eastern journalism’ in John LeCarre’s Honourable Schoolboy. It might have been Phillip.

2010-09-19T12:57:00.006+01:00

What other people did on their holidays . . .

Meanwhile . . . Get your washboards out

2010-09-19T12:41:00.008+01:00

What I did on my holidays . . .

Sennen

Porthmeor

Porthcurno

Long Rock

Next What other people did on their holidays . . .

Meanwhile . . . Shakin' all over New Zealand

2010-09-13T10:05:00.009+01:00

Barrie Briscoe
May 31, 1936 to August 23, 2010

To a funeral on a Cornish hillside in late summer sun with the smell of the sea, the rustle of leaf-heavy trees and the distant roar of the A30. It was for Barrie Briscoe, a nature-loving atheist who'd outrun his three score and ten and who'd lived at least four lives - roustabout, academic, architect, painter.

I didn't know him well. He was the head of the architectural practice which worked on a project with me. I don't know if he even liked the end result of the project. But I enjoyed his company the few times we met. And I think he felt the same. I like to think he did anyway.

I knew he’d been ill, very ill, of cancer. The last time I’d seen him he was in a bad way and that was last year. Then, I know, things had got worse. Yet his death still came as a shock. It always does, it seems.

I learned by email. I was away from home so I'd taken my laptop to the pub for its free and fast wi-fi. There, in my googlemail, was a message with his name in the subject field. It was from his wife, Petra - who I knew far better, through the project. 'I am sorry to tell you that Barrie died,' it began. Direct, clear and forthright. A language of friendship.

The funeral was in a vast, private garden just to the west of the Penzance that’s opened to the public now and again. I guess its owner was a friend of Barrie’s. The invitation was a flyer, with a picture of him at the top. Glass in left hand, held by the stem, right hand in a semi-fist, the point-making gesture of a lifelong teacher. He’s smiling. His eyes are twinkling. Usually that’s a lazy cliché but Barrie’s eyes really did twinkle.

‘No religious rite or cleric,’ said the invite. The ceremony was led by a friend, Richard Vanhinsbergh — I didn’t know Richard but his close personal knowledge of Barrie gave the affair a gut-felt pungency.

Bernie — who I do know, he was the builder on our project — was there, too. He dug the grave. I’ve carried, a coffin — my aunt’s, across rainy, muddy, flat, wintry Catholic ground north of Liverpool. That felt, well, primeval. What Bernie did, that felt even older.

The funeral crowd — a big one, a hundred or so — gathered on the top of a hill. There was fizzy wine to drink and fishy snacks to eat. A gathering of Penwith's great and, well not good perhaps, but good-intentioned at least — in the early evening, anyway.

The coffin was then taken down to the burial ground. We followed behind and stood round the grave, a gouge in the grass sentried by a rectangle of small olive trees. There were words said — warm and knowledgable of the man we were interring. Many of them drifted on the air, blurred by the sound of the wind-bothered leaves. Their half-absence, half-presence seemed right, somehow.

There was a harp playing. The coffin was let slip into the grave, by a half-dozen friends. There was a bit of crying, not a lot. People there knew enough about death not to indulge or fall into half-imaginary emotions. When it was over, Bernie hung back — he and his men had a friend's grave to fill in.

Then there was a party, at a gallery in town, by the sea. There were a few of his architectural models — simple, inspired, made of cardboard — and pictures of him on the wall. Over the years, this part of the country has attracted a lot of people whose lives elsewhere, well, didn’t work out. Many of them were artists or at least arty. They were pretty much all there to say goodbye to Barrie. They sat outside, in the late afternoon sun, drank beer and smoked roll-ups. A lot of them seemed to be called Bernie.

There was a lot of food, mostly provided by another friend, Freddy (a woman). So much food, in fact, that, wonderful as it was, there were doggy bags as you left. And that, too, had a sacramental aspect. Somehow, it felt like you were taking a bit of Barrie home with you. I had mine, a pasta dish, for lunch the following day. It tasted really good.

2010-08-04T11:52:00.003+01:00

Vicky Cristina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? Part five*

It’s possibly best to start reading earlier in the series but if you really can’t be bothered, all you really need to know is that I’ve been trying to figure out Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

PS1 In case you need telling, I don’t think all Americans are narcissists or that all America is narcissist. Or even that the invasion of Iraq was necessarily a totally bad thing or completely stupid idea. Just that narcissism and solipsism were big players in the badnesses and stupidities of the invasion and what came after.

PS2 Spending so many hours at the cinema with my sons and daughters gave me a deep appreciation for children’s films. Most of them are far better made, acted and plotted than adult films. Children’s passion for logic and consistency is so often worn down as they grow older, their own passion eclipsed by their wish to have their own thoughts supplanted by another’s withered hysterias. How else to explain the status of, say, Ken Loach or Mike Leigh?

PS3 My daughter’s current rave is Toy Story 3. She’s grown-up. She watched it on her laptop, a bootleg recorded on a phone from a mid-row seat in some American or Israeli multiplex. I can’t do that. I’m a grown-up grown-up. I’d love to see it at the cinema but I no longer have any children to take me. If I went by myself, they’d think I was a paedophile. And I had enough of those as a child myself, watching cartoons, alone, at long-defunct cartoons-only cinemas on Oxford Street and Victoria Station, moving seat about every five minutes so as to stay one step ahead of their hands. (And I wonder why I’ve just about given up on cinemas.)

Some entertainment?

The last government was always talking about things being ‘world class’. I never quite figured out how — on the Class Scale — that related to footballer’s ‘different class’. Which trumps which**. Oh well, here is a kind of international infant school guide to the world — where everyone is the best at something.

And here is someone who really was the best. Different class or world class or just class? All of them, I guess.

* Of five

** I have the same problem with the Load Scale. I’m never sure which is the greater, a shed-load, a shit-load or a fuck-load?

Next up I’m taking a break for a bit and will return at the start of the football season with — at last — my wonderings about who Freud would have supported in the World Cup. And the Premier League.