Wednesday 16 February 2011
Sunday 12 December 2010
Tuesday 30 November 2010
To be or not to be...
Something peculiar happens to my feet when I enter an art gallery anywhere. I should be attending these things every other day – after all I’m an Art graduate. But a leaden feeling generally comes over me as I struggle inside, invite in hand. It takes all my strength not to skip the exhibition altogether and go for a drink instead.
“No one will ever know,” a devilish Jack Nicholson sort of voice whispers in my ear. I force myself not to look for the bar. “Which would you rather have?” he whispers. “High culture or a Margarita?”
Hyperventilating a little, I just about make it to the first room of the exhibition. There are people everywhere, trying to look cultured and serious. The only sounds are whispers and a muffled shuffle of sensible shoes accompanied by the clicking of stilettos. Half of these people don’t even know what they are looking at and the other half are pretending… Meanwhile, I feel as though I’ve been injected with buffalo tranquillizer, and start looking for a seat – anywhere I might lie down for three hours until it’s acceptable to go home again.
It’s then that I remember why the last time I “did” art was at an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. At least there you don’t have to spend your time with a bunch of boring people pretending to like whatever has been hung on the wall.
There is a halcyon period in your twenties when you ignore any pretensions to clever stuff. You’re past the university project stage, and life is a merry-go-round between the pub and the wine bar. You’re too busy falling in love, falling into debt or falling over to care about the latest retrospective at the Tate. Then you become settled. You’ve got the partner, the mortgage, the job. The kitchen extension is finished. You’re all grown-up. Suddenly, spare time is for self-improvement.
There is an assumption that people actually want to visit obscure old churches while on holiday in the south of France, watch video BBC documentaries about global warming or book tickets for the latest Sam Beckett revival at the Barbican when in London. Being older and wiser means turning off the television when your favorite soap opera comes on, and retiring to the sofa or the bedroom to read a book instead. In Grown-up World, the thirty-something should have passed seamlessly through the “Let’s just get a cheap last-minute deal to Barcelona” phase and taken up picture-framing holidays in Tuscany instead. Not wishing to appear a complete dimwit, though, I do love doing many so-called cultured things, but there’s a time and a place for everything. I just wish some people would let their hair down and stop pretending once in a while.
My father for one, although socially educated and well-travelled, wouldn’t be seen dead at the opera. I once took him with me to Covent Garden. He fell asleep half way through act one, woke up just before the interval and missed the second bit trying to find the bar. His philosophy is simple: “Why spend your life pretending to know stuff you don’t?”
I agree. Grown-up parties – as opposed to drinking copious bottles of wine and talking about nothing in particular parties – can be terrifying. You have to spend the whole time feigning knowledge about politics when all you really want to talk about is who’s bonking who.
Entire areas of chitchat – the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, French grapes, the films of Ingmar Bergman – can be saved for more appropriate places such as funerals. I have been to too many a “do” where I would have preferred to have spent the night in the loo clutching a bottle of Tattinger instead.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t actually want to be friends with some of these people. I’ve made that mistake in the past, most memorably with a guy who liked jazz. You know the type – builds his own turntable and flatly refuses to use his CD covers as beer mats. I do like jazz, but there’s love and there’s luurrve. He once forced me to go to a jazz gig and spent the entire night with his eyes closed in a semi-orgasmic state while tapping his fingers on the table top. Meanwhile, I spent my time wondering when the hell each tune might end. Jazz, in my opinion, would be greatly improved if each piece was limited to precisely four minutes.
The jazz fan told me on the way home that the trio were improvising – in other words they were making it up as they went along. But I’d already figured out that one for myself. I never saw him again.
Admit it: where would you rather be if you had the choice? Sitting on a wooden bench watching a modern dance workshop about the deforestation of South America or sitting in a hot bath with your partner drinking ice cold G&Ts?
Why do you think Stephen Hawking’s philosophical tour de force, “A Brief History of Time”, remains one of the greatest unread blockbusters in living memory? Or why annual membership of a Film Institute is like joining the gym? All those good intentions of watching obscure foreign films with subtitles soon evaporate, and before you know it, you’re back to buying pirated blockbusters from your local ‘peripteron’!
Sometimes I’m too exhausted after a day’s work to read the instructions on the side of a packet of pasta, let alone tackle a one-man rendition of “Under Milk Wood”. Surely I can’t be the only one?
Of course, if my parents hadn’t had to work so hard and late when I was growing up in London and I had more time to listen to classical music and go on watercolor courses in north Devon, maybe all this cultural stuff would have seemed more important to me. I would have known before the age of seven that “Le Nozze di Figaro” is not, in fact, a new ice cream with caramel topping and dark chocolate, and when I reached 30 all the highbrow stuff would have come back to me – in the same way that I can recite all the actors in “The Godfather”, except the good-looking one whose name I can never remember…
I’m not a complete culture-phobe, I just wish some people would relax a bit at “arty” events and not pretend to like things that they obviously don’t. I did hear of an American psychologist who discovered that for most people the urge to try anything new stalls at the age of 24. By the time we reach our mid-twenties, he argued, we think we know what we like and what we don’t, and are disinclined to budge. This makes perfect sense to me, and explains why you never see old people in sushi bars.
Personally, I think there should be a self-help group for people with culture phobia. People could meet in each others’ houses, drink gin and confess – “My name is Lulu and last night I watched ‘House series 4’ on satellite. The repeats. And yes I found it funny...
“No one will ever know,” a devilish Jack Nicholson sort of voice whispers in my ear. I force myself not to look for the bar. “Which would you rather have?” he whispers. “High culture or a Margarita?”
Hyperventilating a little, I just about make it to the first room of the exhibition. There are people everywhere, trying to look cultured and serious. The only sounds are whispers and a muffled shuffle of sensible shoes accompanied by the clicking of stilettos. Half of these people don’t even know what they are looking at and the other half are pretending… Meanwhile, I feel as though I’ve been injected with buffalo tranquillizer, and start looking for a seat – anywhere I might lie down for three hours until it’s acceptable to go home again.
It’s then that I remember why the last time I “did” art was at an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. At least there you don’t have to spend your time with a bunch of boring people pretending to like whatever has been hung on the wall.
There is a halcyon period in your twenties when you ignore any pretensions to clever stuff. You’re past the university project stage, and life is a merry-go-round between the pub and the wine bar. You’re too busy falling in love, falling into debt or falling over to care about the latest retrospective at the Tate. Then you become settled. You’ve got the partner, the mortgage, the job. The kitchen extension is finished. You’re all grown-up. Suddenly, spare time is for self-improvement.
There is an assumption that people actually want to visit obscure old churches while on holiday in the south of France, watch video BBC documentaries about global warming or book tickets for the latest Sam Beckett revival at the Barbican when in London. Being older and wiser means turning off the television when your favorite soap opera comes on, and retiring to the sofa or the bedroom to read a book instead. In Grown-up World, the thirty-something should have passed seamlessly through the “Let’s just get a cheap last-minute deal to Barcelona” phase and taken up picture-framing holidays in Tuscany instead. Not wishing to appear a complete dimwit, though, I do love doing many so-called cultured things, but there’s a time and a place for everything. I just wish some people would let their hair down and stop pretending once in a while.
My father for one, although socially educated and well-travelled, wouldn’t be seen dead at the opera. I once took him with me to Covent Garden. He fell asleep half way through act one, woke up just before the interval and missed the second bit trying to find the bar. His philosophy is simple: “Why spend your life pretending to know stuff you don’t?”
I agree. Grown-up parties – as opposed to drinking copious bottles of wine and talking about nothing in particular parties – can be terrifying. You have to spend the whole time feigning knowledge about politics when all you really want to talk about is who’s bonking who.
Entire areas of chitchat – the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, French grapes, the films of Ingmar Bergman – can be saved for more appropriate places such as funerals. I have been to too many a “do” where I would have preferred to have spent the night in the loo clutching a bottle of Tattinger instead.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t actually want to be friends with some of these people. I’ve made that mistake in the past, most memorably with a guy who liked jazz. You know the type – builds his own turntable and flatly refuses to use his CD covers as beer mats. I do like jazz, but there’s love and there’s luurrve. He once forced me to go to a jazz gig and spent the entire night with his eyes closed in a semi-orgasmic state while tapping his fingers on the table top. Meanwhile, I spent my time wondering when the hell each tune might end. Jazz, in my opinion, would be greatly improved if each piece was limited to precisely four minutes.
The jazz fan told me on the way home that the trio were improvising – in other words they were making it up as they went along. But I’d already figured out that one for myself. I never saw him again.
Admit it: where would you rather be if you had the choice? Sitting on a wooden bench watching a modern dance workshop about the deforestation of South America or sitting in a hot bath with your partner drinking ice cold G&Ts?
Why do you think Stephen Hawking’s philosophical tour de force, “A Brief History of Time”, remains one of the greatest unread blockbusters in living memory? Or why annual membership of a Film Institute is like joining the gym? All those good intentions of watching obscure foreign films with subtitles soon evaporate, and before you know it, you’re back to buying pirated blockbusters from your local ‘peripteron’!
Sometimes I’m too exhausted after a day’s work to read the instructions on the side of a packet of pasta, let alone tackle a one-man rendition of “Under Milk Wood”. Surely I can’t be the only one?
Of course, if my parents hadn’t had to work so hard and late when I was growing up in London and I had more time to listen to classical music and go on watercolor courses in north Devon, maybe all this cultural stuff would have seemed more important to me. I would have known before the age of seven that “Le Nozze di Figaro” is not, in fact, a new ice cream with caramel topping and dark chocolate, and when I reached 30 all the highbrow stuff would have come back to me – in the same way that I can recite all the actors in “The Godfather”, except the good-looking one whose name I can never remember…
I’m not a complete culture-phobe, I just wish some people would relax a bit at “arty” events and not pretend to like things that they obviously don’t. I did hear of an American psychologist who discovered that for most people the urge to try anything new stalls at the age of 24. By the time we reach our mid-twenties, he argued, we think we know what we like and what we don’t, and are disinclined to budge. This makes perfect sense to me, and explains why you never see old people in sushi bars.
Personally, I think there should be a self-help group for people with culture phobia. People could meet in each others’ houses, drink gin and confess – “My name is Lulu and last night I watched ‘House series 4’ on satellite. The repeats. And yes I found it funny...
Thursday 4 November 2010
Saturday 30 October 2010
Truly, Madly, Deeply...
I knew it wouldn’t work, him and I. To begin with, his dress sense would be weird in public – all those skimpy loincloths and armor. But that didn’t stop me fantasizing. What is it about gladiators? Their reckless bravery, the sexual charge of survival against all odds?
You will of course be thinking Russell Crowe. Nice body, great special effects. But my admission is much more shameful – my gladiator was old enough to be Crowe’s father.
But then we are talking pre-pubescent passion here. I was about 11 when I first saw Spartacus. Kirk Douglas must have been pushing 40. If I press the right button in my memory I can still taste the excitement and hopeless longing of it all. Maybe you have similar memories? The first teenage crush that gets out of hand and threatens to drown you. A trial run for the adult experience. Sweet, terrible, obsessive love…
It all started in the front room of our house in London. When, at the end of his magnificent, doomed slave rebellion, Spartacus died on the cross, I cried for hours. Family legend has it that I was inconsolable.
When they repeated it again I cried from the opening credits – we’re talking a three-and-a-half-hour epic here – because I knew what was going to happen. My mother described it as high-voltage hysteria, but I loved every minute of it.
I didn’t see it as obsessive, of course. I probably didn’t even understand the word. But obsessive it was, in its own nauseous, teenage way. Within a week I had written a groveling letter to the film company, which duly sent me a set of stills from the movie. My room became a shrine to the doomed slave rebellion of 73BC.
I saw the movie a dozen times, until I knew Douglas’s scenes by heart. When I wasn’t watching it, I was reliving it. I sat in school daydreaming of Spartacus. I read and re-read the Howard Fast novel on which the film was based. At night I would fantasise about him in the cell where he was given a woman for the night, but is too chivalrous to touch her. “We’re not animals.” “Oh I don’t know, Kirk, I don’t mind.”
I wanted so bad to be Jean Simmons, his co-star, that for months I went to bed every night repeating over and over, “I have high cheekbones too”, because someone told me about the power of suggestion. Was anyone ever so young? It appears I was.
My passion seemed to last for ever. I think the corners on the photographs started to curl around the time Paul Weller tore into the early 1980s music culture, sweeping me and a generation of pre-pubescent girls with him. No false chivalry there.
Looking back, I feel a certain fondness for all that passion, all that lack of control. The sweet pain of unrequited obsessive love. Because that’s just what it was. A dress rehearsal for the real thing. A rite of passage as important as boys’ wet dreams.
By the time it passed I was exhausted and post-pubescent. If I couldn’t have sex with Kirk Douglas I could at least have sex with someone else. It’s a strange thing, obsessive love. On one level it’s a state to aspire to. Glamorous. Poetic. Dramatic. Technicolor – the stuff of art. While you probably wouldn’t want to end up under the 11:15 to St Petersburg, who hasn’t had just a touch of envy for Anna Karenina? Or wished to experience the kind of love affair where the voltage is so high you singe the world around you as you burn?
Except Anna was lucky in some ways – at least Vronsky loved her back, even if he couldn’t live up to it. But then, who can? That’s the built-in fault line of this kind of love. Where obsessive love is truly reciprocal it moves into another genre altogether.
Troilus and Cressida, Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet – not a lot of happy endings there. Equally obsessed, equally doomed.
In real life, of course, most of us experience the Mark II level. Not fatal but just as painful – the unrequited version. If you’ve ever been the object of it, you may hardly have noticed: the guy who doesn’t let up, the sad, even mad, idiot who can’t take a hint. An object of ridicule rather than tragedy.
When you are the one doing the loving it’s earth-shattering. Even the humiliation is epic. It’s not easy to admit to, even when time has grafted new skin over the wound. Writers, of course, have the art of fiction through which to process their experiences and those of others. Recognize any of the feelings in the following story?
“He was different from anyone she had ever met, a man of the world who had gone places and written about them. His eyes shone as he spoke of what he had seen and they continued shining when he looked at her. Understandably, perhaps, she mistook this glow for something special.
“After their second meeting they found themselves spending the evening together. One thing led to another, which in turn led to bed. Ask her now and she might admit it was a fairly routine coupling, certainly nothing registering on the Richter scale. But “it” must have happened afterwards.
“Maybe it came to her in her sleep, like Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Puck slipping through her window and staining her eyelids with the juice of some love drug so the first thing she sees when she wakes she adores. ‘Oh, Bottom, thou art transformed.’
“Obsession came upon her like an illness. Initially it was delirium. For the first few days she had trouble breathing, such was the sustained level of adrenaline. She could feel her own heart beating a base track to a million sappy love songs.
“It took a week for her euphoria to sour – something to do with how quiet the telephone was. She would pick it up occasionally to check the dialing tone.”
(The phone of course, is an exquisite instrument of torture in tales of contemporary obsessive love. If Tolstoy or Flaubert had them they would have written heartrending hymns to their cruel power. Imagine Madame Bovary’s relationship with a mobile – eat your heart out, Bridget Jones.)
“In the end, she broke down, called him and spoke to his answering machine, leaving a jaunty message – nothing heavy, no hint of obsession to put him off. Maybe he was busy. Maybe he was away. Maybe he took it at face value. Whatever, he did not reply.
“She became mildly deranged, found excuses to drive down his road at strange hours. One night she dressed up and drove to his house. She parked nearby and spent an hour reading the street plan in the hope that he might see her and she could say she’d got lost looking for a party.
“Friends comforted, joked, became concerned and finally lost patience. It had – as one said to her – grown out of hand. Of course she knew that, knew that somehow she’d fallen victim to a capricious heart disease, though by now its symptoms were more like advanced emotional cystitis – all irritation and itch, with the very act of scratching bringing more pain than relief.
“She was moving from mania into decline when finally fate intervened. She was offered a job abroad and packed her illness in there with her clothes. But somewhere under different skies, meeting different people, the symptoms started to fade.
“When she returned, winter had turned to spring and none of the messages on her answering machine were from him. She sat in her living room and laughed before she cried, for there was loss as well as relief. She had left her job and bought a ticket to a continent she’d never visited. When she came back she wrote a novel about it. While it’s possible that none of these events were connected, she chose to believe that they were. But when you think you’re going to die, getting better is a serious as well as a joyful thing.”
The “she” of this story is not me, in case you were wondering, but she does come pretty close in many – mostly embarrassing – details. Reliving some of them for this column I was struck by how fresh their memory is, the taste of the pain unwithered by age or time…
You will of course be thinking Russell Crowe. Nice body, great special effects. But my admission is much more shameful – my gladiator was old enough to be Crowe’s father.
But then we are talking pre-pubescent passion here. I was about 11 when I first saw Spartacus. Kirk Douglas must have been pushing 40. If I press the right button in my memory I can still taste the excitement and hopeless longing of it all. Maybe you have similar memories? The first teenage crush that gets out of hand and threatens to drown you. A trial run for the adult experience. Sweet, terrible, obsessive love…
It all started in the front room of our house in London. When, at the end of his magnificent, doomed slave rebellion, Spartacus died on the cross, I cried for hours. Family legend has it that I was inconsolable.
When they repeated it again I cried from the opening credits – we’re talking a three-and-a-half-hour epic here – because I knew what was going to happen. My mother described it as high-voltage hysteria, but I loved every minute of it.
I didn’t see it as obsessive, of course. I probably didn’t even understand the word. But obsessive it was, in its own nauseous, teenage way. Within a week I had written a groveling letter to the film company, which duly sent me a set of stills from the movie. My room became a shrine to the doomed slave rebellion of 73BC.
I saw the movie a dozen times, until I knew Douglas’s scenes by heart. When I wasn’t watching it, I was reliving it. I sat in school daydreaming of Spartacus. I read and re-read the Howard Fast novel on which the film was based. At night I would fantasise about him in the cell where he was given a woman for the night, but is too chivalrous to touch her. “We’re not animals.” “Oh I don’t know, Kirk, I don’t mind.”
I wanted so bad to be Jean Simmons, his co-star, that for months I went to bed every night repeating over and over, “I have high cheekbones too”, because someone told me about the power of suggestion. Was anyone ever so young? It appears I was.
My passion seemed to last for ever. I think the corners on the photographs started to curl around the time Paul Weller tore into the early 1980s music culture, sweeping me and a generation of pre-pubescent girls with him. No false chivalry there.
Looking back, I feel a certain fondness for all that passion, all that lack of control. The sweet pain of unrequited obsessive love. Because that’s just what it was. A dress rehearsal for the real thing. A rite of passage as important as boys’ wet dreams.
By the time it passed I was exhausted and post-pubescent. If I couldn’t have sex with Kirk Douglas I could at least have sex with someone else. It’s a strange thing, obsessive love. On one level it’s a state to aspire to. Glamorous. Poetic. Dramatic. Technicolor – the stuff of art. While you probably wouldn’t want to end up under the 11:15 to St Petersburg, who hasn’t had just a touch of envy for Anna Karenina? Or wished to experience the kind of love affair where the voltage is so high you singe the world around you as you burn?
Except Anna was lucky in some ways – at least Vronsky loved her back, even if he couldn’t live up to it. But then, who can? That’s the built-in fault line of this kind of love. Where obsessive love is truly reciprocal it moves into another genre altogether.
Troilus and Cressida, Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet – not a lot of happy endings there. Equally obsessed, equally doomed.
In real life, of course, most of us experience the Mark II level. Not fatal but just as painful – the unrequited version. If you’ve ever been the object of it, you may hardly have noticed: the guy who doesn’t let up, the sad, even mad, idiot who can’t take a hint. An object of ridicule rather than tragedy.
When you are the one doing the loving it’s earth-shattering. Even the humiliation is epic. It’s not easy to admit to, even when time has grafted new skin over the wound. Writers, of course, have the art of fiction through which to process their experiences and those of others. Recognize any of the feelings in the following story?
“He was different from anyone she had ever met, a man of the world who had gone places and written about them. His eyes shone as he spoke of what he had seen and they continued shining when he looked at her. Understandably, perhaps, she mistook this glow for something special.
“After their second meeting they found themselves spending the evening together. One thing led to another, which in turn led to bed. Ask her now and she might admit it was a fairly routine coupling, certainly nothing registering on the Richter scale. But “it” must have happened afterwards.
“Maybe it came to her in her sleep, like Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Puck slipping through her window and staining her eyelids with the juice of some love drug so the first thing she sees when she wakes she adores. ‘Oh, Bottom, thou art transformed.’
“Obsession came upon her like an illness. Initially it was delirium. For the first few days she had trouble breathing, such was the sustained level of adrenaline. She could feel her own heart beating a base track to a million sappy love songs.
“It took a week for her euphoria to sour – something to do with how quiet the telephone was. She would pick it up occasionally to check the dialing tone.”
(The phone of course, is an exquisite instrument of torture in tales of contemporary obsessive love. If Tolstoy or Flaubert had them they would have written heartrending hymns to their cruel power. Imagine Madame Bovary’s relationship with a mobile – eat your heart out, Bridget Jones.)
“In the end, she broke down, called him and spoke to his answering machine, leaving a jaunty message – nothing heavy, no hint of obsession to put him off. Maybe he was busy. Maybe he was away. Maybe he took it at face value. Whatever, he did not reply.
“She became mildly deranged, found excuses to drive down his road at strange hours. One night she dressed up and drove to his house. She parked nearby and spent an hour reading the street plan in the hope that he might see her and she could say she’d got lost looking for a party.
“Friends comforted, joked, became concerned and finally lost patience. It had – as one said to her – grown out of hand. Of course she knew that, knew that somehow she’d fallen victim to a capricious heart disease, though by now its symptoms were more like advanced emotional cystitis – all irritation and itch, with the very act of scratching bringing more pain than relief.
“She was moving from mania into decline when finally fate intervened. She was offered a job abroad and packed her illness in there with her clothes. But somewhere under different skies, meeting different people, the symptoms started to fade.
“When she returned, winter had turned to spring and none of the messages on her answering machine were from him. She sat in her living room and laughed before she cried, for there was loss as well as relief. She had left her job and bought a ticket to a continent she’d never visited. When she came back she wrote a novel about it. While it’s possible that none of these events were connected, she chose to believe that they were. But when you think you’re going to die, getting better is a serious as well as a joyful thing.”
The “she” of this story is not me, in case you were wondering, but she does come pretty close in many – mostly embarrassing – details. Reliving some of them for this column I was struck by how fresh their memory is, the taste of the pain unwithered by age or time…
Friday 15 October 2010
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