December 10th - December 16th 2001
Sunday Cloud sketching
Saturday Friend of the famous
Friday Sugared Almond
Thursday Hamiltonia
Wednesday Race
Tuesday Giddy rush
Monday Quack cure
Sunday 16th December 2001
Today's surprise tip of the titfer goes to none other than The Prince of Wales - but only because he said 'turd' when talking to a architects' conference last week. (One looks forward with unusual interest to this year's Queen's Speech.)
Beyond the t-word (and that only in a quote from Tom Wolfe), Chas's views on architecture resolutely continue to oppress the general public by assuming that they, like him, can only cope with buildings that pastiche the glories of the past.
For a genuine insight into why architects aren't in the business of cultivating "manners, modesty and gentleness", His Chasness might care to read The Cloud Sketcher, a rattling good read that traces the passions and fortunes of Esko Vaananen as he moves from fighting the revolution in Finland to building skyscrapers in Prohition-era New York. Highly recommended.
Saturday 15th December 2001
One, just one, of the annoying things about getting old is that more and more of the people you have known start cropping up in newspaper stories, usually busy being richer or more fabulous by far than you ever gave them credit.
Here's one: Gareth Valentine, continuing his horribly successful career as a musical director with Kiss Me Kate, showing his tattoos on the V&A website and recording his Requiem.
Here's another: Chris Ingram, selling his media buying business to WPP and making £64 million quid in the process.
And look, one more: an English girl called Meg, now appearing in major media near you...
Friday 14th December 2001
My renewed thanks to the benefactor who invited me to attend Marc Almond's show at the Union Chapel last night in the company of Nicky, Mark, Marcus, David and Jonathan. Those last two alone will no doubt be blogging the event with a degree of informed opinion way beyond my comparatively casual interest, but I have a couple of things to say:
What a thankless task it must be to open for someone else. When I arrived (late) the stage was already hosting three skinny men of dubious foreign extraction, performing a series of undemanding dirges (one of which may, or may not, have been called "You're my little octopus"). Nuria (do we have that name right?) had all the charisma of a bunch of medical students on sabbatical but seemed quite content to noodle away whilst the audience got on with the important pre-concert tasks of intoducing each other's friends, getting the beer in and generally catching up.
Nice to spot a few familiar faces in and around the audience (Yet-Another-Vauxhall Dave, White Garry, Porn Andy, Francesco etc etc.) Slightly surprising too, given that Marc Almond has always been something of a minority interest for many gay men - most of whom appreciate a drama-queen when they see one but secretly like to think they grew out of that particular brand of bed-sit angst when they got their hands on their first Ikea catalogue.
Does anyone find Almond attractive, I wonder? Despite the fact that he's astonishingly well-preserved for a man with his history, I find him curiously affect-less, even when taking a standing ovation from a hall filled with fans. He doesn't do much in the way of costume, he can't dance for toffee, and his body-language seems to have got stuck way back in the days when he mimed to Piaf in his bathroom mirror.
It's mostly about the songs, I guess, and it helps considerably if you're already familiar with the material, which I'm not. The excellent sound quality was, for me, both a blessing and a curse: a blessing, because (wow!) you can actually hear what he's singing; a curse, because (hmmm) his lyrics do often lurch into banality - frosts are always bitter, hearts are always broken.
Above and beyond the mundane detail of tunes and lyrics, it struck me that a large part of his appeal is his dogged insistence on exploring one particularly painful corner of the human heart, the part that broods, pouting, somewhere between dust-yerself-down and slit-wrists-now. (I appreciate that this is not exactly a fresh insight.) It's a place where we've all lived, but surprisingly few artists (outside France) cover it with any degree of honesty, and Almond does it very well, stripping his skin off over and over again and rarely, if ever, becoming monotonous.
I was surprised to find how much more familiar his material sounded, compared to last year. Given that I've not exactly been swotting up in the meantime, I can only assume there is some bizarre osmosis at work. His penchant for verse/chorus verse/chorus helps, I guess.
I liked 'Mother Fist'. 'Broken Hearted and Beautiful' was lovely. 'Moonbathe Skin' was, gasp, almost funky. 'I'm Sick Of You Tasting Of Somebody Else' is a great title. And the new(ish) track 'I Created Me' is so good, so very Marc Almond, that you'd think he'd been singing it all his life (and maybe his life would have been easier if he had).
He said he was fighting off 'a bit of a cold' which I seem to recall he was doing last year as well. That may or may not explain my feeling that his voice seemed curiously under-powered for much of the evening.
Technically, it was an excellent show: crystal clear sound-quality and stunning lighting effects. Stir in Almond's dedication, the ambience of the Chapel itself, and a semi-fanatic audience who are mostly a bit light in their loafers and you have a great recipe for a top night out. If this is going to become an annual event (which seems quite probable), it could easily become a must-do date for the diary, even for those, like Marcus and I, who are far from dedicated fans. See you next year?
P.S. Nice to see Britta in the Hen and Chickens after the show. Nice, too, to discover that the H&C's well-received Christmas show stars no less a luminary than the ineffable Paul Keating, newly-released from the Pet Shop Boy's Closer to Heaven. Front-row tickets for that one, please, plus a macintosh to cover my lap.
Thursday 13th December 2001
Like most other UK bloggers, and unlike most of the UK press, I found When Louis Met The Hamiltons completely fascinating. Are the Hamiltons cold-blooded mercenary exploiters of the media? Or simply helpless buffoons with neither taste nor intelligence to guide them? Come to that, how naive is Louis Theroux?
Two segments struck me with particular force:
Theroux claims that people are convinced the Hamiltons have some sort of sexual secret, and Neil and Christine don't quite manage to convince him (or us) otherwise. ("Our sex life is completely normal," she said, banging dirty saucepans into the sink. "COMPLETELY normal.")
Neil attempts to make a joke about how he could produce a doctor's certificate to prove himself impotent (and therefore incapable of the rape he was charged with): the clownish mix of bravado and self-pity with which he says this, and the agonised disdain with which she attempts to disown the suggestion spoke volumes.("Oh, Neil...")
I seem to have been the only person to pick up on this, so I offer the theory only tentatively - but what if that's the heart of their relationship right there? Neil fumbling with his genitals, muttering "Sorry, my love, sorry"; Christine nobly sighing "Never mind" and turning to the other side of the bed...
It would explain that strange weak creepiness he has. Explain the way she drinks and flirts for England. Explain their childlessness, their childishness, his phoney eagerness to please, her phoney stoic strength of character, their lust for (surrogate) celebrity.
No?
Slowly but steadily, I floated towards consciousness today completely free of outside influence: no shouting from next door, no traffic noise from outside, no phones ringing, beeping or shuddering. Bliss.
As my bedroom crept into life around me, I observed everything painted with that precise shade of crepuscular gloom that, at this season, means it's either 8:30 in the morning or 5:30 at night.
Both seemed equally possible, equally unlikely. I went to bed (with Napoleon, of all people) sometime after 5am but my sleeping patterns are notoriously unpredictable. So I'd had either three hours sleep, or twelve.
Drifting into the kitchen to start making coffee, I discover it's 12:30. What a strange day.
Wednesday 12th December 2001
Looks as if today's Home Office reports on race may sound the first chimes of the death knell for political correctness in this country. And about bloody time.
Personally, I find the biggest curse of the p.c. culture is the pall it casts over a conversation. Running every noun and every verb under a scanner before you utter it, checking and re-checking each word for its potential to cause offence, does not make for fluent conversation. (Nor for fluent writing - when did you last read a blog-entry that dared even touch on the issue?)
As it happens, my disastrous date on Saturday was quite a good case-study in this respect.
As reported, He didn't make a huge physical impression on me in the few moments whilst we first met: small, light-skinned, dark hair - I filed him under mixed-race, if anything.
Walking into his flat for the first time on Saturday evening, things became a lot clearer when I was introduced to his friends: three Indian guys and two Indian girls.
It goes without saying that 'Indian' is something of a shorthand term here, short for 'second or third generation immigrant stock, parents or grand-parents originating from somewhere on the vast Indian sub-continent (Pakistan? Bangladesh?), presumed to have grown up under an English educational system mediated by 'non-standard' family-based cultural values'.
But, hmmm, how 'Indian' are these people? How 'Indian' is He? Are they Muslim, or Hindu? Or Sikh, or Jain? (Buddhist? Methodist?) Three of them are noticeably not drinking. A Ramadan thing. Presumably. And when they offer me a snack, it's curry rather than ciabatta (and very nice too.) So we're already slightly off the usual map of gay society - these are not your usual bog-standard shaven-headed Guardian-reading atheists.
You'll think I'm obsessing here. I can already hear some dipshit voice at the back of my head telling me to chill out, we're all just, like, people, man, and it doesn't matter what colour we are on the outside.
Which is nonsense of course: each and everyone of us comes out of our own culture, be that working-class or middle-class, gay or straight, large family or small. And the differences between our cultures, and the different attitudes and assumptions that those cultural differences create, is fascinating to me, especially within my own sub-culture. I'm truly interested to know what it's like to be, say, a gay Goth, or gay and deaf, or gay and black.
That requires us to acknowledge that at least some difference exists in the first place. Some occasions are easier to deal with than others: "I can't help noticing your wheelchair" (whilst still fundamentally non-pc) is a lot more straightforward than trying to discover the cultural background of someone who's skin, or accent, is noticeably different to your own.
"Where are you from?" just doesn't work; the answer is going to be, quite rightly: "Finsbury Park, but I stopped for a drink in Victoria before I got here." And "Where are your parents from?" doesn't work either, because - given Britain's long immigrant history - the answer is likely to be a smug "Croydon" or "Cornwall, originally, but they moved to Wales." Continue down that road and, before you know it, you're starting to sound like an immigration official.
On Saturday night, one of His flatmates deals with the fundamental question of ethnic origin very efficiently by starting a riff about how he'd been working in Los Angeles, and he'd told this girl he was Indian, and she'd gone: "Wow! Like...?" and he'd had to say "No, no, not native American." And that got us on to how 'Asian' in the States was the equivalent of what we'd (informally) call 'Oriental' in this country, and.. so on.
The possibility of further intriguing cultural difference is confirmed when He quietly indicates two of the guys, a couple, and mutters "Hamesh is getting married next week but Raj knows and is cool about it..."
A little later, after we've dealt with SClub7, and Dolce and Gabbana, and Heaven (the club, not the concept), when we're milling about preparing to go out, He has a twittery conversation with one of the girls about bumping into somebody's cousin on Old Compton Street. (It's around this stage that I begin to realise that I am not dealing with a rocket-scientist here.)
Walking to the club, I lightly interrogate him about some of this conversation. "You said she was with a.. was it a 'bag-wallah', forgive my pronounciation? And he was a.. Rajnash?? And you said she was engaged to somebody 'in our community'? What community is that?"
He stops and stares. "Wow, you really pay attention, don't you?" (Well yes: hello!?) And gives me some sketchy answers. ('Bag-wallah', as you might guess, is somebody who wears a turban.)
Turns out, eventually, that He's a Punjabi Sikh. Fascinating. If we'd proved capable of maintaining a conversation longer than ten seconds at a time, I'd have looked forward to finding out a lot more about that.
But, sadly, it's already apparent that He is a man of hidden shallows. Even his shallows have shallows.
Shame.
Tuesday 11th December 2001
The nightmare that was Saturday was bracketed by the ample delights of Friday and Sunday, nights of bibulous cameraderie which, by way of stark contrast, lurched deliciously from one unplanned delight to another.
Both David and Jonathan have documented, to some degree or another, their experience of these evenings; neither quite seems to capture the giddy rush with which one surreal set-piece succeeded another.
Like: standing in the Edward, dimly appreciating that an evening which was supposed to be winding down has seen our initial group of three rapidly swelling to four, then six, ten, eleven.
Like: realising that the seventh is someone I've known, and fancied, from a distance for several years and that he now has his hand round my waist and is stroking my thigh.
Like: sitting in the Spiral seeing Saunders swim into view with yet another cute but slightly disoriented young man in tow, and realising that this probably means I've now collected the entire set - the mad one, the deaf one, the Spanish one, the accountant and the history student.
Like: Drew offering to bargain a snog for 10p for the pool table, and me getting the better of the bargain.
Like: wearing my Springboks shirt to the Vauxhall and then seeing at least three other people wearing one, and thinking "Hmm, the whole team must be in".
Like: standing at the urinal whilst a complete stranger asks me where I'm from, and taking a while to realise that the only appropriate answer is "Er..nowhere in South Africa".
Like: standing behind a group of guys on a crowded dance-floor watching one of them solemnly pouring and offering around capfuls of liquid, a slightly mysterious act of communion which was obscurely enhanced by the fact that he was pouring from a Body Shop bottle.
This last had me particularly perplexed: clearly drug-related, and I'm not exactly a virgin when it comes to matters pharmaceutical, but..?
All is clear now. Silly me, it's gamma hydroxybutyric acid. Doh.
Hmmm, that's a thought - you don't think someone spiked my drink this weekend?
Ha! I should be so lucky.
Monday 10th December 2001
With Marcus in mind, I've been carrying around the phrase 'sleep apnoea' in my notebook for several months now; I knew I'd come across an article about cures for snoring somewhere but damned if I could find it.
Today, spurred on by stories about Which? reports damning quack cures (mot juste, perhaps), I've finally found it again: the Zx device, which works by pushing the wearer's lower jaw forward, keeping their airways open during the night.
(Won't work for me because it requires a visit to a dentist - but then again, sod it: since the odds on me actually sleeping with anyone seem to be lengthening exponentially lately, one might as well snore.)
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