A visit to two private art galleries in London today. Marcin Dudek in Fitzrovia has a clapped out smashed up graffiti-ridden bus with Steua Bucharest football insignia all over it. You enter the broken bus and walk down the aisle past the ripped-up seats. Dudek is a former hooligan recalling the glory days with a set of exhibits of daubed violent pieces accompanying the headliner bus in the window of the petite gallery on Little Titchfield Street. The other side of Oxford Street in Mayfair an exhibition of photographs by Thomas Struth of the chaotic inside of the Cern Collider in Switzerland, a hotch-potch of wires, tubes, concrete bars and cable trays. Chaos is pleasing to the eye. We need it, which is why a complex forest is so relaxing. This is a less interesting exhibition than the Dudek collection, but it is interesting (isn’t it?) that our contemporary hyper-controlled world needs a bit of the dark side, escape from the deep facile-virtue channelling we are constantly sujected to. I have nostalgic thoughts about the central Manchester of my youth, a dangerous place of slum clearance and broken bottle-strewn wasteland. What is now the Manchester Exhibition Centre and before that G-Mex in those days was the gutted skeleton of the old central station, a looming gothic presence to a 17-year old. The area was fraught with menace with the isolated pub stood upright on the bleak terrain and so-called clubs which were dingy dives where you could drink after hours. It was a threatening and dangerous place to knock around in. I have a lot of nostalgia for it.
Monthly Archives: July 2023
July 24: too thoughtless to put out
On Friday I read a columnist in the Evening Standard where the journalist, in an avuncular, supposedly comic style, gave out the opinion that people from London are more glamorous and attractive than people from Manchester. This being an avuncular and supposedly comic style, there was no analytical element to his pronouncement, no explanation that money and class plays a huge role in this random observation. The columnist himself was from Manchester, which makes the bald naivety of the statement perhaps even more offensive. Making a statement like this is the equivalent to saying that black people are more criminal than white people without considering that some of the areas where black people live are the most under-privileged in the country. Imagine the outcry if he had said such a thing. An editor should look at his piece and say, sorry, this is just too thoughtless to put out.
July 11: i put my feet in a bucket of water
It’s summer. It’s London. Why not taste the treats on offer? When you look at the entertainments out there you may well not want to participate. Tina Turner, The Musical; The Jersey Boys: We will Rock You. You would have to tie me down with washing line to make me watch any of these musical extravaganza. All that high decibel warbling and audience hysteria. Get me outta there already! Even Shakespearean theatre is to be eschewed these days with its ideologically driven takes on the classics. Henry V as a study in immigration. Titus Andronicus a feminist reading. You can pay hundreds of pounds for this nonsense. Here’s what I did last night. I put my feet in a bucket of hot water. Then I lay down on the settee with headphones on and listened to the first four movements of Mahler 7. Not the last movement, obviously. This relaxed me sufficiently to sit down and read German for two hours (Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March , followed by Heinrich Boell’s Katerina Blum). Both in their own ways exemplary. I have never slept so well.
July 10: not the dosage i’m used to
It doesn’t take much to put me off my stride. I have never really had a proper full-time job of the 9-5 variety but I still need structure. This time of year always has me on edge. The change in rhythm. No people or too many people. Not the dosage I’m used to. A couple of weeks ago I supervised a trip to New York. That was too much people for my introvert sensibility. Now not enough. Plus people from my past popping up randomly. Ghosts of earlier times. How are you to relate to them? Do you read them as they were? In which case you must also be as you were. First, you decipher the physique. A pair of glasses here where once there were none. A voice that has shifted. A point of view that has softened The truth is that you can’t know. These are just wisps of people that float in from the past and they cannot really be deciphered. Take no position on them because you cannot know. Plus the fact that my days are empty. It’s probably good for me. I have to go to places I don’t usually have the chance to get to. You have to lose your volition when you are in an unaccustomed place. It entails more suffering than the routine. But I suppose it does you good despite yourself. You don’t think you’re doing much exploring by sitting at home with a cup of tea but you are.
July 9: case one has died
Today I read the news that autism case one has died. Don was eighty six and died recently. He was the first officially designated case of autism in the 1930s/40s before the condition had been defined. The young boy called people by numbers, blamed the needle when he was pricked by someone, got people’s attention by pinging them with an elastic band. He was labelled a dullard and a simpleton before Leo Kanner examined him, articulated the features of this condition and coined the word autism as ‘an inability to relate to others in the ordinary way’. When I teach Albert Camus’ L’Etranger, officially published in 1942, I am quick to note that if the book were written today the main character Meursault would probably be seen as on the autism spectrum rather than the heroic existentialist band-width.
A worrying feature is that autism has recently attained a kind of cool status, an extension of nerd cool. The binary certainties of their world view are refreshing to many. The same tendancy runs through some modern vernacular usage. It is seen as a good thing to be obsessed with something. The BBC encourages us to binge watch their box sets on iPlayer. Obsession is never a good thing. Nerd techno evangelists with their binary simplicities are our new messiahs, whilst what we need are people with a more nuanced approach to life. The terrible dictators and tyrants of the 2oth Century were also absolutists. Compromise was a dirty word, but if you cannot balance your positions you can easily fall into obsessive, absolutist and dangerous states of mind. Being autistic is not cool, not especially creative. Like much mental illness, it is a prison.
Don lived a good life and found meaningful roles in society. He hald down a job and was a respected member of the community, but he would have probably been happier relating to others in a less extraordinary way.
July 5: the austro-hungarian mode
There is a moment in Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March where the grandson of the great hero of Solferino who had saved the life of the emperor and had consequently received honours that raised the class of the family into minor aristocracy explains his hatred of cards. He is a lieutenant in the army during peace time and spends his time in minor nineteenth century official acts and at the casino. He has a collection of stiff Austro-Hungarian principles, one of which is his hatred of cards and espousal of dominoes. Gentlemen, I recommend to you the game of dominoes, he proclaims. It is upstanding and teaches moderation. This type of principle rules his increasingly empty life in the shadow of his renowned forebear whose presence he forever feels like an icy wind on the nape of his neck.
I find that I too have a number of these principles that I can summon forth when required. Gentlemen, I might say to the virtual casino, you have before you a man who has never seen a Star Wars film. The hush runs through the assembly. Or else. I cannot accept your kind offer of a plate of asparagas for, as you may have heard, out of principle I never eat a vegetable starting with the letter a. I am single-handedly keeping alive the Austro-Hungarian mode.
July 3: it breaks open my entire routine, this misplacement
I can’t find my gym pants. I can’t understand where there can be. I go to the gym in my gym pants. Then I come back in them. Then I either put them in the dirty wash or back into my gym bag. There is nowhere else they can go. And now I can’t find them anywherw. How does one explain these missing things? When I was twelve I remember coming back from a school football match wearing two pairs of underpants. As my mum said at the time, that was an aberration but what of the other boy who came home with no underpants at all. Had he not noticed? At twelve you might not, but at my age? Where are those gym pants? It has ruined my regime. I can’t find an alteranative. My gym shorts are too brief for weather that has turned a bit chilly. It breaks open my entire routine, this misplacement. And then one things leads to another. If you can’t find the pants you can’t do the exercise and if you can’t do the exercise you go about your business with guilt and the guilt contaminates. I am going to spend ten minutes now having a proper root around to resolve this issue once and for all. What usually happens in these cases is that you resolve in yourself the conclusion that life is a a random contingent material, only for many years later for the transgressive article to turn up in some odd corner of the flat. What you must do then is accept that the world is not so contingent, but rather that you are just plain rubbish. A banal but necessary admission, as we have come to accept.
peoplearerubbish 