Wednesday 22nd August 2018.  I read Beverly (2016), the graphic novel by Nick Drnaso. Mr Drnaso’s second, Sabrina, has just been longlisted for the Booker Prize, the first time a comic book has had the pleasure. Beverly is a series of short tales with overlapping characters, set mainly in the suburbs of contemporary Illinois. Various drab and mundane lives are examined, with hints of psychosis lurking beneath the surface. The tone recalls Todd Solondz’s film Happiness, not least with a troubled boy who has visions of mass slaughter. Artistically, Chris Ware’s style is the nearest point of reference: quiet panels, pastel shades, human faces reduced to bare lines, much like the diagrams in the safety instructions on airplanes. Drnaso’s style is more deliberately crude though, hinting at the frustration of the characters; brave faces as masks of loneliness.

But I wonder if this approach now touches on cliché. When I saw Solondz’s latest film Wiener Dog I felt the weariness of a once-fresh vision turned into repetition and staleness. Perhaps this is unfair: did people tell Henry Moore, ‘Not another big lump of stone with holes and curvy bits! Haven’t you done that enough?’ What does one want from a favourite artist – more of the same, or a radical departure? It is difficult to tell. Still, Mr Drnaso’s work has the confidence and seriousness of lasting art.

I have dinner at Pizza Express on Coptic Street, near the British Museum. Chosen mainly because Derek Jarman’s early 1990s diaries mention it as a regular London eaterie. It’s still here, a Pizza Express since 1967. The building itself is a former Victorian dairy, with the original decorative lettering left unchanged on the exterior; the letters are like a children’s picture book. Hardly anyone else is in there tonight: quite the contrast to the more packed branch on the Euston Road.

**

Thursday 23rd August 2018. One of my favourite Pet Shop Boys songs is ‘Delusions of Grandeur’ (1997), a b-side, or ‘bonus track’ as they are known in these less physical days. I now learn from the sleeve notes to the reissued CD of Bilingual that the song was inspired by the Baron Corvo novel Hadrian VII. This is enough for me to love the group forever. I also realise that Neil Tennant is a rare example of a male entertainer today who has never been tempted to grow a beard. I take some comfort from this.

Indeed, on the tube today there is an advert for a young person’s 18-24 railcard. The accompanying photo is of two young men playing video games. They both resemble George Bernard Shaw. In my case, despite the excuse of age, I feel that growing a beard would be fraudulent. It would signal to the world that I felt the slightest bit manly, and that would not do.

**

To Islington Vue with Ms Shanthi to see Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. The film is not exactly Citizen Kane, but I come for Cher singing ‘Fernando’ and I get it so I’m happy.

I note that the director is Ol Parker, who did Imagine Me and You. This was the Richard Curtis-esque lesbian romcom that was a flop when released in the mid-2000s, but which has now become a cult favourite. In the Abba film Lily James, playing the young version of the Meryl Streep character, has the most to do: she works her socks off to make the sequel work, and succeeds. ‘Sentimental’ is usually a pejorative, but if the film is well-made enough, to the point where nothing feels lazy or banal, it’s hard not be won over. On the way out of the screening room two teenage girls are walking ahead of me. They clearly love the film, despite the ancient songs and aging flesh (except for Cher, who is now 90% Tupperware). One girl is in such a good mood that she spontaneously does a cartwheel while walking down the corridor. It’s that sort of film.

**

Friday 24th August 2018. I read a lengthy interview with Stewart Lee which has been issued as an A4 fanzine, ‘Where Are the Thinkers?’ (published by Post-Nearly Press). There is much discussion of how best to make art in one’s forties. Mr L talks about the group Sleaford Mods, two men who were too old for the Radio 1 crowd, and who made no concessions to joining in with current trends whatsoever. Instead, they just worked on their music and put it out, to the point where an audience came to them. By this time their work sounded confident and defiant and lasting. It didn’t sound needy, that’s the secret. The best way to build an audience is to sound like you don’t need one. Whereas hype, fashion, and youthfulness might attain success more quickly, but it’s less self-sufficient.

(This is what I need to do now, but with books.)

Mr Lee talks about the time in the mid-2000s when he ‘massively slimmed down his expectations of life’, and just worked on making his work work. A more intense version of the same thing happened to Russell Brand, though only after he exaggerated his image into a cartoonish, camp blaze. Sebastian Horsley was on the verge of a similar, neo-dandy success when he died. I admit it’s what I want to happen to me, too. If only because I don’t really make sense otherwise.

**

Evening: to the Regent Street Cinema for a double bill of old Arena BBC TV documentaries. One is on the 1960s record producer Joe Meek, the other on the 1960s playwright Joe Orton. Both were gay men called Joe who lived in small flats in North London, and who both met with untimely deaths in 1967. Travis Elborough introduces the films, and points out the irony of 1967 being the year of the partial decriminalization of homosexuality; indeed, 1967 also saw the death of a third gay pop culture figure: Brian Epstein. After the Meek film there’s a Q&A with the drummer on many of the  records, Clem Cattini. Now 80, he’s full of polished anecdotes about the various egotistical characters he’s worked with over the years. It’s quite cheering to see someone from rock and roll history who’s not only alive, but who isn’t mentally scarred or bitter about money. Mr Cattini just got on with making music. When he casually mentions that he was the drummer on ‘Shakin’ All Over’ by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, that monument of rock history, tonight’s audience breaks into applause.

**

Saturday 25th August 2018. I am wearing a chalk-white suit today. Partly because Tom Wolfe has gone, so I like to think there’s a vacancy, but mainly as a kind of yin to Roger Stone’s yang.

I’m reading Derek Jarman’s diaries when the news comes through that Keith Collins has died. Collins was Jarman’s ‘HB’ in the diaries: the director’s late muse and live-in companion at Dungeness. I’m intrigued to discover from the Guardian obituary that they were never lovers in the sexual sense: Collins had a lifelong boyfriend, Garry, whom he married this year, just before he died. Thinking of the diaries now, I realise that they hint of a non-sexual relationship, though it’s never made obvious.

Nevertheless, the two were devoted to each other. One photo in Smiling in Slow Motion has Collins cradling a frail Jarman on the latter’s hospital bed. The younger man has a tattoo of a seahorse on his arm. A couple of years ago I was in the same room as Collins when I attended an IMAX screening of Blue, which he introduced. But I never had the chance to speak to him. I wish I had, if only to show him my seahorse cufflinks.

Some more thoughts on Smiling in Slow Motion. Vintage are planning to reissue At Your Own Risk and Chroma next year, both of which were written in the period covered by these diaries. Interesting to compare the old book covers with the new: Jarman’s face is gone, replaced by shots of the Dungeness garden. It’s a reminder that the man himself was once a brand – a TV chat show guest, in fact. In 2018 perhaps his selling power relies more on the work, not least the garden. Jarman himself says somewhere that he should have been a gardener rather than a film director.

Neil Bartlett’s introduction to the new edition of Smiling is a useful contrast to Olivia Laing’s introduction to Modern Nature, the earlier diaries. Whereas Laing specialises in renewing artists’ lives down the years through a detached and personal reading, Bartlett is a direct witness from the era in question. Accordingly, he can corroborate the queer rights struggles depicted in Jarman’s diaries.

Bartlett reveals that one of Jarman’s aborted projects was a modern-day film of Dorian Gray, with Bartlett himself as the writer. He also reminds the reader that although usually labelled as a filmmaker, Jarman was rated by the art world as a painter, so much so that he was shortlisted for the Turner prize in the 1980s. This is the key to Jarman’s work, and what makes it so intoxicating and addictive. As with the films, Jarman’s prose has a highly aesthetic sense of its own artisan integrity. He wrote the diaries with a fountain pen in a decorative hand – a page of which is reproduced in Smiling in Slow Motion – and kept writing until he was physically incapable of continuing.

Mr Bartlett further argues that for all the rainbow-branded awareness of today’s more enlightened times, there is still a dearth of depictions of gay domesticity, then as now. Certainly, the book is evidence of the way that in the early 1990s gay people were not just struggling for their rights, but for the right way of struggling. Jarman favoured the radical street protests of Peter Tatchell and Outrage, as opposed to Ian McKellen and Stonewall’s more polite, lobby-based efforts. Indeed, there’s times in the diaries when Stonewall seems as much Jarman’s enemy as the Conservative government.

It is the old dilemma of speaking to power: is it more effective to kick down the doors, or to politely knock?

When thinking of death, Jarman mentions artists whose passing wasn’t so sad, as ‘their work was complete’. In his case, despite the tonal finality of Blue, he was working on even more films when he died: his Dorian, plus an adaptation of James Purdy’s Narrow Rooms.

Meanwhile, Keith Collins is the hidden star. Not only is he a recurring character, as Jarman’s handsome companion, collaborator, and eventually carer, but he also transcribed, edited and named this posthumous volume (after a line in the diaries about Ken Hicks, one of the actors in Sebastiane who had died of AIDS by the early 1990s, but is immortalised in the film, smiling in slow motion). The book is now a memorial to Collins as well as Jarman. It is required reading for those who live an artistic life against the odds.

 

**

Monday 27th August 2018. To Broadway Market, my first visit since moving to Dalston. Though it’s technically within the same postcode, it’s slightly difficult for me to get to. I can either take a cramped and infrequent bus that winds through residential streets (the 236), or I can ride the smooth Overground train from Dalston Junction to Haggerston, then walk east along the canal.

Unlike Dalston, where social worlds collide, Broadway Market is more overtly arty. At Donlan Books, one of those shops where one wants to buy everything, I pick up Not Here – A Queer Anthology of Loneliness. I have a sandwich at La Bouche, a busy deli where one can barely move for all the laptops.

Dinner with Kath G at the veggie-only Mildred’s in Dalston Square. I like the space of the high ceiling here, the clear lines of the new building.  My other favourite local restaurant is Mangal 2, which is smaller but cheaper, and one often sees Gilbert and George in there.

**

Tuesday 28 August 2018. I cannot get used to the idea of an album ‘dropping’, as in being released. It smacks too much of the testicular.

**

Wednesday 29 August 2018. Evening: to the BFI Southbank for a screening of Jarman’s Sebastiane. There’s a short introduction which acknowledges the recent deaths of Lindsay Kemp and Keith Collins. Mr Kemp’s face is the first sight in Sebastiane: the bald dancer covered in white body paint and little else. I note how the first image is briefly a blank blue screen, just before the credits start, which makes for a neat bookending with Blue. The infamous erection shot now seems unusual rather than shocking, and entirely fitting to the dreamy, loving ambience. The film is now tame compared with what one can see on the internet, and yet still daring in terms of what is seen in the cinema. Once, people went to cinemas in central London to enjoy pornography. Now they go to the cinema to escape all the pornography online.

I look around at the audience, which is half the pleasure of going to the cinema in the first place. There’s a few gay men, as might be expected, but also a group of four or five young women, who are very quiet and who take the film extremely seriously. Students of film, I decide. And one or two elderly heterosexual couples. I’ve found there’s always at least one elderly couple at any film screening I go to, but for arthouse gay fare it does rather seem less expected. All of which hints about my own prejudice. One can never tell who will enjoy what.

In the foyer of the BFI I’m recognised by one of the staff, Rastko Novakovic. ‘We have a shared passion, Mr Edwards’. He is making a Ronald Firbank film. The details are at theflowerbeneaththefoot.com.

**

Thursday 30 August 2018. Thinking about Big Brother, the TV show, and how the first series in 2000 was the only one to allow books, I consult the British Library copy of Big Brother: The Official Unseen Story  by Jean Ritchie (London: Channel 4, 2000). This confirms that the first set of rules indeed allowed books and magazines – two of each per person. If it were me, I’d have taken in The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Complete Ronald Firbank.

Of the BB housemates in 2000, Anna took in To Kill A Mockingbird. Mel took in Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, which she then lent to Darren, who had previously described himself as a non-reader (a dangerous example of the power of books). Most of the other books taken into the house were cookbooks, self-help and spiritual books, or self-teaching manuals for languages or science, brought with the hope of learning new skills. By the second series, the books were banned.

**

Friday 31 August 2018. An impulsive trip to Southend, mainly because I’ve developed a love of sea air, if only because I’ve also developed a cold. Southend is very quick by train from East London: one goes via West Ham and is there under the hour.

I love the little pier train, which exists purely to take people from one end of the pier to the other. I also love that one can send postcards from the postbox at the sea end.

Afterwards: fish and chips at the Royal Hotel, with a sea view, reading the LRB. Then I escape back to London before the infamous Essex nightlife kicks into action. My white suit is already getting comments.

In the LRB, Sally Rooney reviews Sheila Heti’s Motherhood in the best possible way: reviewing the other reviewers. The book asks whether a female artist should have children, in terms of having a fulfilling life. Heti’s narrator – who is essentially Heti – eventually decides to be childless, the better to concentrate on making art. Art for her is ‘the child that will not die’. Well, I think, that depends on the reviews.

Rooney quotes Willa Paskin’s review in Slate, in which Paskin declares her own motherhood. Outrageously, Ms P wonders whether the book might have been ‘better’ if Heti had chosen to be a mother in the end. This seems an incredibly rude thing to say, even for an arts critic. Ms Rooney doesn’t hint at her own maternal status, but she sympathises with Heti if only because of all the female critics rushing forth to rub their own motherhoods in the author’s face. It is as if the book is criticising them personally for being a different person.

A similar thing happened with John Updike’s review of Alan Hollinghursts’s The Spell (1998). Updike went from judging a literary novel to judging all gay people ever. They were not ‘proper’ human beings because they did not have children (Updike forgetting about the ones who do).  This was not a question posed by the novel, but Mr Updike rushed forward to answer it anyway.

Between parents and the childless, one would have thought it would be the latter who would be more defensive about their choices. With these critics it seems to be the reverse. All reviews review the reviewer.

**

Saturday 1 September 2018. A sunny day. I wander around Battersea Park. The Pump House Gallery is closed for a wedding. A sign reads ‘Mr & Mrs Alford’. Outside there’s a marquee full of dressed-up people drinking a toast. One of them beckons to me (I think). I wonder if he recognises me, or is drunk and wants to mock me, or that he thinks I’m a late guest. I walk on.

It’s a shame I’m not invited to more weddings, if only because I often dress like I’m going to one.  ‏

Near the Old English Garden I find a 1980s monument to animals abused through vivisection. The memorial is a small statue of a dog. A plaque reveals that it in fact replaces a much older memorial from 1906, which a subsequent council decided was too controversial, and removed. I think of Fergus the white rat, my landlady’s pet, whom I occasionally looked after. Fergus was saved from a lab. He died this week of old age, at two and a half years.

The Peace Pagoda is another 1980s fixture of the park. Like the dog statue, it was paid for by the left-wing GLC, and symbolises another protest, this time against nuclear war. The view of the Thames standing on the Pagoda platform is superb, and underrated.

**

Monday 3 September 2018. My birthday. Cards from Mum and Auntie Anne, and a text from Charlie M. I do my usual birthday thing of getting on a train to somewhere I’ve not been before. Today I’m still on a coastal theme, and am curious about Hastings.

This is a slight cheat, as I was in Hastings once before. Spearmint, the band in which I briefly played guitar, played a gig there circa 1999. After the gig I was left sitting in the tour bus by myself, for some reason. Outside the van, which was parked near the town centre, a group of laddish young men appeared, clearly on their way back from a pub. They then proceeded to have a vicious fight with each other for no other reason than it was a Saturday night. This went on for some minutes: there was blood on their t-shirts. I had no choice but to sit there until this depressing sight ended. That said, afterwards I noted the pleasing resonance of witnessing a real life battle in that particular town.

Since then, I’ve been told that Hastings has become a much nicer place to visit, with hardly any violence, at least not on Monday afternoons. So here I am. The tourist information office sells an entire book about the locations used in Foyle’s War. I stop for a drink in Crowley’s Bar, an Aleister Crowley-themed venue near the railway station. One might think it plays death metal, but when I visit they’re playing 70s disco hits. Tonight the upstairs room is hosting a session of role-playing games. There’s a small library in the corner, with books on Crowley, a Clive Barker novel, and a comic, Satanic Mojo.

Mum has been to Hastings before, albeit not to the Aleister Crowley bar. She recommends a book-lined café, Hanushka, so I investigate. It is heaven. I spend a pleasant hour or two just leafing through the hundreds of books they have, with bookshelves coating every wall, ceiling to floor. I look through The Abba Annual 1982. Agnetha’s favourite film director is Roman Polanski. There’s a quiz of ‘Abbagrams’: ‘Nina Pretty Ballerina’ is the answer to ‘Bleary Anna In Triplet’.

Some aspects haven’t changed from my previous experience, though. As I walk past a pub in the town centre, some pint-downing men outside nudge themselves at my white suit. ‘Oy! Ghostbusters!’ As catcalls go, it doesn’t even make any sense. Hastings really needs to get a better class of idiot.

The pier has been refurbished. There’s dozens of little metal plaques around the handrail, the results of a fundraising drive. Many of the plaques are engraved with the usual memorials. Some mark happy memories of youth, such as the time in the 1960s when the pier hosted concerts by the likes of The Who and Dusty Springfield. Others are mysterious in-jokes: ‘Thick as These – Andy and Felix’, ‘Take Off Your Stockings and Pee In Your Shoe – Peggy’.

**

Tuesday 4 September 2018. One benefit of living in London without much money is that one can take advantage of last minute tickets. If you turn up at a show with minutes before it starts, there are often cheap or even free tickets available. Particularly at industry events, where the guest lists are large.

Tonight I walk into the BFI Southbank on a whim. I am soon handed a free ticket to a preview of the new Channel 4 TV series The Bisexual. The show is a comedy directed by and starring Desiree Akhavan. I had enjoyed her film from a couple of years ago, Appropriate Behaviour, about the ups and downs of a wisecracking Iranian-American woman (Ms Akhavan) in New York, as she looked for love across the genders, or failing that, a fling that wasn’t terminally embarrassing. The Bisexual is more of the same, except in East London. There’s a Q&A afterwards with Ms A and her fellow cast and crew, including Maxine Peake, but Ms A dominates proceedings. She points out how many lesbian films are directed by men: Carol, Imagine Me and You, Blue is the Warmest Colour. On top of which, there’s too few bisexual role models: ‘There’s Anne Heche, but she’s not the best one. She broke Ellen’s heart.’

The first two episodes, which are screened tonight, are very funny and engaging. There’s satirical echoes of Nathan Barley, along with the cult, sardonic feel of Peep Show. Except more queer and more female. It’s on in October. It deserves to do well.

**

Saturday 8 September 2018. To the Rio for another Desiree Akhavan project: The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a new film. This time Ms A stays behind the camera and adapts a novel about a gay conversion camp for teenagers, with 1990s period details. The protagonist listens to an album by the Breeders – on cassette. I wonder what the young actors made of cassettes, those obsolete if mostly unmissed little objects.

I quite enjoy the film, but compare it unfavourably to But I’m A Cheerleader. That film had the same plot, was also directed by a queer woman, and was (in every sense) much more camp. Cameron Post is made in a traditional realist style, so it feels like a straight text about gay people. This might be what reading Ronald Firbank novels and watching Derek Jarman films has done to me, though. I’ve started to hunger for idiosyncratic styles. It can be a style of dialogue: The Bisexual is conventional in form, but the catty quips and bon mots bring the required amount of style.

That’s what’s really underrated now: style. People are typing away too quickly, posting, tweeting, churning out the content, all the time valorising quantity and frequency over individuality. Writers are terrified of sounding different. As a result, so much content reads the same and sounds the same.

More style, less content. There’s too much content. We need to get post-content.

**

Monday 10 September 2018. To the Horse Hospital for the launch of Travis Elborough’s latest, Atlas of the Unexpected. It’s his second book of strange and unusual places. This one has the Shell Grotto at Margate, which I have visited. The Shell Grotto is the sort of place one can’t believe really exists – the stuff of HP Lovecraft’s dreams. Actually, it also evokes that Jeff VanderMeer Neo-Lovecraft novel, Annihilation. I chat to Cathi Unsworth about Edith Sitwell, and Ann Scanlon about Joyce. Blueboy’s ‘Chelsea Guitar’ is played by the DJ – the b-side of ‘Popkiss’.

**

Wednesday 12 September 2018. To Gay’s the Word bookshop. I’ve been asked by Birkbeck Library to recommend books which might denote ‘reading for pleasure’, as opposed to academic texts. The library encouraged me to pick books that were in stock at local independent shops, such as GTW. Very happy to given this shop as much business as possible. Now that Foyles has been taken over by Waterstones, independent bookshops need more support than ever.

I ask Jim at GTW which books have been recurring bestsellers at the shop over the years. It’s an intriguing list, including Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, John Rechy’s City of Night, Bernadine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road.

**

Friday 14 September 2018. Watching all four series of Please Like Me on Amazon Prime (they’re doing a free six-month offer for students). The programme is adorable. It gives the impression that Melbourne is stuffed with ludicrously good-looking men who dress like they’re in Belle and Sebastian.

Am now reading Jarman’s At Your Own Risk (1992), a fragmentary, aphoristic book which channels his personal history through the wider history of gay rights in Britain. There’s an anecdote, repeated in Jarman’s Kicking the Pricks (also titled as The Last of England) in which he remembers going to the London gay club The Sombrero in 1972, and seeing people sing along to the Carly Simon song ‘You’re So Vain’. I wonder if Alan Hollinghurst used Jarman’s anecdote when researching The Sparsholt Affair, because that novel uses the same song for a 1970s scene set in a London gay club, the fictional ‘Sol y Sombra’.

Some lines from At Your Own Risk: ‘I have a vocation that comes before illness’. ‘We are all failures and we know it. It’s that knowledge which keeps us trying’.

And: ‘The lid was off; the dance was on.’

**

Saturday 15 September 2018. My co-supervisor Heike Bauer asks me if I’d like to give a special LGBT / camp tour of 43 Gordon Square, as part of Open House London Weekend. It’s short notice, and unpaid (like all such tours) but the research is compatible with my PhD, so I agree.

Today I take a look in the Woolf and Whistle bar, on the ground floor of the Tavistock Hotel. This is the site of Woolf’s flat in the 1920s and 1930s, where she wrote most of her major books and ran the Hogarth Press. The Woolf and Whistle bar has a modest Woolf theme to it. There is a large, glossy black decoration on one wall, made up of lines from Mrs Dalloway. The bar sells a ‘Virginia Woolf’ cocktail: gin, Prosecco, gomme syrup, lemon juice: £6.90. In the gents toilets the cubicles are lined with reproductions of Vanessa Bell’s covers for the books. One of them is A Room of One’s Own. It’s not clear if this is meant as a joke.

**

Monday 17 September 2018. To a training session at Gordon Square for Open House Weekend. I offer my research regarding the often-quoted joke about the Bloomsbury Group: ‘they lived in squares and loved in triangles’.

Most sources give no attribution. A few, like Amy Licence’s book, Living in Squares, Loving in Triangles: The Lives and Loves of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, attach the quip to Dorothy Parker, but without any proof of where Parker said it.

Lisa Appignanesi’s book All About Love, attributes it to the New Statesman editor of the mid-twentieth century, Kingsley Martin. Martin did say it in a column in 1941, but he was quoting someone else:

I wonder what people mean by ‘Bloomsbury’? […] Certainly it is no longer what Margaret Irwin used to describe in the ‘twenties as the place where ‘all the couples were triangles and lived in squares.’

• Kingsley Martin, ‘A London Diary’, New Statesman and Nation, vol 21, issue 527 (29 March 1941), 317-18 (p. 317).

The Margaret Irwin source was recently identified in an article by Stuart N. Clarke (”squares where all the couples are triangles”, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, 92 (Fall 2017/ Winter 2018), 38-40 (p. 39)). It’s in a satirical scene from Irwin’s 1928 novel Fire Down Below. I’ve checked a library copy of the book to confirm this:

Mr. Wem knew everyone who was a philosopher or politician or artist or writer or thinker, or rather, everyone whom he counted as such, which did not mean that his acquaintance was at all wide. It was in fact limited to a part of London that Peregrine had referred to in his absence from lunch as Gloomsbury.

‘Where’s that, Father?’

‘It is a circle, my fair child, composed of a few squares where all the couples are triangles.’

• Margaret Irwin, Fire Down Below (London: Heinemann, 1928), p. 109.

So Margaret Irwin, the author of historical novels like Young Bess, seems to have originated the ‘squares and triangles’ joke, rather than Dorothy Parker.

It’s also interesting that the joke was made while the Bloomsbury Group was at its height, proving just how famous their polyamory was at the time it was still going on.

The joke would have been pleased the Bloomsbury gang themselves. For them, gossip was a force for social progress. As Virginia Woolf wrote herself: ‘the fact that [same-sex affairs] can be mentioned openly leads to the fact that no one minds if they are practised privately.’ – from ‘Old Bloomsbury’ (1922), in Moments of Being.

Woolf would have felt vindicated by this passage in Jarman’s At Your Own Risk, about being a young gay man in the 1960s:

The sixties were infatuated with the Bloomsbury Group – upper-class Bohemians who led open and ambisexual lifestyles in the twenties and thirties. […] We were smothered with information about the Bloomsbury artists. It wasn’t to do with their work, more to do with their love life – Virginia Woolf was bisexual, Vita Sackville-West had a lesbian affair, Maynard Keynes was queer, so was Lytton Strachey who had my friend Robert read him Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in a Paris hotel one night. There was a spate of biographies. The lives of the upper-classes were being popularised. This broke the secrecy that surrounded us and we pitted ourselves against the old moralities.

– Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk (1992; repr. Vintage, 1993), p. 65.

Jarman put this sentiment into his film Wittgenstein (1993). One of the supporting characters is Maynard Keynes, who is shown in a relationship with a young man, played by Keith Collins. Jarman’s other muse, Tilda Swinton, plays the Bloomsbury hostess Ottoline Morrell. She was fresh from the film of Woolf’s Orlando.

**

Tuesday 18 September 2018. Reading an interview with Olivia Laing, I’m intrigued that she calls herself a former Riot Grrrl, and once published a fanzine, Blah Blah Blah. I mention this to Leila Kassir at Senate House Library, who knows about fanzine archives. She directs me to the London College of Communication in Elephant & Castle. This is a good reminder that one should consult human librarians over Google, whenever possible. Librarians are the keepers of the Un-Googleable things: we must cherish them.

So here I am in the LCC, an imposing modern building by the roundabout, where the computer terminals are state-of-the-art Macs.

Issues 3 and 4 of Blah Blah Blah are indeed typical fanzines from the early 90s Riot Grrrl scene. They’re A5 photocopied pamphlets, written entirely in longhand, alongside images cut and pasted from magazines: and it would have been a literal cutting and pasting, too with scissors and glue. The teenage Ms Laing gave her name as ‘Olivia’, of Denmead, Hants.

The zines are undated, but references to records like God Is My Co-Pilot’s Speed Yr Trip and the Voodoo Queens’ ‘Kenuwee Head’ place them in 1993 or 1994. The writing isn’t so reviews and interviews, but energetic and passionate sloganeering, in the spirit of groups like Huggy Bear and Bikini Kill: ‘Take over the NME and Radio One!’ ‘Burn down the schools!’

The last issue mentions that she’s started a band of her own: ‘We rock!’ And, like a lot of fanzine writers did in those days, the younger Olivia attacks music critics, in this case Melody Maker‘s Simon Price. Today, like many former zine writers, Olivia Laing is a professional arts critic herself. I wonder if her band made any records.

These fanzines, and others, have been donated to the LCC by the musician Jen Denitto, she of the bands Linus, Scarlet’s Well, and The Monochrome Set. When I was in Scarlet’s Well I played with Jen myself, her on drums, me on guitar.

Reading between the lines of my own thinking here, I realise I’m still coming to terms with being part of the generation that’s moved from consuming culture to curating, championing and preserving it, taking it seriously. I wince at seeing bands like the Manic Street Preachers being marketed as ‘Dad Rock’, and pejoratively so (and indeed, overlooking the female fans of that same generation). Even if we are not parents, many of us now feel a need to pass on our knowledge and experience – our cultural genes – in a wider sense. It’s down to us to tell and to guide. ‘Pass it on’, as The History Boys says. Well, everyone has something to pass on; the trouble is deciding what ‘it’ might be.

I recently came across an article on the Bustle website (bustle.com), a site which describes itself as ‘the largest premium publisher reaching millennial women’. The article was titled ‘9 LGBTQ+ British Books Perfect For Film Adaptation Because They Deserve The Big Screen’. Woolf’s Orlando appeared in the list:  ‘This list would be woefully incomplete without Orlando […]. It needs a film adaptation NOW.’

While it’s worrying to think that the young journalists of 2018 place scant importance on fact-checking, it’s interesting that the 1928 Woolf novel has become better known than the 1992 Tilda Swinton film.

Still, there’s more to being an ‘educator’ than going online and typing ‘wrong, o embryo!’ under some overworked urchin’s listicle. Best make everything you do part of your own work (as with this diary) and put it out there. If only to stop future generations thinking that John Harris’s book on Britpop is the last word on the 1990s.

History is not written by the victors, but by those who can be bothered to write it.

**

Wednesday 19 September 2018. I do some research on a large painting which hangs in the Keynes Library at Birkbeck’s Gordon Square building. It’s The Garden Room (1951) by Vanessa Bell, a colourful rendering of a room at the Charleston farmhouse, with the garden in bloom seen through French windows. Two women and two little girls are sitting or standing around in a rather staged manner. According to Frances Spalding’s biography, Vanessa Bell, the seated woman in 1950s clothes is her daughter Angelica, staring across the room at herself as a three year old child. The other little girl, in red, is Angelica’s daughter Amaryllis. The remaining woman is deliberately ‘unknown’ according to Bell, though to me it looks like a self-portrait. The painting was originally a commission to mark the Festival of Britain. The idea was that a number of artists would provide works on large canvases, in line with the spirit of life coming off the ration. The painting appeared in The Listener magazine, in its original form with the seated woman looking entirely different. Bell reworked the painting afterwards, making the figure more like the adult Angelica.

I often sit near this painting in seminars, so it’s good to know a bit more about it.

**

Saturday 22 September 2018. I do my LGBT-themed tour of 43 Gordon Square as part of Open House London Weekend. The rain pours down, so I can’t stand outside and talk about the different houses, but the three tours indoors go well enough.

I don’t have time to memorise a set of monologues for each room, so I ramble using my notes, but better that than drearily reading from a script. For the last tour only one visitor turns up, so it becomes more of a conversation. It turns out that she was at the Sebastiane screening at the BFI. So I make more of my Jarman-Bloomsbury connections.

**

Monday 24 September 2018. The titles of this year’s new albums by Spiritualized and Moby both quote the same line from Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, ‘Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt’. Spiritualized’s effort quotes the last three words, while Moby’s, which came out earlier in the year, uses the whole line. One wants to tell them: other novels are available, dear hearts. I like that Vonnegut line myself, but I am also sensitive to the way Vonnegut has become the sort of ‘default cool’ writer that people in bands are meant to like. ‘Great minds think alike’ is the alibi of those who lack great minds.

**

Tuesday 25 September 2018. Still on a queer Bloomsbury tip, I go to the British Library to consult a couple of handwritten letters from Maynard Keynes to Duncan Grant. While researching the tour, I had consulted the Richard Davenport-Hines book Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes (2015), which has a colourful account of the economist’s love life.

I was especially intrigued to learn that in 1910, while living in Cambridge, Keynes had not only met Magnus Hirschfeld, the German sexologist, but had provided information about his anonymous gay flings, for Hirschfeld’s research. The Davenport-Hines book cites a couple of letters held at the BL as evidence, so here I am in St Pancras like a good researcher, deciphering Keynes’s handwriting for myself.

It turns out that Keynes doesn’t refer to Hirschfeld by name, but to a ‘German doctor’ who specialises in homosexuality, and who was ‘the principal witness in the Eulenburg trial’. If that wasn’t enough to narrow it down, my co-supervisor, Heike Bauer, who has written extensively on Hirschfeld, confirms that MH indeed visited the UK in 1910 for his study Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (1914), and that this included a trip to Cambridge where he saw (but did not meet) Oscar Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland.

What piques my interest is that the letters prove that Keynes and Duncan Grant were familiar with the gay slang usage of the word ‘so’. Rather wonderfully, Keynes calls Hirschfeld ‘The Secretary of the Society of International So.’ (This is not quoted in the Davenport-Hines book, so it may be an exclusive for this diary). I’d known that ‘so’ was an old slang adjective for homosexual (it’s in the film of The Naked Civil Servant), but this appears to be a rare usage of ‘so’ as a noun, to mean homosexuality. I’m tempted to rustle through Keynes’s other correspondence, to see if he uses ‘camp’.

**

Thursday 27 September 2018. I have taken to calling the DLR ‘The Delightful Little Railway’.

When I put this on Twitter, Richard Hamblyn replies: ‘I always mishear ‘a TfL announcement’ as ‘a tearful announcement’. And often it is.’

**
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Tags: abba, big brother, birkbeck, birkbeck school of arts, bloomsbury group, derek jarman, desiree akhavan, gordon square, hastings, keith collins, keynes library, lrb, mamma mia, margaret irwin, maynard keynes, nick drnaso, olivia laing, open house weekend london, pet shop boys, sally rooney, school of arts, sheila heti, southend-on-sea, stewart lee, vanessa bell, virginia woolf

Friday 13 July 2018. I read about a commotion at this year’s Pride march. A group of women calling themselves Get the L Out made their own mini-protest against the main march. Before the procession could begin, they lay down in the road, preventing the others from setting off. It appears that they claim the LGBT movement is somehow ‘erasing’ the ‘L’ – lesbians – by overly favouring the ‘T’, as in transgender people. This argument was soon condemned by more established lesbian voices, such as DIVA magazine. Subsequent marches have included banners saying ‘L with the T’.

This year marks the 30^th anniversary of Clause 28. I remember how lesbian protests back then meant women invading BBC TV news bulletins and handcuffing themselves to Sue Lawley’s desk. Or it meant abseiling onto the floor of the House of Lords. These were actions aimed upwards in society, against authority. To protest against trans people, whose lives are much more compromised, is manifestly kicking downwards. There are surely worthier fights for the same passion. Around the world LGBT people as a whole still have a hard time of things. Division among the ranks cannot help.

**

Picador Classics has published a new edition of Firbank’s Flower Beneath the Foot with an introduction by Alan Hollinghurst. The cover is a decadent illustration by Georges Barbier, of fantastical, semi-nude tango dancers circa 1919. They look like Aubrey Beardsley characters updated into the Jazz Age, just as Carl Van Vechten’s described Firbank as ‘Aubrey Beardsley in a Rolls-Royce’.

**

Saturday 14 July 2018. A comment from my PhD supervisor on my latest work: ‘This sentence is less clear than usual’. It’s the one sentence in 30,000 words in which I tried my hardest to write in an academic style. Now I realise that, contrary to the misconception, many academics value the art of elegant prose. It’s the lack of care during editing that results in convolution. Still, nice to know that Dr B associates me with good writing.

**

Sunday 15 July 2018. Lunch at the Salisbury pub in St Martin’s Lane. No TV screens, for once. It’s the only pub I can find in central London which says ‘Sport Free’ on the blackboard outside.

Then to the Curzon Soho for McQueen, the documentary on the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen. The film follows the usual arc, rags to riches to the tragic early death, with the bonus that the riches are indeed from rags. I’d forgotten about the phrase ‘the rag trade’ as slang for the clothes industry, but it’s used in the film by members of McQueen’s family, who are working class East Londoners. McQueen played up his Cockney background as a career move – his relatives admit as much. Though it’s the family’s Scottish roots which really fascinated him: hence his Highland Rape show. It is easier to mythologise one’s ancestors if they seem a world away. The answer to the family tree show on TV, Who Do You Think You Are, is really: Someone Exotic, I Hope. Still, I find myself drawn to his daring and artistry. He was a rare example of someone in fashion with a sense of individualism, as opposed to joining in and keeping up. I’d love to have a McQueen suit, but for the style rather than the status.

**

Monday 16 July 2018. I’m trying a new hairdresser: Open Barbers, in Clunbury Street near Old Street tube. Like Barberette in Hackney, they favour a gender neutral approach. With no pun intended, this does appear to be a growth industry. Many high street hairdressers seem stuck in the 1970s. My heart sinks at the implication that in order to have a trim I need to talk knowledgeably about football, or am fine about having The Sun or The Mirror as reading matter while waiting.

Open Barbers has a library of queer A5 fanzines, and even offers its own fanzine on the way in. The general atmosphere of social progressiveness extends to a pay-what-you-can service. In theory you can pay as little as £10, though a poster points out their own costs (£15 per hour to break even, a bit more for colouring). They certainly do a good job with my ludicrous mop, which seems thicker than ever.

**

Thursday 19 July 2018. Reading a couple of books about books. One is Damon Young’s The Art of Reading, which mixes philosophy with references to Star Trek spin-off novels. The other is Alberto Manguel’s Packing My Library. ‘I’ve never felt alone in a library’ he says, which is very true. And yet, it’s funny how reading presents an image of isolation, of not-there-ness. When Big Brother started in the UK, they allowed books. These were soon banned, as images of people reading made for bad TV. This is why appearing on a reality TV show is less appealing than going to prison. In Wormwood Scrubs they at least allow books.

Mr Manguel relates an anecdote about Noah Webster, author of the eponymous dictionary. One day, Webster is caught by his wife locked in an embrace with the family maid.

‘Noah, I am surprised!’ says Mrs Webster.

‘No, madam,’ says Webster. ‘I am surprised. You are astonished.’

**

Friday 20 July 2018. London’s heatwave continues, to the delight of no one. The green grass in Russell Square is giving way to a rash of yellow. Scenes from The Day the Earth Caught Fire suggest themselves: people abound in sweat-drenched work clothes. Tempers on the tube flare like forest fires.

I’m in a café when Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time After Time’ comes on the speakers. The original, for once. Franchise cafés tend to favour cover versions, of the kind favoured by John Lewis at Christmas. They fit the franchise theme of replication: the appeal of a Starbucks or a Pret is that it’s a space which is a cover version of other spaces. In every branch of Leon, the walls have copies of a family’s holiday snapshots. On the walls of Caffe Nero are photographs of people drinking coffee in an idealised Italian setting. It’s all fake and artificial and I quite like it, like Warhol liked Coca-Cola (‘all the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good’).  It’s only the cover versions in the piped music that irritate, because music plays closer to the heart.

I once asked the staff of a Pret if they had ever thought of tuning the speakers to a local radio station, like greasy spoon cafes do. They looked as if they were going to set fire to me.

Today I sit and listen to the original Cyndi Lauper record, properly. I’m intrigued by the soulful male voice that suddenly appears on the choruses. How tempting to impose a narrative: the spirit of a dead lover, or a figure from a dream. (I look him up: it’s the song’s co-writer, Rob Hyman, of The Hooters). Bowie’s ‘Absolute Beginners’ is another example: a mysterious female voice accompanying Bowie in the background.

**

Evening: to the Curzon Soho for a special screening of Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (1998). The film is set in the New York club Studio 54 in the early 80s, but now, twenty years on, I see the film as a nostalgia piece for my own youth in 1998: going out to club nights on a regular basis, living to purely go out. It’s my Saturday Night Fever. Tim Chipping is also here, and we spend the time afterwards in the bar chatting – but not too late (we’re older). Tim says he’s thinking of finally moving out of London, because of the soaring costs of living. He has his sights on Glasgow, ‘my second home’. My thought is that, had I the means to do so, I’d also quite like to live in Scotland, but only seasonally, to escape hot summers like this one.

**

Tuesday 24 July 2018. It occurs to me that at the age of nearly 47, I still have absolutely no idea what I want to do with my life. I was rather hoping something would suggest itself.

It doesn’t help that today the PhD students are sent a jargon-splattered 100-page document about the Research Excellence Framework. This is a government initiative designed to make sure (as I understand it) that British universities are doing Good Work with Proven Impact. I can only assume that the main purpose of the REF is to put people off a career in academia.

The irony of acquiring qualifications in English literature is that they give one an increased intolerance of the literature of the workplace.

In your forties, you start to feel like a ghost. Less visible to the swim of things, but able to slip between worlds more easily. And you know more things. I’ve still yet to solve the puzzle of how best to translate my own abilities into a regular minimum wage, but I can tell more easily what paths would be unsuitable.

I’ve enrolled for a second year on the part-time PhD. Here’s hoping I can find some sort of funding.

**

Friday 27 July 2018. Today thunderstorms are forecast. I find myself desperately willing them to arrive. ‘Let it come down!’ – Macbeth.

On the tube the Victoria Line is especially unbearable. There are now adverts on the trains for ‘cut-price’ cremations, priced at £1195. What with the current temperatures, it would be cheaper to put the body on the Central Line and just give it a couple of hours.

On another tube poster the Mayor announces that he is building ‘genuinely affordable housing’. ‘Affordable’ no longer means ‘affordable’, just as ‘housing’ by itself does not mean housing for anyone (because it’s not affordable). And soon, ‘genuinely’ will too become suspect, and the phrase will require, ‘no, really’. Linguistic sticking plasters, over gaping social wounds.

**

Idling on Twitter reveals one’s age. I see conversations about the 1990s which are clearly made by people too young to remember them – millennials, as the generation is now known. I want to say, ‘Just because you were a child in the 90s doesn’t mean that all 90s culture apart from Harry Potter and Friends doesn’t exist.’

I wonder if there’s a term equivalent to mansplaining. Eldersplaining? Two suggestions are sent to me: ‘passéxplaining ‘, and ‘Gen X-plaining’.

**

Thursday 2^nd August 2018. ‘At full strength, wit is rage made bearable, and useful’. – Gore Vidal on Evelyn Waugh. This is from a 1962 review in the New York Times. Vidal came to dislike Waugh in later life, but the truth of the quote still stands.

**

Friday 3^rd August 2018. A suggestion for renaming the Death Star in Star Wars: The Bauble of Unkindness.

**

Sunday 5^th August 2018. A headline from an article in Pitchfork: ‘How do we support musicians when the easiest way to listen to their music barely pays them at all?’

My answer:  PayPal them directly. If you like an artist’s work, and they’re alive, seek out their website. If they are taking donations, they are struggling. So, donate.

**

Wednesday 8^th August 2018. I’m reviewing some Pet Shop Boys reissues for The Wire and am reading the group’s old interviews. Today I learn that Neil Tennant wrote most of the lyrics to Electronic’s ‘Getting Away With It’ (1989), including the title. Also: it’s about Morrissey. (Source: liner notes to the 2001 reissue of Behaviour, which is getting a re-re-issue this month).

Also learned: Behaviour was a response to Depeche Mode’s ‘Enjoy The Silence’, which the PSBs were envious of. Depeche Mode became globally massive around this time. Tennant cites an interview with an American journalist, who told him, ‘you and New Order make this great music, but then you just whine over the top of it’. Depeche Mode whine in much the same way, and yet are much more popular around the world. I wonder why this is.

Perhaps the Pet Shop Boys’ lack of physicality is an obstacle to mass worship. Their image is of two men, one of whom seems embarrassed to be there, while the other one seems even more embarrassed to be there. Whereas Dave Gahan is more giving of his whining English flesh: more blood and sweat. Neil Tennant was never one for tattoos.

Since then, there’s been a thousand bands trying to emulate ‘Enjoy The Silence’. Ironic, as that song in itself is DM trying to outdo Cure/Smiths/New Order/PSBs all at once. It’s a template based on other templates.

**

In Lorrie Moore’s introduction to her new book of essays, See What Can Be Done, she quotes a reader who tells her, ‘Your pieces in the New York Review of Books are the only ones I can actually understand’. Moore adds that this was not a compliment. The speaker was really admiring the knotty sophistication of the other writers, and was being patronising to her. But Ms Moore took it as a compliment anyway – which is a very Lorrie Moore thing to do.

Quite a few critics talk of having ‘crushes’ on Ms Moore, or of wanting to be her best friend, without worrying that they too might be thought as condescending. It’s the way she writes: intellectual, yet funny and humble. ‘Quirky’ would be another word: usually thought patronising, but it shouldn’t be. ‘Quirky’ is a slightly tarnished version of ‘ludic’.

I’d be happy to be the token ‘quirky’ guest at a literary festival, say. Better quirky than dreary.

**

Thursday 9^th August 2018. To Gay’s The Word to mark the reissue of Smiling in Slow Motion, Derek Jarman’s final volume of diaries. The bookshop appears in the diaries (page 270, in the entry for 30 November 1992), though rather unflatteringly. Jarman rages against the shop for declining to stock Love Bites, a book of sexually explicit photographs by Della Grace (now known as Del LaGrace Volcano). Jarman sympathises with Grace, calling the bookshop ‘the Jesse Helms of Marchmont Street’ and ‘the vinegar dregs of the right-on’. Jesse Helms was a homophobic American politician at the time.

I mention this to Jim MacSweeney, the shop owner, who was there in the early 90s. He tells me that GTW would have been still recovering from the mid-80s raid by HM Customs & Excise, who were looking for anything they could claim was illegally obscene. The shop narrowly escaped closure, and for a few years afterwards they couldn’t take any risks: they were being watched. What gets me is Jarman’s lack of sympathy for both sides, the queer indie shop as much as the queer indie photographer. I like to think he might have changed his mind were he alive today. The shop is still independent and still going strong, even in this age of Amazon, and is still fending off instances of homophobic window-smashing, as recently as this year.

Still, I love that a bookshop is not just stocking but celebrating a book which criticises it. And besides, Jarman was always a difficult figure within the LGBT community. Stonewall and Ian McKellen come in for similar treatment in the diaries. I think many readers today will politely disagree with this side of Jarman, and focus on the more positive and inspirational examples of his life and art. The final words of Smiling in Slow Motion are ‘true love’, after all. And that’s the focus of tonight’s event.

As with the new edition of Modern Nature, the cover depicts the landscape around Jarman’s garden in Dungeness, this time at sunset. It’s interesting that the original books had Jarman himself on the front. His face was his brand – a celebrity of the early 90s. Indeed, the diaries themselves relate people asking him for his autograph (those paper versions of selfies). These days his work takes the focus. One might say his garden is now more Brand Jarman than the films. Certainly the diaries frame his garden as his magnum opus, with the films almost as diversions from the flowers: Edward II, Wittgenstein, Blue.

The new edition has an introduction by Neil Bartlett. Tonight Mr B is at the bookshop to give not just a talk but a tree-planting at the Marchmont Community Garden nearby. I’ve never noticed the garden was there, though I must have walked past it countlessly. It’s in a sliver of land next to the Brunswick Centre, right by Skoob Books and the back of Waitrose. It’s also close to the blue plaque for another gay diarist, Kenneth Williams. Something about the juxtaposition of the concrete Brunswick with this defiant little garden seems fitting for a Jarman tribute.

The tree in question is a little black elder, chosen by Bartlett ‘as it’s hard to kill and has slightly poofy foliage’. The tree is efficiently planted in the north-west corner, with the help of a man from the garden’s management team. Mr Bartlett tops up the hole with a spade and poses for photos: ‘I’m in Princess Margaret mode’.

**

Wednesday 15^th August 2018. Irritations over ambiguities in English. When describing the use of Google as a verb, Fowler’s and the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors advise ‘googling’, without capitalising, because you can’t trademark a verb. Hence ‘hoovering’. But the LRB and the Guardian prefer ‘Googling’. This sort of thing keeps me awake at night.

**

Thursday 16^th August 2018. I watch some of the new Celebrity Big Brother. The term ‘mystery housemate’ is rather redundant in a house of people whose level of celebrity is already a mystery.

**

Friday 17^th August 2018. Reading Jarman’s diaries. My favourite flower name in his Dungeness garden has to be jack-go-to-bed-at-noon (tragopogon pratensis). Closely followed by eggs-and-bacon (lotus corniculatus), which I imagine Jack, a night shift worker, having for breakfast before turning in.

**

Saturday 18^th August 2018. Looking for an air-conditioned pub in King’s Cross, I venture into Parcel Yard, the station’s old sorting office. I don’t get far. Three men in football shirts see me, then go into exactly the same kind of homophobic catcalls I’ve had since I was a teenager: kissing noises with their mouths, ‘woo-hoo!’ noises. And not meant kindly. I feel threatened and so leave, though a bleakly positive response occurs to me: ‘Still got it!’

I suppose my catcallers could well have been from out of town, given that the pub was inside King’s Cross Station. As expensive as London is, I still worry that the moment I step outside the M25 I’ll be put straight in a wicker man.

What I would have liked to have done is something like the actions of Nick Hurley, a young man whose anecdote became a popular tweet this month. He had been walking in the streets of Manchester on his way to Pride, and was wearing coloured glitter on his face. A passing driver shouted ‘faggot’ at him. Mr H caught up with the car at the traffic lights, and emptied a tube of glitter through the window.

**
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Tags: alan hollinghurst, alexander mcqueen, birkbeck, depeche mode, derek jarman, gay's the word, lorrie moore, neil bartlett, open barbers, pet shop boys, pride, ronald firbank, tim chipping, whit stillman

Sunday 14^th August 2016. To the Constitution pub in Camden, for the club night Nitty Gritty. Tonight is also the birthday of Debbie Smith, who’s one of the club’s DJs. Atalanta is on the door, sitting at a little table as one enters the basement down a narrow staircase. I keep her company there for a while, watching others make their way gingerly down the steps too. It’s a pleasingly old building, so the stairs were probably built not so much for club goers to walk down but for minor characters from Dickens to be thrown down.

I spend a pleasant couple of hours here, even dancing a little. The Constitution’s back garden looks peacefully over the canal. As the pub is detached and a good walk from the shops and the more touristy parts of Camden, it has the air of an oasis. Local London. Dog walkers use the towpath, and dogs have been known to wander through the basement’s back door and straight onto the dancefloor. A pug-ish one appears tonight and skips around for a few seconds to a Kinks b-side (‘What’s this? What’s this?’). Thankfully the owner removes this slapstick gatecrasher before it sees the platter of birthday cake in front of the DJ booth.

***

Monday 15^th August 2016. I’m editing my review of the Pet Shop Boys book, Smile If You Dare. I cut a line about the possible influence of Paul Morley on the style, mainly because the writer is probably too young. My own generation of music writers essentially fell into two camps: those trying to be Paul Morley – mad, funny, rambling – and those trying to be Simon Reynolds – sober, stern, analytical. There’s a part of the Pet Shop Boys book where the appearance of a hidden track at the end of the Very CD is likened to bettering the resurrection of Christ. I would call this The Full Morley.

There is still a lot of love for the actual Mr Morley today, as his new book on David Bowie is in the Sunday Times General Hardback Top Ten. The music papers Mr Morley once wrote for have either died or become free handouts. For people to pay for a fat hardback of music journalism, and to do so in number, is not to be sniffed at. Most of the rest of the books in that chart are either Ladybird parody books or memoirs by the stars of YouTube. It’s very hard not to write something here that will sound like a rant from Ed Reardon’s Week.

***

Tuesday 16^th August 2016. To the Regent Street Cinema, where I’ve been invited by Heavenly Films to host a Q&A after a screening of Lawrence of Belgravia. This is Paul Kelly’s documentary about Lawrence, the surname-less frontman with the bands Felt, Denim and Go-Kart Mozart. It premiered at the London Film Festival in 2011, where I saw it myself, before getting a proper cinema release in 2012. For whatever reason, the DVD has been only been released now, and tonight’s screening acts as a DVD launch. Paul Kelly and Lawrence himself are present, ready to answer the audience’s questions, and I’m the one with the clipboard, looking like an albino Denis Norden.

I’ve interviewed people professionally for magazines before, but this is my first time as an onstage interviewer. But I go to a lot of film and book Q & A events for my own pleasure, so I more or less know how they’re done. That said, there is a craft to asking the questions, and it’s not always instinctive.  When people talk normally, they tend to monologue at each other, or switch off, or repeat themselves, or interrupt, or go off on tangents. A public interview is a performance: there needs to be a sense of putting-on.

To prepare, I read about a dozen interviews with both Mr Kelly and Lawrence, and watch my own copy of the DVD again. I also watch some old editions of the Parkinson show on YouTube, noting what makes an ‘open question’: one that will ideally guide the interviewee into making those little trips of insight and revelation.

On the night, I am asked to give a short introduction, which I do happily, standing in front of the stage. Housekeeping, flavoured with opinion. I focus on Mr Kelly’s lack of clichés: particularly no uses of studio mixing desks as backdrops to talking heads. And no talking heads, either, in fact.

The Regent Street Cinema has had a long former life as a college lecture hall. This explains the seating, raked high on a steep slope, looking down at the screen. Not unlike the set-up for IMAX screens. A dramatic history too: the Lumiere brothers showed their early movies here in 1896. The tickets for tonight state that we’re in ‘The Birthplace of British Cinema’. A plaque on the street also declares this to be where members of Pink Floyd were students. Not the young Syd Barrett, alas, which would have been apt for a film about eccentrics in music. No, the less interesting but more sensible members. That’s my wording, not the plaque’s.

Special badges are given out to every person as they enter. Sky blue buttons saying ‘Lawrence of Belgravia, Tuesday 16^th August 2016′. There’s a queue on the way in. The rows fill up. A staffer whispers to me before I go on: ‘This is more people than we usually have for these things’.

I haven’t spoken to Lawrence since the late 90s. ‘Never say ‘Long time no see’, says Warhol somewhere. Better to act as if it were yesterday. So that’s what I do. During the Q&A he smiles a lot, which throws me. The first question from the audience: ‘You’re one of my heroes, along with my dad’.

I can’t resist using the Q&A to tell Lawrence that his music is on Lynsey Hanley’s list of songs to accompany her book on class, Respectable. Lawrence says he’s read it; a Birmingham connection. I quote the lyrics Ms H quotes from Denim’s ‘Middle of the Road’, the ones about choosing to like whatever music you listen to. Much of her book is about the importance of breaking down cultural barriers, where areas of musical taste are psychologically prescribed.

On a couple of occasions I fall into the trap of asking closed questions, because my brain is wired to come up with theories, almost by default. That’s what five years of university does to you. But then I notice what I’m doing and move on. I’ll be better at doing that next time; I’d like to do more Q & As.

Lawrence stays to sign records for fans. Stephen Pastel and Tracey Thorn are in the audience. JC Brouchard, whom Biff Bang Pow once wrote a song about, gives me a copy of his book, Felt: Ballad of the Fan. ‘Is that a book on Felt?’ asks someone behind me. One of several books, now. There’ll be a BA course in Lawrence Studies one day.

***

Friday 19^th August 2016. To the ICA to see Wiener-Dog, the new Todd Solondz film. I loved Happiness, and quite enjoyed Palindromes and Storytelling, but have reservations about this new one.

One thing is that I’m not really in the mood for his signature mix of misery, misanthropy and bad taste. Another is the form: a portmanteau film of four short stories, linked by the titular sausage dog. This works for old British horror films, but not so much for contemporary US black comedies. With one narrative paraded after the other, the overall experience is of fluffy disconnection. A little weaving together of the different strands is needed, a la Pulp Fiction. Or indeed, a la Happiness.

Still, there’s plenty of funny moments, not least the surreal ‘Intermission’, where the dog is filmed as if it were the size of a house, and walks through a series of unlikely backdrops to a Champion the Wonder Horse-like song. But I don’t think anyone sets out to make an intermission the highlight of a film.

***

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Tags: felt, go-kart mozart, heavenly films, lawrence, lawrence of belgravia, lynsey hanley, nitty gritty, paul kelly, Paul Morley, pet shop boys, regent street cinema, todd solondz, wiener-dog

Saturday 30^th July 2016. To a garden in Clapham for Heather M’s housewarming party. It’s one of those occasions where I only seem to know the host, reminding me how bad I am at fitting into social circles. But I enjoy chatting with the others there – a funny, friendly gang. There’s a curious plastic box on a short pole in one of Heather’s flower beds. After placing our bets as to what it might be, Heather explains it’s to repel local cats from using her garden as a latrine. From time to time the box emits an ultrasonic hum. Cats apparently take an extremely dim view of the sound. Presumably even those felines who are partial to experimental music.

Coming back on the train from Clapham, I am surrounded by people in wedding clothes, or in the case of hen nights, pre-wedding clothes. Tiara-ed up bridesmaids, lads in hired suits falling over each other by the station barriers, group outings in specially made t-shirts. The height of the wedding season. All the reports about weddings being too expensive, or about young people preferring to be married to the naughtier parts of the internet, seem exaggerated, at least looking around today. Though I’m not exactly an expert, squeezing past all these glimpses of love lives at Victoria station, then traipsing home to my unshared bed.

***

Sunday 31^st July 2016. I’m going through old CDRs of music, throwing them out, wondering just how much music a person ever needs to own. It’s not the same with books. Anthony Powell had it right: books do furnish a room. CDRs, being inelegant and at the mercy of the march of technology, clutter it up.

I read Anita Brookner’s A Start In Life. Penguin have gone Brookner mad since her death, and reissued about a dozen of her umpteen novels as rather beautiful new paperbacks. They look a little like the record sleeves for The Smiths: vintage twentieth-century stock photos in black and white. The exception is the new edition of Hotel Du Lac, which has a colour photo of a summery mountain road, dominated by a clear blue sky. The special treatment is, I suppose, because it was the only one to win the Booker Prize.

With its tale of a quiet, bookish girl at the mercy of a childish and slovenly mother, A Start In Life often reads like Absolutely Fabulous from the point of view of the daughter. The opening line, often quoted, is still the best part: ‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew her life had been ruined by literature.’

***

Tuesday 2^nd August 2016. Bump into Roz Kaveney in Bar Italia, Soho, and spend a pleasant hour chatting. Some discussion of the Bowie Prom the other night, where various singers covered the songs of the late David B. I think a problem with tribute concerts is that one has to like the singers as well as the songs. On top of that, when it comes to covering Bowie, the man’s image eclipses the material. Bowie’s own versions of his songs are always going to be the most interesting, because it’s Bowie. Still, I admit I have a soft spot for Nirvana’s take on ‘The Man Who Sold The World’. And indeed, for Barbra Streisand’s entirely unasked-for ‘Life on Mars’.

***

Thursday 4^th August 2016. I’m reading Lynsey Hanley’s Respectable, her new book on the psychological effects of the British class system – ‘the wall in the mind’ as she calls it. It draws heavily on her experiences growing up on a vast Midlands council estate, and takes its tonal cue from Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy. What I most like about it is Ms Hanley’s unabashed digressions into her love of pop music and indie bands, seamlessly linking them with her wider discussions of statistics. There’s a section on her life as a member of the Pet Shop Boys fanclub in the late 80s. I’m currently reviewing a new book about the PSBs for The Wire, written by someone not even born until 1988 – a ‘millenial’ I think the term is. It’s interesting to compare the way the different generations write about 80s music; millennials will never know how hard it was to access music that spoke to them, pre-internet. It meant late night BBC Radio 1, or the music papers, or nothing. And then it meant journeying off to a decent record shop. Fandom was harder won.

At one point in the book Ms Hanley recounts a moment where her personal diary was discovered at school by her classmates, only to leave them baffled. It was covered in quotes from the Pet Shop Boys’ book, Annually. This sort of experience is, of course, now vanishing, as the personal jotter of today is more likely to be Tumblr. Teenagers may still feel isolated at school, but once they get online they can at least find a community to suit them. The use of pop music – and pop radio – as a sole access to another world is over.

Ms Hanley views the PSBs’ hits as a kind of entryist portal into a ‘secret language of taste and class’. The Pet Shop Boys were not only ‘The Smiths you can dance to’, as the critics’ tag went. Given daytime radio’s dislike of The Smiths, the PSBs were also The Smiths you could actually be exposed to. It was an era, says Ms H, ‘when it was possible to be sophisticated without apologizing for it’.

She goes on to talk about Momus, in fact, whose music she found through the Annie Nightingale show on Radio 1. A playlist made to accompany Respectable (kindly forwarded to me by the publicist, Emma Bal) includes the PSBs, Momus, and Denim’s ‘Middle of the Road’. Ms H likes that Lawrence is from Water Orton, close to where she grew up on the Chelmsley Wood estate, and that he keeps his accent for singing. I’m conducting a Q&A event next week with Lawrence himself, for a screening of Lawrence of Belgravia, so I shall try to mention this.

Having had my interest in the Pet Shop Boys renewed, I’ve also been investigating their fan club magazine Literally, which Ms Hanley must have received as a teenager, and which is still going today.  It’s always been in the same A5 print-only format, and has never been issued in an electronic version. How fascinating that a group as electronic as the Pet Shop Boys also believes in print-only media. That said, I do wish they’d reissue the Chris Heath biographies on Kindle.

I get hold of an issue from 2014, which captures the duo on a US tour. The PSBs now have a strict rule about never letting fans take their photo with them. Autographs, yes, photos, no. Saying no to a selfie is, I suppose, the new way of being sophisticated.

***

Evening: to Vout-o-reenee’s for the private view of a members’ group show. The club has its own art gallery, and many of the members are working artists. So the current show is a pleasingly eclectic experience which nevertheless holds together, thanks to some careful juxtapositions. There’s paintings, sculpture, electronic light displays, and some sort of conceptual work based around a fake blue plaque for Ralph Steadman. I’m a bit baffled by the latter.

Atalanta K’s artwork is a huge painting of two thin greyhound-like dogs, Borzois I think (Atalanta writes: ‘They’re actually Sloughis‘), posed vertically against a black background in the medieval heraldic style.

I also enjoy a painting of an anguished male face, in a pastiche of Francis Bacon’s ‘Screaming Pope’ style. The title is ‘Ceci n’est pas une pape’, or whatever the French is for ‘this is not a Pope’; thus punning on Magritte’s pipe. It takes a while to dawn on me that the figure is Ian Paisley.

**

Tuesday 9^th August 2016. To the Curzon Soho for The Neon Demon. I go to a late showing, after 9pm, which suits the film perfectly. Ostensibly a tale of struggling fashion models in LA, it quickly moves into a parade of stagey surrealism, eroticism, bizarre hallucinatory scenes, necrophilia, and finally violent horror. The idea that the fashion world is a form of cannibalism, where young bodies are ‘fresh meat’, is first taken figuratively, and then literally.

The film has had some of the most scathing reviews of the year, so it does rather force the viewer to take a binary side, for or against. In which case I’m on the ‘for’ side, as to write it off is overlook the manifestly superb visuals. Lots of pink-saturated tableaux of the models, whose beauty is so abstracted that it makes me think of the Terence Donovan video for Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Madame Butterfly’, currently on show in the Photographers’ Gallery. It also fits with the recent revival in unrepentant surrealism, as seen in The Lobster, Black Swan and Under the Skin, though mercifully it doesn’t have the latter’s scenes of people moping about aimlessly for minutes on end. I get enough of that at home.

But also it reminds me of Liquid Sky, the bizarre early 80s New Romantic film about models and aliens in New York. This is mainly because The Neon Demon has a very early 80s-like soundtrack, all pulsating synths and ominous drum machines.

What clinches the film as a work of worth is that it’s the first time in years I’ve seen strangers in a central London cinema turn to each other after the lights go up, and start up conversations about the film. That alone makes The Neon Demon special. ‘I think everyone should see it,’ says one woman to me. But not everyone can take gruesome imagery, however beautifully shot.

***

Wednesday 10^th August 2016. In the British Library or London Library at the moment, working on the review of the Pet Shop Boys book. There’s not many people about, which is nice, probably because of the fine weather, holidays, and the Edinburgh festival going on.

I’m using my old-school Neo2 word processor, which keeps me offline. Today I spend far too much time fiddling with the opening sentence of the review; always a mistake. You need to press on with the bulk of any piece, and then rework the beginning and ending after that. Today, thinking about Neil Tennant’s changing hairline on the Pet Shop Boys’ record sleeves, a joke suggests itself:

‘I’m not balding. My hair’s just gone post-imperial.’

***

Thursday 11^th August 2016. I’m in WH Smith’s in St Pancras, looking for the right colour clipboard to co-ordinate with my summer suits. I regard WH Smiths as a sort of non-binary option for stationery shops. It’s there for those times when one feels neither feminine enough for Paperchase, nor butch enough for Ryman.

I pass some young people sitting on a wall outside Birkbeck. They notice me, laugh and shout out:

‘Haha! His hair’s the same colour as his suit!’

I want to turn around and say, ‘Yes, dear heart. It’s called coordination. You wouldn’t understand.’

Something I don’t miss about being young: having to hang about in groups like that. On corners, or sitting on walls. But I’m not sure I ever did that when I was their age, anyway.

***

Friday 12^th August 2016. Early morning. I write this sitting in Spreads café on Pall Mall. A bedraggled, worn-out looking old woman is sitting near me, surround by bags, and trying not to fall aleep. She is dressed entirely in clothes from souvenir shops, topped off with a Union Jack beanie hat. Her t-shirt is an ‘I Heart London’ one. If she were a character in a drama about homelessness or immigration, the makers would be criticised for clunky symbolism. But that’s what she’s wearing.

***

A man at another café table is on his phone, telling off a colleague:

‘We’re not singing from the same hymn sheet, that’s the problem.’

There is a pause.

‘Okay, fair enough. We are both singing from the same hymn sheet. But you’re miming.’

Tags: anita brookner, lawrence of belgravia, lynsey hanley, pet shop boys, the neon demon, vout-o-reenee's

‘You’ll have trouble keeping that suit clean!’ laughs the 537th person today.  Yet when I take off my jacket and neckscarf and pretend to be normal, I find myself envying some other besuited dandyish guy walking about.

I just like to look like myself. Only problem is, to most people I am not myself, I am ‘Oy! Suit!’ until further notice. Roll on further notice.

***

Latitude is more eclectic than ever: this year’s bill includes Mew, Squeeze (the two following each other), Patrick Wolf, and Chas And Dave.  Not Patrick Wolf AND Chas and Dave. But I would never rule out such a team-up here.

A group of 11-year-old boys passes me. A plump, posh one – clearly the leader – suddenly shouts  ‘Hands up who wants to see Spiritualized?’

***

My Friday is very much a day of bits. Bits of acts watched, bits of bands heard. The way sound carries from the various PAs, it’s possible to stand in the woods some distance from the main stage, and hear a kind of organic remix. I can make out the Pet Shop Boys, sounding half underwater, with Bat For Lashes over the top, plus the occasional angry burst of existential swearing from the Poetry Arena. As the wind changes, the mix changes.

Today, I don’t see a single act from start to finish. It starts with me sticking my head inside the Literary Tent for a few minutes to catch Shappi Khorsandi, the Iranian-born comedienne who is currently everywhere. She’s reading from her book, ‘A Beginners Guide To Acting English’, specifically a conversation held at cross purposes with a taxi driver. The cabbie assumes that because she is a lone woman doing two ‘pub gigs’ in one night, she must be a stripper. When he asks her, ‘What do your parents think about your job?’ the daughter of an exiled Iranian satirist replies innocently, ‘Oh, my dad doesn’t mind at all. In fact, he does something similar himself…’

John Joseph B says hello, and I catch a bit of his show in the Cabaret Arena, called I Happen To Like New York. It’s a cross-dressing, picaresque monologue in the vein of Hedwig And The Angry Inch. As it’s more of a scripted story than a cabaret turn, one really needs to see the whole thing from start to finish, and I feel a bit guilty when I pop in about halfway through.

The latest score from the Ashes (or Test Match, or whatever it is), is displayed on a special hand-made board outside the festival’s Supermarket Tent. Years ago, one would assume the person doing the updating would have had a portable radio. These days they could be getting the score from their iPhone. But the score board is still hand-affixed numbers on bits of card, and that’s what pleases me.

I catch a little bit of Lykke Li (though miss her actual song ‘A Little Bit’). By this point I have Fickle Festival Goer syndrome, deliberately wanting a brilliant artist’s next song to be less than brilliant, so it’s okay for me to go and get my jacket from the yurt, or get a drink, or go for a pee, or whatever. Her opening number is heart-stoppingly wonderful, and I am happy. Her second song is just okay, so I am happier still. It means I can get my jacket.

FFG syndrome applies even more to established acts, as nostalgia enters the equation. When the Pretenders are on, you don’t want to be in the toilets for ‘Brass In Pocket’, so the more recent stuff has the Time For A Pee feel. But it can work the other way around. For some, dusty old hits might feel overfamiliar, even stale, and thus toilet-break bound. Going through the motions in every sense. Tracks from poor-selling recent albums may sound fresher live, performed with more gusto.

It depends what people want from their concerts, and what the artists think they might want. Cosy old destinations, or trips to unknown territory? It’s odd how people prefer new material to come from younger acts only (when everything is new), with the exception of Seasick Steve. He’s the Right Kind Of Old.

In my case, I flinch when bands reform just to play the old stuff, if I’ve already seen them first time around. My Bloody Valentine and the Pixies – whom I both saw circa 1990 – are back, but with no new albums. Take That can come back with new hits which eclipse their old stuff, so why can’t MBV and the Pixies?

Every other friend of mine has been raving about the concerts by the reformed Blur. As much as I like a few Blur singles, I can’t get over the sense of Pavlov’s jukebox – a conditioning for nostalgia. It’s as Philip Larkin described his later appearances when his poetry was drying up – ‘pretending to be myself’.

Is the appeal of the Pixies playing ‘Doolittle’ live any different to the appeal of ‘Mamma Mia’? And is there a Pixies musical yet?

There’s hypocrisy here, though: last year I watched the Buzzcocks run through all their old hits, and utterly loved every minute.  So there goes my own argument.

***

Never quite a nostalgia act themselves (I think they’ve resisted the ‘classic album in full’ gigs), the Pet Shop Boys typically pull out all the visual design stops, transforming a standard rock festival stage into their own Devo-meets-Gilbert & George installation. The theme of this one is cubes, squares, boxes and pixels, with a backdrop of white cubes as a projection screen, somewhat recalling Pink Floyd’s The Wall, of all things. Both Boys start off in blocky, Lego-like costumes with gauze cubes over their heads, accompanied by two robot-mannequin dancers whose cube heads revolve in sync. I notice how the older Neil Tennant gets, the higher and sweeter and more nasally-androgynous are his vocals. It’s like Leonard Cohen in reverse.

Despite all the synchronised videos, backing tracks of umpteen synth parts and programmed drums, the only aspect which feels unreal is Mr Tennant swaying slightly on his legs, or indeed moving about at all. Anything other than deadpan stillness seems too much like Rock. Which would never do.

The PSBs do a medley blending ‘Can You Forgive Her’ with a newer track in the same 6/8 time signature. This really does test my ‘old v new’ feelings. ‘Can You Forgive Her’ is one of my favourite songs by anyone ever. By playing snatches of it alongside bits of an unfamiliar new song, I feel frustrated. Medleys are not trying something new: they’re  non-commital dips, unsatisfying gestures, the musical equivalent of a DJ playing the start of a record for it to morph into a bootleg ‘mash-up’ with something else. Which might please the head (‘how clever!’), but rarely the heart (‘Aw… my favourite song. Where’s the rest of it?’)

On the recordings of Noel Coward’s 1950s supper-club performances, his medleys are outrageously cheeky: 20 seconds of one hit, followed by 15 seconds of another and so on. Just enough for the audience to recognise the song and to do that irksome thing of clapping to show they know what it is:

‘Don’t put your daughter on the stage Mrs Worthington (CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP)…. Someday I’ll find yooooooo (CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP)… Mad dogs and Englishmen go out – (CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP).’

Ultimately I’ll always want a whole song over any messing about with it. It feels okay to wander about a festival, sampling little bits of different acts, but not okay for the acts to do the same thing to their own material.

***
I meet up with Charley Stone and company (including Charlotte Hatherley) in one of the open-air Obelisk Arena’s raked seating sections. Combined with the huge video screens either side of the main stage, magnifying the performance with lots of  camera angles, it’s far and away the most comfortable audience option. At least, if like me you’re getting to that stage when you crave A Nice Sit Down, and can’t sit on the ground. My days of standing with the packed crowds Down The Front and braving the constant shoving are over. The only problem with the Obelisk Arena seats is being exposed to the elements, but it’s easily solved with an umbrella-cum-parosol.

[Update Sat morning: A strong wind turns the umbrella inside out and splits its spokes irretrievably. I did wonder why it was so cheap. Duration of brolly ownership: less than 24 hours.]

Charlotte H is playing twice this year, as guitarist for Bat For Lashes and as a solo act. Charley and I go to watch her with ‘The Lashes’, headlining in the Uncut Arena. It’s the largest marquee, with standing room only. The options are either standing at the back if you like a little space, though with a severely obscured view, or going further forward into the crowd and suffering the constant pushing and shoving. I remember how I used to deliberately follow bands with limited fanbases but brilliant records, so I’d never have to worry about this happening.  The Garage or New Cross Venue was my limit for standing-only gigs (or The Luminaire today).

Although I’m pleased that BFL’s brand of unbashed artiness and love of dressing-up (the singer enters in a big gold cape) is so popular, after two songs I am nearly kicked in the face by a child sitting on their dad’s shoulders. I read far too much symbolism into this.

By half past ten I’m in bed, utterly exhausted.

Tags: bat for lashes, catcalls, latitude, nostalgia acts, old hits versus new songs, pet shop boys, pretenders