Saturday 28th March 2015.

I finish Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Despite its stark, Hemingway-esque language, I can’t find myself as gripped by the story as the praise of the cover promises. I think it’s because I never was a fan of post-apocalyptic survival stories – or survival stories full stop. Robinson Crusoe repelled my interest up until the hero finally saw The Footprint (a scene mirrored in The Road). For all my love of being alone, I still need the knowledge that society is out there, burbling on reassuringly.

Two police officers hand out leaflets outside Highgate tube station. There’s been a spate of mobile phone thefts around the station exit. The thieves’ modus operandi is to drive up on mopeds, mount the pavement, and pluck a phone out from someone’s hands, before they realise what’s happened. So the police leaflet urges people to watch out for mopeds driving on the pavement. This would be a noticeable sight enough, I’d have thought. But no: the hypnotic effect of phones really does blind people to their environs. Heads in the clouds. Or rather, heads in the Cloud.

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Sunday 29th March 2015.

Afternoon: to the BFI Southbank with Ella H, for another film in the Flare festival: Regarding Susan Sontag. For once, it’s a tribute that’s not approved by the subject or their relatives. Even though Ms Sontag’s son and sister appear, it’s clear that the director’s own agenda has priority. As it is, the sister admits that SS ‘was never honest with me all her life’.  There’s no new interview from Annie Leibovitz, her last long-term companion. Instead, the film uses lots of archive footage and readings from her works, including the recent diaries. Its theme is more biographical than critical, so it feels at times gossipy, and at others frustratingly cagey; but then that was rather the fault of the subject. There’s no attempt to either completely praise or condemn Sontag: the film just wants people to regard her, as the title suggests. Make up your own mind. One old girlfriend tells outrageously filthy and possibly unreliable anecdotes. A bow-tied critic says ‘Do you really need to ask the author of ‘Notes on ‘Camp” to come out?

In fact, coming out is demonstrably still news in 2015. This week has seen newspaper stories about Ruby Tandoh, the 22-year-old former contestant of The Great British Bake Off, coming out as a queer woman (in her words). What’s interesting to me is that (a) she prefers ‘queer’ to ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’, and (b) that she recently wrote an article about camp as a form of personal empowerment, as inspired by Molly Ringwald’s prom dress in Pretty in Pink. She quotes Susan Sontag’s 50-year-old essay.

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Tuesday 31st March 2015.

Evening: to the Tottenham Court Road Odeon with fellow Birkbeck student Jon S, to see Get Hard. Jon’s suggestion. He suspects it’s not exactly My Sort Of Film, but I’m happy to give it a go. It turns out to be an undemanding, broader-than-broad Hollywood comedy. It stars Will Ferrell as a pampered businessman, who has to prepare for time in jail. Kevin Hart plays his car wash manager, who teaches Ferrell how to, as it were, ‘get hard’, so he’ll survive. The film seems to be trying to ape those rich-white-versus-poor-black comedies from the 80s, like Trading Places. Except it’s now 2015, and the places have done a fair amount of their own trading. Things have changed.

It is safe to say that this film is not going to usurp Citizen Kane from the canon of peerless art. The plot is risible, the jokes are obvious, tired, insulting, and the whole thing is doubtlessly offensive to many. But I find the tone intriguing – it uses racial and gay stereotypes for many of the jokes, then goes to pains to paint the characters as anti-racist and anti-homophobic. Interestingly, the one type of prejudice which it uses for comedy, but doesn’t apologise for, is sexism. Perhaps this is due to the in-built ‘male gaze’ of the Hollywood machine. As some female critics have pointed out, even the Oscar-winning Birdman gets away with sexism, in the guise of defining its male anti-heroes.

Still, the force of the performances – especially the manic Mr Hart – carry it along. There’s enough decent jokes to get the Tottenham Court Road Odeon’s mixture of students and tourists laughing loudly for much of it. Although it’s not nearly as witty as Appropriate Behaviour, I enjoy being in a room of laughing popcorn-guzzling strangers, as opposed to a silent room of arthouse fans, the kind who regard laughter as uncool.

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Thursday 2nd April 2015.

Morning: to the V&A with Heather M, for the exhibition Alexander McQueen – Savage Beauty. It’s somewhat more than a collection of fashionable frocks. The late Mr McQueen was a pure artist, without a doubt, but also a very popular one – a kind of rock star designer. He managed to convert oddness and incongruity into mass-market glamour (see also Lady Gaga). In this exhibition, his short life’s productivity and range of invention leaves one dizzy, particularly in the room that becomes a gigantic Cabinet of Curiosities, with compartments spiralling upwards until the exhibits are out of sight. There’s screens, lighting effects, theatricality, lots of nods to animals and horror films, a room in mock-catacomb décor, and spooky mannequins with gimp masks and horns. It’s at turns beautiful, bizarre, frightening, and, like a lot of posthumous celebrations, life-enhancing.

Heather M is a member of the V&A, which means we can take tea in the member’s café. This is tucked away in the glassware gallery on the fourth floor. I never get tired of the way one has to access it behind a mirrored door.

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Afternoon: at the London Library and British Library, researching my essay on American post-9/11 anxieties. I read some essays on capitalist symbolism in the 2008 Batman film The Dark Knight. It can be argued that Heath Ledger’s Joker is zero-hours capitalism taken to an extreme: he kills off his own henchmen as soon as they’ve completed their task in hand. Then he sets fire to all the money they’ve helped him steal, in a huge, blazing pyre of dollar bills.

Other essays read the film as an allegory for the War On Terrorism, but I prefer the capitalism-allowed-to-go-mad reading. I suddenly thought of Shelley’s apocalyptic poem The Mask of Anarchy, written in response to the Peterloo massacre of 16 August 1819. An old, old story: a political protest leads to government violence upon crowds, with the result that new laws are rushed in to tackle the scapegoat of ‘anarchists’. Shelley’s point is that the government are the real ‘masked’ anarchists.

So I’ve decided to link this to mask imagery in 9/11 texts, such as in the aforementioned Batman film, in Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel In The Shadow of No Towers, and in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalists. I’m also bringing in Native American ‘trickster’ mythology and a story by Henry James that describes the first NYC skyscrapers as having ‘sinister masks’ (in his American Scene of 1907, James really hates skyscrapers). Today I find a quote by Ralph Ellison on identity – ‘America is a land of masking jokers’. You can imagine how smug I felt after that.

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Evening: to the Queen’s Head in Acton Street, Kings Cross. A birthday gathering for Ms Shanthi S. My anxiety levels are over the top already, what with the ever-approaching deadlines for college. Tonight there’s the double worry of having to arrive to join a group by oneself – I always feel a torrent of awkwardness when I do that – made worse by realising the birthday table is full up. But after an interval of getting in the way of the ladies loos, eventually the table is moved to allow more space for chairs. I squeeze in, have a glass of rosé, and calm down.

One of Ms S’s friends at the table is Bill Drummond. He was one of the men behind the 90s hit band The KLF, who went on to did Situationist-style art-pranks with all the money they made. One such project was the simple burning of a million pounds in cash, and filming themselves doing so.

I don’t manage to speak to Mr Drummond. It seems rude to go up to him purely to ask one question, the one which immediately occurs: did he see the cash-burning scene in The Dark Knight and think, ‘been there, done that’?

Mr D is speaking to a man who apparently is an advisor to the Labour Party’s business spokesman. Jokes about the burning of cash write themselves.

Tags: alexander mcqueen, bfi flare, bill drummond, birkbeck, get hard, regarding susan sontag, ruby tandoh, the dark knight, v&a