Sitting here, going through all the CDs I’m disposing of, waiting for this laptop to convert the songs I want to keep (or haven’t even listened to yet) into mp3s.
Last night – to the Drill Hall for a private view of painter Sadie Lee’s new show, And Then He Was A She, comprising her new portraits of Holly Woodlawn, the transgendered Warhol Superstar immortalised in the opening line of that Lou Reed song. Ms Woodlawn is depicted at the age she is now in raw, excoriatingly vivid poses: half-dressed, undressing, getting dressed, topless without wig or make-up but with a walking frame and cigarette, in gigantic close-up on huge canvasses. But instead of playing to the archetypal stranger’s prurience of wondering what goes on beneath a transsexual’s clothes, these are exquisitely rendered celebrations of defiance; the individual taking on the unfairness of gender, flesh, age, infirmity, the smoking bans, the world. And triumphing, surviving. For context, it’s accompanied by a second room full of biographical material through the years: looped footage of Ms Woodlawn in those Warhol films, selected 1970s portraits and so on.
I say hello to Ms Lee, who’s in a marvellous silver suit and lipstick, playing host. I also chat to Ella Guru, to Maggie Hambling, to Zoe who I used to work with at Kenwood House, to Pippa Brook who was in the bands Posh and Shopgirl and is now in a band called All About Eve Babitz, and to Lea Andrews of Spy 51 and her girlfriend Gemma, soon to be married.
Another famous Holly, Holly Johnson the singer (of Frankie Goes To Hollywood fame), is there. I sign my name in the guest book under his. He puts a PO Box, under something like ‘Pleasuredome Enterprises’.
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Email re Music & Video Exchange:
whatever you do dont go back to soul and dignity exchange – they are the worst rip offs in the world.
Time Out Magazine featured MVE in their ‘Worst Customer Service’ feature the other week, but I do have a couple of perfectly lovely friends who work there. I think it depends which branch and which employee you get. I also appreciate they have to take into account their own storage space, avoiding duplicating items, and so on. And snootiness tends to be part and parcel of any record shop that knows its stuff, a la High Fidelity.
That the person behind the counter might be some dusty acquaintance of old makes it even harder to want to go there as a seller. The awkwardness would be doubled. After both parties have been forced into the requisite teeth-sucking and pained expressions, meeting in a social capacity afterwards might never quite be the same. Going there as a buyer, though, no problem.
