Category: ultracultural

And people think I’m fussy?

I giggled at this passage that I just encountered in The Joe Orton Diaries:

Peter Willes rang up. ‘What do you mean by sending me such an atrocious script?’ he said. ‘What?’ I said. ‘All the “O’s” are out of line. I can’t read a script like that. Haven’t you another copy? ‘No,’ I said. “I’ll have to get it retyped,’ he said. ‘I can’t let the actors see a script in that state.’ ‘Did you read the script?’ I said. “A little.’ ‘What did you think of it?’ ‘I thought it rather dated,’ he said, ‘though that may have been the effect of the “O’s”.’

See? Good typography makes a difference.

One more thing about Orton

You know, there are lots of other things that have been happening that might be better to write about (Travel and work abroad! Fetishwear spending sprees! The waxing and waning of various flirtations!) but all that stuff always takes so much time and effort that I ought to be devoting to things that actually help pay my bills. But since I’ve just started reading The Orton Diaries on today’s bus/tube/plane/train trip, I’m thinking again about a certain ex and all the similarities between him and Orton’s carefully constructed public persona that just seem too perfect to be a coincidence. And the intro of the book also reminded me that Orton’s diaries and letters are held at my old university, in the library where a certain someone also used to work.

Also, Orton is still really sexy and smart and funny. But kind of a jerk, just like a certain someone always was.

Prick up your what now?

Joe Orton

I’ve just finished the original book, and am now finally watching the filmed version of Prick Up Your Ears, the biography of playwright Joe Orton. I had a nagging sensation while reading the book that there was a lot about Orton that reminded me of an ex of mine with whom I had one of my more melodramatic relationships. Twice.

Gary Oldman as Joe Orton

Watching the film now, I’m convinced that Orton — and particularly Gary Oldman’s performance as Orton — fed into this guy’s personal mythology, and certainly his kit bag of posturing and affectations. He was, like Orton, a guy from a fucked-up working class background who picked himself up by his bootstraps using a fistful of natural intelligence and talent. Like Orton, he was also sexy as fuck and kind of a smug, self-satisfied cock. I don’t recall him ever mentioning Orton — I guess by the time we’d met he’d moved on to other literary obsessions. Actually, it would be more in character if he’d decided that Orton wasn’t much to think about from a literary standpoint, no matter how much he played up the same kind of romantic rebel schtick.

Sex and the Pity

I was too tired to face the drunken hordes of Brighton last night, so I decided to just chill out and catch a late show of Sex and the City at the cinema near my hotel. There’s no point in giving a review of any kind, since there are so many others out there who are actually bothering. (Overall? Meh.) I just have a handful of quick thoughts:

  • Um, that’s not the lending library.
  • David Eigenberg is still my favorite of all the men who’ve been trotted out on that show over the years.
  • I’ve finally figured out who Samantha Jones has reminded me of all this time: Alison Steadman in Abigail’s Party.

    And that’s praise, not criticism.

  • Is it just me, or was the whole movie a lot more explicit about the label whoring and the obscene wealth of the characters than the show ever was? I mean, the references were always there, but it all just felt a lot more vulgar in the movie. Maybe it was just the effect of seeing so many of those aspects of the show crammed down your throat all at one time.
  • Oh, and there’s a term for this kind of script that comes at the end of a long-running series and tries to make everything hunky-dory in the most contrived ways: fan service.
  • It was weird to walk out of the fantasy version of my old home town and into the streets of Brighton on a Friday night. I couldn’t help but notice the trickle-down effect of the SATC dream as it manifests itself in the real world, elsewhere.

Cultural Miseducation

For ages, most of what I knew about the golden age of Hollywood came from figuring out the jokes on old sketches from The Carol Burnett Show, which I watched in reruns pretty regularly as a kid. Until about three or four years ago, this was all I really knew about the story of Gone with the Wind:

(From Nerve and IFC‘s “50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of All Time“, which is filed with genius.)

Very Barbara Pym

It is these asides, I think, that make Excellent Women so beguiling. The plot itself is not without interest, but it is the narrator’s comments on her world and on the scraps of pleasure it allows her that are so utterly engaging; as where Mildred says, right at the beginning: ” ‘I have to share a bathroom,’ I had so often murmured, almost with shame, as if I personally had been found unworthy of a bathroom of my own.” To be found unworthy of having one’s own bathroom is such an unexpected notion, but it is amusing because it is a cri de coeur of frustrated ambition, of a desire to be something that fate will clearly never allow one to be.

Stuff You Should See

For a while there I wasn’t getting out of town and doing too much, just hanging around Reading and my room trying to watch my budget and get some work done. (I may have also been a bit gloomy for the last few months, but that’s another issue altogether.) I’ve been trying to take advantage of some free time in London lately, though, culminating in a huge culture bender yesterday.

In the morning I went to the Design Museum to catch the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year (I know, but it’s better than the name makes it sound) exhibition and a retrospective of architect/designer/engineer Jean Prouvé.

The Design Awards show had lots of nice things, but it wasn’t especially stirring since I’d seen so many of them reproduced before. The fashion bits were a really great surprise, though, and some of the interactive stuff seemed interesting but I was prevented from getting a closer look by a pack of French school kids swarming around anything shiny in the gallery. It was also nice that they included Titus Nemeth‘s sketchbook as well as some of the proofs from his development of his Naseem typeface, which was perhaps the only part of the whole exhibition that shed any light on how some of the winning work came about.

The Prouvé show was excellent, and luckily the ticket for the museum lets you experience the brilliance of his stuff for a bit more, since it also gives you admission to his protoype Maison Tropicales, which has been reassembled over at the Tate Modern. (Hopefully I’ll get a chance to check that out before the end of the weekend, at which time I may indulge in the big Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia exhibition they’re running.)

China Design Now

The highlight of the day was an impromptu visit to the Design China Now show at the V&A. It’s really Uh.May.Zing., especially since so much of the design work (except for the architecture) doesn’t seem to have been shown around much in the West before, not even in the current explosion of design blogs. It’s packed with gorgeous work, and for those of you with real jobs and stuff the related products they’re selling in the shop might be just as tempting as the show itself. Seriously, just go.

My Idol

John Waters by Nan Goldin

For well over twenty years this man has been my hero. No lie. No exaggeration. It was John Waters and his affectionate fascination with with trash — and his own stylish, articulate, and eccentric way of blazing his own trail — that encouraged me to fully embrace whatever aspects of the high and low culture around me that caught my fancy. I was always a quirky kid. It was John who taught me that was a good thing.

Waters is most famous as a filmmaker, of course, but it was actually his books that first blew my mind. From the moment in high school when I first read Shock Value and Crackpot, I was hooked. When I finally caught a double feature of Polyester and Desperate Living some time in 1987 or so, they just confirmed what I had already come to treasure about his view of the world.

It’s easy to peg Waters and his work as campy irony or immature shock tactics, but everything he’s written, ever talk I’ve heard him give, and every interview I’ve ever read has made it clear that he really believes in the underdog and the honesty of being what you want to be, no matter how trashy. In Waters’ world, you’re only evil if you’re a superior asshole who doesn’t want others to be happy doing their own thing. For a man of refined tastes, his sense of irony is not something he uses to maintain a distance from anything, it’s a way of celebrating the lovable in the generally unloved.

He’s demeted and sweet and mischievous. When Hairspray first came out, I loved that the master of trash had made a subversive movie the whole family could love. Even the musical version throws a sucker punch or two in the midst of its squeaky clean reinterpretation of the movie:

Waters is entirely unconcerned about his oeuvre becoming softened as it goes broad. “In a way, the most subversive thing I ever did was think up Hairspray, because now families are sitting there watching two men sing a love song,” Waters said, as a car finally pulled over. “Who would ever have thought that Jerry Mathers, who I grew up with” — the child star in the title role on Leave It to Beaver, who now plays the father in Hairspray — “would be singing to a man in a dress on Broadway in something I wrote!” (From his New York interview)

I want to keep trying to be like him as I keep trying to grow up.