Paella As Performance Art - Covent Garden

For a couple of days in early March it was Spring in London. Blue skies, temperatures in the 60's and sunshine. Not so much for the rest of the year. Anyway, I was wandering through the Covent Garden Piazza that Sunday and saw this... Paella as performance.

Elles - A Film of Two Versions

So I saw Elles the other Sunday. You may need to check which version your local art-house is playing, because I think there are two. They look the same, but somewhere there's a subtle difference.

Elles is about Juliette Binoche writing an article about two students (Anais Demoustier from the bainlieus and Joanna Kulig from the Polish tower blocks) studying in Paris, who work as prostitutes. They get their dates through an Internet site, so they don't have pimps, and they don't have drug problems, and they seem to be studying as well. They have flats you and I would like to have, and Joanna Kulig has a LOT of shoes as well as an amazing pair of natural breasts. The clients range from a hot young man to an abusive creepy guy to a guy who breaks into tears when faced with Anais Demoustier's lower regions (Even ten years ago I wouldn't have understood that, but I do now.) 

Meanwhile, our Juliette has a husband who keeps answering his mobile in the middle of supposedly important conversations, an older son who's skipping school (because his parents are such great role models) and a much younger son who plays computer games. The younger son is there to indicate that even after a chunk of years, Juliette and her husband were still enjoying a full marriage. Hubby and older son have porn on their "ordi's" (the diminuitive of "ordinateur", so presumably slang for "laptop").  She's a workaholic, deadline-fearing, control freak who feels her actual life is betraying the bourgeois dream she must have had when she got married. Binoche is the go-to actress to play complicated women who you know would be unbearably irritating after an actual whole day, and I suspect we weren't supposed to sympathise with her, but to see her as the problem, not the victim.

The film I saw seemed to have three main positions. First: "the girls come from poverty, can make enough money to get nice flats and things while studying, and you're going to expect them not to? How much do you know about the world in 2012 exactly?"  Second: "so guys go to hookers, and when what they have at home is Juliette, what exactly do you expect them to do?" Third: "sure some of the guys are creeps and some are nice, and some are sad and some are slightly weird but fun. You were expecting what, exactly?"

The film I saw was a stylish (code for "lots of designer clothes, really good photography and set design") but emotionally realistic piece of story-telling - even if it is about a very small niche in Parisian society. I thought it showed the rewards and risks of the lives the girls were leading quite well, and it didn't fall into all the tired old cliches about up-market prostitution.

Other people saw a movie that didn't get with the program and give us those tired old cliches about up-market prostitution. As in "Szumowska provides lurid scenes of perverted sex, but she offers no new insight into the sordid world of prostitution and the dangers sex workers face" or "In case you have forgotten, all women are prostitutes, and all men are johns" or "Szumowska attempts to draw an equivalence between Anne’s line of work and that of her young subjects, but fails to make anything meaningful stick. Elles is the polar opposite of Steve McQueen’s Shame: while that film was a scorching tract on the commodification of desire, this is just smut with a baccalauréat". The last reviewer clearly imbibes the Kool-Aid and is looking for a job in the British Film Industry - Shame was a load of cliched codswallop with zero insight into anything. 

This movie commits the cardinal Anglo left-wing feminist sin of failing to show women as victims, the cardinal Anglo misandrist sin of sympathy to men, and the cardinal Anglo female solidarity sin of being on the side of hot young girls against tired and dishevelled wives. I stress the "Anglo" bit, because anyone who has met Polish women will know that they don't really connect with all those Anglo views. Somewhere in this movie is an understanding for all the hot girls who cashed in their hotness while they could - and if there's one thing Anglo misandrists hate more than men, it's hot girls who cash in.

A recurring device through the movie is the use of classical music to indicate that our Juliette is having a fantasy sequence. This would make the happy-family ending - where everyone is sitting round the breakfast table, in contrast to the harried and un-communal real breakfast at the start - a complete fantasy. In which case we can guess that things are not working out well. I suspect that the film-makers had to compromise at points, and this ambiguous happy ending was one such compromise.

When It's Never Cool To Be Single

There are two occasions when it is very difficult to be cool and an older single guy. The first is Saturday after about 10:30 in the morning, and the second is on any kind of away-from-home holiday.

Saturday is couples day, parading-our-domestic-bliss (or misery) day, groups of people having fun day, football day, let's go running in the park with two hundred other people day. Saturday is the one day when it isn't grown-up and sophisticated to be doing something on your own. An early breakfast on your own is just about okay, but after that the Couples take over, bringing their entitlement and crying babies with them. (I live in London, your Couples may be nicer.) Saturday night is, of course, amateur night out. A sensible older guy gets an early night so he's fresh and ready for the gym Sunday morning.

Away-from-home holidays are weird when you're an older single guy. Especially if you have, as I have, forsworn mood-altering substances. It's one thing to spend the day in a slight alcoholic daze, and another entirely to be awake at 06:30 with sixteen hours to fill before bedtime - on your own. No-one to talk to, no-one to shag, no-one to eat with. £1,000 for airfare, hotel, food, car rental and gas: that's expensive sand between your toes. A thought that will vanish the moment you hook up and actually get laid. Which is why the "older guy" bit matters. Older guys don't hook up on holiday. (Very few people hook up on holiday - except drunk English women with local guys.) A holiday is a strain of its own that only single guys know about ("I'm enjoying this, I really am, this is interesting, it really is, look at that, look at this" is a mantra that goes through your head a lot).    

On Saturday morning, and the morning of any away-from-home holiday I want to wake up in a good hotel in Paris, Amsterdam, New York, London, or a beautiful beach location, with a sexy woman next to me, make love again, have breakfast in bed, watch her shower, and walk round wherever like we own it, which with her beauty and my whatever it is that I must have for her to be there, we will. 

That's not going to happen. I don't have the money. For the airfare and hotel, let alone the woman. However much I know all this stuff, Saturdays and holidays always get me down. ("Rainy days and Mondays" have nothing on "Saturdays and Holidays"). Perhaps "down" is too strong a word. I can't escape the hollow feeling. Which vanishes the moment I wake up Sunday morning. (If you're single and a guy and not in a relationship, yes, there will come a time when waking up alone Sunday morning will not hurt like a mofo. Mind you, not for a couple of decades.) 

Which is why I have years when I don't "go on holiday" and years when I do. And why Saturday never feels right, no matter what I do. The reason I know this about being single and the timing, is that none of this happens when I stay with friends at weekends, and none of it happens during a work-week. Saturday Bloody Saturday.

Spitalfields Oxfam "Shwopping" PR Event

So one rainy Monday lunchtime, I head off to a nearby record store with a cafe to do some writing and pretend I don't work in a crappy open-plan office with more flu germs in the aircon than Porton Down. And I see a couple of cranes hanging clothes out to dry. Or get wet.

Tuesday there's even more, and I asked a guy who was taking pictures of people taking pictures of the clothes who the artists was. It's Oxfam, he said. There's going to be a Press Event Thursday. With Joanna Lumley.

I missed the event on Thursday (I was having a very bad week) and went back Friday. 

The article says "Brick Lane", "Old Truman Brewey" and "London College of Fashion" so I'm guessing there were artist / designers involved in laying it out and making it. The clothes are fastened to a chicken-wire type frame.

If only as much though had gone into the name. "Shwopping"? Huh? What? How stoned do you have to be to think that up, and what exact units of measurement do we need to estimate the tastelessness that decided to use it? 

What's Missing From An Active Urban Life-Style

I ran across this quote on VK's Empire of Dirt while wandering around what's known as the manosphere.

"... most of the guys I know... work a full hard day, ...go straight to the gym put in some work there. The[y] go home, cook a nice meal, watch a little bit of tv, write, or do whatever with the little time [they] have and then go to bed. I might be weird but in my social circle I don’t know any guy that goes home and just drinks a six pack of beer for the hell of it and if they did, I’d ask them what’s wrong with them."

If you live in a Big City, you will recognise that life. I do. I wake up at 05:30 and get to bed at 22:00. I'm seriously thinking of making that 21:30 or even 21:00. I used to be a night owl, but now I wake the birds up so they can sing their dawn chorus. There's no evening left. Anyway, I'm an old geezer while VK and the guys he knows aren't. The thing is, there's something missing from his day. Look at it carefully: it's the life of a single man. There's no-one at home. And there's someone else missing...

The Gang.

That variable-sized, varying-membership group of guys and gals you hang with, call up when you want to go out, go to sports and concerts and clubs with, drop in on when you don't want to be on your own, and who make up the cast of your social life. I was in or at least connected with three gangs, one at university, one in my twenties and one in my thirties, but being shy and non-social and an alcoholic, I only really used them as an occasion to drink. The mythical literary groups and artistic movements of the twentieth-century were Gangs, sometimes ex-pats and other times brought together by common interests (the Surrealists) or common ambition (the YBA's). Not that my Gangs were as glamorous, but it's a vivid illustration.

VK could be taking Gang Time for granted, but I wonder. It takes a reasonable amount of commitment to keep a Gang functioning: most of the people in it need to show up at least once a month, and it needs two or three parties a year so that everyone can gather and keep up.

People move jobs, find partners and think they don't need to go out, get jobs that leave them no energy. Or they start going to the gym. Unless it's on your way home, the gym takes up the last bit of spare time and energy you have for the day. My commute doesn't help much either. Social-life Gangs eventually fade away, and there's quite a few ex-members who thought they were being more mature and growing up and like that as they contributed to the fade. But they weren't. 

I was chatting the other day about networks and Masons to someone at work. Cynics both, we agreed that such things were useful to people who could be useful. A regular salaryman with no authority to do anything and no useful friends or contacts - like me - brings nothing to a network (let alone the Masons) and consequently doesn't get included in, however polite people may be. It's the same with The Gang. People drop out when it no longer meets any of their needs, or when they realise that it never did.

Until they find themselves putting in a full day's work, going to the gym, going home to cook a nice meal, watching some Netflix and going to bed. Maybe going to the movies or a show or a gallery every week, and going girl-hunting whenever. It works for a while, right up to the point where you notice that your morale and motivation has dropped to zero and you have no idea how to get it back again. When I had a Gang, all I had to do was spend some time with them. It made me feel like I had a life - even if I really didn't - and that was enough to get me back again.

Resolutions From A Stay-At-Home Holiday

I spent last week on holiday, at the Plage-de-Sept-Cadrans in the further western reaches of Greater London. That's a shot down the path to the road leading to the Plage. When it was hailing.

Each day I went to bed at ten-thirty and woke up between half-six and seven the next morning feeling something I haven't felt for the longest while. Rested. Relaxed. Content to just lie in bed for a few moments. You know what a real holiday is? When you don't have a giant to-do / must see / must keep busy list to tick off, but there is some stuff you'd like to get done, just not some giant project.

Mine was about getting all the DVD's and CD's off the shelves and into boxes - I'm neat, my house is small, and those things no longer represent a "collection", a subject I will write about later. Over the week I bought twelve packs of plastic CD slips from Rymans and six shoe-box size boxes from Paperchase, and it's still not completely done. I had ten black plastic bags of DVD covers and CD boxes. Nine three-foot shelves of box sets and single CD's / DVD's are in six double CD-width boxes. It took a lot longer to make the transfer than you might think. I sourced, bought, assembled and used a new lawnmower, since the last one burned out after a lot of service. I had lunch at some good local restaurants, went to the gym and watched a bunch of movies and stuff on the DVD player. 

Mostly I enjoyed the feeling that I could set off to do something and have enough time to do it, without feeling it was taking time from other stuff or "life". For the first time in a very long time, I wanted to leave the house to "do stuff", rather than wanting to stay in so I wouldn't have to see the outside world. (Not sure if that will last a week at work though.)

As I revelled in having a proper relaxed level of hormones going around me, I was able to get a few things straight:

1. Spinning and running are on hold for a while - I suspect Renata-the-trainer is right and both activities mess my hormones up

2. The corrective training schedule Renata's given me, done three times a week gives me the feeling that "I've done enough work" whereas what I was doing before didn't give me the feeling that what I was doing was enough

3. Gym is twice during the week and Sundays - the other evenings are for kicking back one way or another.

4. I will blog twice a week from now on - right now, three times a week is taking too much time and effort, and the quality is too variable. Tuesdays and Fridays. 

And when I say "hailstones", I mean, like this. Click to enlarge and see April hailstones.

On Not Begging In Cafes

Big Issue Guy just came into the Caffe Nero where I and a number of other people come first thing (I mean 07:40) in the morning to have a quiet cup of coffee, sit at our laptops and get into whatever mood we need to be in. He walked from table to table with his spiel and we all said NO in one way or another. I just shook my head and didn't even look at him. None of us felt bad about it and all of us felt irritated that he was in the cafe importuning us. Does that make us selfish salarymen with no sense of charity and not a shred of human kindness? 

I don't think so. Just because he's short of money and down on his luck doesn't mean that he gets to be inconsiderate to us. Why was he being inconsiderate? Read my opening sentence. He knows why people come into cafes and he knows we don't want to be disturbed - more or less by anyone or anything. We don't want adverts, let alone passing life insurance salesmen (they don't sell on the street any more now I guess) or charity collectors. We don't really want other people bringing their arguments and bad vibes in. Everyone knows this. People who then ignore it are being inconsiderate. 

However, what applies to Big Issue Guy applies to anyone trying to sell me something. This is what's wrong with hospitals and doctors' surgeries showing fake TV channels stuffed with advertising. I didn't ask for it and I'm already paying for the place with my taxes - making me watch ads is making me pay twice. London Transport long ago struck the right balance, using the ads in effect to decorate the stations and sticking to posters, which after a while I find I can tune out. Almost no-one else gets the balance right: I accept that commercial radio needs to broadcast ads to make money, but then I don't listen to it, and ditto for commercial TV. That's why I buy box sets. I have no idea at all how 8Tracks pays for itself, and assume that at some stage it will be polluted by ads. When Facebook inundated me with dating ads I nearly cancelled my account, until I said I wasn't interested in finding anyone of any sex ever.

What I'd like is for The Big Issue to tell its vendors not to enter cafes, restaurants and other places. Robust proprietors chase them out anyway - but I can't expect the pleasent and busy barristas in Caffe Nero to do that.