The Culture Blog For Connoisseurs Of Everything

At lunchtime on the day before the Sunday People published pictures of Charles Saatchi engaging in ‘a playful tiff’ with his wife, I was standing at a market stall outside his magnificent art gallery in Chelsea, slurping down oysters laced with Tabasco. They were horribly delicious. I ate half a dozen then wandered over to another stall in what was turning out to be a really first rate food market and bought a bottle of Sagres beer for a pound. A pound! For a beer! In Chelsea! While I was consuming this a gang of surly cumulonimbi that had been lurking over Sloane Square snuck up behind and tipped a torrent of water on my head. It was that really wettening sort of rain that gets down the back of your neck. Nonetheless I remained in good cheer and took refuge under a gazebo opposite a trio of Frenchmen who were selling duck sandwiches. It seemed rude not to order one so I did, by shouts and gestures. A ton of duckmeat was frying in a great pan, and my stomach, already aroused by the oysters and beer, murmured in anticipation. While waiting I turned to the American hipster next to me and made a small remark about being so hungry that I could eat the pan’s entire contents. The hipster was wearing a tiny white baseball cap on the back of his head, a garish Jackson Pollock-style shirt in red, brown and gold, drainpipe trousers rolled up at the bottom and a needless scarf. And yet, do you know, he looked at me
as if I was the
weirdo.

***

I have fallen in love, as happens from time to time, with a pop song. It is this one. I’m not sure if hipsters approve of Vampire Weekend, who seem pretty hip as a band but perhaps are too preppy or some such fine distinction, frankly I neither know nor care. As well as having one of the loveliest melodies since The Low Anthem’s Charlie Darwin, the words speak to me. The gloves are off, the wisdom teeth are out. Why, that’s just the sort of thing I’d write if I was writing a song. At first I tried to think about what it meant, but of course there’s no mystery. Like most art made by men, it’s about: (a) the fear of mortality; and (b) the desire to get laid.

***

The current show at the Saatchi gallery is called Paper and it has the usual 9:1 ratio of ridiculous to sublime. The best work by far is that of Yuken Teruya, who cuts exquisite little paper trees out of the sides of paper bags. You peep into a McDonalds carrier and see a tiny oak – the sensation is one of childlike wonder. But otherwise, all sex and death. So much for male art. But what is female art about? It is about mysterious, unnameable things. And when women get ridiculous, my goodness me, they really get ridiculous. Here’s how the guide leaflet describes the latest project by Nina Katchadourian:

Nina Katchadorian’s Seat Assignment project makes use of materials readily available on flights. Locking herself in the toilet, she takes self-portrait photos on her phone in the style of 15^th century Flemish portraiture. An inflatable neck cushion becomes a makeshift headdress; a paper toilet seat cover stands for a plain white collar. Her works draw parallels between the Old Master belief in his ability to generate an eternal memory and the ubiquity of the contemporary self-portrait.

Now that’s a niche.

***

I wouldn’t swap our Parliamentary system for any other but its binary oppositional nature can be tiresome when the Opposition opposes solely for politicking reasons. The current Eds-led Opposition is surely the worst for this in living memory, and it is it on education that this worst Opposition is at its oppositional worst. Under Michael Gove over half of secondary schools have opted to convert to academy status –  a much-needed revolution in the system for which, as Andrew Adonis has pointed out, Labour should actually be taking credit, since academies were their idea. But principled Labour men like Adonis or Frank Field are few in this hideous Brownite rabble of Oxbridge-special-adviser phonies.

The scandal of state education over recent decades is often understated, All those years of grades supposedly ‘improving’ while, thanks to exam board corruption and self-serving unions and ministers we were slipping further and further behind the rest of the world until we’ve ended up with a two-tier system: the best private schools on the planet for the privileged few, and a state sector that sees mediocrity as the most a poor child can achieve. And by sending so many young people into life without useful skills but with huge debts and worthless degrees, we’ve ripped off a generation.

So thank God for Gove. There is so much I like about him. I like that I knew of him before he became an MP, that he is an opinionated culture-vulture who speaks in full and terribly precise sentences. I like that he’s the adopted son of a Labour-supporting Aberdeen fish merchant. That he went to a state school but won an independent school scholarship and that this has given him a confirmed belief in the value of education and a desire to give similar opportunities to those who can’t afford private fees. I like that he has undisguised contempt for his foes, whom he rightly sees as defenders of a failed status quo and as enemies of the poor. I like that he is hated and constantly misrepresented by The Guardian and Independent and that nut Michael Rosen. I like his weird, purse-lipped saintliness.

The Meaning of Liff defines ‘glenties’ as a “series of small steps by which someone who has made a serious tactical error in a conversation or argument moves from complete disagreement to wholehearted agreement.” Saint Michael is so obviously on the right side of the argument that it is unsurprising to see his Opposition equivalent Stephen Twigg making small but unmistakeable glenties to Gove.

***

I don’t know about you but since Saturday’s Wikiworm I’ve been whistling the Colonel Bogey March and singing about Nazi testicular abnormality round the clock. Adolf Hitler: the single most important figure in British cultural identity of the last 100 years.

***

Fans of The Ginger Man will recognise the concluding verse of the first diary chunk above as a nod to J P Donleavy. My article about him in Slightly Foxed magazine has prompted generous correspondence, including actual physical handwritten letters (remember those?). Particularly interesting is this email from Mr Denis Mayne of Northern Ireland, which I quote here with his permission…

I read The Ginger Man when I was a wayward student at Trinity College in Dublin in the 1950s and like Mr Nixon I was more enthralled by the antics of Sebastian Dangerfield than I was about the sex scenes.

The book was dramatised as a play and I had the good fortune to attend the first – and last – night when it was performed in Dublin. I arrived after the curtain had gone up and slipped into a row near the back. It slowly dawned on me that I was the only person in the theatre who was laughing. The reason for this was revealed when the lights were turned up at the interval. Apart from myself the audience consisted of a few small groups of priests and nuns who were there, of course, to condemn and close the play. At first I was amused by the ludicrousness of the scene and then realised that I was witnessing something profoundly sinister in this gathering of small clumps of ominous black, faceless and silent predators. I actually felt quite nervous for I was in the midst of a coven of the Irish Purity Police who controlled what the people of Ireland could and could not read, view or hear; the Church’s version of the three monkeys who ‘hear no evil, see no evil and say no evil’. It was rare to see these people in public for like the foot soldiers of all secret police forces they preferred to maintain anonymity […] The cloak of holiness is a strong shield against accusations of hypocrisy.

May God have mercy
On the holy
Hypocrites?
No.

Yours sincerely
Denis Mayne

***

To be holy but not a hypocrite you would need to be a saint, I suppose. But what exhausting, cruel people the saints were. This thought occurred to me while perusing Saints Alive, Michael Landy’s temporary exhibition at the National Gallery. It consists of half a dozen giant, grisly manifestations of saints who feature in the National’s collection of paintings. The statues are mechanised with visible Heath Robinson-like cogs and springs and when you press a button with your foot they do something horrible to themselves in the name of God. So St Apollonia hacks at her teeth with a pair of pliers, St Jerome whacks himself in the chest with a big rock, St Thomas’ finger jabs viciously into the torso of Christ. A grotesque ‘Multi-Saint’ combines the mutilations of, inter alia, St Peter Martyr (chopper buried in his head), St Lawrence (roasted on a griddle) and St Lucy (plucked out her own eyes and sent them to a suitor who kept praising their beauty). Sex and death. As art Saints Alive is certainly effective, being shocking and funny and sickening. I’m a Catholic myself but with a largely Anglican temperament and these dogmatic selfish self-immolating judgemental saintly hardliners turn my stomach even as they draw me to them.

The violent clanging of the statues’ movements is awful, especially in the National Gallery. Somebody in the accompanying video for Saints Alive says in a faintly critical way that the National is known as a place where you view old paintings in gold frames in a reverential hush. But what’s wrong with that? To my mind there are too many places in this world full of noisy grotesque things and too few full of hush and  gold frames. And at least those paintings last; four out of the six Landy saint machines were already ‘out of order’. Afterwards I went over to the Sainsbury wing to pay my respects to the Doge, a secular saint whose shimmering wise eyes tell that he could peer deep into a man’s soul and forgive what he saw there, and that he would have no time for these self-harming fanatics, butchering their bodies to make some acroamatic theological point now long dissolved into the vapour of lost beliefs.

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