Naked women: why?

To the Donmar Warehouse, for the heralded all-female production of Julius Caesar. As politeness requires, I’ll start with the positive and praiseworthy.

 

One It was short, two hours, with no interval. Not a minor point at the Donmar which must have the most uncomfortable seats of any internationally renowned theatre.

(This might also help stoke the slight but unmistakable air of smugness in the crowd. They have not just managed to get tickets for such a famous little house but they have suffered for their art. They exhale the same air of entitlement that plumes from the mouths of the people queuing outside this month’s most hippest no-reservations restaurant. Pitt Cue, say. Oh, I know, I am so early 2012. Slap my wrist.)

Two They did a great job of editing it down. The story shone through and was easy to follow, even if you didn’t know much or any Roman history. Again, not a minor point. It’s an unwieldy play. The guy in the title is dead half-way through. There’s not much in the way of sympathetic characters. There is no surprise about either the murder or the denouement. All that stuff about divination etc makes no sense to modern minds. Etc, etc (to drop suitably into a little Latin).

Otherwise? Well, it wasn’t very good. When asked at the end, I replied: one star. And, feeling poncey, added: jejune. Later, I also said: same kind of half-dead tropes there had been in guff like my school’s student production of Titus Andronicus. Neon lights! Paramilitary uniforms! Shouting! (Even! More! Than! Usual! For! A! Shakespeare! What is it about actors and Willie the Shake? Why do they have to shout lines that should be spoken? My first theory: they, like memsabs addressing foreigners, are convinced that volume enhances comprehension. My second theory: they know not what they do — or what the lines mean.)

Okay, okay, I hear you say. So far, so usual, what’s your point and can’t you get to it quicker?

So: nakedness. Naked women, in particular. One naked woman, in this case. She was wandering around at one point. It was a bit of a shock. Mostly because, well, it made no sense. At all.
Why, oh, why do directors persist in prevailing upon actresses to take their clothes off in the name of art? Obviously, it does make sense some times. I remember a production of Sondheim’s Passion in a theatre even smaller than the Donmar. The show starts with a couple rising from a bed where they have just had sex. We had front row seats. The singer-actors were naked. As singers, they were wonderful. They also had singers bodies. I couldn’t make up my mind whether their lack of beauty enhanced the humanity of the story or merely distracted the audience into physical critiquing.

I asked one of the two women who came to Julius Caesar with me about the naked woman. Yes, she said, I couldn’t work out what it might have signified either. Also, she added, it wasn’t as if the actress was the . . . Then she said something that if I’d said it, I would have had angry stares at least. She was, let’s put it this way, less than enthusiastic about the actress’s physique.
I’d thought that, too, obviously. I’d had another thought, too. That the director and the other actresses might well have pushed her into it. Its pointlessness whiffed of bullying. Women, almost invariably, are far, far more judgmental of other women’s bodies than men are.

So, for me, that was the only moment that the all-femaleness of the show made sense. Just as a gang of senators gang up on JC, so here a gang of gals gang up on another gal. That the parallel of this untethered emotional violence was unseen by its perpetrators made it all the more poignant but also genuinely tragic. Julius Caesar meets Mallory Towers.

Meantime, here is some decent female nakedness, in a short fashion film made by my daughter.

PS I didn't want this text to be centred but there is something that goes wrong in blogger when you paste in an image. The text centres itself and you can't reset the alignment. At least, I can't. Any thoughts etc welcome.

And finally . . . the Euroswearing 2012 final

But first . . . a little maths. My swearing algorithm has correctly predicted the outcome of each of the six matches on which I’ve applied it. That is, clearly, way above chance. Exactly how far above?

Well, I don’t bet. I have no moral attitude to gamblers*. I enjoy their company, even go to casinos with them occasionally. But I don’t gamble. Even when I intend to place a bet — because I’m certain I’ll win and want to prove it, rather than in search of profits — I always forget to do it. It’s not even that I’m reacting against a family of gamblers or anything. As I say, gamblers tend to be good company. Up to a point, anyway. Their conversation tends to the, er, somewhat limited — or, to be kinder, focussed. Still, that’s what happens, I guess, when you spend your life putting your money where your mouth is.

So, what did the bookies have to tell me about my ‘winning streak’? I took the kickoff odds — from Ladbroke’s, I think, see, I really am that uninterested in the details of the betting world. I then calculated what would have been the return if i’d put £10 on each match. Result: on a £60 outlay, I’d have ended up with £96.65. Result. Well, kind of. It would have paid for dinner for one, I guess.

If I had actually been betting, I would have done what I was always do — or at least claim I would do if I ever got round to placing a bet. That is, I would have kept half of the winnings and added that to the next bet. Even I, though, could see that wouldn’t make much difference — or me much money. So I did a different calculation — the kind of optimism-based one that real punters guide their lives by. I imagined I’d placed a tenner on every game and reinvested it all as I went along. Result: on a £60 outlay, with constant reinvestment, I would have made £623. Result. In my dreams, anyway.

Nearly all that profit, by the way, came in the last game of the six, when my algorithm predicted Italy’s triumph over Germany. Bear that in mind as you read on. So . . .

Italy vs Spain

Let me recap. Basic national swears first. Italian: strongo! Spanish: hijo de puta! Nothing to choose there, is there. So let’s look at their alternative national swears. Italian: cazzo! Prick, that is, and carrying something of its force. Spanish: coño! Cunt but used so frequently it just doesn’t carry the same weight — Mexicans think Spaniards use it so much they call them los coños. Which puts Italy slightly ahead.

How about blow-jobs? Well, the Italian l’arte bolognese — ie it’s a speciality of the inhabitants of Bologna. (And, I know I cracked this joke before but . . . it does add a new twist on spaghetti bolognese.) Spanish? Butifarra — sausage. Again, the Italians have it.

So let’s separate it — how else? — on having sex between a woman’s breasts.  The Italian/Spanish approach is detailed in Filthy English, page 199.

When an Italian wants to discuss what in English English is called a tit-wank, he talks about una spagnola, a Spanish thing. If it's a Spaniard talking about sex between a woman's breasts, it's una cubana - a Cuban thing.

(An aside. If nothing else, the sullenness of the English phrase, tit-wank, would by itself explain why England did not progress further in the tournament.)

Again, I make that a draw. Blaming another nation for your own polymorphous desires is a human eternal.

We have a result, though, don’t we. It’s Italy to win.

How much would that make if the latest odds were applied to my (imaginary) winnings so-far? Well, the best I can find (after ten seconds googling) are 29/10. The bet is £623 plus £10 = £633. Which would give me (have given me, that is), a final total of £2468.70 on an outlay of £70. Now that would buy me a dinner or two.

* I do, though, have a sense of outrage about encouraging people to gamble. I get genuinely furious at Ray Winstone’s disembodied head appearing at half-time in TV football matches to tempt loose-pocketed punters. Often, I shout at the screen — something I don’t do much otherwise. He should be embarrassed at his avarice. Really embarrassed. Almost as embarrassed as he should be for his performance — accent and acting, both — in that Scorsese terrible film, The Departed. How terrible? It won an Oscar. Yes, that terrible.

Journey to the island of Pic Tocome

Yesterday, I said I was going to give examples of inadvertent errors — in the context of French penseur Derrida's appearance in Apple ad. I said it was probably left in by mistake from an early private draft.

I see similar things most days. I now get The Guardian delivered direct - which means it's there on my door mat every morning before I wake up. But it is, of course, an early edition. So mistakes haven't always been cleared away. A regular error is leaving the typesetting or subs instructions on the printed page. It'd be text boxes in Quark or something like that. They'd be using a template and there would be dummy words in the text boxes to indicate what should go there. 

Example? Invented in detail but typical and frequent in type. If a football match has kicked off late, there will be no result. Rather, on my printed copy, there will be words such as: Score to go here.

I do have one real example, though. It's not from the Guardian - where I did work for a while so I do know whereof I speak. It's from the Mail on Sunday - where I also worked for a while so I do . . . etc etc.

It's about a man named Roddy. He was deputy editor at the time. Being deputy editor of a major newspaper is much like being a vice president of the US. It's elevation without the fun of being able to actually do something important. So Roddy, among other duties, looked after the travel pages - which, if I remember right, came with the added responsibility that the ski writer was the son of Daily Mail's editor. Responsibility without power. A situation which makes it difficult to stay awake. Or stop heading off to lunch around 11am.

So there he is looking at a layout for a travel spread. Quick glance. Quick read of the display copy. Still hard to concentrate. Thinking of what he's going to see at the theatre that night — he was (and is) an extremely cultivated and charming and smart man. If a little . . .well, let me finish the story.

He has to say something. Like he cares. So he sees on the page what he thinks is the holiday spot being written about. And he comments on it. This is what he says: 'Pic Tocome. Excellent. Everyone tells me that's the island to go to this year.'

Only it wasn't, of course. He had just read the dummy phrase written in a blank box on the layout. It said: pic to come. That is, a photograph would be put there but it had yet to arrive.

Did anyone laugh? Come on. This was the Mail on Sunday and he was the deputy editor.

Did anyone point out his error? Ditto.

Did anyone tell him later? I just have.

Do I think it's news to him? Yes.

Tomorrow Euroswearing 2012 is back. Whose filthy mouths will propel them to victory in the semi-finals

Something for everyone . . . Well, most of us

I realised that, over time, I'd built something of a horde of links to interesting (or stupid) stuff that I'd meant to post. So here they are . . .

One Never again will you be able to say Italian pop doesn't have something to offer the world.

Two Think of all the people in the world you would rely on to steer you in the direction of a good bottle of wine. Thought it through? Right, you must have come to the same conclusion as you'll find here: ask that dirty, smelly, long-haired blog in the corner of the bar with a Marlboro Red in one hand and the fruit machine in the other. That's right. Fine wines the Lemmy way.

Three If in 1974, you'd asked some an old bloke in a suit about the future of computing for the 21st century, how good would his guessing be? What if he were the bloke who wrote 2001?

Four Something completely daft (and promotional) about Pringles. The ones you wear, that is, not the ones you eat.

Five Just admit it. You know you always wanted to learn how to dance like a Goth . . .

Six If only this really was how you flew into Heathrow, every time.


See you soon . . .

Oh, nothing significant at all. Just a silly picture

Here it is . . .

That's it.

Next Cornish stuff — no pasties, though

Park benches and the people who break them

First, a warning: this blog is at risk of being gommy. Grumpy old man-y, that is.

It’s about my local park benches. See, I told you it was a GOM thing.

For some time, I’d noticed that there seemed to be far more broken benches than there used to be. A lot of them also seemed to be somehow bent at the front.

If I thought about it, I think I must have thought it was a result of the park’s increased popularity and its now regular swamping by non-locals. Probably, the young and boisterous among them were, well, smashing up the benches.

Just so you know — if you don’t already — that it’s Primrose Hill park I’m talking about. Not the badlands under any circumstances.

But now I’ve discovered I was wrong. Those park benches weren’t being destroyed by young people — to whom I apologise, unreservedly.

No, they are being broken carelessly but knowingly by the rich and affluent. Simply, personal trainers are encouraging their charges to use the benches as something to jump on and off. It’s some kind of fitness thing. And it’s a completely shit piece of behaviour by people who should know better.

How do I know? I’ve seen it. On many occasions. I’ve even said something. And not been responded to with the, well, politesse, one might hope for.

There was a complete disconnect. No understanding that by improving themselves they were degrading the lives of others.

As a GOM, part of me (at least) felt, as did an automobilistic GOM under different circumstances, that they should — both trainer and trainer — be taken out and shot in front of their children. Slowly.

This time is different, though. I took a photo of the trainer and trained doing it. Here it is. I’ve also sent it to the Royal Parks people.

And next time I see it, I’ll take another picture. Only closer.

Aaaah, that’s better. Thank you for bearing with me.

Now I will GOM off.

Next I don’t know what exactly I will post next but I do promise it won’t be gommy.

Bits & pieces, eight

When I finished my course, I also thought about what I would miss. One of the things that came straight to the front of my mind was coming out of Goodge St tube station early on Saturday mornings, always into an empty Tottenham Court Rd. 

Mostly, in my memory anyway, it was bright and sunny. I still can’t figure out why it was so meaningful to me. A promise of hope and potential, perhaps.

Whatever . . . it also made me think of this . . .

Bits & pieces, seven

Just a short note letting you know . . .

One I've redesigned this blog a little, giving all you lucky people a chance to buy my book – in a way that gives me a small kickback.

Two If you haven't learned this already directly from me, I have taken to tweeting and will be creating an alternative advent calendar by sending out a select (and hopefully offensive) fact from my book Filthy English every day till Christmas, at least. My intention is to send it around nine-thirty in the morning, just in time for you to read it on your way to the pithead (or office, perhaps) and retweet it to one of your many, many, many fellow twits. (Help me, please, have I got my terminology right there?)

Three I have added a tweet button here, plus more buttons that will enable you to follow this blog and get updates every time I post, instead of having to wait for my occasional reminders. Come on, you know that's what you've been waiting for.

Next (tomorrow) London WC1

Bits & pieces, six

When I finished my masters, I meant to write something about the Wynne Godley story — how he was appallingly treated by the analyst Masud Khan and how that scandal was dealt with by the psychoanalytic establishment and what meaning and resonance that story still has. But I didn't do, did I? So here is his obituary, which tells some of the story anyway. It's an important tale and there's more here.

PS In case you're wondering why one of those links takes you to a piece of ecclesiastical sculpture, it's because his head was the model for one of the figures.

Bits & pieces, five

Something (fairly) silly? (But perhaps don't bother if you have no interest at all in either football or childhood's bestest imaginative construction toy.)

Bits and pieces, four

When, last year, my old (in both meanings, at least) colleague, Murray Sayle died, I wrote a short memory of him — which I was then asked to read at his London memorial. I didn't think, though, to share any of his wonderful writing with you.

Recently, I found this piece by him — which I didn't even know about. It's a great short sample of his work. One of the smartest things you're likely to read about John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

I might post links to more of his work but, meantime, I'd say it's worth searching out these bits and pieces . . .

One His take on Bloody Sunday, effectively suppressed for thirty years or so. He was there on the spot and, much later, gave evidence to the enquiry. If his conclusions haven't been entirely vindicated, the piece still has resonance.

Two His take on Tiananmen Square. A quite different view of how many were killed and what the demonstrators were on about. An interesting perspective at this time of worldwide Square Dances.

Three His documentary about North Korea, done with the great photographer Elliot Erwitt.

Four His revisionist history of the Vietnam War — where he was a reporter.

Five His version of the atomic end to World War Two — which I helped with, in the smallest of ways, by editing the British version, for the Mail on Sunday's Night & Day, down from the New Yorker original.

http://www.jpri.org/publications/occasionalpapers/op18.html/
murray sayle article

http://www.jpri.org/publications/occasionalpapers/op18.html
murray sayle article

Bits & pieces, three

I bumped into someone I hadn't seen for a while the other day. He's an acquaintance, I guess, rather than a friend but I've known him a really long time so those things start to blur a bit.

Anyway, I hadn't seen him for long enough to be surprised when he told me had a two-and-a-half year old daughter. (He's not young, either.)

Her name? 'Clemmie,' he said, then added: 'Well, actually it's Chlamydia.' A beat. 'A memory of how her mother and I met.'

For once in my life, I was silent.

Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he was joking. I don't know.

I do know this, though. Years ago, he happened to mention he knew De Niro quite well. I didn't believe him, frankly.

Time passed. He called, late one Saturday. 'Bob's in town,' he said. 'Those two attractive young black women friends of yours . . .' Actually, he didn't say that. He used their names but that's private. The rest was true. His meaning was clear. So was Bob's, of course.

What do you mean? What are you thinking? Nothing happened. Of course, it didn't.

Which, in turn, reminds me of a moment at passport control at JFK in New York. I was with my daughter who was then thirteen or so and, in dress-style terms, passing through — there's no polite way to put this — her 2nd Avenue hooker period. A4 skirt. High stack heels. Boob tube top. Chewing pink bubblegum.

'May I have your wife's passport, too, sir,' said the passport official.

'That's not my wife. It's my daughter,' I said. 'What kind of man do you think I am?'

'We get all sorts here, sir,' he said.

Bits & pieces, two

Interviewer Were you a good violinist?

Interviewee I was very so so. And, that's giving me an edge.

The point of this bit (or piece) is, I guess, the identity of the interviewee. It's lyricist Hal David, worked with Burt Bacharach, mostly. Wrote these opening lines: 'Every day I wake up, before I put on my make-up . . .'

Now sing the interviewee's words to the tune of those lines from I Say A Little Prayer. They almost fit, don't they. Not exactly but close, in beats and rhythm.

The point? That the wondrous ability David had to write lyrics that sounded like real speech was, it seems, rooted in his own speech rhythms. That's why those lines from I Say A Little Prayer are so wonderful. No matter how often I hear them sung by Aretha Franklin (or Dionne Warwick/e), they always sound like she is finding that thought as she sings the words — that neat trick that only really on-the-money actors can do on a regular basis. I'd always thought that was mostly down to the singers. Now I think I'd have to say it was already there in the lines written.

PS If you hadn't guessed it by now, I'm working on something about pop music — not just lyrics but the whole deal. It's a big thing. I've got lots of stuff about lots of songs. And I'm trying out some of the thoughts etc here.

Next up Another bit (or piece) but not about music that time

Bits & pieces, one

I have a file of notes of stuff and links I thought to put on this blog. Somehow, for various reasons, they don't always make it on. So I've decided to put them up, one a day, till I've run through them.

They're all brief. They're often stupid. Sometimes, they are no more than a link. And, by and large, I'm not giving context or explanation or analysis. I'm leaving that up to the space between your ears.

Think of it, perhaps, as an online version of Sir John Soane's Museum — an external manifestation of the stuff that floats around between my ears. It'll probably tell you more about me than mere fine writing ever could. Not that you might like what you find.

Anyway, whatever, I start with a quote which I found quoted by someone else. I forget who. The point, I guess, if there is one, is to figure out why I might feel the need to quote it.

Or just laugh.

So, here goes . . .

Fowler The Mathematics of Plato’s Academy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Second Edition. 1999. 'Part of every literate person’s intellectual baggage, along with the second law of thermodynamics and the principles of relativity and indeterminacy, is some version of the story of the discovery of incommensurability by Pythagoras or the Pythagoreans…'

See you tomorrow . . .