Self and others

I’ve made a few small changes to the way this blog looks and is arranged.

One I’ve added a new photo of myself. I’ve already asked some of you this question but no-one has got it right yet: who took the photo? There’s a prize for a correct answer — and it’s not a signed copy of the picture. Clue one: he’s not unknown (actually, that’s two clues, isn’t it). Clue two: there’s another clue lower down in this post.

Two I’ve added a link to rocksbackpages (rocking writing under free-ish associations below). It’s an archive of all kinds of pop music writing. There’s loads of my stuff there. I think you might have to pay for some of it but it is also available free via some local libraries. There is a link on the rocksbackpages home page to something called Freekly. The idea here is that you sign up — for free — and the site interrogates your iTunes, then sends you links to pop music stories, old and new, that you might be interested in. If you then buy stuff on click-through, I get money. That is the idea anyway. I find it quite fun: it’s even recommended my own writing to me. So it clearly has taste.

Three I’ve added a link to Professional Photography magazine (legendary photography, under free-ish associations below). I’ve been writing a series for them, on . . . legendary photographers. I’ve done a dozen or so far, including Guy Bourdin, William Eggleston, Herb Ritts and Deborah Turbeville. As soon as I’ve done posting this, I’m off to finish one on Araki.

Next up Shhhh

Group theory

People were always asking me the same question about my course. It was the one I’d have asked me, too, if I weren’t me. It was this: ‘Theoretical?’ As in, why Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies? Does that mean they’re not real studies, only theoretical ones? Some put it less politely.

I’ve always given the same answer — there or thereabouts, anyway. I tell them that it’s theoretical as opposed to clinical. That is, it’s not training to become an analyst or a therapist etc. It’s the study of psychoanalytic theory. Its practice, too, as it happens. But not how to practise it.

Last week, I came up with another answer: a less abstract, more concrete one. It comes in two parts.

Part one. We are sitting in the seminar room. The seminar leader is outlining the work, life and theories of Wilfred Bion, an analyst who helped set up the Tavistock. His notion of ‘containment’ has seeped out into the wider world. Roughly, it’s the idea that the analyst can take a patient’s messy, unhappy emotions, hold them ‘inside’ himself for a bit of processing and return them in slightly better shape. It can sound hippy-dippy but Bion didn’t mean it that way. He was looking to explain how patients could and did get ‘better’.

Bion also did a lot of work on group dynamics. In some accounts, he is the major influence in the early development of studies on how groups function — and dysfunction. This was raised in the seminar. There was, though, only the briefest reference to the fact that we, in the room, were a group — and no attempt to discuss or dissect its dynamics. That’s theoretical for you — a discussion of the practice rather than the practice itself.

Part two. After class one Saturday, I’m having lunch with the other students who, like me, had chosen to do the course over two years. We are discussing this year’s students — the way you do, the way anyone would. We talk about them as individuals and as a group.

Interestingly, we each have quite different views of them — as individuals and as a group. For some of us, they are far more intellectual than the previous year. For others, they like to talk more. For some of us, they are more engaged in the subject. For others, they are less worldly. For some of us, there is a feeling that the course directors thought the previous year’s lot — ie us — were a bit flaky. Others of us thought: whatever.

What we all agreed on, in an unspoken way, was that there was a group, that this year’s intake were a group and that we were a different group — still essentially linked to last year’s students who have now left. How easily and inevitably are groups formed, I thought. And how we look for and mark the things which make our group distinctive. And how small a step it can be from there to marking the things which make our group better — or, at least, we imagine they do. And from there to the eternal tragedy of Freud’s narcissism of small differences.

A tale of two dumplings

Some years ago now, my father-in-law had a stroke. So it was decided that, to lighten the load for my mother-in-law, we would have that year’s seder at our house.*

The seder meal is a fairly standard one — though it varies from family to family. The one I’m used to starts with chicken soup plus all the trimmings. Bits of chicken, noodles and — most particular and important of all — kneidlach. Little dumplings.

I’d eaten kneidlach many times, of course, and can’t say I’d liked them much. They’re the kind of thing, I guess, that you have to grow up eating to appreciate. About the size of a very large marble and the colour of a camouflaged tank, they’re heavy eating. To my mind, they’d be better put to use as large calibre ammunition.

I’d never made them, though. I’d not even watched someone make them. So, charged with providing a batch for fifteen or so people, I did what I thought was the most sensible thing. I looked up the recipe in Claudia Roden’s Book of Jewish Food — to Jewish food what the OED is to the English language.

I followed it carefully, finely chopping the coriander, beating the egg whites into peaks and folding them in with a knife. These kneidlach were fantastic, by far the best I had ever eaten — light, fluffy, fragrant, joyous.

I’m not a big praiser of my own cooking in public but I was about to say something when I caught the air of general distaste around the table. These aren’t right, was the clear and general vibe. These are not kneidlach as we know them. But they’re much better, aren’t they — light, fluffy, fragrant etc etc. Absolutely, I was told. That’s what’s wrong with them. Kneidlach are meant to be heavy, leaden, drably coloured. Home is where the heartburn is, I guess.

So I never made kneidlach again. Which is where this story might have ended. Then I happened to be reading a New Yorker profile of Claudia Roden. In it, she told a story about what she, a Sephardic Jew from Cairo, thought of the food served by her husband’s Ashkenazi family in London. She found it quite awful, leaden, colourless and flavourless — dreary, central European, stodgy. In particular, she hated the kneidlach.

Years later, she took her revenge. When writing the kneidlach recipe for her masterwork, she invented her own recipe for them — a Sephardic reimagining of an Ashkenazi staple. Which, of course, was the one I followed so carefully. So light, so fragrant, so . . . inauthentic.

* The seder is the Passover meal, the one that Jesus is tucking into in the Da Vinci painting that the book got all coded up about.

I have seen the future and it’s . . . pandas

I was in Israel last week, for a wedding — eight hundred or so of the bride and groom’s closest friends. It was a Sephardic-Ashkenazi marriage, held in a kind of pretend oasis in the rich flatlands south of Tel Aviv.

There was food (lots, of course). There was drink (lots, too). There were no suits and virtually no ties — but many, many deep-cut frocks, somewhat to the dismay of the religious, Sephardic side of the union. There were Power-pointed speeches. There were video-screens.

There was dancing — to modern house, to the delight of my son and the dismay of the older guests. The newly-weds were, as tradition demands, hoisted up high on shoulders. The groom’s brothers and friends hit the shots and circle-danced.

And there were pandas . . . giant, inflated, dancing pandas. Four-metre tall pandas, with men inside. They joined in on the dance floor, buffeted and barrelling around till exhaustion set in.

So? So this is where you first read about it. I’m as certain as I can be that this was the first appearance of inflatable giant pandas at a wedding anywhere. The bride had seen them on a TV show and thought: that’s exactly what weddings have previously lacked. The way you do.

I could, though, hear the minds of the young girls on the dance-floor whirling away. They were thinking: when I get married, giant pandas, that’s what I’ll want. But, Daddy, they’ll say, there are always giant pandas at weddings, it’s tradition. Etc etc.

The future started here.

Next up A story about the Sephardic-Ashkenazi thing, starring Claudia Roden . . . and me

I have seen the future and it’s . . . asparagus

A couple of weeks back, I went to the last game of the season at Arsenal. They played Stoke. They won easily. The man next to me chanted at the Stoke fans: we pay your fucking benefits, we pay your fucking benefits.

At half-time, I went to the loo. As I walked in, I was hit by a really strong smell. Not piss. Not shit. Not unpleasant but not pleasant either. For a moment, I couldn’t place it. Then I could. It was asparagus-scented piss. Someone had obviously just had it for lunch.

Forget rants about prawn-sandwich eating fans, that just displayed the shallowness of Roy Keane’s cultural horizons. He hadn’t even noticed that prawn sandwiches have been the cheap option in supermarkets for a decade at least. (Then football players, like pop stars, are so cossetted that they often don’t even know you have to actually buy plane tickets and need to remember to take your passport with you.)

No, asparagus-consumption is the new measure of the new football fans. Maybe they could open a farmer’s market at the ground on match days. Maybe that man next to me could start chanting: you don’t even like asparagus, you don’t even like asparagus.

Next up I have seen the future and it eats shoots and leaves

A room in Bloomsbury

So there we were in a private room in a Bloomsbury hotel. Which sounds more Virginia Woolf than it was. Far more. Maybe a bit Lytton Strachey, though. It was just down the road that his little brother James translated Freud into English. I doubt James Strachey took local hotel rooms for the afternoon, though.

It was a drinks-affair to mark the end of the course’s seminars. It was in a room off the main bar, with a large TV screen showing a black and white Audrey Hepburn movie, with the sound turned off. Breakfast At Tiffany’s suggested someone. But it wasn’t. I knew that. The Eiffel Tower kept cropping up and there’s no Eiffel Tower in Breakfast At Tiffany’s — nor two eggs over easy with wholewheat toast either, of course. Noel Coward kept appearing, too. I felt I’d seen it but couldn’t remember it.

Nearly everyone on the course turned up. In fact, the only absence I noted was the person who talked the most in seminars.

There were chairs round the edge of the room. We sat in them, a little awkwardly, the way you do when you’re not used to socialising. The people who knew each other talked to each other. The faculty members poured the white wine (not bad) and handed round the Thai-ish snacks (pretty good).

‘How generous,’ said a student to the administrator. ‘You paid for it,’ said the administrator who, despite not being English, has a finely tuned sense of English dead-drop irony. The student was clearly taken aback. ‘Your fees cover everything,’ I explained. I’m not sure I was understood.

After an hour so, the drink ran out and most people moved on to a pub — the cheapest pub in the area. We stood on a pavement in the early evening sun and drank cheap beer and cider from plastic cups.

They told me about how their year was so much less social than the previous one. I told them that I’d felt a real outsider for most of the year. Because I’d done more than three-quarters of the course (and exams) in my first year, I attended hardly any lectures. So it took me a really long time to get a hold on all their names. Also, there was often barely a spare seat and I’d find myself squeezed out to the margin.

The social thing seems to have been really important to them.

One of them told me he’d just been working, as an actor, on a Ridley Scott’s new version of Robin Hood, filming in Surrey somewhere, I seem to remember. He played a French assassin. ‘Talk them to death with Lacanian concepts, did you?’ I said.

Then someone mentioned Princess Marie Bonaparte, the woman who rescued Freud from Vienna. Catherine Deneuve played her in the 2004 biopic. Brancusi sculpted her as a phallus. A cousin of Prince Phillip’s, she sloped off from the Coronation with Francois Mitterrand, then a French cabinet minister. To psychoanalyse him, she said.

I added the odd fact that she’d had her clitoris surgically moved. Twice, in fact, if I remembered right.

‘Why?’ asked one of my fellow cheap beer drinkers.

She thought it might improve her sex life, I think.

‘Where did she have it moved to?’

I said: ‘I don’t know.’ Someone else said: ‘To her forehead?’

I should have replied but didn’t: ‘Walthamstow, actually.’

PS The film finally ended. It was Paris When It Sizzles — which has a film within a film called The Girl Who Stole The Eiffel Tower.

Next up I have seen the future and it’s smelly

What a (narcissistic) difference a year makes

The other week or so, there was a drinks evening for everyone on my course — right after the final lecture/seminar ever, for me anyway.

It was in a room at the myhotel just off Tottenham Court Rd.* We walked the few hundred metres in loose groups. Some got a bit lost, of course. I asked: what would be the collective noun for psychoanalysis students? I think I remember suggesting: a confusion. Someone else, though, came up with a far better idea. I can’t remember what it was, though. So the best suggestion will be rewarded with a copy of the Freud Goes Pop CD I compiled to amuse myself.

En route to the drinks, one of this year’s students said to me: last year was much more sociable than this, wasn’t it?

I said: ‘Oh, no, not at all. I thought you lot were really sociable.’ She disagreed — though she did disagree when I suggested they were harder working than the previous year. (I might have used the word ‘swottier’. If I didn’t, I’m embarrassed to admit that at least part of me thought it.)

So I said: ‘What about the Sunday morning film shows at the ICA?’ (A season of four movies which I dreaded in advance and didn’t like much when I was there — the post-film discussions were not exactly sparkling.) ‘Didn’t you go out for coffee or a drink afterwards?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Well, maybe one or two occasionally.’

Which was pretty much the end of the chat. There was nothing else to say, really. She was, it seemed, clearly right. This year was less sociable than the previous one.

And yet . . . all year, I’d felt differently about this. Somehow I’d got the idea that they were far more social than they were — certainly than they thought or felt they were. I’d come into a seminar and they’d all be chatting away to each other and I’d feel something of an outsider.

We couldn’t both be right, of course, could we? Well, yes, of course we could. Groups form so easily, don’t they. And define themselves against each other so clearly, so easily — projecting all kinds of stuff on the other group, as imaginary or fantastic as it can be.

To them, the previous year was the Friendly Ones. To me, this year was the Swot Team.

Freud had a phrase for this, of course: the narcissism of small difference.

* There was a similar event last year. When asked for venue ideas, I suggested Spearmint Rhino — it’s just down the road. They weren’t keen on the idea, for some reason — not even when I raised the possibility that they might get a special psychoanalyst’s discount.

Next up What we drank at the drinks, what we ate (and some of what we said)