Two Chaps Talking

Mon Vieux,

Art colleges for the masses eh? In the words of Queen Victoria on the subject of teetotalism, a pernicious heresy. Though this fortnight I came across a few who might benefit from just such an alternative outlet for their energy. But I'll come to that.

We've lived you and I. And we didn't get to where we are today by shirking a bit of Unpleasantness when it bared its fangs.

Remember the days on the school playing field when someone needed correcting and the Queensberry rules had to be invoked? Or rather shoulders had to be pushed and the word 'Yeah?' repeated over and over again in the fervent hope that one of your mates would rush over and drag you away shouting 'Leave him, he's not worth it'. Thus preventing the next step which would be the grappling of each other's necks until one gained a secure grip and could squeeze a submission from the other. The pressure might induce a mild nose bleed but no more. And I'm told there was even nobility in defeat if the match was fair.

Those were the days.

All very interesting but scarcely germane you may think. Would that it were so. For this recent weekend fresh from a ride in the country with a pal and his dearest to look at a rural retreat for the OB&C we decided to venture north on this fair island and enjoy some food originally from ironically, the deep South.

Now a Chap doesn't really know a city until he's seen it from all angles. Hence forays into the Old Centre of Amsterdam, the Topkapi Harem in Istanbul, or Phat Phong in Bangkok. Where else can a Chap get the experiences needed to regale the club of an evening?

With that in mind and with the target being some way north of the official res. we took a cab and were exposed to an instructive panorama of the Third World areas of this fair city. You'll have seen the sort of thing in shanty towns around the world.

Charlie's Barbecue Buffet has been fulsomely praised by those in the know in this city for some time now and with good reason. With Autumn drawing near what could be better than fried chicken spiked with hot sauce, smothered pork chops and succotash or collard greens and barbecued ribs? Nothing that's what and once we'd got outside of our third helpings we were spiritually transported to New Orleans. A jazz band funeral could have passed us and we would scarcely have noticed.

What in fact we did fail to notice was the sun going down and the night shift emerging from their lairs. Going into Charlie's in the late afternoon sun we left a lively and energetic version of downtown Kingston, Jamaica. Coming out in the early evening we were in Mogadishu circa '92.

What had previously been open areas of natural wildlife for little children to skip around were now darkened waste ground for dumping bodies. Classic Nineteenth Century architectural structures ripe for renovation were now crack houses ripe for SWAT raids. And smiling families and kids playing footie were now swaggering groups of young men with pimp rolls, ghetto limps and Tupac bandannas.

Technicals drove by with dark windows and blue lights instead of gun mountings but were no less dangerous for that. And high powered motor cycles screamed by delivering bad things or fleeing the scene of the crime.

But why need a Chap worry? We were after all only one block from the enormous castellated edifice that housed the local constabulary. Furthermore I'd seen dozens of brightly painted Police motor cars parked along the street. And you don't spend your formative years as a Bournemouth New Romantic without being able to deal with harsh stares.

Mind, I'll not pretend that I was entirely sanguine about our little trek.

It is true that we excited some unwanted attention. Yes there were several young toughs sprawled over a police motor car outside the police station and for them to have so little fear of recrimination said something about their disregard for authority. And yes, words may have been called in our general direction that don't bear recording in our fair correspondence. All that is true and yet we made it the half dozen or so blocks to brightly-lit safety and cabs without any actual contact being made. Another chapter in the book.

Only when I returned home did the OB&S put me fully in the picture.

OB&C, 'You noticed what those kids sitting on the cop car were wearing didn't you?'

Yours truly, 'No my sweet, I fear I did not.'

OB&C, 'Red. They all wore something red. And that makes them Bloods. You know, the gang that cut people open just as an initiation, before they even get going on the real stuff. I'm talking about the kids that you led us through the middle of. On the way back from the restaurant that you suggested. You know. At night. In the dark.'

Yours truly, 'Ah.'

She was not impressed.

I reassured her with talk of the Code Duello and Cosh pockets. I shot my cuffs nonchalantly and may have mentioned that they'd got off lightly. You know, the sort of thing that goes down well at the bar.

Well it seems I don't know the fragrant sex as well as I thought and I am confined to barracks for the nonce. Needless to say Charlie's won't be including me on their Christmas list as a regular customer. But I am getting full use of the couch in my study which has to be a bonus surely?

Yours in exile,

S

Posted by S at 03:29 PM | Permalink

Dear Boy,

Sometimes I'm proud to be British. I'm sure it hasn't troubled the American media at all but your irritating David Blaine is over here at the moment. Having performed his 'Man in an ice block' to wondering throngs in New York he has come to London to perform 'Man in a perspex box hanging from a crane at Tower Bridge without food or water for forty four days'.

Far from wondering, the Great Sun-reading herds have turned up mob handed to taunt him. Initially it was kids throwing eggs and bags of chips but soon someone had positioned a greasy burger van right underneath the box, Yahoos were driving golf balls off the bridge at him and someone, doubtless incensed at his comparison of his suffering to inmates in concentration camps, has begun pelting him with bacon sandwiches and bagels. This morning it was announced on national televison that a parade of homosexuals will be marching to the site to throw sausages at him.

It speaks volumes that, while New Yorkers gathered to marvel at his endurance, Londoners are holding a round the clock vigil with powerful flashlights to catch him taking a shit.

Yesterday, one of the bright, late summer days for which England is justly famous I saw a man on a Segway weaving down Marylebone High St. It's the first I've seen in the UK and the driver wore the smug smile of a man who had evolved above the need for dreary bipedal locomotion (why are Segway drivers always short men? Is it the added six inches that appeal?) and could ease, effortlessly between the common masses.

The street was crowded but passers-by, to a man, conspicuously ignored him. Three people pointed in an animated way but they turned out to be students from the American University (BA. (hons) Window Treatments and Gift Wrapping). The only other response I could detect was from a fantastically aristocratic old dame sitting outside Patisserie Valerie who muttered, under her breath "C*nt", before returning to her Earl Grey and tarte de framboise.

There are, of course, less laudable national traits. For the past six weeks the BBC has been running 'Restoration'. In this programme a selection of collapsing 'heritage' sites, from what the BBC still insist on referring to as 'The Regions', bid for public sympathy. The winner, after a public telephone poll, gets three million quid's worth of lottery funds. As it combines our national fascinations for cheap audience participation programming and the unquestioning preservation of any heap of crap over fifty years old 'Restoration' has been an instant success. It's finally hooked the Aga classes into Pop Idol style viewing.

Of course, in the interests of research I've watched a couple of episodes. Each venue has had to describe its plans for the future if granted the funds and all but one of them aim to relaunch the building as a "community arts centre/gallery/space".

Words almost fail me. I, like you, benefited from an art college education and, like you, pursued a discipline based in a craft. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have missed it for anything and I feel it has helped me through much of my later life. What worries me is the assertion that everyone has the fundamental human right to express themselves through the fine arts at the public expense. This flatulent liberal notion, traceable to Morris, Ruskin, Toynbee and their ilk is a corruption of the Victorian belief that the masses could be prevented from rising up and raping their redhaired muses in their agreeable pseudo rustic studios by teaching them copper beating, pokerwork, country dancing and lino cutting at 'Institutes' in underprivileged areas. Most of the dangerously intelligent members of the lower orders would have been more than happy to put the reformers straight on the realities of this had they not been fortuitously slaughtered on the Western Front.

Social engineering through crap crafts was bollocks then and is bollocks now.

The problem is that if we have art centres, galleries and 'spaces' everywhere, people will make shit art to fill them. In the past, at least art had some social purpose. Craftsmen painters were hired to record and commemorate the patron's wealth, possessions, taste, wife or piety. Nobody was 'expressing themselves' and certainly not at public expense.

Do you think Michaelangelo Buonarotti went to art college?

Leonardo: Oi Mike. Wasssuuuuuuuup?
Michaelangelo: Fuck off Leo. I've got a head like barrel of sick. I was up all night in the Union bar slamming Aftershock.
Leo: So you're not going to Cenino Cennini's lecture on ermine tail brush making and rabbit skin gesso?
Mike: Na, fuck that. Can't afford the materials. I've already blown my grant on drugs and outfits to make me look like a twat. Have you seen how much the Egyptians are charging for lapis lazuli this year? Either I do next term entirely without the colour blue or I piss off to Goa for six months and stay stoned 'till Dad coughs up again.
Leo: You could get a job
Mike: A job? Like I'm going to spend three years up a ladder doing ceilings for that old poof Sixtus. You're having a laugh.

I still teach at colleges occasionally. Last year's diploma show for my old place featured the same embarrassingly adolescent showing from the photography dept.

Every year there will be...

1. A breast obsessed soft pornographer
2. A vicar's/academic's/policeman's daughter who exorcises her repression by getting her kit off for sensitive self-portraits at the drop of a lenscap
3. Two people slavishly copying either David Bailey or Irving Penn
4. Some twat with a Hoxton fin who knows someone on Dazed and Confused who's shot three pages of his girlfriend in thrift shop knickers looking like an underage Ukranian prostitute on ketamine
5. A bloke with a whispy beard who's spent three years doing ball-achingly detailed palladium prints of driftwood in situ
6. Someone who shot a sequence of a week in the life of the ashtray in his flat, the only work he's managed to get off in three subsidised years which he claims is 'Conceptual' and can't be hung alongside mainstream photography.

None of it has any social value. All of them will end up either with proper jobs or hanging one exhibition every ten years on one of those subsidised public 'spaces'.

Last week I passed a fly poster for a one man 'exhibition of black and white images' ('images' is always a giveaway) called 'Perspectives on Hackney'. Who's perspective? Is it likely to add richness to my appreciation of the area? Do I give a fuck?

Perhaps art does have a social purpose. Perhaps, by enabling this talentless Hackney epsilon semi-moron to believe he's a struggling artist, he can be made more content to live on his risible social security payment. It is notable that the most fertile ground for arts centres is invariably the desolate hell holes where manufacturing industries used to be.

This is so uniquely, mimsily British though. The terrible notion of the Great and the Good, elevating the downtrodden through art.

I can't imagine the Senator for some benighted industrial sump in Michigan telling the hairy knuckled sons of toil...

"I'm sorry, guys. We had to close the meat packing plant, the blast furnace and the wharf. But we're using a substantial government grant to convert some of the warehouses into a multi-use arts centre/performance space with a vegetarian cafŽ, wheelchair ramps and a mission statement built on cultural diversity".

The most burning irony of all is that this crap is paid for out of Lottery funds, the de facto tax on the hopeless and desperate.

I've just noticed that the building at the end of the street has a cartouche over the door engraved 'The Institute of Swedish Gymnastics'. Initially I found myself wondering at the enthusiasm of the founders and their belief in the secure longevity of their endeavour. It takes some kind of belief in an exercise regime to invest in a five-storey beaux-arts pile in the heart of the metropolis. Does anyone still do 'Swedish gymnastics'?

I'm further amazed by the fact that current owners haven't been up there for a bit of discrete work with the chisel. I'd have excised the I and C to read 'Institute of Swedish Gymnast s" and waited to see if any dropped in.

Pulchitudo et Salubritas

T

Posted by T at 11:09 AM | Permalink

Dear Boy,

So true, so true. Polari is a loss to us all. Fortunately the BBC have put out all of the Julian and Sandy sketches on tape. In my favourite they describe, in lovingly camp detail, being shipwrecked...

Horne: Good Heavens. That sounds awful. Did you manage to drag yourselves up on deck?

Jules: Oooh no. We were quite casual, weren't we Sand?

I had a bit of a vada round the web for more and turned up the following version of the King James Bible.

1 In the beginning Gloria created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was nanti form, and void; and munge was upon the eke of the deep. And the nanti lucoddy of Gloria trolled upon the eke of the aquas.
3 And Gloria cackled, Let there be sparkle: and there was sparkle.
4 And Gloria vardad the sparkle, that it was bona: and Gloria divided the sparkle from the munge.
5 And Gloria screeched the sparkle Day, and the munge he screeched nochy. And the bijou nochy and the morning were the una day.

Sounds a lot better if you imagine Kenneth Williams intoning it.

Your thoughts, though, inspired me to the following. A bit of a list of my current linguistic pet hates which I offer in the certain knowledge that you will never have uttered one of them.

Acquire

It's an awful admission but, alongside the Shipping Forecast and an occasional blast of The Archers, I'm growing fond of Antiques Roadshow. I'm sure it's been going longer than you've been over there but, in case you had better things to do on Sunday evenings, I'll refresh your memory. The programme goes out on BBC television in the (I'm inclined to say God Forsaken) graveyard slot just before Songs of Praise. Much like Radio 4 cricket commentary it projects a Zen calm quite unrelated to its content into the already bucolic and unrushed downtime between afternoon kip and dinner and, for this reason, has become something of a cult.

The format is blindingly simple. People queue for hours to show their old junk to experts, fervently hoping that the shite encrusted spill vase that old Uncle Pelfrey picked up in a drunken fit of remorse on a dirty weekend in Totnes is actually a rare Sevres sphincter-easer from the boudoir of the Sun King.

There are two ways of appreciating this great British institution. The first is to turn your own valuations into a betting or drinking game the second is to watch the tragic faces of the hapless suckers as they are told the real valuation. There are several scenarios...

a) Some dead-eyed, venal Tory bought an oil painting from commoner for a fiver, believing that, with his superior education and refinement, he has spotted something of supreme value and brings it along seeking public validation. He is usually informed that such items can be had by the container-load from Indonesia and that the ignorant Cockney barrow boy he bought it from was called actually called Giles, had a degree in art history and has recently retired to Marbella.
Facial effect: Smug to humiliated panic

b) A comfortably middle-class burgher from the retirement belt brings in the handsome Georgian silver punch bowl he invested in at retirement, expecting it to have risen modestly in value so he can smile quietly at his financial acumen and restrained but cultured tastes. He is informed that the piece comprises a stolen EPNS bowls cup, Circa 1982, a balti dish from an Indian restaurant and the clutch plate from a 1968 Commer van spot welded together by a blind scrap dealer with palsy. The hallmarks turn out to have been put on with a felt pen.
Facial effect: Detached amusement to outraged horror

c) Husband and wife bring in a small oil painting inherited from the mother-in-law he clearly loathes. Both have high hopes for its value and a windfall from the old bat that will keep two terminally idle sons and a nymphomaniac daughter out of state education long enough to turn them into productive earners in the City and get them off their hands in a long and happy retirement. The painting indeed turns out to be valuable whereupon both deny emphatically that they care about its value or that they would ever part with something of such enormous emotional importance.
Facial effect: Utter relief to rat-like duplicity and cunning

Whatever the actual valuation there are two verbal tics that flicker through all the interviews. All pieces were 'handed down through the family'; usually meaning that one of their parents bought it in a junk shop more than five years ago. Also, nothing was ever 'bought' it was always 'acquired'; 'My Father acquired it during the Boxer uprising'. 'My Mother acquired it from an antiques fair in Reading'. 'I just acquired it from the bag of that old lady in front of me in the queue'.

Why do a group of people, distinguished by their greed and their atavistic desire to get something for nothing, baulk so much at the simple concept of buying something?

Funnily enough, estate agents are big on acquiring too. "Your opportunity to acquire this much sought after broom cupboard in fashionable Toxteth". It's OK. It's not bought. No filthy money changes hands. Except for my 15% commission, of course; which I will demand in used, soiled, grease encrusted fivers and use to rub against my ghastly, shrunken rubbery genitals until I shriek out a painful lonely little climax.

Within

" I attended theatre school and had several opportunities to act. I am currently working in the industry and would like an opportunity within film."

Euan Blair's application for a place in Film Idol, cinema's answer to Pop Idol.

My little Tony, our noble PM, risked his policital career and socialist credentials to send that little bastard to a monstrously expensive and, we are assured, academically brilliant private school. And suddenly there is that fucking irritating 'within'. Why, whenever anyone is writing anything vaguely formal or business related, can't they resist sticking in a 'within' when an 'in' is all that's required.

The best examples usually come from estate agents or in job ads.

"A gloriously appointed home within London's fashionable Notting Hill".

"A challenging opportunity within a fast-growing sales team".

Now I think of it, use of 'within' is usually bracketed with appallingly convoluted and strained English, but why is it ever thought necessary? Is it more than 'in'? Is the house not just located in the district but, in some way I am intellectually ill-equipped to conceive, intrinsic to it? When someone writes of 'extremely unique' one can at least feel that they are clumsily trying to express a superlative quality of uniqueness, however unnecessary that might be, but more in than in? Superlative insideness? My brain positively melts down. It's like one of those Steven Hawking books that everyone claims to have read that involves trying to imagine things in five or more dimensions.

Self Starter/Team Player

And while we're on the subject of recruitment ads. There's something about the whole job interview process that just makes you question who's kidding who. Particularly when the self satisfied fucker on the far side of the desk leans back and says...

"So why do you want to work for us then?"

...what kind of answer is he expecting? There are only two; a) I'm out of work you bloated excuse for a wannabe plutocrat or b) you are stupid and vain enough to be offering more money than the last gang of slavering, decerebrate masturbating bonoboes.

We can't we get away with questions like that anywhere else. You don't ask the plumber 'So why do you want to clean 19 yards of impacted faecal matter from my U bend?' You don't ask someone on a date 'So why, in your own words, do you want to sleep with me?'

What sort of anus believes anything anyone says when applying anyway. I'm lying if I express any interest other than a job that pays too much for doing too little and you're kidding yourself if you think you want anything more than someone smart enough to be competent and stupid enough to be exploitable.

But worst of all is the almost ubiquitous demand that applicants should be 'motivated self-starters' and 'team players.'

Asking someone to be a 'motivated self starter' translates as...

'If, at any point in the future you fail to do something vital because I have neglected to brief you, will you be prepared not only to accept the blame but to admit that it wasn't mere neglect but a fundamental flaw in your personality?' Asking someone to be a team player means they should be able to do this while dealing with the sum neuroses of the rest of the company.

Putting 'Self starter' in a job ad is admission that your future employer is incompetent, 'Team Player' a warning that his staff are a bunch of sociopaths.

Another particular favourite is the cretin who, in what he believes to be a display of incisive interpersonal evaluation, asks you to enumerate your own faults. It has become the interviewee's favourite game to list faults that actually make them sound better.

"I guess I'm a bit of a workaholic". "I suppose I tend to pay too much attention to detail". Why not just add "... and I have a regrettable tendency to fall to my knees in the presence of my superiors and spontaneously fellate them while offering them money".

In my last interview, the fool asked me how my mother would describe me if she met me in the street.

And finally. The piece of superfluous verbal effluent that exercises me most..

'I have to say...'

Believe me, you don't.

T.

Posted by T at 03:14 PM | Permalink

Mon Vieux,

I am vexed and irked beyond measure.

Whilst getting outside of a Lucky Jim the other day an omi said to me, 'Look at that whistle. What an eek. All joshed up you're fortuna you are.'

Had a droog overdone the old moloko lite? Was he about to visit something horrorshow about my fragrant person? Should I have tolchocked it sharpish hoping to viddy the rozzers? Would I be wiping krovvy off my gobber with my rooks?

No my dear Chap. Have a snifter. All is well. I write merely to enjoy some of the more outlandish variations of our wonderful language. You'll have noticed some Polari, used by chaps whose love dared not speak its name during the fifties and sixties when their collars might end up getting felt, rather than their other bits, should they have been caught seeking company. Mr Burgess of course needs no explaining, any more than does the odd Cockney rhyme. But there was a shibboleth in there and I have no doubt you spotted it. It's dirty filthy ugly head reared up in relation to a simple drink.

Yes that's right, the so-called word 'lite'. Wholly unacceptable in polite society it would have had the saintly Sir K spluttering in disgust. He would have castigated the perpetrator to within an inch of his sanity, albeit not that very far considering.

Lest I give the wrong impression let me state for the record that I consider the English language a living breathing organism and each and every regional variation as valid as the next. Yes that's right. From Newcastle to New York to New South Wales there is a constant stream of excellent contributions to the lexicon and I salute them all. I may not use them but I heartily endorse their existence and welcome them into our Oxford English Dictionary with open arms.

So what's my bloody problem?

In a word cokesnortingadvertisingdrones. I can just see them sitting round their horrible little workstations congratulating each other on their revolting goatee/Hoxton art gallery/new SUV/Hamptons restaurant/darling little Moroccan souk spice stall/&cet. Over their 'Bud Lites' they agree that the world needs more tat and it should be called a 'Towlmastr' and it needs to be trademarked. And where would we be without a 'Plumr'? And what of 'Acuvu' and 'Accu Chek' - can the world really last without them?

Harmless fun for the great unwashed a chap might think. Let the hoi polloi consume their baubles and potions and enjoy them, for what harm do they do?

Would that it were so. That these 'words' are registered as trademarks is laughable, as though anyone would else would want to use them. Ha ha indeed.

But there is a dark side. They creep, you see, these 'words,' into the language.

It is now quite normal for teenagers in this country to spell the word night thus n-i-t-e. Ditto l-i-t-e for light. The list goes on and it gets worse. Not only that but the jack-booted Murdoch propaganda machine that is called Fox is presuming to declare ownership of the words 'fair and balanced' in order to prevent a book being published that features the same words in its title. That the book exposes Fox's propensity for lying filth is of course the driving motive, but it is an alarming precedent. Are we to be prevented from using our own language according to the whim of corporations, left only with the new 'words' provided and approved by their advertising agencies?

It is well known that the White House Inc. and Bush Gov. Corp. are striving to make what is already a corporate society more so. How long before they mandate new spellings according to brand sponsorship, or outlaw old ones that have been registered as trademarks or are perhaps not to their political liking? With their economy of attention span and intelligence they might want a name for this new way of speaking. Something catchy and easy to pronounce. Newspeak perhaps.

Lest you think all is doom and gloom this fortnight let me go on to fill you in on an amusing new form of entertainment here in the New World. Now it is well known and accepted that the second best-dressed tranche of society after the Two Chaps is the Friends of Dorothy. Slim, mannered, clean and well-turned out they are a credit to their kind and exactly where a chap should turn should he find himself without access to our own advice.

Of late some thoughtful souls have realised this and turned the process into an amusing television program. Briefly a five-some of light-in-the-loafer chaps take on an itinerant outdoor labourer and try to teach him how to tie his own shoe laces and use a knife and fork. It is hilarious. Particularly as once they're finished they turn the oaf loose on his unsuspecting female mate.

Having hitherto spoken only in monosyllables and been fed outdoors the victims adjust with varying degrees of success. After extensive training some are able to eat at tables though one thought pushing a finger-full of dark brown chocolate mousse into his mates' mouth was somehow conducive to amour ('That's considered a bad thing in our society' quipped one F of D). All good clean fun and useful in explaining to the ill-informed that well-dressed men don't all shop on the same side of the street (my tailor's down a back alley in fact). I am informed that this is about to be foisted upon the Motherland. Thus far it carries my tacit endorsement.

On that I leave you, once more to take up the sword in defence of all that is correct.

Vulneratus non victus,

S

Posted by S at 09:57 PM | Permalink