James Ellroy comes across as being a difficult man to interview. It’s not that he clams up – he seems to love doing interviews – or only says boring stuff. But his schtick-to-vaguely-serious-answer ratio is highly variable, depending on what kind of mood he’s in, how much press he’s been doing lately and so on, and is in any case quite hard to judge. Choose the wrong day, or press the wrong button, and you’ll get something like this (from a 2006 New York Times Magazine interview):
I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.
Props, then, to Stefanie Marsh from the Times, whose recent Ellroy interview is a minor classic of the genre. Her best move was pretty simple: getting hold of the Playboy serialisation of Ellroy’s thoughts on his relations with women, and on the nervous breakdown he had after finishing The Cold Six Thousand. This enabled Marsh to tell us that Ellroy’s ex-wife had the following complaints about his deportment: ‘You drove around Carmel in shit-stained trousers. My parents heard you jacking off upstairs. You peeped women while you walked Dudley [the dog].’ It seems especially cool/disturbing that the former Mrs Ellroy couched these complaints in Ellroy-speak, though I’d guess that the quoted lines are his paraphrase in the Playboy essay, which was called ‘Why I Chase Women’.
Ellroy provided Marsh with a list of the women he fantasised obsessively about during his breakdown. They were ‘Anne Manson, the former principal conductor of the Kansas Philharmonic; a lesbian FedEx courier; and the Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter’. All he’d ever wanted from life, he said, ‘was to write great books, live a big life, know God and commune with women of great substance’. (Meaning women not like ‘young women in LA – pierced, lacquered, varnished, enhanced, tattooed’ – who ‘could not have coarsened themselves more. It’s only a brief moment before they say “it’s like” or “I’m like”’.) We’ll probably hear a great deal more about this when Ellroy – a ‘lunatic romantic’ (Marsh) and ‘tenuously reformed pervert’ (himself) – starts promoting the book that Playboy was serialising, The Hilliker Curse.
For the 30th anniversary gala of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art on 14 November, Francesco Vezzoli’s Ballets Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again) featured a performance by Lady Gaga that defied parody. Wearing a hat designed by Frank Gehry and a mask designed by Baz Luhrmann, Gaga played on a rotating Pepto-Bismol-pink Steinway grand piano decorated with blue butterflies painted by Damien Hirst while Prada-clad dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet pliéd around her. In other words, an average Saturday night.
Everyone’s a little Gaga these days. Alexander McQueen premiered her latest hit, ‘Bad Romance’, during the finale of his Spring 2010 show in Paris. Hedi Slimane shot the cover for her new album, The Fame Monster. She’s Twitter friends with Yoko Ono – ‘Dear @ladygaga Thank you for singing IMAGINE. Hearing that made me choke up. You are so beautiful! In Sisterhood and love, yoko’ – and snagged Swedish hottie Alexander Skarsgård to play her boyfriend in a video. Christopher Walken and Jude Law have each given a dramatic recitation of her hit ‘Poker Face’; not to be outdone, Kanye West, Kid Cudi and Common got together for a dirty little hip-hop ditty called ‘I Poke Her Face’. Gaga’s largely responsible for the trouserlessness in women’s fashion that has now spread even to Carine Roitfeld of French Vogue. Beyoncé invited her to team up for her new song ‘Video Phone’. Marc Jacobs asked her to perform at the after-party for his fashion week show in New York – although depending on your source, she was either 45 minutes or two hours late because she was having sex in her dressing-room.
All of this would be unbearable were it not for the fact that Gaga writes classic pop songs overlaid with insanely catchy electro-synth riffs. Her music videos are both ridiculous and wildly entertaining: in her latest, for ‘Bad Romance’, she emerges from an industrial sleeping pod in a white latex sensory-deprivation body suit, dresses up in a polar-bear peignoir, seduces a Scandinavian giant (she certainly has a type) wearing a gold chin-piece, and spontaneously combusts.
And underneath the posturing and couture, she’s still recognisable as the girl who watched Cabaret one too many times and had crushes on her gay friends. She went to NYU, where she dabbled in a little Warhol, Dada and Hitchcock (she has a particular fondness for Vertigo). She perfected her make-up technique while doing ‘bags and bags’ of cocaine and listening to the Cure. She’s a natural brunette who dyed her hair blonde to avoid being confused for Amy Winehouse (understandable). She craves drama and fantasises about high art, but more than anything she wants to have a good time: ‘Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick/I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.’
Deep in our collective memories are those 1970s album covers, you know the ones: a dwarf in one corner, a strong man in eyeshadow in another, and somewhere in the middle of it all, but still in the shadows and probably in a leotard, is the artist formerly known as Bob, George, or whoever it was. Their spirit lives on in Bob Dylan’s Christmas video.
Bob, well he’s always been a cussed so-and-so, and part of the game of being Bob is to do whatever your fans really don’t want, and then watch them twisting themselves around so that they can still love you in spite of it all. You go electric, you do Victoria’s Secret commercials, you grow a beard (more than once, in several different styles), you do a retro-radio show on cheesy themes, and you say 1956 as ‘nineteen hundred and fifty six’ like you’re a subway driver from the Bronx aspiring to work for the British MovieTone News. Your fans decide that, yeah, ‘nineteen hundred and fifty six’ is how it always ought to have been anyway. You do the ultimate dreadfuls: the Christian thing, an album with Johnny Cash. You do a pastiche of Bill Nighy in Love Actually and call it a Christmas album. More »
Riding a bicycle round London for ten hours a day is grindingly difficult. A bike courier is paid £2-£3 per job (with a 10 per cent bonus for working a full week if you’re lucky), income can be fickle, and a slow week spent standing in the rain is no fun at all. Though it varies dramatically, couriers cover distances averaging around 300 miles a week. Couriers are obliged to deliver whatever a client wants delivered as quickly as the client requires; if you can’t get from pick-up to destination within 40 minutes, you don’t get paid. Covering London from (roughly) Wapping to Knightsbridge and Camden to Elephant and Castle, you see a lot of the city, a lot of weather, and a great many post-rooms. More »
It’s strange to find the New York Times Book Review devoting three full pages to yet another round of the Gordon Lish/Raymond Carver spat, previously addressed (at length) in, for example, The New Yorker, Slate and the New York Times’s own Sunday magazine. Stranger still to see it come down so heavily against Lish, one of the more accomplished editors of the 20th century.
The byline is also odd: Stephen King – who was once praised (by the same publication) for his masterful reworking of the ‘evil-car motif’. Really? I don’t mean to pick on King. But King, reviewing Carol Sklenicka’s new biography of Carver, does pick on Lish, who is singled out for his ‘heavy hand’, for ‘the strangely elitist view he seems to have held of Carver’s writing’, and for his ‘baleful’ and ‘heartbreaking’ influence on Carver’s stories. When his own first novel was accepted for publication in 1973, King says, he was More »
Philosophical theories of justice generally assign an important role to rectification, the putting right of past wrongs. Thierry Henry’s handball in France’s World Cup qualifier against Ireland last Wednesday has offered a mass exercise in rectificatory justice, with many in the Republic calling for the game to be replayed. The Irish know what they’re talking about, having recently had to take the Lisbon Treaty referendum to a replay in order to get the right result. FIFA has spoilsportingly turned down the Irish FA’s pleas. The iniquity is blatant.
But why stop with the Henry handball? More »
I was glad to see in today’s press that it was decided to separate the question of what sex Caster Semenya really is from the questions of whether she could keep her medal or compete in women’s sports. It seemed to me that the drive to publish the results of the sex determination tests was always sensationalist and intrusive, and that it missed the important points at issue in this situation. Yesterday’s decision by the IAAF goes part of the way to honour the complexity and vulnerability of the person here, but also to affirm the way her gender is bound up with cultural and familial modes of belonging and recognition. In fact, I wonder why we feel compelled to determine sex in a definite way, given that sex can be ambiguous (and is for at least 10 per cent of the population, and much more if you take ‘psychological factors’ into account), and the standards that we use to ‘determine’ it are clearly shifting and not always consistent with one another (chromosomal, hormonal, anatomical, to name a few). In fact, the negotiated agreement with Semenya is not based on the ‘facts’ of sex, but on a consensus achieved among the various parties to the case about how to proceed. Let’s applaud this distinction.
After all, the question of whether she should be allowed to keep her medal or to participate in women’s athletics is different from the question of what sex she really is – and should remain so. More »
Amid all this celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, I’m left wondering whether I was the only one to have jumped the other way at the time. It turned me into a Marxist. All my adult life before then I had thought that Marx had been wrong, for example in predicting that capitalism would need to get redder in tooth and claw before it was undermined by its internal contradictions. The Russian Revolution however had not occurred in the most advanced capitalist country, which is why, by my way of thinking, it could only be kept alive by tyranny – a premature baby in an incubator was the metaphor I liked to use. In the West it had been shown that enlightened capitalist societies could smooth away their own roughest edges, by taking on board social democracy, the welfare state, decolonisation and the like. All this seemed to put the kibosh on the old man’s gloomy prognostication of capitalism’s needing to get worse before it exploded, releasing us into a brave new socialist world that not even Marx could describe in detail (consistently with his belief that it was the material base that determined intellectual superstructures), and that I, for one, was not at all confident that I would come to like. Happy days. More »
Richard Nixon, visiting the Great Wall of China in 1972, said: ‘I think you would have to conclude that this is a great wall.’
Ronald Reagan, visiting the Wall in 1984, said: ‘What can you say except it’s awe-inspiring? It is one of the great wonders of the world.’ Asked if he would like to build his own Great Wall, Reagan drew a circle in the air and said: ‘Around the White House.’
Bill Clinton, visiting the Wall in 1998, said: ‘So if we had a couple of hours, we could walk 10 kilometres, and we’d hit the steepest incline, and we’d all be in very good shape when we finished. Or we’d be finished. It was a good workout. It was great.’
George W. Bush, visiting the Wall in 2002, signed the guest book and said: ‘Let’s go home.’ He made no other comments.
Barack Obama, visiting the Wall on Wednesday, said: ‘It’s majestic. It’s magical. It reminds you of the sweep of history, and that our time here on Earth is not that long, so we better make the best of it.’ During Obama’s visit, the Starbucks and KFC at the base of the Wall were closed.
During his first visit to China, Barack Obama reportedly addressed a range of contentious issues with his hosts, in private: Iran, North Korea, climate change, the yuan and its impact on the global financial crisis. But, whether in public or in private, the US president tiptoed very lightly when talking about China’s human rights record. At a town hall meeting in Shanghai with young Chinese, Obama deflected the chance to criticise Beijing’s censorship of the internet, for example, talking only about universal rights in the vaguest terms. At a scripted ‘press conference’ – neither he nor the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, actually took any questions – Obama walked the same line, telling Hu that the US is committed to universal rights, but refusing to mention any of China’s specific failings. More »
