Blog 2007

Friday, 20/07/07: Dinner without food

I can see why people in the past got so over-excited about spiritual teachers. Am just starting Ken Wilber's Integral Psychology, and am struck with the thought that I am being rescued from hell - in this case, the hell of postmodernism. Which technically, I suppose, makes Ken Wilber my saviour... I want to google and see what kind of reception he has had from critics. When he calls postmodern post-structuralist biographies "about as interesting as having dinner without food," do snooty French people haul him over complicated, tautologious coals, or do readers round the world leap up from their sofas crying, "Yes! That is EXACTLY what postmodern post-structuralism feels like!"?

Isn't it depressing when a close friend reveals himself to be, at heart, a postmodern post-structuralist? A friend of mine recently explained to me the work of his favourite philosopher, concluding with the words, "And so, you see, resistance is futile." I was reminded of Camille Paglia's remark, a propos the structuralists: "Of course the French were feeling alienated! They'd just been occupied!" There seems to be, at the emotional core of these philosophers, a buried memory of World War Two: everything revolves around concepts of disempowerment, enslavement and the insidious traps of thought and language. The unfortunate reader is bludgeoned into a sense of defeat. Resistance is futile indeed!... Honeys, the war is over.

I want to go my local Prontaprint and have a mug made saying: "Structuralism and Poststructuralism - making disempowered people feel worse since 1907."

Monday 23/07/07: Art is the answer

I read in Ken Wilber today: "When you contemplate an artwork that you love and value, you are joining the subjective and the objective worlds—the worlds of values and facts, morals and science...—in a unified embrace..."

Yesterday, down in Brighton, I finally bought three sketches by the late Eddie Cairns off my friend Mark. Mark inherited much of Eddy's work when he died intestate in the early 80s, and has always intended to sell them off to interested parties and give the money to AIDS charities. Better that than have them lying in a cupboard. The drawings are wonderfully evocative of an era. It's not just the Freddie Mercury moustaches—it's a moment in time, a whole world of desire and fun and anxiety. This was a time when people weren't afraid of colour, when David Bowie dressed up as a clown and got Edward Bell to draw him hyper-glamorised. Cairns' style really gelled towards the end of his life, in 82 and 83. These last pictures are in a graphic, decorative style, like fashion sketches with a desperate bravado, yet they always capture personality. Here are a couple:

Wednesday 25/07/07: Why it's more or less impossible to get an old-fashioned date with a sex-fiend

Despite (or was it becaue of?) a jaunt to the House of Commons with my friend Chris to watch Prime Minister's Question Time and have a roast chicken lunch in the cafeteria (I took home House of Commons napkins), I later fell to musing on the meaning of life and the importance of bodywork. Gay men (I cannot speak for lesbians) seem to be uniquely fitted, by the experience of our lives, to critique society, to have an outsider's view. Paglia said that when a man becomes gay his IQ goes up 20 points. But all this sharpness, this savvy, is in the head. Alongside the mental dividends of growing up gay lies the deep pain and woundeness carried in the body, which is why what gay men need is not talk-therapy but body-therapy. By the time a gay man gets to forty, he is usually either a sensualist or a celibate. When in doubt, half the gay population nips down to the sauna, and the other half retires to its cold, lonely bed. (And never the twain shall meet: the sensualists find the celibates very dull, and can see one coming at twenty paces.)

At Gay Love Spirit they are finding things to do with sexual energy other than (or in addition to) shoving it up some stranger's arse. The idea is that if we want gay people to come through as healers of the culture's psyche, we are going to have to heal ourselves first. (Or, as my old friend Maxime used to say, "Cobbler, heel thyself.")

Wednesday 1/08/07: Nude yoga workshops for world leaders now!

As a brash young Orton-spouting student, I used to think that the world would be a better place if everyone, particularly world leaders, had more sex. I now see the error of this position. World leaders do have sex; the problem is, it doesn't achieve the desired result, namely, reunification of head and body. Reading in Ken Wilber today, I came across this: “The self identified with vision-logic is the centaur.” The centaur is Wilber’s word for the level of consciousness at which the mind/body split is healed. What he is saying is that the mind only really opens up and goes beyond ego when it has made its peace with the body. In my experience this is true: you can only escape a fundamentally egocentric (or ethnocentric or any other kind of -centric) attitude if you can relax, and you can only relax in your body. You can only have the luxurious feeling of being truly yourself when you are one with your body. So let world leaders have sex or not, but make sure they do their bodywork. Make sure they locate those areas of stored tension, and do rebirthing breathing, and cry, and punch cushions, and have birth-memories, and feel better. Make sure they dance once a day, every day, before breakfast. Make sure they attend nude yoga workshops. Make sure they know where their centre of gravity is. I’m serious. Only when the world is governed by people who do this stuff will we have any chance of sorting the planet out. When I put it this way, do you see what I mean? It is perfectly possible that “centaurs” could be elected to positions of power. Women’s lib, gay lib, body lib. Let us hope so.

Sunday 12/08/07: Culture wars at Queer Pagan Camp

Sunday night: To Queer pagan Camp, where I find myself, after a very good vegan dinner, sharing washing-up duties with an climate-change protester called (let us say) Anne, who asks me about men, and why we have sex in open spaces, and whether women should be envious. Having recently re-read Camille Paglia’s fab opening chapter of Sexual Personae - by far the most insightful essay on the male neurosis I know - I ask my fellow-skivvy if she is familiar with it. She bristles, and replies that she hasn’t read it, but has heard about it. “Isn’t she the one who said that women are incapable of high culture?” “No,” I reply, “she said that men’s achievements in the arts and sciences are a neurotic manifestation of womb-envy. You should read it. It’s a corker.” “I have better things to do with my time,” she announces with some hauteur, evidently alarmed that she is sharing a washing-up mop with the Devil’s Disciple. I finish the washing-up (unaided) and ponder. How many female friends do I lose by sticking up for old-school feminism’s bete noir? Oh well then, so be it. When one has actually taken the trouble to read a book, it seems a pity not to defend it to those who haven’t.
Next morning, I find myself sharing Linda McCartney sausages with a jolly group of women around a morning camp-fire. One of them gives me a smile and says, “We hear you stood up to Anne.”

Tuesday 14/08/07: Thank you, Queer Pagans: the most fun I’ve ever had with my clothes off.

Still at QPC. In the night, a horrid storm, and we awake in a muddy field, tents and domes flooded and gazebos flattened. And it’s my birthday. Battle-of-Britain spirit emerges: my shorts are rushed into Bridport for drying with everyone else’s wet stuff (and never seen again), and my friend Sparkly rustles up emergency soup for eighty, but when evening falls and it is still raining I decide the day needs to be turned around somehow, and so I ask Sparkly to arrange a small birthday ritual for me, in which I am blindfolded, stripped, spattered with strawberry yoghurt and then licked clean by nine fit pagans, hand-picked by Sparkly, in his amazing dome, complete with wood-burning stove, rugs and lanterns. The ritual is erotic-not-sexual; despite the fact of ten attractive gay men being naked together in a tent, no orgy ensues. But I have to say it is the most fun I’ve ever had with my clothes off. Next day, gossip rages about my birthday treat and a handsome, intense young Israeli expresses disappointment at not having been invited. Queer Pagan Camp is not for the faint-hearted, but its pleasures are intense.

Wednesday 22/07/08: I stalk the city's streets like Dostoyevsky

In David Cronenberg’s great eighties horror-flick Videodrome, anyone who watched that nasty, nasty cable-TV show (torture, murder, electrified clay walls) developed a special sci-fi brain tumour through which they could be controlled by the evil scientist Barry Convex and his crew. And I often think, as I stalk this city’s streets, that London life is like that. I have long since unplugged my evil, vampiric TV set, but I am still assaulted by advertising whenever I use the underground. And by people’s faces. City life is draining because energy follows thought (or attention) and in the city your attention is constantly being distracted. When you meditate, or even just spend a day in the country, your attention goes where you choose to send it (mostly inwards) and your batteries recharge. Try making a journey on the underground without looking at a single advertisement. Try walking through the city without looking at a single face. At first you feel like a loser, but after a while you feel like Dostoyevsky. You begin to understand why city people are so very, very different from non-city people, and why it is so hard to fully engage with them. Most city people are flat batteries on legs.

Friday 31/08/07: Flesh is weak!

I have just completed a play called Flesh Is Weak, and as I intend (following the practice of my playwright grandfather) to put the thing into a drawer for nine months before showing it to anyone, I want to let off a little steam by jotting down some thoughts and feelings about it.

The play is based on a one-act comedy called Get The Guest, which was part of a triple bill I produced in 2004 at Oval House with Phil Setren, and which transferred to the bigger space there in 2005. The play starred James Holmes as a lecherous guesthouse proprietor and Nick Malinowski as his trembling victim. There was a plan to develop it into a TV series and we filmed a trailer in the summer of ’05, but I felt ambivalent about the TV route. Get The Guest was the first stage-play I had completed since petulantly turning my back on a promising theatre career at the age of twenty-one. It had played like a dream, and it felt like a breakthrough and a homecoming. I wanted to write more plays.

2006 was taken up with the production of my full-length play Wild Fruit, and it was only in 2007 that I finally got round to writing the extended, full-length version of Get The Guest, now Flesh Is Weak. What helped me to find my way forward was a brilliant, meticulous production of The Caretaker, featuring my friend Con O’Neil, which I caught in Brighton and later again at the Tricycle. A critic had noted a Pinteresque quality in Get The Guest and, having stopped watching Pinter many years ago, I had decided to return to the scene of the crime, and see if there was indeed a connection.

Pinter at his best, properly done, is truly atomic. Intense, ineffable, grimly hilarious. One thing I particularly noticed was the pacing. To call it slow is to miss the genius of it. It progresses at the speed of obsession. It has the urgency of desperation with nowhere to run to. When people talk about the Pinter pause they really mean the Pinter pace, his unique contribution to modern theatre.

Anyone who has ever been to the theatre will instantly nail me as an alumnus of the venerable school of homosexual comedy. The nice thing about being gay is that we poufs cling to our cultural icons like lifebuoys in a shipwreck, and consequently we barely notice when they go out of fashion. So Tennessee was out of fashion in the sixties and seventies, was he? Only to heterosexuals. So Noel was eclipsed in the eighties? Not in Brighton. Wilde, Coward and Orton are to your theatrical queer what vitamin C is to most people – just one of the basic essentials of life. Of the three, Coward, though the least magisterial, is the most useful, because he managed to produce a decent body of work before being knocked up in gaol or bludgeoned to death. (Wilde’s oeuvre looks like a telephone directory when collected, but inside you will only find Dorian Gray, The Importance and a couple of fairy tales.)

You can learn more or less everything you need to know about stage comedy from Wilde and Coward, with Orton coming in at the end to show how it can all work in the post-modern world. Wilde had structure and Coward had texture. Coward never went in for stylised conclusions like those of Earnest and What The Butler Saw, probably because he saw himself as some kind of naturalist. For him, dialogue was all. His most triumphant moment is the underrated Fallen Angels, a stunningly simple two-hander (for most of its duration) in which two women spend an evening waiting for the arrival of a super-sexy Frenchman they have both, previously – separately – had flings with. Sisterly solidarity slowly mutates into suspicion, paranoia and finally outright rivalry as the alcohol works its magic and the prospect of a good hard fuck looms ever closer. The play demonstrates, in a nutshell, Coward’s method: emotion and sexuality are conveyed through dialogue, and the theatre arena is used to ritualistically whip up an energy of hysteria in which the glass-shattering sexual suspense of the onstage characters infects the audience and is released in laughter. If properly executed, the play takes an audience to a place where they will literally scream at a raised eyebrow. (The Frances de le Tour/Felicity Kendall production achieved this orgasmic effect).

Pinter comes from Coward; or maybe it is fairer to say that Pinter comes from he-who-must-not be-named, the foul beast Samuel Beckett, who was, for all his halo of modernity, just a response to Coward. Without Fallen Angels, no Waiting for Godot. And Pinter, bless him, takes poufta comedy and gives it guts. Meanwhile Orton came along and restored to comedy the quality that the defiantly anti-intellectual Coward had subtracted, namely cultural self-awareness. Orton delved right back into classical Greek drama to get to the roots of theatre, with the result that his last play was so conceptually dazzling as to be almost unplayable. The death of Orton was the greatest tragedy ever to befall English-language theatre. Just think of all the cobblers we might have been spared had he survived! In fact I would go so far as to say that more, many more people would be going to the theatre today had Joe Orton lived to consolidate his vision of comedy. He was theatre’s David Bowie, and he died before taking his message to the millions.

And so this diary entry has been not about my play but about my heroes. All well and good. A writer reads and sees what he wants, and then writes what he can. The best you can do is get out of your own way and let the play write itself. Let the ghosts of dead playwrights dictate the next line. This is when things start getting interesting: when your own agenda becomes less important than your membership of the cult of your chosen art-form. Gay people have a good sense of this dynamic, because modern homosexuality, like it or not, is itself a cult. The religious nature of sexuality is staring us in the face. From here it is but a short step to the religious, cultish aspect of art. I am more interested in ritual than in dry post-modern games-playing. Camille Paglia called Hollywood “morally bankrupt but ritualistically profound.” Sounds good to me.

Sunday, 7/10/07: My new theory of cinema and theatre

Just back from the Isle of Skye which, to quote mad David Byrne, is "a good place to get some thinking done."

OK, so here’s my new theory: post-modern theatre is a mistake. If you want to be the latest thing, make a film. I don’t mean stop making theatre. What I mean is, make your peace with the fact that theatre is a merely modern art-form. The decision to make theatre is just as valid as the decision to make a chest of drawers. Theatre is needed and necessary; it may even be that there are still great plays to be written. But the form itself is not cutting edge, and attempts to make it so are mostly kind of sad. Robert le Page? Zut alors!

A certain eminent British theatre director (name withheld to protect the guilty) read my play Wild Fruit and told me I would be more contemporary if I wrote in shorter scenes. Fuck off. If I want to write short scenes I shall write a screenplay.

Cinema is the art-form of the postmodern age, because it relates to dreaming, and hence to the psychic realm, which is the level of consciousness currently unfolding in the collective mind. The syntax of film is the syntax of dream. This is why it is unwise to make surreal films. The whole art-form springs from surrealism; thus surrealist cinema usually feels tautologous and over-egged.

Analysis, inner work, spiritual practice, are all about subjecting the psychic realms to full waking consciousness. The goal of advanced meditational practices is to continue meditation right into sleep. What is brought into full waking consciousness loses its power over us. Cinema is the dream world experienced while awake, and is thus a direct metaphor for what mankind is currently trying to achieve in the evolution of consciousness.

Theatre relates to the psychic realms too, but is fundamentally anchored in the concrete. Things in a theatre are physically present, they are not a flickering trick of the light. And this is the glory of theatre: when spirit is conjured up in a play, it feels like a really solid incarnation - the butterfly well and truly pinned down.

My advice to today’s playwright? Better to wallow in theatre’s concreteness than try to minimise or deny it. Forget back-projection. Forget surfing the bloody internet live onstage. To hell with alienation, and masks, and revolving sets! Forget Brecht and Pirandello and forget, every morning as you wake up, the foul beast Samuel Beckett. Write long scenes. Have one really solid-looking set. Go retro! Be brave.

Friday, 19/10/07: Thomas Mann and Peggy Lee go head to head

I settle down with a book of Thomas Mann short stories, still belatedly fleshing out my England-centric education. A few pages in, and the spirit of anti-literature stirs within me like a dragon in its lair. Foot-dragging Penguin translation (uncredited - the translator presumably begged for anonymity) plus that creeping sense of nineteenth-century claustrophobia, of drowning in mental crap, that one remembers all too well. I note with grim satisfaction that the first story in the collection is the source for the gloriously jaded Peggy Lee number "Is That All There Is?" - and note, petulantly, that I consider the Peggy Lee product to be far more interesting in every way.

Friday 2/11/07: A nice nude to warm the bedroom wall

Have been posing for my friend Philip Byrne recently, and in return he has given me the fabulous drawing below. I told him I didn't want a drawing of me, I'd rather have a picture of some gorgeous powerful arse to warm my bedroom wall. He was quite surpised. He said, "Most of the flashers I draw want one of themselves."

to see more of Philip's work, click here

Tuesday, 06/11/07: Never try to hoodwink a psychic Frenchman

A spiritual teacher needs to be a little bit psychic... OK, so I’m checking in with my new teacher, a charming Frenchman who runs an esoteric school from various hotel rooms in London, Paris and New York, and he says to me, “Robert, you have to read the mystics. And I mean proper mystics, not Woolworths mystics, not Eckhart Tolle.” I blush and mutter, “No, of course not.” What I haven’t told him is that Eckhart Tolle is exactly who I have been reading for the past couple of weeks - the smoothly comforting mystic-lite world bestseller The Power of Now (as endorsed by Oprah Winfrey). Well, what’s a boy to do? I was exhausted after ploughing through the excellent but brain-frying Wei Wu Wei’s “Open Secret” (twice) and I needed a little light relief. Another time I shall know that the Master cannot be so easily hoodwinked!

When I am not pitting my brains against riddlesome mystic texts these days I am wallowing in Henry Miller, and once again I am somewhat humiliated to observe that not only could I personally never hope to match such electrifying writing, but also, neither could any Englishman. We had George Orwell's grimly masochistic Down And Out In Paris And London; America produced the riotously misanthropic Tropic of Cancer. Sorry - no comparison.

Wednesday 2/01/08: Happy New Year!

As you can see, I spent the New Year period sensibly making myself a mask at a workshop run by my friend EJ. I was at a residential event called Loving Men at New Year. Highlights included a sensuous touch workshop with Andy Saich, during which I had an unidentified spiritual experience. Loving Men is an organisation run by the lovely Dennis L. Carney, the gorgeous Tim Foskett and the handsome Alfred Hurst. Their events are more structured than an Edward Carpenter Gay Men's Week, but less rigorous than a Gay Love Spirit course. I shall give a link to their website below this entry.

To find out more about Loving Men, click here