Hot Tips 2007

Books I've read, things I've seen. Mostly these are recommendations because I try not to bitch.

Camille Paglia: Break, Blow Burn

She Who Is To Be Obeyed reads 43 of the world’s best poems, and finds time to smack down those naughty structuralists along the way. Who likes Camille Paglia? Artists do. Mind-expanding.

Anyone of an artistic bent who isn't familiar with the thundering first chapter of Paglia's Sexual Personae is missing out on vital information they need to proceed with their life. If you are a man and you are frightened of women, and if you come over all docile and apologetic in the face of man-bashing rhetoric, Camille Paglia could be your new best friend. Warren Farrell (see below) offers the most intellectually coherent (and rigorously fact-based) replies to the man-bash, but Paglia does it with more panache and, being a woman, achieves the better balance. But that's another story...

Warren Farrell: Why Men Are The Way They Are

Amazing how un-dated this 20-year-old book about male socialisation is. Farrell is a masculist whose work makes Iron John look like the Teddy Bears’ Picnic. Camille Paglia critiqued the feminist idea that "men should be like women and women can be whatever they like." Farrell expands on this. Later he wrote The Myth of Male Power, a book so disturbing that nobody reads it.

Peter and Leni Gillman: Alias David Bowie

A wonderfully detailed and damning biog from 1985. Bowie will be remembered as one of the great English storytellers, a gorgeous instance of mental illness transfigured into art.

People walk around with the front cover of Aladdin Sane on their T-shirts, twenty-five years after the release of the album. Why? Because, like much of Bowie's disturbing output, this is an image that we have not yet processed. It is a modern Mona Lisa, arresting, provocative, sphinxishly riddlesome. Transvestite? Well, kind of. Bowie did drag like no-one before or since. For starters, he chose as his glamour template the masculine, sometimes cross-dressing female icons of the early century - Dietrich, Garbo, Katharine Hepburn - thus presenting himself as a man impersonating a woman impersonating a man. Gay lib? Not at all. The manifesto, albeit unhinged, was that this was a new mode of dandyism, this was how men in the future would dress to increase their chances of pulling birds. Add to this a lightning-flash that was clearly splitting the artist's head down the middle, the latest in the endless line of nervous references to a family madness which was to carry off Bowie's brother Terry and which terrorised the star throughout his golden period.

Inside the gorgeous gatefold (Swiss-printed) sleeve was a collection of pop songs that featured not just a jolly fusion Jaques Brel and all that was best in sixties English rhythm and blues, but also an outpouring of lyrics that indicated a mind plugged painfully into the wall-socket of schizophrenic illumination. "I had so many dreams! I had so many breakthroughs!" Yes indeed, and then what happened? "The door to dreams was closed." The mind, unable to integrate the peak experiences into any kind of structure, crashes disastrously back to earth (another recurrent Bowie image). No wonder, at the age of eleven, we were impressed: these were some of the most vivid, urgent images since... who? ... Blake?

Now look again at the cover photo. Glam? Yes and no. Like many climactic works of art, the image contains the seed of a future movement, in this case the Goths. The glamour - the loading of the face with sexualisation - tips over into the macabre: the pink of the flesh has too much blue in it, the eyes are closed, and the post-produced pool of water resting on the shoulder suggests a statue. This is a death-mask as much as a beauty-demo. Sex is death. Glamour is a lie. The pop-superstar (that "brave Apollo," that triumph of rampant personality) is a hallucinating psychotic who believes himself to be not only Jesus (falling from the sky to save us all) but also Hitler, the raw ego capable of anything. "Millions weep a fountain... Who will love Aladdin Sane?"

Iconically sexy people tend to incorporate melancholy in their auras, because they understand that every love-affair is also a funeral. This is why conservatism, which may not be a very desirable force in politics, is often integral to art. Nostalgia is unavoidable to those who are most intensely alive. At the height of exuberance, the presence of the past. Bowie presented a startling futurism that was underpinned by all sorts of backward-looking subtexts, from the horror of the second World War to the regressive pull of family history. The Aladdin Sane artwork was in red, white and blue, colours that spoke of Bowie's hot-and-cold core, but also of Britain's imperial flag; and the lightning-flash icon, which we all thought was jolly science fiction at the time, was also the emblem of Oswald Mosley's English fascists. (In 1970, tripped-out Beatles-freaks would read all sorts of hidden messages into the cover of Abbey Road, hungry for a complexity that wasn't there. A couple of years later Bowie stepped in and obligingly provided precisely such hidden codes and complexities, but hid them so well that nobody noticed.) Futurist and reactionary, pioneer and tawdry drag act, he was at his best when most gorgeously dragged-up and most stridently elegaic, the mask freeing up the imagination for extravagant outpourings - an apotheosis he managed twice, with Aladdin Sane and Scary Monsters. Time is waiting in the wings! Ashes to ashes!

The Gillmans’ biography ends with Bowie performing at Live Aid, which, either naively or with a wicked wink, they describe as “an artist at the height of his powers.” To the Bowie fan, the years following on from Scary Monsters were a funeral indeed. Let’s Dance could have been dismissed as a wobble, but at Live Aid he seemed more like an estate agent than rock’s William Blake. Somehow he had managed to cash in his chips, packing up his mask of enlightenment and trading, thereafter, as a cross between Cliff Richard and David Lynch. What has been, for me, always something of a mystery was where exactly did all these new, post-Let’s-Dance Bowie fans come from - and why? Did the millions that made him a “global superstar” in the 80s convert to him because they liked Let’s Dance, or because that album was a declaration of moral hygiene that made it OK, retrospectively, to get into all that orange-haired bisexual stuff? Bowie appeared on TV in his horrid new suit, bland as a morning TV host, laughing about Ziggy Stardust and washing his hands of the whole “funny” episode. Erm... why?

What had happened was this: Bowie’s brother Terry, having pleaded with his famous brother for many years to get him out of the mental institutions in which he was incarcerated, killed himself in December 1984. No longer could the question of poor mad Terry be ignored. The story had ended in a way that could never be reversed.

Gay people often moan about Bowie "going back into the closet,” but this is to miss the point. Bowie’s attitude to his homosexuality was always quirky, to say the least, and he had never supported gay lib. He had, in fact, spoken out against it. The point was that for him, the homosexual domain was NOT seen as an equally valid mode of expression that needed to be honoured and respected; it was a transgression, a flirtation with madness. All the excitement, energy and inspiration came gushing from precisely this source. It was painful being plugged into that wall-socket, but by golly it got you places! (In the seventies all Bowie had to do was sneeze and people jumped to attention. He behaved maybe more outrageously than any star before or since, inflating himself into a godlike presence - ”Stand aside! Mr Bowie does not like to be touched!” - and terrorising the music press editors. His ruthlessness was legend, and his haughtiness extended even to his fans, whom by 1975 he openly despised, laughing at them when they turned up at his Diamond Dogs concerts sporting the style he had jettisoned.) Now madness was a joke that was off-limits. No more wall-socket, no more inspiration. Time to come down for good.

What is oh-so-satisfying about David Bowie’s oeuvre is that he was (once) a good enough artist to intuit all the contradictory factors that made him, to foresee his own rise and fall, and even to write the epitaph of his own talent: ashes to ashes.

The golden-period work lives on as an enduring portrait of the sumptuousness and fragility of the human ego (look at that cover photo AGAIN!). Part of Bowie's project was to elevate self-aggrandisement to the level of an art-form, and very nice too, except that pop music has never really recovered. Now every time we turn on the radio we risk hearing Oasis.

This fabulous book is proof, if proof were needed, of what an astonishingly potent art-form pop music was in the seventies... and explains why we would be naive to hope for lightning to strike twice.

Alan Downs: The Velvet Rage

If you are unconvinced by the sight of buff guys sweeping down Old Compton Street in tight tank-tops and suspect that male homosexuality might be a complex and bittersweet fate, you are ready for this book. (Note: The book is addressed squarely to male homosexuals and I am told is not at all interesting if you are not one of those.)

Nick Duffell: The Making Of Them

Thinking of sending little Nigel off to boarding school? Read this devastating book about the emotional price of boarding school education, and Nigel will be spared. Duffell does workshops for Boarding School Survivors. Think you might want to attend one? Try telling your friends. They will almost certainly laugh. Which is, of course, the horror of the boarding school scar: you can never confess to it, because it only applies to spoilt ponces. I did one of Duffell's workshops, and he said, "Men don't need Viagra, they need to feel more." Too right, baby.

Roger (the drawings of Roger Payne)

Roger Payne’s figures are less exaggerated than Tom of Finland’s, more anatomically accurate, but he shares Tom’s exuberantly pro-sex agenda. The drawings have a wicked sense of humour. Roger presents sex as drama: the story is in the body. His pictures also reflect how gay sexual fantasy has broadened its canvas in the past decade or two. You don’t need to be young and gorgeous to be in a Roger sketch, you just need to be in a state of advanced sexual excitement. Like the best people (one remembers the Pre-Raphaelites) Roger is an obsessive. Types recur, faces repeat . There’s the smooth, barely-legal boy, always passive and cock-hungry; the jaded but sexually expert middle-aged man, balding and lined but still impressively potent; and in between the two, at the sun-like centre of the sex-o-verse, the hairy, swoonily handsome athlete, who spends his life being pestered for sex by the other two (and bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain British tennis star). There is one lovely Roger sketch that features all three, although I didn't find it in the book. A brutish old janitor is guiding the athlete’s cock into the hole of a delirious boy-skateboarder through a rip in his jeans. The lurking suggestion is that the athlete isn’t particularly bright and wouldn’t otherwise have known where to put it. But hey, who cares? If he's that sexy, does it matter if he's stupid? Roger’s humour, while obviously beyond language, manages nevertheless to have a palpable Englishness. He’s a national treasure. ISBN 978-2-84547-153-5

Christopher Booker: The Seven Basic Plots

Reactionary and repetitive, this 700-page tome nevertheless had me reading to the end. There are errors that would make a schoolboy blush (Othello didn’t stab Desdemona) and some of the books Booker mouths off about he appears not to have read (Naked Lunch is by no stretch “a pornographic novel”). Of course the critics were merciless. Booker’s project took 35 years to complete, which means that the ideas he based his thesis on (Jung’s) are no longer fashionable. But if you have ever wondered why a single line from Shakespeare can feel more soul-nourishing than, par example, the complete output of Samuel Beckett, this book may be for you.

The Rose Tattoo at the National Theatre

My mother and I recently took in the Steven Pimlott/Nicholas Hytner production of The Rose Tattoo, starring Zoe Wanamaker. As the house-lights came up for the interval, my mother innocently asked, "So tell me, why is it that you like Tennessee Williams?"

Antony Gormley: Blind Light at the Hayward Gallery

My enjoyment of this exhibition was impaired by a creeping feeling of nausea and a sudden heavy headache. I lasted 30 minutes. Gormley proposes a world where morbid SM nightmares are served up as civic art for shopping centres. Even the crowd-pleasing Blind Light, a huge glass room filled with white mist in which punters grope in blind disorientation, is two-faced: a jolly sensory-deprivation ride, but also a bizarre voyeuristic joke in which half the audience is humiliated for the amusement of the other half. Powerful and nasty.

Gay Love Spirit: Authentic Eros I and II

If you have ever entertained the heretical thought that sex without authenticity might be a waste of time, check out Gay Love Spirit (see the link on my Links page). Facilitated by Andy Saich and led by Kai Erhardt, this staggering four-day workshop for gay men is about getting out of your head and back into the body. For me Kai is the Camille Paglia of the gay bodywork scene - completely coherent and centred, both earnest and hilarious, a one-man revolution whose believes that the future of the planet depends on the sexual self-awareness of individuals. At the end of the third night of the workshop, as all twenty-three of us lay entangled in a heap on the floor of the meditation room, sharing erotic stories and letting out group howls, there was a brief pause, and then Kai announced from the middle of the heap, without moving, "That concludes the formal part of the evening."

Vernon God Little at the Young Vic

No matter how good an adaptation is, it will always be an adaptation. Novels have a different language from plays. When they are adapted for the stage, you invariably get passages from the novel cut and pasted into the play. So there the audience sits, listening to novel-language and feeling vaguely ill-at-ease. Plays need to be written from scratch.

Shortbus

Got the DVD of Shortbus and devoured it immediately. Every time I see this film, I think, am I dreaming? Did I really see that? And I don't just mean the erections and the penetrations - I mean the erections and the penetrations happening in the context of a gloriously funny and melancholy script, gorgeous camerawork, ravishing design and a cast who, without exception, turn in perfect performances. Why weren't there riots when this film was released? Why didn't everyone see it, in the way everyone saw the Full Monty? (yes, I know why, but still). The cast is credited with devising the story, which, as a screenwriter, I film both humbling and disturbing. The wittiest, truest film of last year - by miles - had no author! If one had the devil in one, one might compare and contrast with the practice of a certain lionised British film director, who gets his casts to create his films for him and then takes the screenplay credit for himself. Shortbus should be taught in schools.

John Milton: Paradise Lost

Having recently been seized with a fit of iambic pentameters (see my poetry page) I decided to check out the old dragon Paradise Lost to see if that was where the vibe was coming from. I recoiled in horror. I normally read proper books, such as (this week) Nabokov's Lolita and Ken Wilber's excellent No Boundary, and so I was all the more shocked to come upon what I can only describe as an assault on the human spirit. T S Eliot accused Milton of introducing a "dissociation of sensibility" into English poetry, which is a mild way of putting it. In Paradise Lost, language has all its sensual, emotional and spiritual qualities amputated, leaving us with a raw, angry mind whose twisted pleasure, it seems, lies in making the reader feel bad. Fittingly, the only memorable images in this telephone-directory of a poem are the opening descriptions of hell, for hell is where we go when we are cut off from our bodies and our intuitions, and when people like Milton bark at us from pulpits.

What is grimly hilarious about all this is the fact that Milton was a republican who came to prominence as the author of a series of pamphlets justifying, to an appalled Europe, the execution of Charles I. The regicides' apologist, having survived the Restoration by the skin of his teeth, now chose as the subject of his "great" epic another civil war, in which Satan challenges the most high God and loses. To a post-Freudian reader, Milton's trousers are truly round his ankles: the God of Paradise Lost is clearly the divinely-appointed British monarch, and Satan the misguided, Christmas-pudding-banning republican who, let's face it, ultimately lost the war. In other words, Milton was a venon-spitting theocrat whose problem was that, deep down, he identified with the devil. Go, girl!

Ken Wilber: No Boundary

Where has Ken Wilber been all my life? This is a book that will save any spiritual seeker years of wandering in the wilderness (aka the "Mind/Body/Spirit" aisle at Border Books). Wilber doesn't address the reader from the exalted position of being an "awakened one", doesn't trumpet his own achievements in consciousness. He doesn't tease you with gnomic sayings, provocative paradoxes or unhelpful calls to instant mental revolution. He identifies himself as a "pandit" (philosopher) rather than a "guru" (mystic).

Spiritual teachers can be a bit of a bore, all too often grouchy and high-handed, as if resentful of having returned from Nirvana to rescue us poor deluded sinners. Wilber writes in plain English, speaks to you one-to-one as an equal. Despite its disguise as a modest self-helper and road-map to personal growth, this is a book of palpable spiritual power. The chapter on "The Centaur Level" contains a mind/body exercise to address psychosomatic blocks which, I kid you not, delivers the kind of results in one week that could take ten years of psychoanalysis.

It does seem to be the case that there are people who have indeed achieved advances in consciousness, and they walk among us. You can meet them. It's what's going on. If you are fortunate, and you can tell the difference between an authentic "awakened one" and a dangerous psychopath, you can get yourself the kind of personal spiritual tuition which in past ages was reserved for the very few. But quite often these people, who really have experienced consciousness breakthroughs, aren't natural teachers. They can be dismissive, intolerant and difficult. They can lack what NLP calls "pacing" skills, ie, they can't imaginatively descend to your level of ignorance and make things comprehensible on your terms. This is where Wilber can help. You can't have Wilber as your own personal tutor, but you can have his books as back-up when your own personal guru/psychopath goes all opaque and unreasonable on you.

Read Ken Wilber immediately. There is not a moment to lose. As Marcus Aurelius so wisely pointed out, not only is life short, but it can be rendered even shorter by the onset of senility...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

For many years I avoided translated literature. I like language, the way it gets you into the head of another person. And a novel is a motorcar that needs all its working parts to be in order if it is to whisk you off to wherever it wants to take you. Reading Gregory Rabassa's translation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Penguin), I couldn't work out whether I was really drowning in old-fashioned heterosexual kitsch, or whether it was all the unfortunate result of the translator's serpent-like presence. This is a book where, after the murder of the rich young stud, the town's "pleasurable mulatto girls" (whores, Reader) are seen in the picturesque courtyard "putting mourning dye onto their party clothes." This is a book that contains the phrase "carousing nights;" a book in which the maid walks into the kitchen "in full adolescent bloom," and the young master growls, "The time has come for you to be tamed."

O Gabriel Garcia Marquez, are you really a cross between Bertolt Brecht and Barbara Cartland, or should you sue your translator?

The Pain and The Itch by Bruce Norris at the Royal Court

To the splendid Royal Court, to see Bruce Norris' splendidly silly The Pain and The Itch, featuring the ever-lovely Matthew Macfadyen leading a strong cast, one of whom appeared to have strayed in from a production of Cats (no disrecommendation). My only quibble would be that one could have wished it to be even nastier than it was. Things only really came vibrantly alive when the bickering crossed gracefully over into the realms of sado-masochism, as poor, soft, HANDSOME Matthew was emotionally tortured by his frigid, bleach-blond designer-harpy of a wife. The plot was a welcome return to 1920s melodrama, the itch of the title being the nameless STD that mummy had passed on to her unborn daughter after fucking grumpy brother-in-law while pregant, the whore. Pre-baby-boom they would all have shot themselves, but these people sensibly just carried on swishing around their astonishingly ritzy set and causing (by a not very credible sequence of events) the death of their downtrodden immigrant maid, whose bereaved, saintly husband hovered over the car-crash of it all like a cross between Ghandi and Banquo's ghost. Oh how we laughed.

The Pain and The Itch is a clever play but, if truth be told, one wouldn't wish it any cleverer. As we left the theatre, people around us were agonising over whether or not they had correctly construed the labyrinthine plot. "But why did the police arrest the maid?" "Because Matthew left the phone off the hook and then they had that conversation, and the police were secretly listening in, and..." I saw people texting each other across the lovely auditorium with helpful suggestions. This is unfortunate. You can't imagine people coming out of a Tennessee play saying, "So did Stanley rape Blanche?" So much said, so much plot, and yet the creeping feeling that nothing actually happened. But then, what do I know? I find, these days, I don't even particularly like Moliere, whom I suspect to be, to some extent, the excuse for this kind of stuff. Perhaps we are entering a new neoclassical age, in which mental agility will be considered enough. I once had the misfortune to be cock-teased by a snotty twenty-three-year-old, who was kind enough to inform me, "Since Pulp Fiction, people of my generation have felt comfortable with circular plotting."

Ernest Becker: The Denial of Death

Feeling energetic, I decided to take on this Pulitzer Prize-winner from 1975, reprinted in 1997 in a smart new edition and endorsed by more or less everyone, including, elsewhere, Ken Wilber. But then, Wilber understands that consciousness is a many-levelled thing, and that each level needs to be dealt with seriously and thoroughly. Becker’s book is, in long stretches, fabulously insightful and illuminating, but by the end you may be amusing yourself by trying to work out exactly why they gave this wrist-slasher the Pulitzer.

For much of the book, the reader has a jolly time. Becker kindly digests Kierkegaard for us, and explains which bits of Freud have made it past 1975 and which bits haven’t. (Freud is acknowledged as "right ideas expressed in the wrong language," with his reductive sex-instinct theory now more or less discredited). At times we hanker for a more up-to-date mentality, less homophobic and sexist, but on the whole we can dismiss these slip-ups as we devour the insights. He’s marvellous on the subject of depression and how the depressed become a burden – indeed, aspire to be a burden – to those around them. He’s brilliant on the doomed project of romantic love, and the equally doomed Don Juan/sex-pig project. He’s gorgeous on the subject of psychoanalysis, pointing out – hooray! – that analysis most certainly won’t save us from our introspection.

But as he nears the end of his thesis, Becker’s tone becomes cross and shrill. Man is an animal who is unlucky enough to be able to imagine his own death, he says, and so the basic underlying reality for mankind is terror, horror and dread. (I am always rather tickled by the way these brilliant minds assert as self-evident fact the idea that animals don’t know the terror of death because they aren’t self-conscious. How much research backs up this “fact”? Precisely none. Animals don’t give interviews.) Anything other than this state of terror is repression – welcome, necessary repression, but repression nonetheless. Becker is very cross about anyone who thinks otherwise. And that’s a whole lot of people. He’s cross with gurus, he’s cross with Gestalt, he’s cross with Reich. He reserves special scorn for anyone who suggests that psychological healing or atonement may be found through the body. His tantrum seems to be to do with an intuitive sense that the future is going to leave him behind – that people in the twenty-first century will look for consciousness and meaning in places where Ernest Becker never trod.

What Becker represents is the level of consciousness just below what Wilber calls the centaur level, and he is proof that each level denies the existence of levels above itself. In other words, he’s a part of the truth. We can understand ourselves in terms of post-Freudian psychology, up to a point. We can muse on our castration anxiety and our Oedipus complex, and if we are poufs (or even if we aren’t) we can cogitate on our repressed horror of the female genitals, and if we are into worshipping the boots of sneering skinheads no doubt the shrink can explain why. But on the centaur level, the healed body-mind level, much of this stuff just dissolves away. The existential anxiety of the brainy people looks like just that – a brain problem. These are people who most certainly don’t dance before breakfast. These are people who don’t do Authentic Eros workshops. These are people who may never have attempted to put their consciousness into any part of their bodies other than their heads in their entire lives. They probably don’t even meditate.

In the end, old Becker makes a fool of himself. Skepticism, he says, is a more radical experience than mysticism, because it is “a more manly confrontation of potential meaninglessness.” This is too good. Manly! That hilariously discredited word! So skepticism is more butch than mysticism, is it? Oh really. And should I aspire to butchness, or is it OK to swish a little? Is mysticism effeminate? And should that bother me? Becker is like a man standing quivering outside the door of a gay bar. Should he go in or not? What will happen if he does? What will he discover? What will he see? Will he still be himself when he emerges? Similarly, the skeptic stands quivering outside the imposing porch of the College of Psychic Studies. Should he lay his hard-won university skepticism to one side, and venture in, and do that guided Kabbalistic meditation, and maybe have an EXPERIENCE of some kind?

The intellectuals of the future, Camille Paglia said, will think like today’s gay men. I now see what she meant. The Ernest Becker consciousness will eventually be superceded – that is, if the human race survives long enough. The future can only be swishy.

Andrew Cohen: Evolution Is Something You Do (Talk and Workshop)

Imagine going to a queer disco and saying, “I went to an amazing talk and workshop over the week-end. Andrew Cohen. Have you heard of him? He works with Ken Wilber. Brilliant speaker, quirky Jewish New York humour. He has this teaching he calls Evolutionary Enlightenment and it’s totally cutting-edge. Specifically takes on what he calls the narcissistic, isolated post-modern ego - a phrase that made me shiver with unwelcome recognition. Cohen’s take on spirituality is a radical break with the ancient traditions of the East in that, where they offered transcendence, he emphasises that the here-and-now is all we have. This is it. And unlike many modern gurus, he’s not just peddling altered states of consciousness - which more and more I am finding seem to be ten a penny these days. Cohen’s emphasis is rigorously rational and has a strong moral slant. He will tease the post-modern pieties of his audience by making a sweeping generalisation and then cackling, ‘Did ya think that was judgmental?!’ Beneath the cackling, however, there is a steely purpose: to blow paralysing post-modern relativism out of the water. It’s not all relative. The people he is addressing are a bunch of the most privileged, educated, sophisticated human beings that ever walked the planet, and we are whining about our problems and expecting God to help us. It’s got to stop. What more do we want God to do for us? This is a brilliant, intellectually coherent spiritual package created specifically for people like you and me. It's one step ahead of everyone else. And what’s more, they’ve bought premises in Islington and you can just pop in and meditate and have dinner...” Imagine saying that at a queer disco. XXL or Hard-On perhaps. You wouldn’t pick up, would you?

PS: A few months have passed, and I have cogitated a bit about old Andrew Cohen. A few reservations have emerged. He advises his students to "consider two or three years of celibacy" (even though he himself is married) and, on the occasion I heard him speak, appeared to be rather down on the idea of procreating. And the problem with the Islington centre is that it is effectively an ashram without a guru (Cohen lives in the States). That said, I am sure that he is an inspiring teacher if you are attracted to the idea of austerity — and many are.

Ionesco's Rhinoceros at the Royal Court

To the Royal Court, Britain's palace of new writing, to see Ionesco's lovely forty-nine-year-old play "Rhinoceros". Erm...

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg)

Rush to see Eastern Promises. If you are stark naked when you read this, don’t pause to dress. Rush out to your nearest multiplex. Perverts and women around the country will be excitedly spreading the news that the film contains a quite long scene in which Viggo Mortensen fights off two burly knife-wielding thugs while stark naked in a Turkish bath (him, not them.) This is indeed the dizzying high-point in a film that has instant classic tattooed on its knees. Since movies began, handsome heroes have either fought off assassins or been subjected to ritual flagellations of one sort or another. In the hands of Mr Cronenberg, this traditional spectacle blossoms into an SM spectacular, all blood and blades and buttocks. This is the best Cronenberg since Dead Ringers (1988), no question. Every second is pleasure: every sleazy twitch of Mortensen’s, every bad hairdo, every hell-red interior, every dirty London street. Cronenberg has found a way of taking his basic palette of passions - the perversely erotic, the gorgeously horrid - and enshrining them in a rock-solid genre narrative. Because the gangster genre is less of a freak-show than horror (his earlier mode), the Cronenberg passions are more of a subtext, but as such they subvert the mainstream all the more effectively. By the end of the movie you realise that Mortensen has in fact seduced queer crime-lord Vincent Cassell and settled down with him in a queasy quasi-marital partnership, while Naomi Watts is given a new dress and left to look after the baby. As the credits roll, you cry out for more, but you know in your heart that all has been said that needed to be said. Only in Cronenberg! We are not worthy!

Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer

Picked up a copy of Nexus in a second-hand bookshop on the Isle of Skye; devoured it and rushed out to buy Tropic of Cancer; devoured that. If, like me, you are not particularly well-read, Miller may come as a revelation. He is so modern-feeling that it comes as a shock to realise that he was born in the nineteenth century and his trademark “Tropic” novels were written in the thirties. While literary academia (Eliot, Pound, blah blah blah) was having what Paglia calls its myopic little sulk about the collapse of the dominant old belief-systems, Miller was out there furiously shagging Parisian prostitutes and trying to wrangle his next hot dinner. Like Iggy Pop reeling through the streets of Berlin forty years later, piecing himself back together and gestating his masterpiece, Miller has an insatiable lust for life no matter how bad things get. So Western culture is collapsing? About time too — it was a load of bollocks anyway. His delight in language is such that even when you don’t much like what you’re reading about, you love the words you’re reading. His hands “wander over the keys with the felicity of a Borgia’s murderous paws.” He evidently sees himself as Dostoyevsky’s heir — alienated, isolated, ranting, amoral — yet this is much more fun than Dostoyevsky or, for that matter, any translated text. Miller throws words around with a riotously anarchic kind of erudition that will have you reaching for your dictionary without the least twinge of annoyance. And then, from the heights of a sublimely deranged rant he will flip into his coolly detached memoir style and inform us, for example, that “in the bidet were orange peels and the remnants of a ham sandwich.”

Of course it is of note that Miller refers to women as “cunts” throughout most of Tropic of Cancer, but then, this is a hardcore misanthropy ride, to which the easily offended are not really invited. You might imagine that women would be cross with him, but in my experience you can actually use your copy of Tropic of Cancer to pick women up — or at least, you could if you wanted to. As I was sitting on the tube, contentedly gorging on a description of some flea-ridden orgy, the gorgeous Cuban singer-songwriter (female) sitting beside me purred into my ear, “That is my favourite book!” And we sat and chewed the Miller cud until it was time for me to get off. Would she have engaged me in conversation if I had been reading Naomi Wolf?

Glengarry Glen Ross at the Apollo Theatre Shaftsbury Avenue

Less flabby than most West End revivals, and Aiden Gillen is fun to watch - floppily angry, with a bizarre way of walking about the stage suggestive of a drunken puppet. Jonathan Pryce is somewhat underpowered (I am SO tactful). For your money you get two great sets. The play itself, an "estate agents are horrid" thingy which I hadn't seen before, is certainly of interest. People talk about the "testosterone" of David Mamet's work, but it seems entirely sexless to me. Or is that just the English acting? Splendidly wordy, splendidly pointless, with a shape that defies expectations and, instead of ending, just stops. A thought: yes, American drama is energetic and eloquent, but does anyone ever shut the fuck up in an American play?

Christopher Isherwood: Goodbye to Berlin

Here's a strange case. We all know "Cabaret" is the greatest film. Liza Minelli's incandescent performance, Bob Fosse's blistering choreography, blah blah blah. And we all know that Christopher Isherwood is the root source of the triumph, the "novelist" who actually sat down and was intellectual enough to string all those sentences together — the brains behind the bauble!

Oh riddlesome knot! The other day I picked up "Goodbye to Berlin" (the source novel) and read a few chapters, including "Sally Bowles" (the source of Liza's character). Reader, it reads like Winnie the Pooh with swastikas. Thus does Fate perform strange conjuring tricks. Thus does a Hollywood movie, such a low-brow thing, establish an author as a high-brow, when in actual fact he was probably never any such thing, just another E M Forster casualty who pissed off to Europe.

Present laughter by Noel Coward at the National Theatre

Coward is England’s Mozart, and he just gets better with the passing of the years. Like Mozart, Coward will produce an effect when performed by amateurs — or bad professionals — but it is only when he is mounted with meticulous precision that he reveals his true nature: delicate, poignant, thoughtless, hilarious, diamond-hard. Coward disliked and distrusted the intellect. He dispensed with thought and replaced it with theatricality — a staggeringly Zen manoeuvre. He let Doctor Theatre fly the plane. The result was a stack of plays that are ineffable in that they always mean something different from what they appear to mean. If you think Coward’s psychology is “thin” it is because you are looking in the wrong places. Look for it in the tone, the vocabulary, in what isn’t said. In my humble opinion, Coward makes Chekhov look about as subtle as a rhinoceros.

At the National Theatre they are giving a blistering Present Laughter, the one about the popular playwright pestered by hangers-on. The set is a feast in emerald green and the costumes and styling — as sported by a sexy, laser-sharp cast — make you want to pinch yourself. At three hours (including interval) the play is the perfect length. Watching Alex Jenkins deliver the massive part of Garry Essendine is like watching a solo violinist of superhuman skill. All this, plus a show-stopping turn from Pip Carter as the fabulous repressed psycho-homo groupie Roland Maule, and your joy is complete.

Hovering over the auditorium, I think, is one extremely happy ghost.

Queen: Greatest Hits I & II

A few years ago I was up for a gig to write a screenplay of The Freddie Mercury Story, and so, not possessing any Queen records, I bought the CD of Greatest Hits I & II, which has remained in my collection ever since, a big gold box-set of an embarrassment. I have always recoiled from Queen. For me they are the sort of band that got rock a bad name. Did I think Freddie was great at Live Aid? No, I thought he was absolutely horrid.

Back in the seventies (here we go!) Queen briefly looked like an elegant, decadent little glam rock outfit. Sheer Heart Attack had one of those lying-on-the floor cover-photos, like Lou Reed’s Berlin. Killer Queen was a nice song, with its champagne and Marie Antoinette lyrics, and Bohemian Rhapsody was nice for the first couple of minutes. But the elegance was always giving way to bombast. Freddie cut his hair and a lumbering rock nightmare was born. No more gorgeous little ballads to send shivers down your spine, just fuck-off stadium chants that sounded like the dinosaur’s footsteps in Jurassic Park.

Once or twice, reluctant to waste money, I have been very brave and listened to the whole tawdry collection. I have shuddered to Fat-Bottomed Girls, thawed briefly to Crazy Little Thing Called Love and chuckled indulgently to We Are The Champions. I have reeled with horror and distaste throughout most of Disc 2, experiencing de nouveau the death of rock ‘n’ roll as I drown in slickly-produced eighties cobblers. But I am not here to moan. I want to tell you about something I noticed.

Between Bohemian Rhapsody (1975) and The Show Must Go On (1991) there are thirty-two “hits” of varying degrees of appallingness. But look at those two bookends — the first and last, as it were — and something kind of magical emerges. Bohemian Rhapsody, I have always thought, is surprisingly existential for a chart-hogging pop song. “Mama, I just killed a man,” — and now “nothing really matters.” The vocal is exquisite, very authentic, rich and strange, one that can stand up alongside classic Bowie, and the piano-line is good too, limpid and sensuous. Of course the whole middle section is unbearable, but once they’ve done their “Night At The Opera” thing and got it out of their system, the song has only one place to go — back to the start, the dripping piano and the lamenting refrain, “Nothing really matters...”

Sixteen years later and Freddie’s dead, and it’s all been rather ghastly, what with the whole AIDS thing and the not coming out (despite being a clone and singing with a band called Queen), and now he’s posthumously singing The Show Must Go On. Freddie’s voice is back to its old androgynous purity and the melody and lyrics are once again stark-naked authentic: “Does anybody know what we are living for?” Good question! The subject of the song is a thinly-veiled contemplation of Freddie’s own approaching death, for real this time, as opposed to the operatic melodrama of the earlier ballad. And I think to myself, Great! Two terrific songs! — but in between the two, a career that (forgive my frankness) was the very opposite of elegant and existential and authentic.

To some extent, the story of Queen is the story of rock’s ambivalent attitude to homosexuality. Joining a rock group in the seventies would provide the opportunity to live out queer fantasies while staying in the closet. That black nail-varnish, that band-name, they’re just showbiz, a little joke, ha-ha! Fame and success, instead of bringing freedom, increase the feeling of exposure and the need for the closet, and so the louche styling is replaced by uncomfortable macho posturing which, ironically, only makes you look more faggy. (Note: there is only one truly effective closet, namely the grave).

Death is a great opportunity for transformation, and there was an atonement of sorts at the end of Freddie’s line. The Show Must Go On is his Ashes To Ashes, a poetic auto-epitaph that questions the entire edifice of his career. Yup, it was all a big old show whose function was to distract attention from Freddie’s discomfort with himself. “Outside the dawn is breaking,” as it would be for a condemned man. The layers of illusion and ego are dissolving away with his “flaking” make-up, leaving only Freddie’s Chesire-cat smile, which is both his courage and his dishonesty. Shivers down the spine indeed at this gorgeous evocation of the moment of death, where the person is reduced to his most naked self.

Queen, I suppose, were rock’s Dr Faustus. They realised that between them they had the requisite talent to conquer the world, and they couldn’t resist. Very early on in the game they kissed goodbye to their soul. That lovely butterfly was only briefly glimpsed once more at the very end.