Sirs & Madams,
One of PENICILLIN magazine's finest and most committed and most original writers, Chad Calland (though you will know him by a different name, I will perhaps leave you to guess which one!), has just released his very first book 'BECOMING A MAN'.
Click on the cover to buy and read a preview
"The task of being a man is not easy," says Chad Calland, in these powerful pages in which he guides us on how to be our "best self", and God knows no one at times has made it look harder than Chad. Long thought (wrongly as it turns out) to surely be the illegitimate son of Oliver Reed, England's greatest ever Englishman, Chad Calland, hellraiser, heavy drinker, womaniser, sharp dresser, WRITER, MAN, has been brought to the brink of destruction in his life, until a 'miracle' and an act of mercy saved him at the eleventh hour. In that moment he resolved to save others as he had been saved. Now he explains what it takes to "become a man" in today's world that wants us to fail. "Using your edge to an advantage and using it to gain a foothold." Any man who is lost, and is losing his footing, and feels himself slipping down the mountainside, needs to learn how to find this "edge" and gain this "foothold".
"Our demons grow in the shadows and burn in the light of truth, we cannot face them without discipline, hard work and the will to iron and burn them out. They will attempt to cling on and hold on, we will scream in agony as they attempt to hold on."
BECOMING A MAN has a Nietzschean air to it and Nietzsche is one of my favourite writers ever. I like the kind of almost exultation in Calland's writing, but an exultation not without struggle, a striving for exultation as it were. A hard won exultation. The words are driving, propulsive one might say. Heading for an explosion. "A slow burning fuse approaching its moment of detonation". "Jesus is Great and so am I" graffiti I saw on a subway wall in Nottingham comes to mind.
A stamp with a flaw will be worth millions in years & centuries to come and collectors will travel the world to track it down. A stamp that is perfect is boring and worth almost nothing. If Chad Calland was a stamp he'd be a Penny Black but a Penny Black with something very slightly wrong with it that was posted from a Victorian era Manchester brothel and opium den in a last desperate attempt to communicate to the outside world. A cry for help and a cry to help. And that is what we search the world for. Here is Chad Calland's Penny Black, and here is that letter.
An admirer
Ernst Graf
Airport
Lounge Lizard
The decadence of airport lounges! Another indulgence I had remained quite ignorant of until I began travelling around Russia with the incomparable Tusk.
‘If I’m taking regular flights I’m not going to slum it with the plebs’, he said to me one day in July, before signing me into Club Aspire at Heathrow.
It made sense. Plus Tusk, like many others, had a special deal with a credit card company which meant that he could visit these heliport pleasure palaces gratis, bringing a guest along with him.
‘It’s economical too,’ he argued. ‘If you add up how much you’re going to spend on food in airports in a year then it makes sense. Plus you can concentrate on work in them too.’
It resonated with me, it really did. I was hearing his message. I have, you see, a somewhat complex relationship with travel. On the one hand, I hate airports and all of the nonsensical rigamarole you have to go through, especially in this new era of extreme caution against the omnipresent disease. But on the other hand, I love the artificiality, the unreality, of airports - the glass and chrome, controlled electronic lighting, ambient muzak, and stores - luxury stores!
I want to be, I have realised, the kind of man who travels so frequently that he buys all of his clothes in airport branches of Hugo Boss. What a fabulous life that would be! Nothing so organic and earthy as going to one’s local town to shop, but instead, doing all of one’s essential life admin in transit.
Because if you’re always going somewhere else then you’re never ‘here’, and perhaps by never being ‘here’ you might succeed in escaping from yourself.
It’s worth a go, anyway.
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But under the tutelage of the ever-impressive Tusk, I soon became an airport lounge lizard myself, snagging a Priority Pass card as quickly as possible.
Well, I have that addictive nature you see - always jonesing for keeping up with the Joneses.
The Priority Pass card, a digital affair with a nice gold ‘P’ logo, turned out to be the key to so many airfield annexes offering relaxation, free food and drink, and an escape from the massed hordes who throng confusedly outside. We visited many such retreats on our travels, and it was interesting to see how varied they are in quality and opulence.
I recently sat in a fairly unimpressive lounge at Kiev International Airport (Zhuliany) that looked a little like a student common room. And I will always remember a wonderful little exchange that took place at the Comfort Lounge in Sochi International, a low-key kind of place that nevertheless offered the weary traveller caviar and champagne (always a favourite of mine at breakfast).
Tusk and I were sitting at a table opposite an old lady who spoke very little English, but who still tried to engage us in conversation. From what we could glean it appeared she was on her way back to St Petersburg, where she hailed from, and she had once been in the navy.
During a lull in the conversation I drew Tusk’s attention to a particularly attractive female newscaster on the TV screen ahead of us - of note, I felt, since the calibre of her beauty would be unusual on British television. Tusk glanced at her and then turned to our new friend, the old lady.
‘Would you?’ he asked, simply.
The lady, clearly having no idea what he had said, nodded her head enthusiastically.
Well, such harmless little japes became our stock-in-trade while, as idiotic Brits abroad, we charged around having no clue what most people were saying to us (and probably very little idea what we were saying either).
But the creme de la creme of international airport lounges (or at least, those I’ve visited so far) must be Malevich Lounge at Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport. As soon as you arrive at the reception desk, a long, curved affair where gorgeous and officious-looking women check your credentials before granting you ingress, this place screams luxury, allowing you to fully inhabit the ‘single, bilingual’ anonymous travelling businessman archetype that has always so fascinated me.
Arriving at Malevich at 6am you might be forgiven for thinking you’ve instead shipped up at a buzzing members’ club like Soho House, or that you’re at a particularly upscale WeWork. Once you’re past the stern receptionists you enter a cavernous room that is nonetheless well-lit given its floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the airfield. And on your left, the food buffet counter.
The big draw for me at these places really is the food. I don’t generally eat breakfast, but when I’ve had to get up at 4am I will cut myself a break. And the spread they lay on at Malevich really is marvellous. Boiled eggs, bacon, sausages, scrambled eggs, cereal, toast, coffee - as much coffee as you can drink - plus a generous selection of fruit juices. Plates of salami and other cured meats. And croissants, and trays of delicate and delicious-looking miniature cakes (the honey cake is particularly tasty). And porridge and tea and milkshake and biscuits, all piled up and all continuously replenished by discreet staff wearing black before the hungry eyes of the assorted upscale Muscovites.
And as if that wasn’t enough, a bar offering spirits, wine and (once again) champagne. The few times I have visited Malevich it’s always amused me to see how many people there drink alcohol in the morning, but I suppose I’m just being a bore, what with my irresponsible preference for teetotalism these days.
And the crowd? A smart set, for sure. Anonymous and wealthy-looking men, the kind who’s money means that they don’t need to bother dressing in anything other than tracksuits and sneakers. Startup-owner types hammering away at silver Macbooks, while grand-looking older women with imperious silver hair look on. Young, affluent families, and - well, this is Moscow - supremely attractive girls.
I spied one such girl stalking across the restaurant one morning in long black boots and a white jumper dress, her thick mass of brown hair shining down her back. Despite the early hour her skin and eyes were bright, her face full of vitality.
As it happened she was sitting next to me - I was hunched over the laptop, setting up another video to release to the slavering trolls of Youtube.
I often counsel men that you should disregard all notions of ‘leagues’, and that just because you think she’s in a higher league than you it doesn’t mean that this is accurate or that you won’t gain traction with her. But this girl . . . well, she looked like a model, and a model with money at that. The kind of girl you’d see coming out of Gucci or Chanel, or perhaps dining at Cafe Bolshoi. Hard to imagine that I would even register on her radar as a prospect.
Oh well, you have to give these things a go.
‘Hi,’ I said to her. ‘I was just doing some work, but I couldn’t help but notice you are very pretty’.
‘Oh,’ she said, and she coloured. ‘Thank you. I am Anya’.
‘Of course you are,’ I replied. ‘I’m Troy.’
We chatted for a few moments, and - as is often the case - despite the fact that she looked forbiddingly high-class she was sweet and pleasant. She was also on the same flight as me, travelling to London.
‘To meet my boyfriend,’ she explained. ‘It’s my birthday’
‘Many happy returns’ I said.
I had no reason to doubt that she was in a relationship (it would have been more surprising if she wasn’t) and there seemed no need to prolong our discourse seeing as the flight would soon be called, but I did suggest we connect on Instagram. She readily agreed, before heading off to the restroom.
When she was gone I checked her profile - 250,000 followers. Elegant shots in upmarket resorts across the world from Bali to the South of France to Mexico. Bikini pics (of course) plus yoga poses and the usual affirmations. She was an influencer with a huge following - an online celebrity of sorts.
I didn’t bother messaging her, but it was interesting nonetheless to come across one of those Instagram model girls in the flesh and discover that they are human after all behind the fancy filters. Well, such is the life of the newly minted airport lounge lizard.
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We continue our serialisation of MT White’s upcoming new magnum opus, The Artist’s Fortitude. It would be impolite of us not to mention this particular chapter first appeared in the esteemed PunchRiot magazine some months ago. I wasn’t going to mention it, but MT felt I should.
The Artist’s Fortitude
Hagiographies
Myth never died. As “reason” and “enlightenment” progress in modernity, myth only expands to all realms—especially to the realm of the artist.
Artists are subject to mythmaking just as much as anyone else, in both work and biography—but really, they’re one & the same. But! As Aristotle said: “the poets tend to lie a lot”. They want their stories, the personal stories they tell, to have a dramatic arc. It’s only natural. I’d say it kind of adds to their allure. In “The Magical Chorus”, Russian musicologist Solomon Volkov points out how many Soviet era artists, like film director Andrei Tarkovsky and poets like Anna Akhtamova, Yevgeny Yetvushenko, and Joseph Brodsky, willfully created and participated in their own mythmaking (Yetvushenko, for example, told everyone he was born in a village called Zima Junction because it sounded more “poetic” rather than Nizhneudinsk—the actual village in which he was born). It’s only natural…
There are the stories about “overnight” successes: Sylvester Stallone wrote “Rocky” in two days; Joe Eszterhas wrote “Basic Instinct” in just 10 days then sold it for $3 million; Michael Des Barres wrote the song Obsession in 10 minutes and it made him “at least” $3 million; Quentin Tarantino used to work at a video store until he directed “Reservoir Dogs”…
The problem with success hagiographies, and artist myths in general, is there’s a great chance artists will be aware of them. And they are informing not necessarily with faulty information but with information out of a certain context, a context formed to cater to the emotional masses, selling them a romantic story to build their legend (what does it matter to the average Ivan where Yevgeny Yetvushenko is really from?). This is true outside the creative sphere as well. In business, knowing about the “genius” of Steve Jobs makes me more loyal to the Apple product. It’s why we rarely hear about the Apple III, the NeXT computer (a 10-year concern for Jobs) or Pixar originally intended as a hardware company—all failures Jobs oversaw. And if we do hear about them, it is always in the context of how the failure led to success. Same goes for someone like George Lucas: Knowing about his struggles making the first “Star Wars” film (“Everyone was against him,” “No one thought Science Fiction was a viable genre”, “no one believed in the film”, “he didn’t have the budget he needed to really make the film he envisioned” etc.), helps me enjoy its success and the movies all the more.
But as an artist, a lonely, atomized artist, it can cause disillusion because I haven’t experienced same.
This kind of leads into another type of hagiography, that of “The Artist as Saint” or “blessed personality”. Actually, there’s no clear lines here. The “success myth” blends a lot with the “blessed personality” myth. “They are (were) a genius,” being a common refrain among friends and collaborators, waxing nostalgic with anecdotes about how exciting and enlightening it was to work or meet with them, the halos only glowing more and more in the literary and filmed portraits that follow in the artist’s wake. A recent example of this is the film “The End of the Tour” about novelist David Foster Wallace, which Bret Easton Ellis called “reverential to a fault.” Ellis used his review of the film to note how it ignored the darker side of Wallace, “the contemptuous man, the sometime-contrarian, the asshole with an abusive side, the cruel critic.” An obstacle for hagiographies like this film is having to explain the dark events of real life, like Wallace’s suicide, while keeping the halo lit. So, their handling is a portrayal of Wallace as, in Ellis’ words, of a man “too sensitive for this world,” whereas Walter Kirn contends the suicide was a result of David Foster Wallace hating “being David Foster Wallace,” (meaning he couldn’t enjoy or obtain the fringe benefits of fame—like money and women). But the film is just fiction, just a story…
A documentary example of this type of hagiography is “A Constant Forge”, about independent film pioneer John Cassavetes. Ray Carney, an authority on Cassavetes and participant in the documentary called it all “a joke”, trying to “sell us this sentimental soap-opera version of who Cassavetes was. It’s not true. It’s a fairy-tale account,” noting the doc omitted mention of his negative personality traits resulting in “the rankest of hero-worship. Cassavetes has no shortcomings and flaws. He has no tangibility, no reality.”
Why is this kind of documentary bad for the aspiring artists who watch? Carney again: “Young filmmakers will watch this movie and fall for its lies. And then they will think they are not right or normal, because their lives are not this way.”
Once again, disillusionment for the artist raises its ugly specter when consuming this type of hagiography, usually in a sea of confusion, because their watching may be at cross purposes with the intent of the documentary. In the case of “A Constant Forge”, Pioneer commissioned the documentary to promote a planned home video set of the director’s work, then Criterion added it to their DVD box set—it was just intended to promote and amplify enjoyment of a product, not inspire budding filmmakers. Whereas the success hagiography (the Lucas example) makes one feel they are falling short in a material or status sense, the “blessed personality” hagiography makes you feel you’re just a failure as a human. In a sense, this latter type may be more dangerous. You question your own life as being lacking or worthless, possibly leading to believing your life is worthless, therefore thinking you have no worthwhile art.
Many a time, these types of hagiographies are concocted by outsiders looking in. Would Lucas, Cassavetes or Wallace write their personal autobiographies as hagiographies? Probably not, but at the same time, they or their estates carefully stage manage the presentations before they even agree to participate.
Because being candid and revelatory about one’s past can open one up for trouble. When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “The Crack-Up” for “Esquire”, his honest three-part essay about his mental collapse, he received nothing but criticism from the likes of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. The latter said it, “seems to almost take a pride in his shamelessness of defeat…I always knew he couldn’t think—he never could—but he had a marvelous talent and the thing is to use it—not whine in public.”
Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway died from complications from alcohol. Fitzgerald, himself a football player and soldier, is regarded historically as the more tragic yet fragile figure. Hemingway, who marketed an image as tough guy, maintains that image posthumously though he’s the one who committed suicide and enjoyed playing the role of female in the bedroom…
When someone is frank, like Fitzgerald or Joe Eszterhas in his memoirs, it can have a helpful, almost therapeutic effect. One can find inspiration knowing they are not alone in whatever they are struggling with. St. Augustine—an actual saint—pioneered the autobiographical form, being honest about his failings in his “Confessions”.
Of course, when talking about “failings”, there is a danger of falling into a synography—actually, artists today tend to veer closer to this form when discussing their lives, almost taking a masochistic glee in how “bad” they behaved. “The Dirt”, a film about hard rock band Motley Crue takes a hedonistic joie de vivre about their party lifestyle. Henry Miller’s semi-autobiographical novel “Tropic of Cancer”, has the author hilariously describe his sexual escapades through France while also lamenting his pathetic character. Even in fictional form, the film “Sideways”, based on a novel by Rex Pickett, has the novelist protagonist portrayed as close to pathetic schlub with only scant redeeming qualities (and his actor friend in the film receives same treatment). In both books and documentaries about Dennis Hopper, a majority of the discussion about the actor/director revolves around his drug use and “wild behavior”, like firing guns in hotel rooms with flaming mattresses flying out the window, or hitting on his daughter’s classmates at her high school graduation. It’s at times both equally horrifying and entertaining, but ultimately depersonalized, also dispelling any sense of tangibility and reality. Discussing how “bad” someone is just a direct inverse of only discussing how “good” someone is. Both are forms of propaganda. Being a bad boy who can do no right is just as fallacious and damaging a story as the good boy who can do no wrong. Just as the hagiography can make the artist feel they are not “right or normal” so can the synography—if I’m not “bad” or “crazy” enough, maybe I’m not really exploring and flexing my creative juices. Just another form of insecurity and disillusionment…
And of course, the thing about artist hagiographies is you’re eventually going to find out the truth if you dig deep enough, and what then, when the façade is broken?
BUT!
As Fitzgerald wrote in The Crack-Up: “Of course all life is a process of breaking down…“
The image of holy artist shattering can have an adverse side effect—at least it did for me: I started exploring the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky after reading an article about him in a “filmmakers of faith” section on the “Christianity Today” website. The summary wasn’t a bio, just a brief discussion of his films and how related to his faith. I just projected/assumed the fundamentalist Christian values common to someone living in the southern United States. “Sculpting in Time”, Tarkovsky’s meditation on his life and work, written before his death, didn’t really betray this image of sainted filmmaker—neither did his solemnly titled diary collection “Martyrology”. But obsessive that I am, I dug deeper into his life. He was far from a saint. He had priapic tendencies to say the least. He left his first wife, an actress, for another woman, also an actress, and impregnated another woman in Sweden before he died. On the set of his film “Stalker”, he maliciously demeaned the celebrated cinematographer Georgi Rerberg, eventually firing him. In fact, the film had to be shot three times, with three different cinematographers, basically due to Tarkovsky’s recklessness, and even though his patron at Mosfilm, Fedor Ermash, did everything to help Tarkovsky finish the film, the director lambasted him in “Martyrology”. For all his lamenting of materialism in “Sculpting in Time” and his films, he basically defected to the West, renouncing his Soviet citizenship, leaving his son behind in Russia, mainly for material reasons (some say due to pressure from his second wife). His friend and cinematographer Vadim Yusov met him in Italy, shocked at the loud, stylish clothes his friend now wore. One collaborator noted Tarkovsky was weak and indecisive in all aspects of his life except his art. Maybe his early death at age 54 led to this hagiography overtaking this image? After the director’s death, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn criticized Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev”, bringing outrage in the Third Wave Emigrant community. “Tarkovsky, it turns out, had been deified,” wrote Solzhenitsyn.
Was I disappointed to discover this information? An understatement. Maybe the disappointment comes from viewing works that are so “high”, it is hard to fathom the artist living a life so “low”. But it’s a part of life. We want icons to admire, even as artists, a life to aspire to. When I discussed a previous relationship with someone I mentored, she asked that I refrain from talking about it. “I don’t want to think any less of you.” Why, in our imperfection do we want others to be perfect? Is it because the mirror image of our own likeness is so awful that we want there to be someone better, someone higher? We want the potential of that hope to be fulfilled? Could it be, we want to escape the mundane mix of good and bad that permeates our existence?
In regards to Tarkovsky, I do know one thing that does not betray his life and image: His films. His characters usually have a passive quality about them, almost taking on the role of martyr. In “Andrei Rublev”, the title character—an artist and monk—is tempted into sex with a naked pagan woman. A young man lies about his credentials as a bell-maker to get a royal commission—yet, he succeeds and it brings him to tears. In “Solaris”, the lead can’t stop his ex-wife from continually committing suicide—a metaphor for the memories that haunt us? At the start of “Stalker”, the title character leaves his wife and child to fulfill his “mission” of escorting people to the alien and mystical territory of “The Zone”—only to return disillusioned. In “Mirror”, the director’s most autobiographical film, a dying man recalls his past (his estranged wife played by the same actress who plays his mother) in the intersection against the bigger backdrop of Russian culture, history and faith. Tarkovsky’s father (who left him at an early age) was a poet. And in a way, his own way, Tarkovsky’s films are poetry too. The poetry of a flawed human trying to piece things together through cinematic imagery, echoing philosopher Lev Shestov’s observation: “Men reveal the most painful and significant truth only when not speaking directly about themselves.”
One documentary featuring Tarkovsky, “Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side of ‘Stalker’”, almost acts as a harmatography, or character assassination, in order to make the great cameraman Rerberg look like a martyr himself. These sorts of portrayals are legion as well. A clear example is the documentary “Overnight”, about director Troy Duffy, which is edited to make him appear as the most hateful and egotistical person to have ever lived as he tries to realize his film “The Boondock Saints”. These works are trying to topple the idols, so to speak, whether it be their artistic acumen (like Pauline Kael trying to diminish Orson Welles’ contributions to “Citizen Kane”) or just portray them as horrible people to almost delegitimize their work (how many articles have been written about Picasso abusing his seven muses?). Solzhenitsyn himself was the object of scorn in books published in both Russia and the West. His first wife, Natalya Reshetovskaya, wrote a memoir (Sanya) portraying him as an overbearing, egomaniacal womanizer who forbade her to bear children because it would interfere with his writing. Olga Carlisle, who smuggled Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle” and “The Gulag Archipelago” into the West and translated them into English, wrote her own pejorative memoir about her dealings with him.
Many artists have questionable events in their past both personal and political. JD Salinger, Elvis Presley, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Fyodor Dostoevsky—all had more than questionable pasts with underage girls. Ezra Pound and Louis-Ferdinand Céline supported Fascism. Boris Pasternak and Dmitri Shostakovich pledged support and wrote odes to Stalin. TS Eliot and Walt Disney were anti-Semites. Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol for a reason. Nobody is perfect.
The problem with harmatologies is the budding artist, depending on the fragility of their ego, may become incredibly self-conscious in their actions and artistic practice, afraid of what others may say about them—especially in this very public social media age. This is probably the reason why many err on the side of masochistic synographies, whether bragging or mourning their “bad” behavior—there’s more than a bit of narcissism involved, but it’s better to promote and manage this information yourself, getting out in front of others who will use it for their own agendas (“Art School Confidential”—a film where an aspiring artist accepts accusations of him being a serial killer in order to achieve fame is a good satire of this inclination).
Harmatologies are usually the product of a scorned party or an uninvolved participant. The former are understandable, whether it be for political reasons (the KGB published and most likely wrote Reshetovskaya’s memoir to get at Solzhenitsyn) or personal (the producers of “Overnight” were former friends of director Duffy). Reading or watching a work like this provides a thrill, like reading a gossip column for juicy details omitted from hagiographies, almost a pornography of information. The latter type of harmatography, written by the uninvolved, like a “scholar” or journalist, are more malicious, a product of Pharisees judging a life or work they had no part in. They are just jealous, or fearful, of both the potential of a work and facing their own mediocrity.
An artist must live in order to create. Harmony Korine advised that artists should explore extremes. I don’t think a creative type can help but explore extremes whether they be sexual, chemical, religious or ideological.
In the example of Fitzgerald, being honest about one’s life and struggle can be a dangerous act. It upsets both admirers and detractors—basically everyone—for opposite reasons. They’re angered by either the extremes of love or hate being upturned, at the disturbance of myth—whether it be that of saint or sinner—because in the end most desire myth, an escape from the turbulence and chaotic nuance of this life. They don’t desire a reminder. Fitzgerald: “and there are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul.”
But the work outlives bad press. The only thing that stands the test of time—if it stands the test of time—is the artistic work (a film like “Star Wars” looks more antiquated by the day). As Terry Gilliam said amidst the troubled production of “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen”: “I think my priorities are right. I will sacrifice myself or anyone else for the movie. It will last. We'll all be dust.”
This grandiose bitterness on the wild breasts of the poet! the bitch spat her amniotic fluid in my dead face, I want to blow the blood of passion on the meat of the rabid females of the city, a platonic coitus with my mother.
MICHAËL POTIER
The fire of a dreadful night has crushed the bones of my jaw, I expel a stinking turd all stuck with rage, my face decomposes in the excruciating light of the lavatories, a melancholy mud covers my obscene body, and in a biblical burp I vomit the shit out of my bowels.
The fog like a thick wall, destroyed in this immensity, I have burning flesh, I think of the negro spirits of music, of the carrion lying in a bed of blue roses, a black bird comes to blow its sadness into my belly.
Ire in the Age of Doom-Posting
Yes, fellow cultured soul (you must be if you’re reading this mag!), I’m here to tell you that – unfortunately – we’re doomed.
Unequivocally, too, as it seems! Global temperatures are rising, which in turn will raise sea levels and submerge the coasts of numerous continents, causing significant impact to life. Prices, interest rates, inflation, and debts have also increased in recent years.
People hold polarizing views and don’t seem willing to compromise an inch on them. Even when presented with something as simple as a counterargument (the very hallmark of any productive debate!), people willfully double-down in factually skewed echo chambers. The fracture dividing our society will soon be a gap we can no longer bridge.
Except… No, actually not!
To break free in the age of “doom-posting”, one first must realize there is much to profit from financially when it comes to exaggeratory naysaying. Consider this… if instead of focusing on negatives in the introduction I opted for a more positive viewpoint – would you have continued to read this far?
That may sound accusatory, but the question is posed for one to reflect. It’s no secret, people love tragedy. It’s no stretch to say that internationally, news media companies wheel and deal heavily – sometimes exclusively – in tragedy.
The more sensationalist the better. Nothing but ultra-shocking, mind-numbing, chaotic headlines to those consuming – driving ratings (clicks) and money in return. From the outside, one can easily ascertain the relationship between news media and its audience as a regurgitating vicious cycle.
Gory, gaudy news sells. Without a demand, logically there would be no supply, right? However, as complicit as the audience may seem in this cycle, the proverbial well has been tainted.
The average person, after the constant assuage of doom-posting (be it television or internet or news or social media), gave in after the prolonged exposure. Like test subjects, they were trained to subconsciously – and constantly – pick only the bad from the good.
After constant doom-posting, people came out from it programmed. Easily and often, it’s overlooked that the human mind is programmable.
You see that notion in full force today when you encounter someone that still buys into the notion of “left vs. right”, “democrat vs. republican”, and so on.
The problems of the U.S. are no longer confined to the institution of politics because simply put, U.S. politics is fakery. Furthermore, why wouldn’t news media take opportunities to spew inflamed rhetoric and get a witless audience hooked to their clickbait headlines for profit?
We’ve veered off far, so let’s bring it back...
To conclude, no matter how programmed one’s mind may be, it can always be “reframed”. Thinking and perception can always be altered.
Re-framing one’s mind may include focusing on individual actions (things you can change) instead of national events (things you can’t change). It’s more important than ever to identify attitude and energy as vitally crucial to not only success – but longevity and efficacy.
Many Americans are simply OK with being told how and what to think, falling prey to believing that anyone has that moral authority over them.
If a potential re-framing is to have any integrity to it, the urge and will to break the conditioning and re-take your own mind can only come from within, only when one decides they are ready for such metamorphosis.
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF ERNST GRAF & M.T.WHITE
on the subject of V for VENDETTA
& GUY FAWKES
EG Friday 5th November 00:31
Have you seen this film?
It's on at my local repertory cinema tomorrow and I'm curious to see it, with it turning Guy Fawkes into a world famous 'face' but I'm sure the cinema will be packed which I do not like.
MT 02:08
I have seen. And I hated it. Real pretentious piece of shit that somehow equates gay and Islamic persecution. Alan Moore, who wrote the original comic, also hated it.
EG 02:29
Yes just watched trailer, pretty risible, and Moore refused to have his name on the credits or take any royalties!
Think only extraordinary thing about it is the power it gave globally to the previously parochial English Guy Fawkes - every year now all round the world there are the ‘million mask marches’, everyone wearing that iconic Guy Fawkes mask.
It absolutely fascinates me the fact Guy Fawkes still 'lives' and has this cultural resonance more than 400 years after his failed attempt at 'terrorism'. This is why November 5th means so much to me.
MT 02:36
It certainly is fascinating. I drove by a protest outside a Scientology branch and all the protestors wore that mask. Quite a surreal sight. I actually knew about Guy Fawkes Day before that film ever cursed our screens, because it is celebrated in New Zealand, where my family lived for a few years. My father always mentioned it as the oddest holiday.
But if Fawkes was successful, we might not have the King James Bible, which as far as language goes, is just as influential as Shakespeare. So it’s quite a fateful day for writers who use English, eh?
EG 03:33
There are so many levels to Guy Fawkes.
Such an ambivalent or dare I say multivalent cultural figure. We burn his effigy on bonfires to celebrate his torture 400 years after the event. Yet the Fawkes mask is a popular symbol of heroic freedom and dissent.
Absolute right what you say about the KJB and Shakespeare. If you stopped people in the street and said to them can you quote me anything from the KJB or Shakespeare almost everyone would say they know nothing of either, yet without knowing it undoubtedly quote from both every single day of their lives. So many expressions from both have entered the language as common parlance without people knowing their original source.
The phrases and idioms of MT White and Ernst Graf will I believe be similarly ubiquitous in centuries to come. (I feel another 'correspondence' is coming on.)
MT 04:04
I can’t imagine someone not knowing the King James Bible or Shakespeare! Actually, I can, sadly. But I grew up with both, and don’t want to think of a life otherwise.
I agree, the phrases and idioms of Ernst Graf and MT White will outlive us, even build a legend unheralded thanks to a power that gives “exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us”.
And likewise, our correspondences will be studied in schools, or back alleyways of a totalitarian state, or both.
I didn’t say it to MT but hundreds of thousands of these Guy Fawkes masks are sold every year, which must make it (covid face nappies aside) the best-selling mask of all time, and every dime & cent of it goes to...Time Warner. In his current state I feared if I’d said this to MT now it would have broken him once & for all, so I didn’t. This is friendship.
Timeless
Nina was late - of course she was, they always are - which was lucky, as it turned out, because it allowed me the time to finally stumble into the bouji and impossible-to-find bar that she had suggested as our meeting place. Of course, received wisdom on these matters sternly recommends that the man should always choose the date venue, but when I’m in a foreign city, especially one as labyrinthine and impenetrable as Moscow, I tend to cut myself a little slack.
This place was especially hard to uncover. Something I experienced several times in Moscow when endeavouring to locate a particular address on Google Maps was the technology bringing me to the approximate location - usually a grey street lined with unmarked and anonymous doors - and then dumping me there with no way of knowing how to gain ingress into whatever hidden dive I was looking for, and the cyrillic text on signs providing me with no handy clues. Often this is because - like in Germany - Moscow has a proliferation of 19th century townhouses with courtyards, and bars and other places of entertainment are sometimes in the hinterhaus, and unfortunately this small but crucial nuance is not always reflected on Maps.
Down a small staircase to a basement entrance - unprepossessing enough from the outside, but when I was finally let in by the staff - there was a kind of speakeasy vibe to the place - I was pleasantly surprised by the interior. I was led into a back room, where couples sat at small tables eating and drinking and listening to a lady playing the harp very beautifully. There were candles at the tables and many chandeliers - delicate and dimly lit - hung from the ceiling.
‘Bad girl - you’re late’, I said when Nina appeared next to me as jarringly as when someone unexpectedly materialises in a dream. Well, I had been lost in the dream world of the internet on my phone waiting for her.
‘Am I?’ she said, predictably impenitent.
‘We’ll figure out later how you can make it up to me. What are you drinking?’
‘Negroni’
I raised a hand and a waitress came over.
Nina is one of the few girls I know who looks as good, if not better, in real life as she does on Instagram. I had originally met her a couple of years before, in 2019, when I was in St Petersburg with my friend Tom Torero. The snow was waist deep that January, and getting to the Galeria shopping mall across the street from our lodgings was an epic task that seemed to take many hours. Nina had appeared out of a doorway in that mall, our eyes had locked for just a little too long, and I walked up to introduce myself to her.
Well, you have to practice what you preach, don’t you?
It was a short conversation, enough for me to get her name and to add her on Instagram. She was a student from Ukraine on some sort of professional placement (hard to decipher what, exactly) that meant she was working in St Pete for a few days. We parted, and shortly afterwards I returned to London.
I had wanted to see her again, but my romantic entanglements in London plus the small matter of a global pandemic put paid to that. Nina had returned to her home in the warzone in Crimea, and for most of 2020 no one was going anywhere. But we remained in touch, sending one another pithy and flirtatious messages from time to time. And on her wall, Nina posted arty images of herself - not the usual Insta-ho stuff - but classy and sometimes strange compositions. Nina with a crown of bananas on her head. Nina painting in a latex apron and (apparently) nothing else. Nina staring into the middle-distance in a broken down, abandoned bus garage. From her posts it appeared that she had the same fascination for the desolate and the run-down that I do. I was drawn to her vision, and her apparent unconventionality.
It was a surprise when, in the summer of 2021, I learned that Nina had moved to Moscow.
‘I am attending university here’, she told me - some sort of postgrad course (again, the details are opaque).
‘Do you miss Ukraine?’ I asked.
‘Better not to talk about that’, she replied, and I felt for her - I know only too well the displacement you feel when spending extended periods away from your homeland.
But tonight Nina was chipper. She wore a smart, long coat that covered a short skirt and black tights beneath. Most strikingly, she wore dramatic lines of pink makeup over each eye, her signature look, an expression, I supposed, of her taste for the performative.
‘Like David Bowie’, I said.
‘Oh,’ she responded briefly. (It’s hard to tell in advance what cultural reference points will stick with girls like Nina. On one hand she was probably too young to have heard of Bowie. On the other, she was a cultured girl with a good grasp of English, and likely an anglophile. It was striking, travelling around Russia, just how often you would hear British pop music playing, from Queen to Elton John to acts like Coldplay, Ed Sheeran and Dua Lipa (who I think we can claim). And of course, Russians all love the Beatles, despite the fact they never performed in the former Soviet Union).
We sat together on the red velvet couch I’d asked the waitress to put us on while she sucked down her Negroni and we engaged in chit-chat about her course, her move to Moscow, the out-of-town suburb where she now lived, Sputnik and various other matters. But I was getting restless, and I wanted to move to another venue (remember, received wisdom tells us that when you are on a date with a girl you should ALWAYS go to more than one venue, as it makes it seem like you’ve known one another for longer.) Also I wanted to take back the frame - once we left this bar I would be in charge, which seemed like the right way around. Further, my newly-discovered taste for shisha was whining at me like a recalcitrant child.
‘Come on, let’s get the hell out of here,’ I said.
‘OK’, she responded, meekly enough, which was encouraging, since what had been clear from our intercourse so far was that Nina was nothing if not feisty. She had a good command of English - much better than I’d expected - and far from being the shy and demure small town girl I’d anticipated, she was challenging and sparky in the manner of a woman you might meet in London. Which was fine - I like the women I spend time with to have some fire in their souls - but it does mean that from the off you are engaged in a frame battle of sorts where both parties are subtly competing for the upper hand.
And as we know, women tend to end up despising those men they are able to dominate. So you have to be careful.
We went out into the main street, lined with fancy upscale shops like Dior and Gucci and I ordered a Yandex on my phone (the Russian version of Uber). I embraced Nina in a faux-gentlemanly way, ostensibly to protect her from the cold, and we joked around until the car arrived.
In the back of the car with Nina! Her face illuminated by the glow of the lights from the street as we shot through the centre of Moscow! There are moments in life - even quite mundane moments like taking a taxi - that seem significant somehow, as though they are scenes from a movie. Driving through the night, it’s so exciting, the Pet Shop Boys once sang, and it’s true. How fantastic, I thought to myself, to be in a car in this mysterious and grand city, so foreign to me and yet so comfortable at the same time, with this beautiful girl. No matter what comes of this particular night - or any night for that matter - moments like this are akin to jewels that we can treasure.
We pulled up outside Timeless, the shisha bar, on an old street off Tverskaya, conveniently (and entirely coincidentally) just across the road from my hotel, the Marriott Grand. I took Nina by the hand and led her in.
The word TIMELESS is written in lights outside the building - thankfully in Latin characters - but the doorway itself is unprepossessing, and no lights from within are visible from the street, leading me, on my first visit, to wonder if the place was actually open. But push on the door and it gives way, ushering the visitor into a smoky paradise.
How I’ve come to love shisha bars on my travels with Tusk! I’ve smoked it before, of course, several times in London, but it was in Russia that I really developed the taste for it. I have far too few decadent habits, these days, you see, what with not drinking or doing drugs anymore, or even smoking cigarettes. But in the past year I’ve discovered the delights of expensive cigars - with Tristan Tate - and shisha with the incorrigible Tusk.
There is just something so fantastic about visiting a great shisha lounge, shrouded in haze, reclining on a chaise lounge with a beautiful woman, sucking in smoke, hearing the bubbling of the liquid, and enjoying that inevitable nicotine head rush together. And Timeless is - apart from another place we discovered in the upscale seaside resort of Sochi - the very best of these smoky palaces I have discovered to date.
There are actually three branches of Timeless in Moscow, although I have only visited the Tverskaya one, set up by a young Russian entrepreneur who studied at Oxford University before returning to his homeland, which doubtless explains certain anglophile touches to the decor, including a red telephone box as you walk in, and Union Jack cushions and drapes.
Not that Timeless is a British-themed place - far from it. The interior is defiantly eclectic, although deep leather couches and chairs are a defining attribute. The word TIMELESS set in lights on the wall. A neon-lit bar area (or areas, since there are two bars, one for alcohol, the other for the construction and consumption of shisha).
The waiting staff are young, good-looking and polite, and they speak very little English.
‘Mr Francis? Ah yes. This way please, sir’.
A waiter led Nina and me though a complex hive of discrete areas, like small, interconnected sitting rooms, where impossibly beautiful girls and rich, sometimes violent-looking men sit smoking together. The soundtrack is cool pop and house music. Some areas are larger than others. One housed about eight people, who were all playing video game on a big screen.
We were taken to a small, slightly secluded cubbyhole providing a good view of the other guests - perfect for people-watching - and a couch - perfect for seduction.
‘Come sit next to me here,’ I told Nina, patting the couch and she complied, putting her bag down next to her.
‘Cocktail? I asked.
‘Yes’, she said, and so I picked up the menu and suggested something randomly.
‘No, I do not like vodka,’ she said.
‘OK, well how about this one?’
She screwed up her face.
‘OK, get another Negroni,’ I told her.
She shrugged.
‘As you wish.’
‘I’ll order us a shisha too.’
‘You know, I used to be a shisha girl in Ukraine,’ she said. ‘Maybe I can select. I have smoked many, many shishas. I know what is good.’
Again, I felt the unmistakable force of a feminine frame grab. I have no doubt that Nina knows a damn sight more about hookah than I do, but it didn’t matter. If I allowed her to choose what we would drink and what we would smoke then all would be lost. And so when the shisha master appeared (yes, he really called himself that), I noisily overrode her and ordered a pipe I had enjoyed previously. And then I sank back into that deep leather couch and put an arm around Nina, who had now crossed her legs demurely next to me, and she lent into me placidly enough, her pretty head on my shoulder. And Russian pop music played and the thought rushed quickly through my mind that, were I to die here tonight, it wouldn’t be an altogether bad way to go.
‘You know they show Playboy videos in the toilets,’ I told Nina
‘Really?’ She perked up, seemed interested.
‘Yeah - naked women cavorting around with one another on-screen while you use the restroom’ I said.
‘Cool’, she responded.
A woman in London would probably have reported the venue to the authorities for misogyny, but Russia is a very different sort of place. But it was true - video screens in the bathrooms showed luxurious clips of beautiful women, sometimes solo, sometimes in faux-lesbian clinches with other girls, dancing naked onscreen for the punters’ delectation. I approved - it was a nice, seedy touch, reminiscent of the porn video cabins you sometimes still see in European cities, or a time many years ago when clubs would sometimes show erotic films as an accompaniment to the house music they played, a decadent gesture that would no longer be tolerated in the West.
‘Well women’s bodies are far more beautiful than men’s’, she said.
‘I can only concur,’ I purred into her ear.
I had a sense that this was going to be a very interesting evening.
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