It’s time I came clean. Despite my fastidious facade as an A-List arbiter of aesthetic excellence - nay, the veritable Taste Tsarina of the zeitgeist - I have a sordid secret.
I am reading a fantasy novel.
I’m not talking Tolkien, with his musty, spunk-smelling arcania and fey, gay little songs. I don’t even mean 
the semi- socially acceptable Pratchett, with his winking, Dickensian dwarves and fulsome, frolicking footnotes. I mean the real, thousand page, ‘Lloris saw the pale steel of a Dhell clan dagger flash before her and turned with a swing of her platinum plait to espy the mighty wolves of Moragh descending the valley’ deal, beloved by middle-aged men with wispy beards and multicoloured pantaloons the wyrld over.
J.V.Jones has none of the restrained accomplishment of Rosemary Sutcliffe, Alan Garner and Ursula Le Guin, the robust historical humour of Bernard Cornwell and Conn Iggulden, or the pure brilliant weirdness of TH White. Her recently completed Sword of Shadows trilogy is undeniably over-ripe and under-edited, turgid tripe compared to my usual fare of lean literary Kobe beef - but it’s earnest, baroque bombast is so pleasurably, swellingly awful, I almost want to stop hiding it behind Orhan Pamuk dustjackets, pop on this Anna Sui ensemble, and out my inner clanswoman. Sort of.
Anyway, something tells me that Tennyson would have loved it. When the real world is recessive, weary and war-worn, sometimes you just have to give it a myth.
A Bank Holiday alone: a shimmering, cerulean depot of dreams. Plans are afoot.
Tonight I will spray an HB tag on Lambeth Tunnel at the Cans Festival, Banksy’s international street art gathering; on Saturday I will wander round Thomas Hope: Regency Designer at the V&A, drawing lissom little sketches in my Moleskine, before getting folked with the Blind Boys of Alabama at Camden’s Jazz Cafe; and on Sunday I will finally read DeLillo’s Underworld whilst grazing on new-season local asparagus spears dipped into homemade Hollandaise.
Or.
Tonight I will be colouring in the bleach marks on my black jeans with a whiteboard marker; on Saturday I will spend 5 hours trying on clothes and doing that list of ‘good outfits I never remember, which is why I always end up wearing the same black jeans with bleach marks’ and then 5 more hours re-assigning genres to my iTunes before I fall asleep clutching an empty bottle of Junipero; and on Sunday I will read C.J.Sansom’s Revelation whilst eating supersweet Green Giant with a spoon from the tin.
Eeny, meeny, miny.
The inestimable Evening Standard, that AMT Coffee-stained, crossword-completed, strewn-across-your-seat Chiltern Railways whore, has taken it’s plump, trembling, sovereign-ringed and sweat-stained finger off the racing pulse of the Nation. Usually so quick to pick up on a crisis, those misanthropic mass-hysteria mongers have failed to identify the biggest English emergency since, well, this.
Yes, a FIG ROLL SHORTAGE THREATENS THE NATION and only the internet seems to care. Sure, a good-time Blonde sometimes likes to hang at the docks with her hard-tack-tough, fly-flecked seaman Garibaldi; once in a while she shyly consents to be spoiled by her dark, glossy-maned, continental sugar-daddy Bhalsen - but a life without the unctious, gritty, soft-doughed embrace of her sweet, sticky poet Sultan Roll?
Now that is a state of terror. We need to detain some fucking wasps.
The line is Play it once, Sam, not Play it again, and now I know why. If the iPlayer had been around in 1940s filmworld Casablanca, Rick would be watching reruns of Sam on Later with Jools in his riad whilst Ilsa shunned gin joints to binge on out-of-season Desperate Housewives.
Introducing the ‘watch again’ concept into the life of an anachronistic Blonde who thinks TV is the disease that killed Little Nell, and who has four channels when the weather is good, is as dangerous as dumping a shipful of sixteenth century Spaniards onto the shores of the New World with an itch in their nethers and a nasty sneeze. 4oD may be as poorly designed and under-populated as Habitat in a recession, and ITV’s Catch Up proves once and for all that buffering is far less fun than it sounds, but with that televisual Tardis the iPlayer, the good old BBC have come up with something so rich, shiny and time-bendingly brilliant, it’s better than David Tennant doing Hamlet in John Galliano doublet ‘n hose.
Chaise lounging in my paisley peignoir, I have become the image of depravity. Reclusive, sallow and gritty-eyed, I am existing on nothing but a clutch of Medjool dates, a samovar of laudanum, and hourly doses of Mad Men. True, my general dishabille came in handy at the Experimental Cocktail Club of Paris’ Toulouse-Lautrec themed ball at Bungalow 8, but now I’m back in the boudior the bed sores are beginning to burn.
It’s time for Rapunzel to let down her iPlayer, shimmy down the tower, and do something wholesome. I think this is the beginning of an abusive relationship.
I’m afraid. So are you. There’s definitely something in the woodshed, and we can only hope it’s not an old man with a white beard, sandals, a faint smell of fish and a gun.
Julian Barnes’ new memoir/essay, Nothing To Be Frightened Of, shows that it’s life, not extinction, that gives panic its power. That kvetching kid Hamlet got it all wrong. We don’t dread the dreams that may come post-mortal coil, but the ones that haunt us now. And if you want to go down to the woods today and give yourself the creeps, pop on a Miu Miu red cape and drop into MOMA Oxford.
In theory, Katie Paterson’s installation - a wall-mounted halogen mobile number that connects to an underwater microphone recording the sound of icebergs sheering from the glaciar in Vatnajokull lagoon - sounds wearily concept-heavy, but the experience is actually startlingly, stirringly sad. The plaintive death-gurgle sounds shockingly familiar: bloody, breathy and blue. Give it a ring.
Romanian artist Mercia Cantor’s The Need for Uncertainty is similarly, stealthily disturbing. An arching nest of gilded cages, housing two real peacocks, supercilious and shitting, sprouts from a dirt floor. Overhead is a suspended flying carpet, hand-woven with emblems of aeroplanes and angels; on the wall is a large photograph of a tree, a spiky wooden symbol exploding from within its trunk, scattering sawdust blood over a witchy forest floor. These are mysterious, pan-cultural talismans of nature’s fairy-tale fantasy and dread, and they are exhilerating and haunting in equal measure.
In the words of fair Bill, the stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired. It’s life that’s the scary bastard.
Magazines are border literature. If novels are birds, mags are butterflies: ephemeral, colourful, their mortality demanding instant impact and flash. Slippery and shiny, they whisper evasive insecurity, coyly coaxing us away from sustained examination to surface dazzle and aspirational gauze. Alighting briefly on minefields of potential depth, danger and debate, they are too light to ignite, but make it all seem somehow the darker for the patter of their fragile feet.
I love ‘em. Reading them cover to cover, ads n’ all, I try to bestow upon them the dignity they crave. Despite being an inveterate non-collector, I find ditching them as distressing as hauling Blanche DuBois to the nuthouse. First are the weeklies, deep in despair at their instant demise: the brash, boozy binge-magz are just too depressed to be helped, but the Sunday broadsheet supplements are needily, brainily knowing enough to give a hit of croissant-flavoured cerebral crack. Monthlies are a little more hopeful, carefully smoothing on the slap, afraid of their mouthy younger sisters but slyly self-important. And then the quarterlies: stately, serious, masking their fear that they are old-fashioned with a pompous mouthful of stiff, creamy pulp. Strangest, most seductive of all are the nouveaux design mags - so beautiful, so expensive, so vacuous they dare you, just dare you, to dump them.
A weekly dose of The New Yorker, a monthly morsel of Vogue and a quarterly quaff of The Enthusiast is the meanest starvation diet I can endure. National Geographic, Wallpaper, Intelligent Life, New Scientist, even Miniature Donkey Talk under duress - if magazines are border literature, I’ve blazed my way, head bowed, through the checkpoints manned by proper books into a wasteland of barmy, brilliant bollocks. Sigh. I’m just gonna have to read my way out.
If glamour is the ability to cast a sexual spell, Annie Leibovitz’s photographs have all the magic of a mute glove-puppet panda with a middle-aged man’s hand stuffed up it’s arse. Her famous photographic tableaux of the blue-blooded and the beautiful, now showing at the National Portrait Gallery and featured in a commemorative online Vanity Fair slideshow, peddle the presumption of glamour as gloss and glass, lacquering locks and polishing butts to produce vacant Stepford bots. Leibovitz has that uniquely American abillity to make sexy girls look like Botoxed Hamptons dames; her 2008 ‘Fresh Faces’ cover styles La-La-Land’s finest as middle-aged mannequins dressed by Molly Ringwald. It makes you long for some grizzled hunter to put them out of their misery and drag their pelts back to 1954.
Almost as unglamorous are the reimagined Hitchcock stills from the same issue, which reduce Alf’s mad, bad, crumbling, crazy, glorious girls into dewy-eyed, retro-schlock, soft-focus stunnas. Seeing Naomi Watts as Marni (or is it a croissant in a napkin?) makes you properly fear for her forthcoming remake of The Birds.
Real glamour has something intrinsically private about it. A sense of hidden depths. A moment of wild surmise. True beauty is in the glimpsed thigh of the withholder, not the triple-page-spread legs of coiffed starlets without a hair out of place. Beware Vanity Fair, and take some lessons from a man who knew what glamour entailed. Intensely private, alluringly enigmatic, Paul Scofield was the consummate conjurer of his time. And God, that voice.
Whatever Davenport or Nyetimber would have us believe, wine is intrinsically unEnglish. Historically comfortable supping small beer in hose down the Rose, or wassailing with mead in old Heorot, our palates are primed for the musk of hop and malt, the crisp juice of juniper and apple. Essentially barbarians, we; the grape is the civilised fruit of sunnier, savvier climes, with an alien, sanguinous Latin savour of guilt and gilt and guile. Elizabeth Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck is a gorgeous bit of vitifiction that proves the point. Dark, devilish and baroque, it captures the flavour of a ripe, purpling, nineteenth-century rural Gallic love that would be entirely unpalatable in the equivalent hale golden barley fields of Beeston.
Wine is equally intrinsically unAmerican. The New World’s native foxy vines and phylloxeran pest makes it a miracle of pioneering optimism that a hybridised European viticulture thrives; even then, the strident sun and odorous oak tend to make hollering, head-splitting blends that rape amd pillage your maw. The cynic’s story of Napa Valley is one of commerce, gluttony and saccharine Zinfandel - but on last week’s pilgrimage to it’s heartland, St Helena, I also heard tales of old US spirit at it’s best - generous, industrious and brave.
At one end of the scale is a winery like Frog’s Leap. A recently renovated colonial fantasy of New England style barns, organic herb gardens and orchards, it is all the more appealing when you learn that it was founded by a thieving seventies squatter. John Williams was a Cornell and Davis graduate who rocked into Rutherford on a Greyhound bus and bullshitted and grafted his way to the top with equal parts chutzpah and talent. Those biorhythmically planted vines interspersed with vetch, sweet peas, mustard and clover, originate from offcuts Williams nicked when he was a labourer at nearby Stag’s Leap.
At the other extreme sits solo Sonoma winemaker George, who nonetheless represents the modern continuation of the Williams ethos. George makes the pure pinot noir he likes to drink. After number-crunching in New York and trading in LA, George came to the Russian River a few years ago to make wine for two months per annum and party for ten. He does all the work himself, hand-numbers his bottles, looks like a bum and smiles, very occasionally, like an angel.
This is what appeals to me about wine: it’s history and humanity. The tale of the terroir and the vintner’s vision run through a grape like a ferrous fingerprint.
And of course there’s the language, all sex and death ; the aroma and the mouthfeel, the tawny and the tannin, the sharp entry and the long, luscious finish. Most of all, it is a language of improvisation and invention, carelessly cherry-picked to express idiosyncratic experience, wrestled to translate sensation into sense.
And that, good master sot, is as English as you get.
No, I’m not ignoring you. It’s nothing to do with that business with the cilice and the rabbit; I thought that was rather sweet, and certainly original.
In fact, sir, the Blonde exploreth, cruising from that veriginous Cisco town glittering with foggy bay and natty gay to the dust-dank tawny depths of that sere, scrubby valley they call Napa. Chapped lips ruby-stained, freckled snout heady with foxy, vinous spice, the Blonde is priming her pen. There’s a whole new vocabulary out here, island-dwellers. Tremble.
Good jazz is like musical metaphor: defamiliarising, juxtaposing, playful, so dense it’s simple, so true it hurts, and so tangible you could reach out and touch it. Under the great sandy ribs and tiny tea lights of Union Chapel, Islington last Friday, I copped a creamy handful from two hungry, young, accessible ensembles who cut through the cerebral crap to create instinctive, sensual sounds.
The Mercury nominated sextet Basquiat Strings combined Bartok, Shostakovich, sweeping Nyman-esque chords and dissonant jazz riffs with a keenness that made my teeth ache. Incredibly sophisticated and multi-layered, their pieces bed down so deep that the lead lines soar free with an eerie, animal purity, scoring the rafters with sinister sweetness. The underlying influence of East European folk adds melancholy edge to a sound that tastes very old and very sweet: tarnished silver and carraway seeds.
Portico Quartet - earthier, insistently rhythmic, suffused with the warm chimes of their distinctive hang drum - moved from pulsing, carnival glee to soothing, crooning melodies with charming, cheeky-boy ease and the mellow, metallic savour of communion wine served in a old clay cup.
Recondite, refrigerated geekBlonde that I am, jazz can leave me intellectually interested, but physically cool. These heartfelt, imperfect bands made me want to stop thinking nonsense about metaphors, lie down, and melt.
