The Only Ones

The idea for this project first appeared a while ago, maybe three or four years back. It's just that I needed all this time to become fully committed and throw myself into what I had in mind. 

The project will be called The Only Ones, and it only got this name because on the 21st of July, in Madrid, there was a particular concert I was going to see. As I was leaving the Ciudad Universitaria metro station, I heard "The Whole Of The Law" from that legendary 1978 album by The Only Ones. Then "Another Girl, Another Planet", and then "Breaking Down". And there I had it, every piece, down to the last drop. 

I will publish The Only Ones, the 2016 original in writing, on dullygray pages at the beginning of August. In the meantime, feel free to check out Peter Perrett's classic album that has both nothing and everything to do with my work.

Connemara

Recent stories: ‘Saint Kitts Swizzle’ & ‘14^th Street’.

---

When I first thought of a life with no Internet, for two weeks only, I did not expect it to be such a big deal. A social experiment, irrelevant and frankly rather intimidating. For a moment, I actually thought about an online blog about me being offline. Took me two seconds to realise this would be like a vegan hunting for meat.

Not that I reject the idea. I really am going offline for two coming weeks. Too many words to type. Too many places to see. Too many people to meet. Windmills of La Mancha, Melody Gardot performing live. I won't be around except through a narrow porthole which, naturally, has nothing to do with either of the two sites. So you see, it actually could be a big deal after all.

---

Connemara is a mountainous district in western Ireland. It's beautiful, but then all of Ireland is beautiful. Back in 1987, at some point between This Is The Sea and Fisherman's Blues, Mike Scott entered a school in Clifden and played "The Whole Of The Moon" to a bunch of schoolchildren and teachers gathered in the assembly hall.

He was accompanied by Vinnie Kilduff on whistle and an improvised choir wearing blazers and 80s haircuts. It’s one of my favourite music stories, and below you can see the video of that performance. I laugh and I cry when I see these kids singing along to Mike Scott going off on the simple, battered old piano.

And then he just stood up and left the room.

---  

Abbas Kiarostami died last week. If you have never seen Taste Of Cherry or the equally brilliant Certified Copy (with one of the best ever performances from Juliette Binoche), you owe it to yourself. As Christopher Hitchens put it, "Upgrade yourself, for Christ's sake. Do you think you are going to live forever?"

A HEART SO WHITE by Javier Marias

Once, maybe twice in a lifetime you chance upon an author who writes specifically for you. Not for a critic. Not for a fan. Not even for a wife or a husband. For you. Every word gets through to you. Every line opens you up like someone saying 'I love you'. Soon you realise that you will not die a happy man if you don't read every book, every short piece this writer has ever come up with. Javier Marias is that kind of writer for me. What Saul Bellow is for Martin Amis. What Daniel Defoe was for James Joyce.

I cannot forget how I first opened The Infatuations back when it came out a few years ago. Half a page – that's all it took. The prose felt magical and begged you to get lost in it. The long-winded, impeccable sentences enveloped you the way some carnivorous plant would, except you were in no danger to be squashed to death. The plot was a beautiful, if complex, embellishment to a style verging on perfection.  

A Heart So White, one of Marias's earlier novels, is all that and more. I could give you the whole plot in three brief sentences (Marias is the kind of writer who can spend two full pages describing a look in someone's eyes), and you would call me insane for praising the book so much. Well, I wouldn't care. Javier Marias is the master of understatement. And with A Heart So White, he has this to say to you: don't tell your secrets to the one you love, not if you really love them. (At which point I start humming the melody of "What She Doesn't Know", Nina Nastasia's fantastic single from 2008.)

All you need to know is this: a recently married man finds out about the secrets of his father. Everything else is the process. It's what you will love this novel for – the painful, ecstatic process of discovery. That and the fact that Javier Marias's novels are full of short stories that fit the general narrative so beautifully (maybe that is the reason why I find some of the stories in When I Was Mortal a bit underwhelming – they feel unfinished). Like the girl at the stationer's. Like the guards and the paintings. Like the two women from a bar who notice you 'the way one notices a mosquito'.

Javier Marias comes up with observations you wish you could never forget: 'in cases of mutual dishonesty, sometimes the only way to reconciliation is through sex'; 'it's always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness'; 'when you listen intently – you can't see anything, one sense excludes the others'. When he mentions Nabokov's Pnin in the sense that people enjoy it rather than finish it – it's priceless. And this coming from someone who has read Pnin multiple times. These observations are interlaced with experience and wisdom, and you will learn a lot about marriage ('narrative institution') as well as older people who so 'rarely allow themselves to blush'.

My personal favourite moment is Marias describing the way we tend to remember people from one particular photo – like our mother when she was twenty-eight. It's a beautiful point, and it provides some sort of key to the bridge between the past and the present that Javier Marias is forever trying to establish in his books. With the coldness and precision of the famous Spanish saying: revenge is a dish better served cold. Spanish people in Javier Marias's novels are complex individuals carrying with them 'the weight of the unspoken', as Saul Bellow once put it, something that will one day give us the knowledge and the experience we need. And stain our hearts so white.

***

'It's strange that words don't have worse consequences than they do'. If you can come up with a line like that, you are my favourite author and you have written one of the most beautiful books I can think of.

Exeunt Britons

I was buying old postcards the other day. Late 19th century, early to mid 20th. It's not something I do very often, but there's this strange affinity I've had for more than twenty years now. I like broken images and I like broken words. Polish gardens from 1908. Hungarian greetings from 1927. Soviet streets from the 50s. French inscriptions, undated. There's life there which once existed and shines through even now, more than a century later. And if there are no words, I'm still as enchanted as I was on the day when my father showed me the flickering flame of his cigarette lighter. The frayed feel of the postcard is unmistakable. 

It was a flea market, filled with hundreds of men whose masculinity looked wasted from a mile off. I don't really mind that; the most interesting men you'll meet all have childish eyes. However, they were not children - they were obsessed. And while obsession is responsible for some of the greatest achievements as well as works of art, their obsession was way too nerdy. A bit narrow-minded, if not actually robotic.

Mistaking me for a fellow collector, they kept asking what sort of postcards I was interested in. Paintings? Cities? Buildings? Dogs? "Old ones", I offered. "Okay", said a guy who looked like a benevolent mobster. "But all of these postcards are old". Which, again, made little sense. "I guess I'm looking for the ones that will look good to me". After all, there are millions of things you like that way. Reason has nothing to do with love. 

Which is all to say - I like Britain aesthetically. I like Britain as an idea. In a world where Catalonia wants a separate state, to have four countries within one is wickedly old-school. I admire the cheek. It's a bit like my British friends (mostly from the north of England, granted) saying that the Queen is a parasite leeching off their taxes, and I just grin to myself: "Well, you will not hear me complaining". Rather, you can occasionally catch me humming the lyrics of "Here's To Old England" by Luke Haines.

That said, I was all for Scotland becoming independent. After all, it was a beautiful narrative that had so much history bubbling underneath. Again, aesthetically - it would have been the right thing. Alas, this was not to be, although suddenly it looked like certain legs had too much clay in them.

Ironically, today it feels like certain legs are all clay. Today, when Britain voted OUT for the sake of quixotic integrity and equally quixotic independence, I try to imagine myself as a Northern Irish citizen. Which has nothing to do with their footballing heroics and everything with the fact that last night the clear majority of Northern Ireland voted IN. 

In truth, it's not that easy to imagine myself as a Northern Irish citizen. I was in the country just once, in Belfast, and mostly for political reasons. The politics looked typically gloomy, the weather likewise (worse than in Swansea) and the brightest memory was the famous wall on which I scribbled a somewhat appropriate title of the great Spiritualized instrumental: "No God, Only Religion". Which is to say, I can't imagine myself living there. But I can easily imagine the hurt feelings inflicted by 'Great Britain' not giving a damn about my opinion. Or that of the country I live in, for that matter. 

So now you foresee not just a new Scottish referendum but one in Northern Ireland as well. It would actually be spineless and weak not to have one. However, there's one thing: they will be nothing like the Scottish independence referendum from 2014. Aesthetically, they will just look ugly. 

P.S. Too bad there were no postcards from old Britain in the flea market the other day. I would have bought one, so as to have something to look at while listening to Belle & Sebastian's immortal "Fuck This Shit".   

Warm nights

In all my experience with various people. Girls, boys, men, women. Periods of art that ranged from boring to fascinating. Periods of life that were by turns sweet, tragic, bitter, ecstatic; maybe all those things at the same time. Great books and terrible books. Stuff that embarrassed me and stuff that did not. 

Memories you dive for happily and situations best forgotten. Jokes that worked at grand dinner parties and jokes that fell flat on sticky bar counters. Terrible songs and Blixa Bargeld doing "Alone With The Moon". Stories I love and stories that should have never been written. 

Good coffee and bad coffee. Worst things in life and a novel by Javier Marias. Late night cocktails that made me sleepy and complex desires that kept me up all night. Loves and infatuations. Bike trips and shaky boats that made me seasick. The rain and the sun. 

In the end, it all comes down to one thing: Sauvignon is better than Chardonnay. There. It's dead simple.  

Last night

Polka played on a harp. Now I have seen everything. 

But really. In a world where some Primitivist wanker is a classic artist (and has been for years), you can't even pretend to be different. A new language has to be found, a new gimmick, and if that means you will have to push the envelope into the void – so be it. 

Strangely enough, we have long reached the point where playing polka on a harp is the least you can do. So play it as well as you can. And last night, well, it was excellent... 

Misunderstood Masterpiece

You know what they say? 'Sexy' is not about the looks. 'Sexy' is about enthusiasm. I've always liked that. Enthusiasm can take many forms, and there's no accounting for all of them, but one thing I know for sure: Scarlett Johansson's maligned/ignored album of Tom Waits covers, Anywhere I Lay My Head, is very sexy. 

Now of course this album is wrong. Everything about it is wrong. Even the actual idea of Scarlett Johansson recording an album of Tom Waits songs will make your head shake uncontrollably. Her vocals lack an ounce of subtlety. The rendition of "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" is straight from butcher's shop. The record sounds vulgar and tasteless. David Sitek can't save it. Thing is – I absolutely love it.

Maybe an evil coincidence, maybe a cunning plan, but Johansson even chooses four of my favourite Waits songs. "Town With No Cheer", "Anywhere I Lay My Head", "Fannin Street" and the unforgettable "Falling Down". The last two feature – hold your fucking hat! – David Bowie on backing vocals. He may have been blackmailed into this, I don't know, but the edge he brings is unmistakable. 

Now of course Anywhere I Lay My Head is not a 'masterpiece'. Hell, it's not even 'misunderstood'. But I do hope that in a few hundred years someone will recognise it as such. Because it sounds glorious. It has passion seeping through the chords and Scarlett's vocals in a way that is most vulgar and profane. It sounds coarse and romantic. It sounds like dirty sex. It sounds incredible.