Objets Trouvés or Eat Your Heart Out, Damien Hirst

I have recently discovered that if you give a heavy 'presidential style' antique desk an almighty shove you can completely tear it off its pedestal. It is the sound of splintering wood that gives it away.

Oddly enough, my somewhat startled host seemed slightly less than delighted; indeed, I almost suspected that he found it in his heart to positively dislike me. However, I think I managed to convince him that his new asymmetric and somewhat wobbly 'desk' was an interesting work of modern art - a postModernist ironic take on the outmoded and frankly rather crass bourgeois concept of a utilitarian desk.

First, there is an obvious Marxist spin in the way that through an interesting conceptual trope – a twisting in on itself or involution – Desk, as I shall now call my creation, exposes the plight of the exploited worker and thus the violence at the very heart of the capitalist system. The unfortunate wage lackey now faces the ever present risk of serious injury if the damn thing collapses on him as he works – echoes of Damocles - thus fostering a need to complete each task with the utmost alacrity. "Work fast or the system will crush you" is the obvious subtext.

From another angle, Desk makes a clear philosophical statement, calling to mind amongst other things Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit or Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. What better metaphor could there be for the rootless, baseless false mode of dasein’s being-in-the-world than this rocking piece of furniture, now forever only tangentially attached to its pedestal? One is almost moved to tears by this stark yet elegant articulation of everyday ontological experience. Desk, in short, opens up whole vistas of existential angst and even horror.

Third, of course, is the almost blatant allusion to the post structuralism works of the late Jacques Derrida. All texts are ultimately groundless; all language rests on nothing other than itself. There is nothing beyond the text. As a foundation for writing, the transformed desk is less than satisfactory - however, as Desk , it paradoxically does provide a foundation in the writer's constant awareness of its provisionality. It is a surface but not a base.

It is amazing that a couple of seconds of work by a high-octane deconstructive performance artist (as I am now tempted to style myself) could so utterly transform and enrich such a mundane object, investing it with hitherto unsuspected depths of meaning.

If you would like me to work similar artistic wonders at your property I am available for a reasonable fee. There is a small extra charge if the project requires wrecking balls or bulldozers.

You Looking at Me?

Glancing at the front cover of The Times the other day, it struck me that there is a fantastic and potentially highly lucrative business opportunity for companies like Cabbage Patch Kids® in places such as Tehran and Islamabad. Forget ‘Preemies’ and ‘Newborns’; they should be making cute little Bushes, Blairs and Rushdies. I don’t think that being flame retardant would be an especially strong selling point, though.

More seriously, just why does the Western media do it? Do we need to see yet another pack of clearly demented bigots waving their idiotic banners and burning really, really badly made rag dolls? Do we honestly need to waste good column inches reporting the mindless rantings of such luminaries as the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman or the Pakistan's religious affairs minister?

So, Pakistan has passed a resolution saying the honour was an attempt to "hurt the feelings of Muslims" and Iran says the award was intended to provoke the Islamic world. I am afraid that Messrs. Ebrahim Rahimpour & Ejaz ul-Haq are flattering themselves. Consideration for their feelings never entered the equation, and nor should it. Salmon Rushdie’s knighthood was based purely on literary merit. It may be an archaic honour but it is a matter for the British Government.

For some reason, the whole episode reminds me of a marvellous exchange in Casablanca:

Ugarte:   You despise me, don't you?
Rick:       If I gave you any thought I probably would.

PS: just as an afterthought, one wonders what will happen when Salmon Rushdie is nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

PPS: My good friend and school chum Gideon Mitchell was strangely enthusiastic about my posting this blog.

Modern Witch Trials and Tribulations

It must be hard, soul-destroying work being a modern witch. Not only do you have to do all those tedious magical things, like collecting newts’ eyes, harvesting mandrake and sacrificing the odd virgin, but you also have to spend an inordinate amount of time hanging around popular tourist spots in Glastonbury looking really, really sinister. It’s a tough job, but I guess that someone has to do it.

A particularly sturdy young witch was on duty in the Abbey Gift Shop a couple of weeks ago. Clad in a curiously fetching albeit distinctly unseasonal heap of purple and black taffeta, she was wearing really interesting Goth-style makeup and absolutely loads of ironmongery. She was also clutching a slightly bedraggled funeral wreath in one hand and a black coffin-shaped PVC handbag adorned with a pentacle in the other (a bit of a give away, I thought).

The poor dear was making a huge effort to look mysterious and evil and it was a crying shame that none of the other tourists seemed to so much as notice her. They might at least have pretended to be a little bit nervous. It was such a hot day and she looked so uncomfortable and under appreciated that I was sorely tempted to buy her a rum and raisin ice cream.

Brian - The Ubiquitous Anti-Chameleon

There is nothing in the least exotic about Brian so the word protean feels a trifle excessive; however, he is something of a shape-shifter and he comes in various guises. His age varies from mid thirties to late sixties; however, he is generally middle-aged and always male. He can be found in various habitats from the Far East to Torquay Pier; however, whatever the environment, his physical malleability seems designed not so much to make him fit in but rather the reverse. Wherever he is found, Brian can be expected to stand out like a sore thumb. I strongly suspect he is the president of the Swindon Photographic Society or just possibly of the Crawley Camera Club.

My first encounter with Brian was in the rather glamorous surrounds of the five star Hyatt Regency Hotel in Hua Hin, Thailand. The year was 1986. We had escaped from Bangkok for a short break and were relaxing in the really quite magnificent air conditioned lobby. The waiter had just brought us cocktails when there was a sudden thrashing from an adjacent floral display and a rather alarming albeit diminutive figure emerged from the lush decorative foliage. Clutching a huge Nikon and looking like a stand-in for the photojournalist in Apocalypse Now, the bedraggled khaki-clad figure hurled himself to the ground and with an extraordinary look of grim determination started clicking. At first I though he might be a member of the paparazzi and glanced around to see if any celebrities were present. But then I realised he was taking photographs of the foliage. In a flash of intuition I realised that the short, dishevelled would-be photographer could be none other than Brian.

After that first encounter, I was always spotting Brian. Whether perched on a portable step-ladder (the ‘photographer’s friend’) and dressed in Gulf War camouflage at the Chelsea Flower Show or emerging from the shadows of the Coliseum dressed in his more usual khaki shorts, matching waistcoat and heavy boots, the only constants were the huge camera, ‘kit bag’ and the complete and utter incongruity with his surroundings. He also wears an air of what might be described as the inverse of studied nonchalance. It is a look of painfully self-conscious yet somehow wilful gaucherie.

My second close encounter was at Stourhead Gardens one early morning in the spring of last year. I was there to try out a very costly tripod that I needed for a photographic job the next day. I hasten to add that I am not a professional photographer and am most definitely not a member of Brian’s camera club. However, I didn’t want to look too incompetent when I turned up my client’s offices and the tripod required some mastering, being both heavy and extremely cumbersome. Realising I needed help, I happened to look up and there dramatically materialising from the swirling early morning mist who should I see but Brian.

Despite the affected professionalism, Brian turned out to be quite hopeless. After fumbling for a while he gave up and expressed his frustration in a glare of absolutely blistering contempt directed at my digital camera. It would seem that he is a purist, a ‘film man’. In a charitable attempt to defuse the situation and to mask any embarrassment he might be feeling, I asked what he thought of the hideously expensive tripod. His eyes took on the gimlet look of a high court judge and he considered for a moment. “A most acceptable bit of kit … for a first tripod” he opined with nauseating condescension before striding back into the mist. Had I been of a more violent disposition or had faster reactions, I would have hurled the thing at his head.

Last Friday I spotted Brian again. He was on Park Walk in Shaftesbury, a place much favoured by young mothers with pushchairs and elderly couples taking their afternoon constitutionals. As is always the case, it would have been virtually impossible to miss him. Not only was he clutching the longest telephoto lens I have ever seen, but he appeared to have transmogrified into a clone of Robert Capa and was busy striking extremely dynamic poses more suited to a particularly hellish war zone than to a genteel and rather sedate Wessex market town. I tried to capture his picture using my own pocket camera, but my wife thought I was being cruel and dragged me away. As I turned to go, I saw what would have been the perfect photo opportunity. Wearing an air that combined professionalism and menace, and with finger on the trigger of his camera’s motor drive, and with gleaming, perfectly calibrated telephoto lens, Brian was advancing towards a bed of pansies.

Fruit of the Loins

A solitary, unwholesome pleasure bringing a momentary illusion of connectedness, of being one with another – lover or stranger, it is just enough to sustain the brief fantasy that there is this shadowy ‘other’. An urgent, not-to-be-ignored quivering next to the thigh; a furtive personal pleasure that must be satisfied even if it entails a withdrawal to some squalid semi-private place, or – if too insistent – a discrete albeit public unholstering and frantic manipulation with fumbling or shamefully expert fingers. Indeed, satisfying such an intensely private act under disapproving public eyes adds a certain frisson to the thing. The spasm passes, the throbbing ends and a brief instant of gratification, la petite mort: yes, oh yes, your BlackBerry® has brought you mail.

We were always told that such ‘filthy’ activities brought with them the risk of blindness, although our Victorian forebears were probably not thinking of eyestrain due to staring at BBMilbank text on a minuscule screen. We were warned that it was a habit that if carried to excess broke up families.

A puerile joke about attending to throbbing tools in public? Well, Research in Motion asked – or just possibly begged – for it . Why on earth name the thing after that most engorged, must turgid of fruits?