Festivals, readings etc

Laing’s Lonely City

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After seeing Olivia Laing speak impressively at July’s Port Eliot festival, I read her brave and remarkable book about a subject that’s almost taboo in our culture: loneliness.

The Lonely City is a study of alienation and estrangement – but also of art, AIDS, attachment and social media – and I recommend it highly. Laing writes of her own bewildered isolation in Manhattan, takes in the work of Warhol, Hopper and others, and says such interesting things about the terrors of aloneness vs. the joys of solitude. Like most of us I’ve experienced intense loneliness in my life – but also a kind of ecstatic solitude. The Lonely City made me think deeply about all of this.

Laing writes beautifully and with piercing honesty. “What’s so shameful about wanting,” she asks. “Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two?” She’s also brilliant on Facebook, Twitter et al: “I wanted to look and I wanted to be seen, and somehow it was easier to do both via the mediating screen.”

The Lonely City

mummy can I have some flowers in my hair? (a post-port eliot poem for bruce robinson)

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But it’s so lovely here:

the hills that roll down to the river,

woods bedecked with lanterns,

yurts for mindfulness, the vegan carts,

the wildest meats this side of Yeovil.

 

And of course the glamping families:

not a chav in sight, no red-slashed crosses,

rabid Leavers from across the bay –

nor one black face unless you count the kora players

in from WOMAD yesterday.

 

Instead the earthy MILFS

with nut-brown feet and daughters

rifling through the vintage stalls in search of skirts

that say they would have rolled in Yasgur’s mud

had they been born in 1951.

 

We’re all too busy pinning flowers to our tousled hair

to listen to the lonely novelist who drifts among the trees

with shoulder bag and Sharpie pen

but who will spend more on Halloumi wraps

than he can ever hope to make by being here.

 

What right has he pronouncing on these boutique hippie kids,

this man forever longing to belong?

Why always separate himself and find the flaw,

why point to self-delusion and delude himself

he has some vantage point from nowhere?

 

He has no zany shirt, nor quirky feathered hat,

he’ll never be the weathered Trustafarian

in mud-flecked boots with wife of 34

who danced all night to raucous bluegrass songs

beneath the darting stars.

 

Still he’s as privileged as every other tosser here:

why can’t he just be grateful we are gathered in this paradise

to celebrate the written word and save the day –

one reading at a time –

from Trump and from Theresa May?

It’s the End of the Road as we know it

Having survived the middle-class bacchanalia of Port Eliot, I’ll hope to see some of you at the dependably charming END OF THE ROAD festival in Dorset on the first weekend of September. I’ll be small-town-talking about Woodstock/Bearsville with Julian Mash in the Literature “space” and it’s a lovely way to wind down the summer…7-Tame-NME1-1200x500

Curious Arts, July 24th

A reprise of my British Library onstage conversation with legendary DANNY FIELDS (below) at Pylewell Park, Sunday 24th July. Danny will once again be reminiscing brilliantly about Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed, Nico, Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop and, of course, the RAMONES, the band he managed in their greatest years…

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“Charidee” Rock!

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My good friends JAMES FOX (left) and ADAM WILDI (right) with my darling wife NATALIE FORBES at a “charidee rock” night at Wintershall, Surrey, as guests of our great pal Rupert Wace.

James, who wrote Keef R’s Life, would probably concur with me that the only real music we heard all night was the half-hour set by the ever-extraordinary JEFF BECK, though Beck’s closing take on the Beatles’ ‘Day in the Life’ for me wasn’t a patch on the glorious ‘Nessun Dorma’ he did last time Rupert invited us to this event.

We’ll be featuring the Beckmeister on Rock’s Backpages this week, ahead of his new Loud Hailer album out next week…