“I saw John Pilger in a supermarket in Clapham.
“I was in the supermarket looking for something to go with the six jars of Hellman’s mayonnaise one of my housemates kept at the back of the kitchen cupboard. He added a jar every time he went shopping, which was about once a month – it must have been something to do with his grant. He’d come home, open the mayonnasie, make a sandwich, then stash the mayonnaise in the cupboard and forget about it.
“I had three loaves of rye bread, a pound of sliced ham and a dozen tomatoes that looked like they’d come all the way from Turkey in a rusty shipping container. I was going to make sandwiches. Ham on rye. Ha ha.”
“So I thought a bottle of wine might be the go, instead of the usual Colt 45s from the off-license that my housemates drank. I lived with a guy called Dave – the mayonnaise man – who was doing a PhD, and a programmer who did something for a newspaper that I never understood. It was summer, and we sat up late drinking beer and listening to soul and hip-hop on the local pirate radio station, which was run by a bunch of Rastafarian dope dealers out of an old shopfront in the high street. They had the neighbourhood drug trade and the local music scene tied up and they never tolerated anyone trying to muscle in on their bandwith or their street corners. Or so I heard.
“We were in this big house near Willesden Junction, a Victorian with sort of two-and-a-half stories. I had a little bedroom off the stair landing half-way up at the back, and there was always washing strung from lines in the stairwell and a procession of people who came and went in the other bedrooms: a woman from Chile, then an African guy studying at some college or other and for a while, just before I moved out, another Australian, who worked in the shop at the Victoria and Albert.”
“You know that thing in summer in England when the sun never seems to set, and then when it does, it rises again straight away, or it seems to. I used to wake up in the early hours of the morning with a vague headache from the Colt 45s and a feeling that I had to hurry up and do something useful.
“I was running through my savings and it was time to get a job, but at the same time I was doing this acting course and I thought I might get into that more. I had my degree and I thought something good would come up sooner or later.
“Sometimes I called people who were doing things I thought sounded interesting. There was this woman documentary maker from New York that I heard about through a friend, and I phoned her production company to see if there might be a research job going or something, but it was like Fort Knox.
“One day, not long after I first arrived, I went down to Brick Lane and bought a bicycle off a guy standing on the street corner. It was too small for me, and freshly stolen, I’m sure. The guy disappeared as soon as I handed over the 20 quid. But I had the bike, and I rode it all over the place, fearless and stupid – down Tottenham Court Road, around Oxford Circus in the traffic, anywhere. That’s what I did a lot of days – rode the too-small stolen bike to check out some part of London.
“Then I met this Canadian guy, Duncan, in a pub. We were talking, and I said I wasn’t doing anything much in particular – I think I said I was looking for an opening – and he said he had a band, and was looking for a girl singer. So I said I’d try out and I gave him my phone number. I thought he was probably just putting the moves on me, but we just talked more about music and what it was like living in London, and then he left. But a couple of days later he called and said the band was going to be rehearsing the next day and could I come down and sing.
“So I had one of those moments – you know, will I, won’t I? When you launch yourself into something on the spur of the moment without thinking it through, and then you have to go through with it. I mean, I could have just not gone and I probably would never have heard from the guy again. Then I thought, fuck it, why not, what have I got to lose? So the next day I got on my bike and road down there, right across London.
“Duncan lived in Clapham, in a big squat with about 15 other people who were all Canadians or Americans, and they all seemed to be in the band. When they played live, he said, there would be five guitarists and two drummers and a whole lot of people playing keyboards and horns. About half-a-dozen of them played through some songs a couple of times, then gave me a lyric sheet to sing. I was as nervous as anything, and the lyrics were pretty strange, but I could sing: I was in the choir at school and we'd all been coached by a real singing teacher. Anyway, I must have gone all right, because he said he thought I might work out. He gave me some tapes and a load more lyrics and said I should go away and learn the songs, and he’d call me to arrange another time for me to rehearse with them.
“I thought, great, I’m going to be in this band. Finally, it’s beginning to work out, just the way it’s supposed to when you go to London. I went home and listened to the tapes and spent the next few days wandering around the house wearing a Walkman and singing these strange songs: arty, intellectual lyrics, layers of guitars, all heavily ironic.
“Then, of course, I didn’t hear from Duncan for about a few days, then a week, then two weeks.
“Finally, I got on the bike and rode down there again, to the squat, looking for him. When I got there a builder’s crew were putting up scaffolding: the house was getting a renovation. Everyone was gone – Duncan, the band, the whole lot of them.
“I didn’t know what to do. I got on the bike and just rode around for a while. Then I saw this supermarket. I got off the bike and went inside, thinking, I’ll buy something to make a nice lunch. Then I remembered the mayonnaise … it was a perverse moment – ham, rye, mayonnaise. And a bottle of vino.
“So there I was, standing in the continental liquor department of this Tesco’s or maybe it was a Sainsbury’s, trying to choose between a bottle of Alsace riesling and some cheap Italian paint stripper.
“John Pilger was buying wine, too. He smiled at me when he saw I was looking at him. I was holding a bottle of wine in each hand, weighing them up. I thought, ‘I should just ask him for a job now.’ I had a my degree, I could do research for him.
“I don’t want to sound like a tosser. But it was like the time in New York when Matt Dillon told me I’d never be a pop star or the time I went to Tokyo with the vague idea of getting into acting for television commercials. It was already too late.”
Monday, 28 May 2007
Thursday, 24 May 2007
The Last Bulgarian Anarchist
The last Bulgarian anarchist lives in a quiet street around the corner from me. His name is Gyorgy; we used to say it “Gee-yor-gee” until he told us, “It’s George”.
He has many of the physical attributes of the typical anarchist: his head, for example, appears too large for his body, which is squat and strong-looking; he has a mane of dark hair and his face is concealed by a thick, black beard that bleeds from his cheekbones and spreads down his throat and deep into his shirtfront.
His large head gives the impression of great solidity, as if it had been hewn from marble, and it seems to have a life of its own, an indepenent existence, like the severed heads you see in terrorist videos.
One of his eyes is fixed, and stares blindly to the side. It’s a slight deformity, disconcerting if you don’t know him well; you can never be sure which eye you should look at when you speak to him.
He dresses in coarse shirts, jeans and workman’s boots, and he speaks with a thick Balkan accent.
Anarchists no longer throw bombs or plot the assassination of prime ministers whose names have no vowels when you write them down.
But I have seen George leading his daughter through the streets, gently, the girl’s small hand clasped in his, her Razor scooter slung over his shoulder like a Kalashnikov.
He has many of the physical attributes of the typical anarchist: his head, for example, appears too large for his body, which is squat and strong-looking; he has a mane of dark hair and his face is concealed by a thick, black beard that bleeds from his cheekbones and spreads down his throat and deep into his shirtfront.
His large head gives the impression of great solidity, as if it had been hewn from marble, and it seems to have a life of its own, an indepenent existence, like the severed heads you see in terrorist videos.
One of his eyes is fixed, and stares blindly to the side. It’s a slight deformity, disconcerting if you don’t know him well; you can never be sure which eye you should look at when you speak to him.
He dresses in coarse shirts, jeans and workman’s boots, and he speaks with a thick Balkan accent.
Anarchists no longer throw bombs or plot the assassination of prime ministers whose names have no vowels when you write them down.
But I have seen George leading his daughter through the streets, gently, the girl’s small hand clasped in his, her Razor scooter slung over his shoulder like a Kalashnikov.
Tuesday, 22 May 2007
Assoline
Sylvie told me about a bookshop in Manhattan that she visited years ago. It was in an uptown neighbourhood on the east side. You entered through a pair of heavy glass doors set into carved art nouveau panels on the outside wall of the building. If you photographed it from a certain angle it would look like a bookshop in Paris, one that had been in business since the time of the second Empire, the kind of place that might have had Zola and Proust as customers. At least, that’s what she said.
Inside was a vast and almost empty space, in muted tones of red and black, with lighting that emerged from you-knew-not-where. Around the walls of this space at about chest height was a single shelf on which the books were displayed, cover out, and if you wanted to examine one you approached the bookseller, who sat at a black desk in the middle of the shop, and the bookseller gave you a pair of white cotton gloves to put on, and took the book you wanted down from the shelf and brought it to the desk in the middle of the room. Sylvie believed the desk was fitted with special lights that would not cause the ink to fade or the pages of a book to become too hot, no matter how long it lay open under them, and the bookshop undoubtedly had some kind of precisely-calibrated climate-control system to preserve the books, too. When you had finished with one book you could ask for another until you found something you wanted, or until you’d seen every book in the shop. More than once, she had done just that, staying for several hours until she thought she had looked at every book. Somehow, she was unable to decide which she wanted to buy, and so she had never bought any. But she went back to look again, and the bookseller, a woman somewhere in her forties who wore her hair in a short, dark bob, dark-framed spectacles and dark clothes, never tired of bringing books to her, of taking them away, and never said more than a few murmured words, possibly not always in English, Sylvie thought – it was hard to tell.
The books were not, as you might think, of the antiquarian kind, but exquisite new editions of titles Sylvie had never even imagined might be published. Many were about artists Sylvie had never heard of, others showed the work of architects who until then had remained unknown to her, showing almost fantastical buildings The books’ design and production was of an almost unimaginably high standard, even for Sylvie, who once worked for a small Swiss publisher that specialised in lavish architectural monographs. But she had never seen anything like the books in that shop.
Sylvie almost never saw another person browsing in the shop during the numerous times she went there: it was as if she was the bookshop’s only customer.
I went to Manhattan once, and Sylvie gave me instructions about finding the bookshop, that I should take such-and-such a train from a particular station, get off at another particular station, leave the station through one exit rather than any other, walk so many bocks in north or east (I can’t remember now) then turn East or North or whatever it was, until I got to a corner that she named, and from there if I looked across the intersection I would see the building that housed the bookshop. She told me this because that was how she always found the bookshop, and she said that any time she had tried to go there by any other route – say, coming on a different subway line from another part of Manhattan – she had not been able to find it. That had happened to her several times, until she realised that the only way to find the bookshop was to follow the precise route she had taken the first time …
To tell the truth, I wasn’t that keen on finding the bookshop – it sounded like a lot of trouble and I certainly didn’t have the kind of money that I imagined I would need to buy the books that Sylvie had described to me. I had been in Manhattan for several weeks and only had a few days to go before I left when I realised that I would have to go to the bookshop, that Sylvie would be terribly disappointed if I didn’t, it was the one thing she said that I absolutely had to do while I was there, and that if I didn’t visit this shop she might never speak to me again. So I set of on the second-last day of my time in Manhattan, going first to the subway station Sylvie had told me to start from, taking the train she had suggested, and getting off at what I thought was the right stop. Then I tried to follow her directions, as I had written them down in a little Moleskine notebook I had with me, full of advice and addresses that people had thrust on me before I left on my journey. The bookshop was called Assoline. But I never managed to find it.
Inside was a vast and almost empty space, in muted tones of red and black, with lighting that emerged from you-knew-not-where. Around the walls of this space at about chest height was a single shelf on which the books were displayed, cover out, and if you wanted to examine one you approached the bookseller, who sat at a black desk in the middle of the shop, and the bookseller gave you a pair of white cotton gloves to put on, and took the book you wanted down from the shelf and brought it to the desk in the middle of the room. Sylvie believed the desk was fitted with special lights that would not cause the ink to fade or the pages of a book to become too hot, no matter how long it lay open under them, and the bookshop undoubtedly had some kind of precisely-calibrated climate-control system to preserve the books, too. When you had finished with one book you could ask for another until you found something you wanted, or until you’d seen every book in the shop. More than once, she had done just that, staying for several hours until she thought she had looked at every book. Somehow, she was unable to decide which she wanted to buy, and so she had never bought any. But she went back to look again, and the bookseller, a woman somewhere in her forties who wore her hair in a short, dark bob, dark-framed spectacles and dark clothes, never tired of bringing books to her, of taking them away, and never said more than a few murmured words, possibly not always in English, Sylvie thought – it was hard to tell.
The books were not, as you might think, of the antiquarian kind, but exquisite new editions of titles Sylvie had never even imagined might be published. Many were about artists Sylvie had never heard of, others showed the work of architects who until then had remained unknown to her, showing almost fantastical buildings The books’ design and production was of an almost unimaginably high standard, even for Sylvie, who once worked for a small Swiss publisher that specialised in lavish architectural monographs. But she had never seen anything like the books in that shop.
Sylvie almost never saw another person browsing in the shop during the numerous times she went there: it was as if she was the bookshop’s only customer.
I went to Manhattan once, and Sylvie gave me instructions about finding the bookshop, that I should take such-and-such a train from a particular station, get off at another particular station, leave the station through one exit rather than any other, walk so many bocks in north or east (I can’t remember now) then turn East or North or whatever it was, until I got to a corner that she named, and from there if I looked across the intersection I would see the building that housed the bookshop. She told me this because that was how she always found the bookshop, and she said that any time she had tried to go there by any other route – say, coming on a different subway line from another part of Manhattan – she had not been able to find it. That had happened to her several times, until she realised that the only way to find the bookshop was to follow the precise route she had taken the first time …
To tell the truth, I wasn’t that keen on finding the bookshop – it sounded like a lot of trouble and I certainly didn’t have the kind of money that I imagined I would need to buy the books that Sylvie had described to me. I had been in Manhattan for several weeks and only had a few days to go before I left when I realised that I would have to go to the bookshop, that Sylvie would be terribly disappointed if I didn’t, it was the one thing she said that I absolutely had to do while I was there, and that if I didn’t visit this shop she might never speak to me again. So I set of on the second-last day of my time in Manhattan, going first to the subway station Sylvie had told me to start from, taking the train she had suggested, and getting off at what I thought was the right stop. Then I tried to follow her directions, as I had written them down in a little Moleskine notebook I had with me, full of advice and addresses that people had thrust on me before I left on my journey. The bookshop was called Assoline. But I never managed to find it.
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