I am newly insomniac (hence this post being written long past my bedtime) and after a certain hour, all television and radio takes on a surreal visual or tonal quality.
One of my strongest and strangest memories from my late childhood was sneaking down late at night and cajoling my babysitter into letting me watch Pauline à la plage by Eric Rohmer. The treatment of an anxious and naive adolescent sexuality and its intertwining with more urgent, sordid adult desires, was something so foreign - literally- to my pre-pubescent, catholic, English sensibility. Yet at the same time I felt an immediate and intimate connection to Pauline, hot and physically opening up as her girlhood phase passed into something more serious, more exciting and risky - entailing as it did, initiation into a petty adult world of jealousies and often desperate lust.
Art critic, Brian Sewell's Dirty Dali, that I came upon past midnight - my struggling, tired self willing to be pulled into a truer, more vivid dimension, was a revelation. I would watch it again and again, because it told me little in some ways, but showed and suggested something more profound - a possibility of another sort of relationship to the material world and to the interior one. Dali was an obsessive masturbator, and liked to invite young men to lie next to his crucified Christ in the garden and masturbate, while he 'fumbled in his trousers'. Dali claimed that all geniuses were impotent. Dali was impotent. He also denied he was homosexual and married an older women who seemed to manage his affairs greatly to her own advantage and less and less with a thought to his posterity.
My only reluctant loss of innocence came when Sewell, who was long ago an intimate of Dali's over several summers, retold the story of Lorca's failed seduction - literally penetration - of Dali. I admit to feeling a little disillusioned; this was my great and beloved Lorca of Bodas de Sangre and La Casa de Bernado Alba, and the strong and beautiful Yerma. Why must I now remember him as trying to penetrate an uptight Dali?
Sunday, June 10, 2007
The great masturbator, Dali
Saturday, June 9, 2007
The Window
I am crazy-folle about Henri Matisse - his bold black lines, and bowl of fluffy flowers atop the flattened, sloping table, his hastily filled in geometric shapes on the rug, the column of white light striping like paint through the room, and the framing warm and clashing greens
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Domenichino, and the lesser orientalist painter, Vernet
Left is Judah and Tamar by Horace Vernet 1789-1863, below is The Persian Sibyl by Domenico Zampieri, 1581-1641 
Today I visited the Wallace collection with Claire. Strangely I had never heard of this London gallery before and it took a girl from Wigan Pier to drag me there. It is an extraordinary place - a national Museum in a grand, historic town house, five minutes from the crushing banality of Oxford street and stupifying Selfridges. On first entering the gates we came upon a bucolic scene (without the sheep): London workers sprawled in the sun, all over the brilliantly green lawn eating their lunch-time sandwiches. We ventured on, wandering inside, into the cool, dark interior that smelt faintly of mince pies, then sharp left through the brilliantly lit gift shop and beyond was a medieval room full of armour. I protested I wasn't interested in armour. Then I looked at it and found it a wondrous and absurd thing. Claire, a Fashion Marketing lecturer, coveted a breastplate, whilst rejecting the chain-mail pants. I considered how likely you were to die horribly in battle anyway. Then we found the great orientalist painting collection and I almost fell in a swoon, forgetting my Edward Said lessons and abandoning myself to the rich exoticism. I think I am obsessed with the eroticism actually and felt a powerful draw to this painting, Judah and Tamar by the 19th century French painter, Horace Vernet. I want to be, simultaneously, Judah and Tamar. As we rushed out so Claire could catch her train, we passed before the great Persian Sibyl and I was mesmerised and abject before her lovely face.