COME SAIL AWAY WITH ME [482]

Is it truly possible to “get away from it all”? Not by just going on holiday, but by disconnecting from routine, resisting the need to “check in” at anything other than an airport.

 

I am routinely guilty of checking what I will be coming back to after a week off from work, but I cannot bring myself to delete the app we use from my phone - we are not required to use it other than in the office, but the illusion of “advantage” means it remains on my home screen.

 

The allure of an ocean cruise constitutes the nearest I can physically remove myself from the networks that run everyday life, without the ability to travel into outer space. 

 

Transatlantic travel would be even more effective, removing all intermediary ports of call, and any opportunity for your phone to connect to a cellular network - Cunard’s Queen Mary 2, the only liner currently offering such a journey, is an opulent destination unto itself, and a more than adequate distraction. I clearly need a break if I am thinking about it this deeply.

 

Of course, you would then be subject to the temporary network created by the liner, something once solely constructed and run by a ship’s crew, now supplemented by the online purser’s office of a digital planner service available to passengers using the ship’s on-board wi-fi, booking meals and activities to distribute people around the ship. Cunard’s planner, “My Voyage”, is a web-based outlier in an industry that encourages the downloading of an extra app to access all services, but even while a printed daily programme is still provided to guest rooms, and most services on Cunard ships do not require booking, there is the implication that accessing a network will be easier and more convenient for the smooth running of the liner, and of your trip.

 

Or you could “stay in touch with friends and family with one of our on board internet packages, and discover our top tips for using your phone while at sea”. If you choose to add it to your voyage, Cunard charges $20-28 per day to access Elon Musk’s low-earth-orbit satellite network Starlink, charging the higher amount if you want video streaming in addition to what is titled the “Essential Internet Plan”, which is web browsing, e-mail and social media, like you never left port. 

 

Having paid £7.75 per day for five days to continue using my mobile phone in New York in 2023 strikes me as a different proposition because I was on dry land during that time. I could have used a printed map and guide, but it was crucial that I could react at the same speed as the city in which I was located. At sea, it is more possible to set your own pace, and to put a distance between yourself and that which demands attention now but could wait until later. 

 

Buying the sort of internet access you could find on land means you may as well have taken your holiday on land, because it means you are willing not to take a proper break - you remain on standby, in the middle of the ocean. I need to explore whether the lives we lead – the life I lead – is able to give us a proper break from them.

IF YOU’RE ALRIGHT, YOU CAN’T GO WRONG [436]

"I'm Alright", a novelty song that charted at number 40 in 1982

The outpouring of grief at the sudden death of Steve Wright on Monday 12th February speaks both to the intimate connection between the radio DJ and his audience, and to his professionalism. I shouldn’t have been surprised at my upset over the loss of such an engaging, friendly and funny personality, when that was all I knew of him. 

Media coverage of Wright’s death, coloured by a narrative that he “died of a broken heart” at the ending of his Radio 2 afternoon show by the BBC in 2022, later dispelled by his own brother, collides with his own lack of sentimentality about his career, having only taken over “Pick of the Pops” four months ago, with further projects to come.

Usually a straightforward and nostalgic chart rundown, Steve Wright turned “Pick of the Pops” into a Steve Wright show: engaging chat, meticulously researched facts, and massive current-sounding jingles firing off all over the place, the energy kept high throughout. He did cut off a few songs too early, but name a DJ that hasn’t done the same.

What makes a Steve Wright show can be tracked through an abundance of radio recordings, and listings in the “Radio Times”. Starting his professional broadcasting career at the launch of Radio 210 in Reading in 1976, presenting evening and weekend shows, he was interviewing Marc Bolan and his wife Gloria Jones within its opening fortnight. Wright’s confident and cheeky radio personality is already evident, with only the jingles and content telling you what year it is, despite having to give way to AA Roadwatch telling the audience that the car parks in Bracknell are filling up fast. He also displays the “gift of the gab” required at a time when there were still restrictions on playing records on UK radio.

After three years, a six-month stint at Radio Luxembourg had Wright reading the news bulletins during his own evening show – the peppering of news headlines, weather, showbiz stories and “Strange But True” features through an average Wright show, over and above the news already on BBC Radios 1 and 2, would be read in the same way, more conversational than authoritative, keeping the audience both engaged and informed – “infotainment” is an apt description for any of Wright’s shows.

Headhunted by the BBC, Wright’s first two years on Radio 1 were essentially a bootcamp - if you weren’t a top-class national broadcaster by the end of this, no-one will be. His first Radio 1 show was on 5^th January 1980, presenting Saturday evenings for three months. One month later, Wright presented “Top of the Pops” for the first time without a screen test. After covering the flagship breakfast show during April, and after taking May off, Sunday mornings became Wright’s main show in June - this month also had him present his first Radio 1 Roadshow from that year’s Lawnmower Grand Prix in Holt, Wiltshire. From June to August, he also presented a Saturday lunchtime hour titled “The Amazing Facts and Figures Show”: a “Radio Times” listing in July had Wright saying that “collecting useless but often fascinating bits of information has always been a thing of mine, and it’s surprising what you find out.” The “Strange But True” and “Factoids” features and spin-off books make perfect sense now, especially the one that stuck in my mind: if you unfurl a human brain, you can cover an ironing board with it.

Wright moved to Saturday mornings at the end of August while both frequently covering other presenters’ shows during the week, while acting as film reviewer for fellow host Andy Peebles. This continued until October 1981, when what became known as “Steve Wright in the Afternoon” began, although he continued reviewing films on other shows for the station. The lightly satirical characters like Mr Angry, Damien the social worker and local radio DJ Dave Doubledecks would start to appear, the meticulous preparations for each show becoming more apparent, inviting comparisons with Kenny Everett.

All this happened before you get to what people start with when they talk about Steve Wright: the “zoo radio” format, with lots of co-presenters, lots of features, big interviews replacing character sketches, lots of clapping and lots of “love the show, Steve!” from listeners’ messages. Hearing him speak on his Radio 1 show from May 1983 about spending a week in Los Angeles and New York, mostly listening to the radio and watching CNN and MTV, explains why his shows for the BBC right up to 2024 retained an energy not present on other British radio shows – it had to be imported. Scott Shannon innovated the “morning zoo” breakfast show on WRBQ-FM in Tampa, Florida, taking it to WHTZ in New York – Shannon did not continue with the zoo format upon leaving WHTZ in 1989, but the station continues to run a similar format at breakfast time today.

The major innovation Wright had upon the zoo format was to run it in a continent where, if people weren’t experiencing a lull in their day at 2pm, they were taking a nap. It was a second wind for its audience as much as an entertaining listen, augmented by bespoke jingles sourced from New York production houses. Ironically, when Wright moved to the Radio 1 breakfast show in 1994, carrying the existing format didn’t work, and his Radio 1 career ended the following year – perhaps it was a bit full-on for British audiences at that time of day. After a short break in television and at Talk Radio UK, Wright joined Radio 2 in 1996 for two weekend shows, resuming an updated afternoon show in 1999 that, while toned down a little, remained an outlier to how the rest of the station sounded.

I am not ready to talk about Steve Wright in the past tense, and listening to so much of his work from across his career only made me wonder what he could have done next. His public modesty about his own career is admirable, and while he never really got personal on air, you were always left with the impression that he was a thoroughly sincere and hard-working man, such as when he spoke to Simon Garfield for his book about BBC Radio 1, “The Nation’s Favourite”:

“Part of the success of the afternoon programme wasn’t the fact that we were postmodern and smart, it was that we were reliable and friendly. You could switch on wherever you were and be amused and have a friend. That sounds terribly pretentious, but it’s true: it’s comforting, it’s something nice, it’s upbeat, we tried only to reflect the good, the funny and the interesting... It's just a jobbing broadcaster doing a gig. When you do a show you can't think of the exact numbers of people tuning in and how it compares with the last figures - such thoughts are impostors. What people remember is the time you got them through their depression, or the time you helped them with their exams... Everything else is unimportant. At the end of the day it's just entertainment. Nobody has a disease.”

WE’LL JUST GLIDE STARRY EYED [404]

I never could say that I flew Concorde but, courtesy of the Intrepid Air & Space Museum, I can say I have sat in British Airways G-BOAD, which flew from New York to London in a record time of two hours, fifty-two minutes and fifty-nine seconds.

However, this record was achieved on 7th February 1996, a long time for such a record to go unsurpassed. Once capable of travelling at twice the speed of sound, this plane’s wing was used by me earlier that day as an awning from the summer heat.

Having previously written about the idea of “the future” having ended with the withdrawal of Concorde from service in 2003, with supersonic passenger travel having turned back into a goal for another generation, I am guilty of believing that speed equals progress. Taking seven hours cross the Atlantic feels like a compromise, the ability to travel faster having now passed, no matter how expensive the flight on the most exclusive of aircraft had been.

Tour groups could sit in the front few rows of G-BOAD, with the remainder of the cabin, galley and toilets roped off. After hearing about the history and technical feats of Concorde, a few of us at a time could look into the tightly-packed cockpit while the guide answered our questions. Developed in the 1960s and using manual, analogue controls, a separate flight engineer sat with the pilots to manually control the fuel from the thirteen fuel tanks across the aircraft, and crucially maintain its centre of gravity. It was explained to us that two people were required to fly the plane, while the third ensured there was still a plane to fly.

What passed for luxury seating and space on Concorde following its final 2001-02 refit is equal to Premium Economy on a Boeing 777, plus leather seats, and minus the in-flight entertainment. But with Concorde being its own attraction, having your meals served on fine china, and receiving a certificate to commemorate your flight, more than balances out having a few stereo music channels available to listen. 

My question to the guide concerned not speed, or the pressure exerted on the plane during supersonic travel – the tiny windows being the alternative to having none at all – but the luggage space. 

It turns out that cabin luggage allocations were the same as for a regular flight, although the overhead bins were quite shallow, while only one 12kg suitcase was allowed in the hold, located at the rear. This followed an initial period of the luggage being delivered on a separate plane, negating the time saved by the supersonic journey, but outside of those taking the weekly trips made by Concorde to Barbados, you were most likely an executive on a business day trip to sign contracts, and carrying hand luggage only. You could still get a bag under the seats.

This confirmed to me that speed was the only advantage Concorde really had. Its prohibitive development cost, and the luxury level at which it was sold to recoup that cost, meant it was never developed any further, leaving reinvention as the next step. The online realm also eliminated the time advantage it offered for business customers, meaning new reasons must be found for needing to travel so fast, other than expecting it to be an option.

 

They say never to meet your heroes...

UNDER THE RED SKY [400]

New York City, Wednesday 7th June 2023, 18:17 ET

Between Monday 5th and Friday 9th June, I took my first holiday outside of the United Kingdom, to New York City with my parents, since beginning this website in May 2016. This wasn’t intentional, but more because my last couple of holidays have been guided by museum exhibitions, resulting in my trip to Tate Liverpool in 2019 to see art by Keith Haring, and travelling to Milton Keynes in 2021 to see furniture by the Memphis collective. To this end, expect an American flavor, instead of flavour, to some upcoming subjects.

 

The main takeaway from this week in New York, however, is that I experienced its worst air quality in sixty years, and walking for miles in it will sting your eyes.

 

I did not watch the news on the morning of Tuesday 6th June, having chosen Looney Tunes cartoons instead, but I was told the main news was the ongoing effect of wildfires in Canada. They began in March, but by June had affected eleven million acres of forest, around fifteen times more than expected for this time of year, displacing 120,000 people in the progress. Two thirds of the over four hundred wildfires were categorised as “out of control”, and their smoke was being carried south towards the north-eastern United States.

 

New York City, Wednesday 7th June 2023, 18:12 ET

Fortunately, our plans that day took us to the Hudson River side of Manhattan and away from the skyscrapers – I am mindful enough of the tall buildings in London holding in exhaust fumes, so New York City was a perfect incubator for all the incoming particulates. All we experienced was a bit of rain, and the grey haze in the sky turning a bit yellow – otherwise, we were fine.

 

The air quality index used in the United States since 1968 usually puts New York into the yellow “moderate” category, with a value between 101 and 150, indicating a risk to people sensitive to air pollution, but otherwise acceptable. Overnight, and through Wednesday 7th June, this index reached 484 at 5pm local time – the maroon “hazardous” category begins at 301, described as “health warning of emergency conditions: everyone is more likely to be affected”. The highest level ever recorded on this index, New York City was briefly the most polluted city on Earth, the sky having turned orange.

 

On the ground, those who already wore masks from the COVID-19 pandemic continued to war them as normal, and everyone else did not. Fire stations began handing out N95 and KN95-standard masks, again left over from the pandemic, but this did not start until Thursday 8th June – by then, Mayor Eric Adams had appeared behind various lecterns telling people to curb their activity, to stay indoors, and that they could skip exercising their dog. 

 

New York City, Wednesday 7th June 2023, 18:17 ET

Meanwhile, my parents and me carried on as normal: the sky had become a sandy colour once we entered the Museum of Modern Art, becoming orange while we were inside. We took refuge in the toy shop FAO Schwarz, in the Rockefeller Center, and later at the Hard Rock Café on Broadway. We only heard from Mayor Adams in the early evening, having walked around more shops. We had reduced our activity, but this meant walking for eight miles instead of twelve. Despite wearing glasses, my eyes had begun to sting, but not enough for them to tear up. 

 

We took as many pictures of the sky as everyone else, both locals and tourists, and we had to be outside to do it. We were there for an experience, and this was the only one not planned. On Thursday 8th June, the sky was clearer, turning to blue through the day, as the wind blew the smoke further east, and we kept ourselves around the outside of Manhattan once again. Now back home, we have no side effects from the smog, but we were lucky, as we could leave. On Sunday 11th June, the air quality index registered at 109.

 

It is not a case that I believe in climate change, for we have experienced the effects of it. This may have been an extreme event, but it is one more likely to take place. Not modifying our behaviour all that much was unwise, but this will have been an event where the advice will now be anticipated for next time. That this event will be described as a one-off, or rare, belies the effect that, around the world, they are happening more often. If you thought you could do something to mitigate the damage caused, you would do it. If you thought you had a way to prevent it, you would do it. I only sound like I am babbling because I feel the need that someone really should be doing something.

COME ABOARD, WE’RE EXPECTING YOU [383]

One thing I learned from my visit to the SeaCity Museum in Southampton is that I love looking at model ships in glass cases. With the museum comprising of three major sections, telling the story of the RMS Titanic and its fateful maiden voyage from Southampton in 1912, the story of Southampton as a major seafaring port, and a rotating display of items from the city council’s archives, at every point no opportunity is lost to display a model of a ship in a glass case. From the 1:25 scale model of RMS Queen Mary, reproduced to a terrifying level of detail by the same shipyard that built the full-size ship, to the latest of the Lego “Titanic” models, this is the closest I can get to experiencing the glamour and opulence of transatlantic travel.

It's odd wanting to travel on something that no longer exists – I sincerely doubt the Queen Mary could move from its spot in Long Beach, California after fifty years, and the SS United States, gutted of its insides and facing an uncertain future in Philadelphia has been out of service for just as long. No-one has reason to build ocean liners of their type, with only Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 maintaining a transatlantic route for only part of the year, its status as a Royal Mail Steamer (RMS) being a ceremonial gesture to the old days of “steam packet” routes across the world. Passenger jets rendered obsolete the ships built to withstand the punishment of the Atlantic Ocean, and ill-equipped to be adapted for cruising, where the ship itself became the destination – only the bottom half of the Queen Mary 2 is built like an ocean liner of old, its superstructure being a modern cruise ship.

I personally find the SS Normandie to be the best-looking ocean liner ever made, from the sweeping lines of its streamlined exterior to the interior presided over by Pierre Patout, a founder of the Art Deco style, with no two first-class cabin designed the same way. However, it entered service in 1935, and many countries’ liners were built with government subsidies that predicated on their being converted for military use if required – Cunard’s original RMS Mauretania, launched in 1906, was also built to be an armed merchant cruiser, with added cannons, but the cost of running such an enormous ship led to ocean liners fulfilling wartime duties as troop carriers and hospital ships. (The Normandie would be requisitioned by the United States when the Nazis took over France in World War II, but it caught fire and capsized in 1942 during its conversion to troop transport, spending the rest of the war laying on its side.)

Cruise ships have changed the expectations of ocean-going passengers – my parents have visited the Queen Mary in California, and were amazed by how small it felt, particularly the cabins. The ships I would have liked the opportunity to travel on, an idea of “wouldn’t it be nice” tempered by thoughts of “it won’t sell these days”, were Cunard’s RMS Media and RMS Parthia. Half the length of the Queen Mary, they operated from Liverpool to New York, transporting a maximum of 250 passengers, all in first class, plus freight. They were Katharine Hepburn’s favourite transatlantic ships, and their more contained and relaxed nature makes it easy to see why. Apart from two decks of cabins, the common rooms were contained on one deck featuring a lounge, drawing room, smoking room, cocktail bar, a long gallery and promenade, library, dining room and barber shop. No swimming pool, no rollercoaster, no climbing wall, only opportunities to relax, sit and chat. Both jet travel and cargo ships would curtail the Media and Parthia’s careers with Cunard in 1961, sold to be refitted as cruise liners carrying substantially more passengers. 

I’M KING OF THE HILL, TOP OF THE HEAP [329]

With the street of Long Acre in London once home to coachbuilders and car showrooms, the similarly industrious Longacre Square in New York City, having taken its name, ironically also hosted horse stables, the American Horse Exchange finally closing in 1910. By then, “The New York Times” newspaper had built and opened its headquarters in the centre of the square, where Broadway intersects with 42^nd Street, and convinced the city to rename the square after itself, something the other dozen or so daily papers at the time hadn’t done.

One Times Square, otherwise known as 1475 Broadway, opened in 1904, and remains the focal point of Times Square, hosting the New Year’s Eve ball drop first begun by the “Times” in 1907. The narrow end of the triangular building, which has famously hosted a Sony Jumbotron screen from 1990 to 1996, used by “The Late Show with David Letterman”, and displayed a realistically-steaming pot of Nissin Cup Noodle, now hosts a 350 foot-long advertising video wall projecting into the square, erected in 2019 to replace a number of smaller screens and billboards. However, it also resulted in removing the famous news ticker, or “zipper”, that had operated at various times since 1928. With similar video screens spreading around the building and across the square, its equivalent space in London has now moved to Piccadilly Circus.

For a building with so many eyes on it, I was surprised to hear it is mostly empty. I visited the ground level Walgreens drug store while on holiday in New York in 2011, but with only one floor towards the top used by the current organisers of the New Year’s Eve celebrations, the Times Square Alliance and Countdown Entertainment LLC, the rest of the building is used either as storage, or is completely abandoned. It matters nothing its owners, Jamestown LP and Sherwood Equities, as the tens of millions of dollars they charge in rent is for its exterior: so long as it acts as a frame for the video screens, it remains profitable.

With only a 500m²  trapezoid-shaped footprint, and only twenty-five stories, it may be easier for most businesses looking for space to find one floor in another building, instead of two or three at One Times Square. Even “The New York Times” started moving out of the building as early as 1913, as its corporate headquarters moved to 229 West 43^rd Street, itself extended in subsequent years. However, production of the newspaper continued at Times Square until the last section moved out in 1960 - even after the “Times” sold the building in 1961, the printing presses, situated in the four-storey-depth basement, ran until 1997, replaced by a more advanced facility based in Queens.

Allied Chemical, a multi-industrial corporation that, through a continued series of mergers, is the company now known as Honeywell, bought the building in 1963, two years after the “Times” sold it to advertising executive Douglas Leigh, and proceeded to re-skin it for the first time, replacing the original Gothic architecture, which made it look not unlike the Flatiron building, with modernist marble, not that you can see it properly now. The Allied Chemical Tower opened in December 1965, acting as headquarters of its Fibers division, and the Fabricated Products division. The first three floors, however, were more like what you would have found at the New York World’s Fair that closed earlier that year: the ground floor housed a demonstration of the upcoming Apollo space project, and an animated model of a city that could then be built on the moon. Displays of chemical processes took the next floor up, and the third floor fashion show displayed clothes made using Nylon produced by Allied Chemical.

One Times Square was already on sale by October 1972 for a minimum of $7 million, Allied Chemical acknowledging they had too much office space in New York City, that the displays should be dealt with by a group more experienced with dealing directly with the public, and that they were never going to get back the full cost of their renovations. The next buyer, real-estate developer Alex Parker, ultimately paid $6.25 million, and initial talk of exhibition spaces on most floors were replaced by hiring out office space to tenants, although a Song Writers Hall of Fame did open on the eighth floor. Between 1974 and 1997, the building was sold six more times, with unfulfilled proposals to replace the exterior with glass, or stripping it to a bare metal frame to use for floodlights. Demolition of the building had also been proposed in 1979 as part of a plan to create an urban renewal district in 42^nd Street.

Having looked through the numerous news articles on the “Times” website about changes in ownership and intent, the lack of consistency is perhaps the major contributor to tenants dwindling away – by 1982, there was reference to leases lasting from month to month, with nothing in the long term. Outside of the “Times”, Walgreens is seemingly the longest-running tenant of the interior of One Times Square. Their lease, signed in 2007, actually covers most of the interior, even though only the first three floors are used. It replaced a Warner Bros. studio shop, operated from 1996-2001 to compete with Disney’s store, but Warner Bros. continued to pay for the lease until Walgreens took over. I have seen evidence that the store closed again on 27^thDecember 2021, but with Walgreens’ lease continuing until 2027, and with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, I could not confirm if this was temporary or not.

The current value of One Times Square is dictated by its advertising potential: Lehman Brothers bought it in 1995 for $27.5m, with the first electronic billboards being installed in 1996. The following year, it was sold to its current owners for $110m. A four-week placement on the main billboard installed in 2019 costs from $2.5m. Perhaps One Times Square is at the point where any future construction means advertising revenue lost. Ironically, the original scoreboard-like ad screen, installed above the “zipper” in 1975, is more famous as an artwork, being the screen on which Jenny Holzer displayed the message, “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT”.

I CUT DOWN TREES, I SKIP AND JUMP [326]

So often a shortcut definition for British humour, I needed a reminder of the revelation “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” was on first viewing. Targeting the eccentricities and authorities found in British life was not new, but it was among the first comedy shows to play to an audience that grew up with television, comfortable with its bold fragmentation and abandonment of sketches, and stretching of established TV show formats. It didn’t second-guess the intelligence of its audience: an explanation of the philosopher Immanuel Kant was not required, whether he was a real pissant or not. The show’s dynamic style and form was also among the first comedy shows its audience would have seen in colour, although the first four episodes were broadcast in black and white before BBC One switched to colour in November 1969.

Despite having seen bits of the team’s later films, I knew none of this when I first saw the first episode of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” in July 1994, the BBC starting a repeat run to mark the show's 25^th anniversary. I was eleven years old – I had seen the first series of “The Smell of Reeves & Mortimer”, but the first episode of “The Fast Show” was still two months away. I didn’t yet realise that what I was about to watch would reflect the attitudes of its time, despite that being the show’s target in 1969. I got the interview sketch about Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson, Terry Jones’s composer whose nickname overshadowed his work, who is kicked off the arts programme when he complains – then John Cleese’s interviewer shouts, “get your own arts programme, you fairy.”

 

My immediate deduction from this was that the character, or the writer of that line, was scared of fairies. I had never heard the word “fairy” used in this context before, and have only heard it used in other TV and radio shows of the period, into the 1970s, and on other episodes of “Flying Circus”: when a journalist is asking the opinion of the man in the street, Terry Jones appears as on a house roof, saying, “I’m not in the street, you fairy,” while a display of an army units “camp square-bashing” chants, “we all know where you’ve been, you military fairy!”

 

Even after realising it was meant as an insult to gay men, one that appeared in the UK between the world wars after being coined, to describe particularly effeminate gay men, in the Bowery section of New York as early as the 1870s, I couldn’t take offence to something that sounded so bizarre. With homosexuality only having begun to be decriminalised in the UK in 1967, it was a current subject that appeared in “Flying Circus”, other episodes in the first series featuring a writer telling his son to go back to Yorkshire over “you and your coal mining friends”, a “Panorama” parody documentary on what makes a man want to be a mouse, and a sketch where a man, having been told by a police officer they can’t help over a lost wallet, asks the officer if he wants to go back to their place – the officer says, “yes, alright”, the audience laughs, the show carries on. Times were changing. I would love to have known Graham Chapman’s thoughts as these shows were first broadcast.

Comedy ages poorly, until it doesn’t: in September 2021, the Chinese government announced that broadcasters must "resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal esthetics,", as they are failing to encourage Chinese men to be more masculine. This limp step is apparently aimed at pop stars and internet celebrities but, as if to show how much times have changed, I haven’t heard the word “sissy” used in years either. The pejorative slang for effeminate men in China, as used by their government, was “niang pao” – seeing as that means “girlie guns” in English, that term is just begging for reappropriation by those who were called it, just like “fairy” and “sissy” were here.

GET INTO THE GROOVE [191]

I stand in front of a painting of two figures - one hand a hole in their torso, and is being used as a hula hoop by the other. Their outlines are painted in white acrylic, within a white outline, on red tarpaulin (not canvas – the metal eyelets have been used to fix it to the wall), and all the remaining space within the outline is filled in with short black-lines, zig-zagging and curving around each other. I look closer. It is not hard to see the artist’s brush strokes, as the lines are roughly an inch wide, but the light in the gallery shows up both the thickness of the paint, and the speed with which it was applied – the drip marks either mark moments of consideration for the artist, or the failure of the paint to keep up with them.

I first discovered the art of Keith Haring around fifteen years ago. Already used to the primary colours and thick outlines of Matt Groening’s creations like “Life in Hell,” “The Simpsons” and “Futurama,” Haring’s works appeared superficially similar and iconic, adding the same bright colours to reoccurring elements like the “Radiant Baby,” flying saucers, coyotes, televisions, computers. However, Haring fused painting with performance art – most of his work appeared outside of gallery spaces, first as graffiti, then as murals, becoming events. The scale of some Haring works, filling whole walls and sides of buildings – locations varying from a tenement in Philadelphia, to the Church of San’Antonio in Rome, and the Berlin Wall - and the sheer numbers of figures and icons compacted together, is overwhelming and bewildering. Think “The Simpsons,” then Hieronymus Bosch, followed by acid house, whose colourful aesthetic he inspired.

An exhibition of Haring’s work, titled simply “Keith Haring,” opened at Tate Liverpool in June 2019, the first UK retrospective of his work. I had to go: I have seen so many of his pictures, but only in books, or online. I could find out what size the pictures were, or the materials used, but I would have no sense of the scale, or the pace at which they were made. I already knew the vast majority of his works are labelled as “Untitled,” the work’s meaning coming only from within itself, and I knew that an art gallery was not the right context for this work – from sticking fragments of art to lampposts and door handles around New York, to sketching onto the paper used to blank expired artwork on the Subway, his artwork is best when it is active, just appearing to you, instead of being held in a vacuum. Regardless, these pictures buzz and excite.

Haring was not given enough time to produce his work – he would die of AIDS-related complications in 1990, aged only 31, and his knowledge of his condition only caused him to work faster and bigger still, while supporting gay and AIDS activist groups, posters for which appeared at the exhibition. I wish he could have lived to have seen the rise of emoji – he left the meaning of his own iconography to his audience, and I imagine he would have got a kick out of everyone now doing the same themselves.

Keith Haring wrote in 1978, the year he arrived in New York, “I am not making pictures anymore... My paintings, themselves, are not as important as the interaction between people who see them and the ideas that they take with them after they leave the presence of my painting.” Within a couple of years, he became a contemporary of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, whose work first inspired Haring to become a painter. What do I do next?

* “Keith Haring” continues at Tate Liverpool until 10^th November 2019, moving to the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels from 6^th December to 19^th April 2020, and finally, from 22^nd May to 20^th September 2020, the Museum Folkwang in Essen.

YOU LAUGH TODAY AND CRY TOMORROW [180]

There has to be a reason why I have seen a documentary film three times within the last six months – it is either that the subject is endlessly fascinating, or the subject feels like an elaborate version of the “Aristocrats” joke. What is the name of this act? Morton Downey Jr. was a radio DJ turned talk show host, whose TV talk show, which ran from 1987 to 1989, was a harbinger of the right-wing hosts found on American TV and radio today. At the same time, “Evocateur” is also the story of someone who constantly had to prove his worth in the shadow of his father and his peers, while simultaneously railing against them – as said by Bob Pittman, the original programmer for MTV, and later producer of Downey’s show, “Often, the most self-destructive people are really entertaining.”

Morton Downey Sr. was a famous singer, but his son’s efforts, including a version of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (the original 1933 song), did not do well. He also had a book of poetry published in the 1960s, titled “Quiet Sounds Make the Loudest Noise,” when he was going by the name Sean. The film returns to this book on a number of occasions, only because its writer is so at odds with the self-proclaimed champion that would say, “I’m after establishing a platform for the American who has been unheard by his government.” Downey found his political voice in an anti-abortion speech in 1981, by which point he was estranged from the Kennedys, who were friends with his family, through his father. The term “evocateur” is used by lawyer Gloria Allred, the human rights lawyer that held her own against Downey in a conversation about feminism, that included Downey wondering if Allred had a tape measure on her tongue.

There are copious scenes in this film from “The Morton Downey Jr. Show,” described as a “talk show with a hockey audience,” where he played the role of the “angry populist,” and where subjects had no grey area, with a clear line drawn between liberal and conservative, left and right, good and evil. His friends are interviewed, saying Downey was acting, and his daughter Kelli could not watch the show, because she could not bear that side of him. There are many stories of rages, and of prostitutes, and there is good, imaginative use of animation to match the fantasy, and to offset the shaking heads.

What would ultimately spell the end of Downey’s show was when the fantasy overtook reality, when his alleging that he had been attached at an airport, had a swastika drawn on his face, and his hair partly cut, was rejected as a hoax, due to inconsistencies in his account. By then, his show, which began in the New York area and had spread nationally, was being dropped by both TV stations, advertisers, and its guests became more like those expected on “The Jerry Springer Show.” As is said during the film, “you don’t think it’s ever going to end when you’re in the midst of it.”

Morton Downey Jr. died in 2001, after battling lung cancer – a lit cigarette was constant on his show. His show was not the sort we would see in the UK, and his personality was not either, as the more conservative point of view is the province of newspapers and online, while TV and radio has to be impartial – it is interesting to see how popular a show like his was, but, as Bob Pittman said towards the end, “so if you say what the worst thing about it is? I was associated with someone that, by giving him a forum, and by giving him a chance to be a celebrity, hurt himself.” What this film does do is make you still care about someone who had used up the goodwill he was due, and it is worth seeing for telling its story so well – but there won’t be another person like Morton Downey Jr.

NEVER SPEND YOUR GUITAR OR YOUR PEN [70]

It is hard to confirm which single product has been manufactured the most in human history, but the ubiquitous Bic Cristal pen, with over ONE HUNDRED BILLION made since 1950, but be up there. After that, we may then be looking at food and drink items, and components of bigger pieces, like bolts, nuts and screws.

Like television, the ballpoint pen is the culmination of the work of many people. The wonderfully-named John J. Loud first patented such a pen in 1888, but that patent expired through lack of interest. However, the Hungarian inventor László Bíró. with his chemist brother György, are credited with inventing the “biro” because they overcame problems others found with keeping the writing ball in place. Instead of just trying to fix it in position, they coupled it with the viscosity of the ink – with the right consistency, the ink can continue to flow without drying around the ball, and without leaking. The Biros’ invention, and the Second World War, took them to Argentina in 1941, where the first “Birome” pens were made in 1943. 

However, of all the companies to make ballpoint pens under licence from the Biros, only one was successful enough to buy the patent from them, and that was Société Bic, based in the town of Chichy, just outside of Paris. Already makers of parts for writing instruments, and well before they started making disposable lighters and razors, the Bic Cristal pen, originally known as the “atomic” pen, appeared as deceptively simple as the original 1948 Citroën 2CV, while using the same thorough, forward thinking in its design.

Firstly, the hexagonal barrel of the pen makes it as easy to grip as a pencil. Making both the barrel and inkwell from see-through plastic made it cheap, while providing a rarely-seen, for the time, guide to how much ink is left. The hole found half-way down the barrel ensures the air pressure inside the barrel remains the same as the outside, while the stainless-steel writing ball, held within a tip made from a brass / nickel compound, was milled to a diameter of one millimetre, with an accuracy of one hundredth of a millimetre. This formula has only changed a couple of times – as of 1961, the writing ball was made of a harder-wearing tungsten carbide, used in Parker’s Jotter pens since 1954, and the top of the cap was cut off in 1991, in case anyone chewing the end of their pen accidentally swallowed it.

The success of the Cristal was sealed by the time it went on sale in the United States in 1959, with Bic having bought the Waterman pen company the year before. Bic were able to offer a pen for 29 cents, when Parker were offering their Jotter for two dollars - Jotter refills costed more than an entire Cristal. It was Bic that introduced the idea that pens could be disposable, with ends broken off, or chewed out of all recognition, or used to clean out people’s ears, or just thrown away. The joke that no Bic pen has ever been “finished” was used in a 2015 promotion, with Bic giving £10 to customers that could send an (untampered) empty pen. Mind you, no-one dares speak of the tone-deaf “Bic For Her” much now, but I can’t say anything that wasn’t said better by Bridget Christie.

The Bic Cristal pen became part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2001, and of the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2006, preserving it for ever more… but you can find them everywhere…

I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR [16]

I cannot comprehend how the Pop Art-ist Andy Warhol ate the same lunch for twenty years – like Albert Einstein, or Alfred Hitchcock, who always wore the same clothes, I can only guess a standard lunch of condensed soup (usually tomato) and Coca-Cola means you save precious seconds that can be spent thinking how to produce the perfect screen print of Marilyn Monroe, or of an electric chair, or something.

Having just eaten this lunch before writing – I had cream of mushroom – I feel that fewer than three hundred calories does not feel like enough to sustain you until dinner, and the soup really needs to be eaten with something. It might fill a hole in your stomach, but not much more.

However, this was not why Warhol, whose career as a commercial illustrator for newspaper and magazine advertisements led him into fine art, chose to make his name by painting the cans and bottles that he saw every day. With a chance to submit works to a gallery, and a need for to distinguish his work from more polished artists, like the comic book-style canvasses of Roy Lichtenstein, or British artists like Peter Blake (he of the “Sergeant Pepper” album cover), a friend suggested Warhol should paint a subject already familiar to people.

The final work, literally named “Campbell’s Soup Cans” (1962), consisting of thirty-two paintings of every flavour available at the time, including Manhattan clam chowder, caused a sensation, mostly from people not sure what to make of it, or outrage over seemingly too much effort used to paint a picture of such an easily available, manufactured object.

Pop Art is based around taking images from popular culture, often changing their context and meaning as a result. The more ironic the use of a banal or kitschy item, the more success the artist may have - the reason a five-year-old can’t do it is because they wouldn’t know why they should. It was a journey not many people had taken, or would want to take, but in our era of unmade beds and sharks in formaldehyde, gallery audiences nowadays are much more receptive. 

While I see the elevation of mass production into fine art, what I also see how we can rightly take mass production for granted. Without various factories, processes and conveyor belts, consider how much effort it would take to produce a can of condensed soup, and a bottle of cola, from cooking the soup and mixing the drink, through to forming a metal can, blowing a glass bottle, and illustrating the labels.

In the book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” whether he wrote it or not, Warhol, an immigrant from what is now Slovakia, stated what made the United States great was how it “started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest… the more equal something is, the more equal it is.” Whether you spent tens of millions of dollars on his paintings of soup tins and Coke bottles or, in my case, £1.68, the meaning of what you see is the same. Democracy, especially in art, means no special treatment for anyone, and levelling the playing field, however that is done, means someone had to take a big step first.

Originally intended to be sold off as individual canvasses, the gallery owner bought all of “Campbell’s Soup Cans,” and they are now kept together by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For Andy Warhol, having had his first successful art show, he could concentrate on pictures of what he enjoyed the most – soup, Coca-Cola, money and celebrity.