Cafe De Paris Piccadilly

Everyone needs to go to a fabulous cabaret at least once a year. With a brilliant presenter whose name escapes me I felt like I was in a British version of the Berlin based film Cabaret with the wonderful Liza Minnelli at Cafe de Paris, Piccadilly, London last night. I have now been down to Piccadilly three times in as many weeks when normally I keep away from this scene of noisy mayhem, licentiousness, red lights, fancy Art galleries, neon lights, drunkards, street people, Chinese restaurants, bordellos, strip joints, Fortnum & Mason's, Lillywhites, the bustling, crowd of scantily clad girls in supersize killer heels,stranded and confused tourists with suitcases trying to save a taxi fare and find their hotels, suits, business people, young old and infirm, crowds of tube travellers and so on and prefer to stay at home listening to Radio Four and catching up on reading my Guardian Review before a new one is printed. And maybe a nice walk on the Heath to look at the  woodpeckers and swans and newly leafing oaks and beech trees.


Having read in recent years several brilliant books featuring London in the nineteenth century, every street I walk on in this area ures up an imaginary melee of toffs, opera goers, ladies  of the night, ladies of all times of the day and night, dandy's, vendors, buskers, musicians, throngs of people shouting, yelling, fighting, drinking, toting for business. Of course the recent biography of Dickens by Claire Tomalin, illustrates these ribald, noisy scenes superbly. If I ever thought this particular area of London was heavy and intense and smelly, I finally realize that back in the day, with cobblestones, horses with lead shoes, rackety carriages, people constantly shouting above the hubbub, tons of rubbish from the Covent Garden fruit market, that you would have to go back probably at least five hundred years to find a time when this 'manor' was in any way quiet, peaceful and buccolic. Maybe a bit buccolic from all the ale, wine, beer, porter, gin, whisky and so on. Drinking water was not something anyone did, so in fact most people were a little over the limit most of the time. I think of Hogarth in St Giles, gin soaked mothers dropping their babies accidentally, pick pockets, pimps and prostitutes and the rest. But also an area of exceptional cultural experience, with a profusion of coffee houses where talk was of politics, philosophy, new theories and ideas and where poets, writers, artists, diarists, travellers, explorers, musicians used to live and where Charlie Dickens wandered on his twenty mile daily night time walks. You wonder just what he would have seen and why he was drawn over and over to the young girls or 'fallen women' of Covent Garden and St Giles just up the road and to eventually forming a place of refuge for them, with the financial help of the spinster Coutt's heiress and paying for them to have a passage to a new life in America. This whole scenario is featured in the book The Scarlet Petal and the White where the prostitute Sugar scrapes her way out of the gutters of this area and ... oh I shouldn't give away the ending. Sad to say we have to perhaps accept that the sex industry has thrived and is still thriving in an even more insidious way in the form of sex trafficking as I speak. I often wonder just who exactly the punters are who gladly avail themselves of underage, scared, frightened, kidnapped girls and even more awful the thought that perhaps this actually does something for them. Making them feel powerful at the sight of such vulnerability and helplessness comes to mind. You then wonder what the follow on might be from the girls if they manage to survive, what kind of people they will be, if they then abuse others. Personally I would like to see a gang of them capture a few of their abductors... Let's say Girl With The Dragon Tattoo meets Prime Suspect meets Tenko. 


The compere last night was from  Australia, he had black eye make up, a trendy hair cut, a tight dapper suit and was the very dandy on the stage, coming into the audience and embarrassing the hapless people who sat too close to the stage. My friend Cathy who took all the photos and the videos, came up for a meeting and wanted to go out on the town and escape from a healthy provincial life. I am not a city girl but somehow I found myself checking through the few bits and bobs in my wardrobe and managed to assume a sort of dressing up. 


It was easy to find the Cafe from the Piccadilly tube going down Coventry Street, passing Shaftesbury Avenue on the way, especially since Cathy had an I-phone and we could track ourselves as two blue blobs from the map on the built in GPS system.  I was almost expecting to bump into Charlie Dickens, Eliza Doolittle selling violets outside the theatres, stacks of rotten veges on the streets plus unmentionables and having to pick our way through all the sodden debris on the streets. 


The neon velvet palace that opened to us as we passed easily through the main door was a vision. Red lights, blue lights, golden sculptural orbs, the ubiquitious red, velvet curtains concealing little private back rooms, the gallery encircling the old dance floor, big sofas everywhere, plus stools and chairs. Standing at the balustrades and looking down at the dancefloor made me think of an old fashioned luxury liner, with their chandeliers and wood panelling.This place built in the twenties, was now more a kind of modern jumped up baroque, Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen would have loved it, very effective in the mix of faux antique, real antique and ostentatious decorative lights and colour. A veritable wonderland, a theatre,a pantomime of life, In the words of the disgraced News of the World newspaper, All Human Life is Here. 


A lady in a long, tight clingy green dress belted out some torchsong melodies. A pair of comedians did awful things with vodka and orange juice, a woman in a sequinned t shirt swung fire around her body and jumped over the burning pots. a burlesque dancer in huge red feathers teetered onto the stage in massively high stacked heels, covered in balloons, fitted out in corset and so on and proceeded to do a staggeringly active teasing dance.  bursting balloons that sent out clouds of white powder to the audience. She chose one man to selectively annoy. Somehow this man was chosen by most of the acts to single out. Whether he was the owner, the backer, somebody rich or important I can only guess. I wonder if the performers were told to give him 'special' attention. He seemed game enough and his wife smiled all the way through and even spoke a few words into the mike at one point. She looked like old money. He looked like a businessman; a perfect marriage.


So we have this amazing dancer and you think it can't get any better. Then a guy comes on in tight grey leather pants and proceeds to do the most amazing gymnastic and athletic dance you have ever seen. Pulling himself up onto this square metal frame, that continually spins round and round,  I guess the boy's version of a pole used in pole dancing he performed the most beautiful arabesques and upside down splits and feats of strength and control that I wondered if in fact he might have been or still is an Olympic gymnast using his training to entertain us thrill deprived audience. We all gasped, yelled, clapped and applauded. It was stunning and beautiful and I welcomed the fact that we had a male being the centre of attention and showing off his beautiful body and muscles in this way rather than the ubiquitious female. It was all done in the best possible taste. So, dining over, cabaret over, the compere herded us off to the various VIP lounges and we trundled off to a burrow of funny little rooms, with a small bar and at the end a room entirely    upholstered in red velvet with about eight red velvet divans dotted around the room. I felt like I was in one of the Big Brother bedrooms. Immediately a couple of tipsy 'suits' dived onto the beds with their various female companions and proceeded to simulate sex in a wide variety of positions. Everyone was smiling and having a bit of a laugh. So far there had been no cheap thrills and it was just a little shall we say 'sophisticated.' My friend and I kind of looked around a bit dumstruck. Loud Tamla Motown music played and I danced around a bit. Some young guy came up until he realized I was old enough to be his grandmother and smiled and moved away. For one minute...


After a few minutes this all got rather stupid and boring. Outside there were preparations going on for dancing. A  cool looking black guy arrived carrying a small briefcase. That has got to be the DJ Cathy said. Of course I said. A palpable change of atmosphere came about, crowds of young hopefuls came in, rather the worse for alchohol, the suits and diners seemed to ebb away as the next crew came in. A few bouncers placed themselves  strategically and assumed very serious expressions. Still nobody was dancing, the music thundered in a kind of metallic and brutal way. I started to lose my mojo. Around 11.45 we finally decided to quit. It would have been nice to dance but I could see that this crowd weren't going to let rip for probably about two hours and even more booze.  We staggered out onto the street where more cool looking bouncers in suits with wires on were holding back a couple of drunk slutty girls. Sorry but's that's the only way to describe them.Girls in teeny dresses and ridiculous heels appeared like moths drawn to a flame. Two came along with belts on and a strip of material across their bosoms with nothing else, no coat, no handbag, nothing just four pieces of outer clothing and again the over the top shoes. You do wonder sometimes. Why buy the cow if you get the milk for free?


I was interested in seeing the interaction outside the door so we lingered a bit. I wished I'd filmed it. We walked towards Trafalgar Square, up Long Acre to Covent Garden, then across the Piazza past the old fruit, veg and flower markets, passing the fancy new bit of the Opera House, then back onto Charing Cross Road and onto the Northern Line Tube, High Barnet Branch. I felt like I could have wandered around for hours in the footsteps of Charlie Dickens, seeing through eyes that he had partially opened for me. Previously this would not have happened, I would simply have been horrified by all this dense population. Now it was a fascinating melee, a living breathing drama, like Chinese Dragons snaking around the streets at Chinese New Year.  And so to bed as Sam Pepys used to say after a good evening out. Tomorrow I think I'll have a nice long walk on the Heath and maybe a swim in the Ladies Pond......hmmmm.

A Bigger Picture


Got down for the second time this week to Piccadilly. First time was to St James Church, designed by Christopher Wren, in which William Blake was baptised and now hosts Alternatives, a Monday night lecture and talk series that spins off into workshops and many wonderful things. Mainly of an esoteric and new age slant. For me just going out on a Monday evening in London was a breakthrough. I usually can't take the noise, the crowds the stress of making my way through a thundering crowd and traffic. It just has felt too painful.

Friday night even though three friends had already dropped out of going to the Hockney show I decided to just bloody well go anyway. It was very amusing going to an exhibition in the evening. I left the house about 6pm so I would be going in the opposite direction of any remaining rush hour traffic. But in fact the tubes are just getting more packed as if the more you have running, the more people will be on them. I reached The Royal Academy, Burlington House just up the road from St James around 6.30 and joined a huge snakelike queue of people doubled up on itself several times like a huge colon in the courtyard of the illustrious Academy. It was originally started by Charles II                 Owned by Dukes of Devonshire in 1753 but had no need of it apparently as they had the massive Devonshire House further down the road. The only part that survives of this are the gates at Green Park and interestingly the old wine cellar is now the Green Park Underground Station. 


Burlington House is not only the home of The Royal Academy but also the Society of Antiquaries, The Linnaen Society, The Geological Society (that originally started as a dining club at the Freemason's Arms), The Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society of  Chemistry. The buildings are made out of Portland Stone from the Upper Jurassic period. So we have a lovely link there for the Geological Society.


Surprisingly the layout of the fountains in the Annenburg courtyard, in front of the academy on which we stood in the slowly moving queue, reflects the pattern of planets in relation to the stars at the birth of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the painter. This is otherwise knows as his astrological horoscope but I would imagine we are not supposed to mention astrology in the same breath as astronomy although they both aim to study stars, planets and their behaviour. I imagined the seventeenth century when this place was built, there would have been horses and carriages racketing on the cobblestones, braziers burning, men selling hot chestnuts and  hot potatoes, all sorts of bustle and activities going on, old soldiers begging, cripples asking for alms at the gates, women with babies asking for a penny or two and probably people trying to shew them away to keep the place looking noble and divine. I was surprised that buskers, performers, jugglers hadn't picked up on the work opportunity given by the huge queues for this show, we were after all sitting ducks as we waited to get in and would have been grateful of the entertainment. I am sure young bucks in earlier centuries might have lampooned famous artists, landed gentry, Lord this and that, to make jokes and entertain and provide satire. Where is that open satire anymore? All tidied away on TV in closed lounges everywhere, everything taken off the streets and sanitized, controlled,licensed and destroyed, sadly. I have a feeling that
the streets of London where a lot more entertaining and ribald than they are now in 2012.


We have special, cordoned off and controlled places in which entertainments happen. There is the Covent Garden Piazza, where the flower market used to be and Cockney flower sellers would yell and brawl and pick up their flowers to sell outside the Opera House close by and perhaps those flower sellers might chuck in the day job if a dapper young gent fancied a roll in the hay with a fresh faced flower seller and give more money than the honest day job provided in two weeks of hard toil, for a few moments of lascivious behaviour. I mean most married women know what that's all about, the lying back and thinking of England bit, forgive me if I'm wrong.


I have a long and detailed conversation with Professor Dr. Joost Vander Auwera from Belgium, or Flanders from whence derived the Flemish language and painters. I mention Bruges and Princenhof. He tells me that this was where the Duke of Burgundy used to live,  when Belgium or Flanders was under his rule. Belgium has a checkered history. He says that it came under the protection of the English at one time to protect it from France our traditional enemies. At this point I wished I'd got my recorder with me as this is just from memory and liable to inaccuracy.  They have a checkered history, I know nothing, he speaks four languages, English very fluently and has given lectures at the Society for Antiquaries to our upper right in the Burlington House Quadrangle. He has a nice friend with him who is very patient with his friend and myself as he can't understand much English. We entertain ourselves by conversing, a cheap and totally non technical activity not relying on paper, phones, devices, mobiles, nothing but our own voices and the words we remember. It is fascinating, we ramble through many subjects like a long hike in an interesting place. I ask and ask, he answers and answers, he loves to lecture and talk,  he has not too old but very portly in a grand and opulent kind of way like a good burgher of Bruges who likes very good food. He briefly describes the extremely high cuisine of Belgium, how the restaurants make everything they use and take ages and how expensive and good and special and fancy it is to go. He says nowhere but in England would an almost mile long queue occur, with people talking quietly, being extremely patient, no one pushing in, an all pervading atmosphere of gentility, all of us united by desire and curiosity to see our very own hero, who lives in our lifetime and not some artist or painter from the past. Of our lifetime, of our culture, of our times. And who happens to come across as a very down to earth Yorkshire man now returned to the land of his birth but whom I suspect still likes a few trips to the sun. Now living in Bridlington on the coast of the East Riding of Yorkshire having been born in Bradford to a radical working class family. I am so enraptured.


A young man joins in, dapper, contemporary, well spoken and well dressed. His father turns up from Shaftesbury, Somerset in a Country tweed jacket and a cap and talks in a posh, drink haddled voice, you know that kind of mellifluous alcoholicvoice that some people have like they are permanently in a state of drawling intoxication from whisky, slurring words, like Prince Charles and that somehow it is posh to sound like this. He does but his son, I notice, detaches himself a little, wants to seem street wise, one of the people.


Closer and closer, colder and colder, but getting warmer and warmer. The staircase is in view, I can see inside and still no impatient surges from the crowd, not Titanic this, we all wait our turn and all are served entry. At last we're in, bliss, it's warm I don't know what to do first. It is 9.30pm. I have till 12 midnight. Hordes of people linger and browse in the shop, tills are doing very good business, Hockney mugs, socks, aprons, books, bags, I pad cases, scarves, prints, cards, books, catalogues all selling like hot water bottles.


There is so much to take in. After the long meditation of the queue, the extraordinary focus that gave and the intense energy of the full moon I feel like I am almost hallucinating as I am overpowered by the colour, the nature, the trees, the humanity, the warmth of the work. I don't like all of it. At some points to me he seems to go crazy with a kind of surrealistic madness when he gets overwhelmed by hawthorn blossom and makes strange crazy objects in an almost alien landscape. He spends hours outside painting, drawing, filming, using charcoal, dozens of lovely watercolours, acrylics, small paintings, large huge monolithic ones, forests, roads, logs, a few from California, in a riotous celebration of the beauty of nature, all done harmoniously and nicely in a nice secure rectangle or portrait with a tasteful aesthetic and with a focus on drawing and objectivity and in that he finds his own added style and interpretation. Some are almost naive, with strange shapes and things that seem to be going out of control with minds of their own jumping around in the otherwise calm landscape.Everything wants to come to life, move, dance, grow and change.


This devotion to nature and the landscape and returning to the familiar places over and over again in some of the work is interesting as his Mother died recently and she gave a focus to his life and a point where he could return to in his life. Now he returns to the place nearby, the landscape becoming a friend and familiar as he sees it over and over again. Now that his Mother is gone. And he has come back and lives there. But of course he can't ever go back to when she was alive except in his mind. I feel that she was a very important and powerful, if hidden person in his life.


I think I even miss some of the work. I walk straight through the strange 'Sermon on the Mount' work which doesn't interest me at all.Why this sudden strange religious theme? I don't see the films he made with nine cameras mounted onto the front of his SUV. He mentions in the text of the catalogue that you can't always portray the entire tree, that our eyes see more than we can put on a canvas or in a photograph, that they are selective so he uses several cameras to capture a wider and A Bigger Picture. I think I may have missed some of the winter trees although I have a memory of them somewhere.


I am so high and turned on by these paintings, the whole experience being somewhat other worldly and very special that I don't realise that it is almost midnight. I have been queueing, looking at paintings and on my feet since six oclock. I took one rest in the largest gallery and there were 70 portrait shaped pictures about two and a half ft by about four. I kept staring at them. They were quite simplified. The woman next to me says they were all done on an I-pad. I am so astonished. I cannot believe her, I disagree and it takes me a full half hour and her giving me a detailed analysis before I can take it in and believe it.She has been before, this is her second visit, she is in almost as much of a daze as I am.


Once again I have to say only trust in what your own eyes tell you. Don't listen to what other people say, make up your own mind, look for yourself, respond with your own senses. I had several people who put me off this exhibition, several cancellations and let downs by a woman who then went with someone else and let me down again. Another said she wouldn't spend 13 quid on it. Another who said it had nothing for her. Again these people were all just playing their part and testing out my commitment or curiosity. I did honestly go because I wanted to know what all the fuss was about and see what people were talking about. Always the best way. I am not interested in the Damien Hirst at the Tate or the Lucian Freud for that matter but maybe the Turner. I feel my entire morale being has been given a lift and a pat on the head.

Ranting and Racism in North Islington

Monday 2nd April 2012

Sadly no posts in March but I have just found something that gives me an intellectual buzz, I have finally copped to Will Self. I'm not sure how long this 'affair' will last, I will probably take offence at something he writes or says or some kind of attitude I don't like, however, given his acerbic, witty, sardonic performance on 'Any Questions' last week and the obvious distates some of the panel had for him, which I relished as those people don't usually let anything touch them, I find myself rushing up to Archway Library and reserving several of his books. I didn't realize he was so prolific, so well read, so involved in Contemporary Thought and lo and behold he has suddenly become a Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University. I am almost starting to think of Philip Roth in the setting of a University which he used in his novels. I am almost scared for the 'youngsters' he will be teaching there and also for him when he mesmerizes his students and they all want to have affairs with him so that he will write a novel or short story about them. I can understand the delight of being 'in touch' with new thought aka young people, new ideas, new energy and so on but I truly hope he doesn't get mired in accusations and broken hearts and scorned students. But then, of course, will come his novel/s on the subject which will no doubt be very readable with probably a mix of high cultural thought. satirical remarks on 'modern' life, observations of people in their early twenties, a lovely shambolic mixture of ribaldry, we hope, intellectual teasers, well grounded comments that can cut through bullshit like a razor blade and so on. Well done Will! I am so glad I have found a new and intellectually stimulating author. And he is very funny to watch on TV too and very good value in interviews. What a guy!

Meanwhile the state of my intellect otherwise is kind of jaded, sad and I am sure I am becoming more and more of a racist. I go down my local road in Archway and am pushed, jostled, intruded upon constantly by people from 'other places,' as it were. I am in the Library and a young African girl, very pretty and well dressed virtually pushes me and everyone else in the queue out of the way like she's is something special and has no need to queue, she is more important than everyone else. She stands so close to me I can hear her breathing down my neck, I am talking privately to a librarian she just continues to stand there and I can't help thinking of the word insolent. There are no pleases, thank you's or excuse me's. I talk to the harried Librarian who gets so stressed and wound up dealing with and trying to be sensitive to the needs of about fifteen different cultural groups. He tells me hardly anyone says please or thank you. His blood pressure is high, if he puts a foot wrong he will be accused of racism and yet he is treated badly himself, almost aggressively by people, he tells me. He is terrified and intimidated by many of the groups of people he serves and tries to help with hardly a thank you. I have a short chat with him. I try to sympathize. He is a middle aged white man probably with a bad heart and he is paying some kind of price and no one seems to have any gracious behaviour but him. What an incarnation he has chosen! But we commiserate briefly and when

the pretty African woman tries it on again he manages to make a boundary, 'join the queue' he says, 'there are other people who are waiting as well as you.' She leans on the counter with disdain all over her face. I wonder what her parents would think. The Library sails grimly on through its never ending process of trying to elucidate education, enlightenment and entertainment to the masses. Most of the youngsters just want to go on the free computers and say things like :) or (; or >;< or ... and so on, a whole world of language that is purely punctuation marks but when it comes to writing sentences, of course the punctuation marks are left out, of course they are. We're the younger generation, we do things differntly, you old people you fxxxxx up the world so fxxx off.

My world has changed from quaint incidents on public paths in Cornwall to the frontline melting pot of certain areas of London with high 'new incomer' populations. I go from the South West of England which is so white you are almost blinded to a metropolitan situation that is so broad, colourful and mixed that I feel I'm in the wrong country. Hundreds and hundreds of people constantly flocking in and competing and surviving and watching out for any way they can of making  money, saving money, finding money, getting money. places to live, schools, hospitals, doctors, dentists and all the rest. It feels like we are Noah's arc and we are about to either sink or tip over. Where does everyone live? Why is it so hard for working white people to find homes, why is it so expensive? How do all these other people manage? Where do they get all their money from? Do they really get Housing first, am I a total racist, are we just too scared of confrontation that we let these situations develop? An Asian man I know in Birmingham said that England wasn't England anymore and that there were too many Asians in this country. There, I've said it, he said it rather. I know its all great for culture and food and so on but how do the teachers cope with all the foreign languages, customs and so on, all the insistence on carrying out different religious practices, the banning of Christmas, the way anything of England in the past is being overruled. But again, am I being racist? I hear people talk of their work situations where they cannot complain about someone because of their race, colour or religion for fear of losing their job. I read of an Asian couple who murder their daughter and try to accuse the Police of racism, If we don't try to tell the truth what have we got left? If we avoid any kind of confrontation don't our standards of behaviour, lack of respect, lack of undertanding and everything else fall down.

I know England, Britain is a nation that has endured wave upon wave of invaders. But there is such thing as an indigenous culture, a native Britain, whether black or white who has lived here, who respects the place, who have some kind of manners instead of the gruff, harsh, taking the piss attitude that many recent arrivals have for white British people. People on the street don't seem to have either self respect or respect for others. You get people just cutting you off walking infront, pushing you out of the way as they say 'sorry, sorry,' when we know the word is 'excuse me.' Why does everyone say sorry before they've actually done anything anyway? On the radio the other day I heard an American woman call what we speak in the UK British English? I mean where the hell does English come from anyway? Then I hear a French woman on Hampstead Heath say that England is going to the dogs. How everyone seems to be feasting before the inevitable. Of course it won't go to the dogs. It might go further down, but it will survive. But I can't help thinking that we are losing something very valuable because people don't interract, parents don't bother talking to children and public servants, like teachers, librarians and so on are not allowed to make comments about certain behaviour because of being accused of possible racism or anti religion. Well I for one like the nice old fashioned way that people used to behave and yes we were a mainly Christian country only a few years ago. I am not a practising Christian but I appreciate many of the progressive ideas of that religion. You helped poor people, you treated neighbours as you wish to be treated. You were not suffering and left on the street because of karma, you were taken care of because of values instilled into the culture that people fought for hundreds of years for in order to make life more bearable. Hospitals, Schools, Libraries, Social Services, Human Rights, Unions, Co-operative Societies all producing a Social System that was fairer and kinder but produced from a lot of sacrifice and bloodshed. Isn't this all being taken advantage of? The wars my ancestors fought in and suffered in to create a beneficient social system, the protests, the strikes, the demonstrations to produce what we have now, that is just used and abused by people who don't have the faintest idea where it all came from, like it fell out of the sky fully formed? Like all white people are the enemy, that they are well off, spoiled. I get the feeling that it is regarded with jealousy, that we do have something to be proud of here and that we could easily lose it, the way things are going. I do not feel particularly grateful to the wave upon wave of economic refugees who don't appreciate how hard it was to create this society. It all seems too much, too overwhelming, too many different languages, too many customs, too many things for public servants to have to be aware of, too many imported problems, too many  

problems laid at the door of this country as if we are responsible for the welfare of half the world's population. Some people say sorry because of the British Empire, other people say they had the best time under the British. Where would you like to live, here or Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, Poland, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Nigeria?? Will everyone eventually develop some kind of manners and gentle behaviour instead of what I see on Junction Road, Archway. Can the UK carry such a load? Can we all get on, knowing that there are many  people here brought up on the welfare state and all the benefits of the education system and so on who hate this country, who go to learn bomb making, and who when captured the first thing they say is that they are British and doesn't that mean something, that they will be treated fairly? I mean it works both ways doesn't it?