Alan Hollinghurst: On Hampstead Heath

Even in winter Hampstead Heath never loses its magic, though it is not as dreamlike and confounding as it is in the high summer. It is a wooded landscape that is never flat and never square, and you lose your bearings in it, taking years to learn exactly how its dips and meanders fit together. Often on summer evenings people stop and ask me the way – they are miles from where they thought they were, and going in completely the wrong direction...

Alan Hollinghurst rhapsodises over the delights to be found on Hampstead Heath 'pon a Summer's evening, for FT Weekend.

FT Weekend: The Ambassador's Party

FT Weekend.

It's a problem I'm sure we've all encountered...

Does anyone seriously think the Russian ambassador would actually give a hoot?

Queeny But Highbrow Interview Of The Week: Simon Schama Does Neil MacGregor

FT Weekend Magazine, of course.

Neil's epic new series, Germany: Memories Of A Nation, starts on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday October 1st.

Gay Of The Week: The Man Who Collects Air Stewardess Uniforms

Right now I have 1,271 uniforms squeezed into my three-bedroom flat in Amsterdam, although none of them is on display. I’m very clever at using my space, so they are hidden in various wardrobes and plastic containers under the bed...

My favourite era is the late 1960s and early 1970s, when US airlines started to realise that sex sells – stewardesses began to wear bright colours, miniskirts and even hot pants. A lot of attendants would not put up with that today.

Hats and scarves are the icing on the cake. Pan Am stewardesses always had interesting headwear, as do Emirates and Etihad today. I once spotted an American Airlines attendant at Dallas airport who was wearing a scarf I liked. It took me a while but I persuaded her to let me have it...

FT Weekend.

Check out Cliff Muskiet's website uniformfreak.com

FT Weekend: Your Actual Bad Art

There is a thing about the Museum Of Bad Art in FT Weekend today. 
Dies happy.

• The Museum Of Bad Art.

Fagburn: On The Beach

Nothing remarkable in Saturday's papers, so I think I'll go to the beach with some improving literature.

PS Mind you, I was up at this crack this morning and went for a troll down Holborn with dolly old Peter Ackroyd.
She says she's writing a gay history of London.
Bona!

Douglas Coupland: On Drugs

The arguments that swirled around new drugs in the late 1980s were electric and stormy and vicious. You mean to say I can tailor my personality into something better than what I was born with? That’s an affront to all that’s decent in this universe! You don’t hear much of that any more. The only thing you get is when you bump into someone you haven’t seen for a while, and you come away from the encounter thinking, “Well, So-And-So certainly seemed a bit medsy today. I wonder what they’re taking?” It’s like the radioactively white teeth everybody in North America now sports. One day you woke up and everyone had teeth like game show hosts. And then one day you woke up and everyone seemed a bit medsy.

Douglas Coupland, FT Weekend.

If there were a Fagburn Media Awards, our Doug would win best columnist.

Is he single?

x

FT Weekend: The Boy Who Collected Vacuum Cleaners

I blame my parents for my unusual interest. My mother says that when I was a baby, I would crawl around the house following her as she cleaned. When I was two, I went to a party dressed as a Dirt Devil MVP vacuum. It was the easiest machine to make a costume for and I liked the red make-up.

I’m 19 now and I own nearly 150 vacuum cleaners. I can tell them all apart just by hearing them – I can do that with most models. My collection is stored at my parents’ house in Adrian, Michigan – it was even bigger at one point but my father threatened to sell the lot if I didn’t clear some space. I keep a dozen favourites in my bedroom and the rest are lined up in our family room in the basement.

My first word wasn’t Hoover but I was mesmerised by vacuum cleaners from really early on. Even at school, I would take out the vacuum at break-time and start cleaning the classroom. I would do half the floor one day and then the other half the next. Sometimes they would let me do the principal’s office or anywhere else that needed a clean...

Kyle Krichbaum talks about his unusual hobby in FT Weekend.

Let's hope the young lad still finds time for a girlfriend.

You may not be surprised to learn Kyle is going to "major in musical theatre". 

Thought For The Day: Douglas Coupland

I think that because of the internet, straight people are now having the same amount of sex as gay guys were always supposed to be having. There’s a weird look I can see on the face of people who are getting too much sex delivered to them via hooking up online: wait, is this as good as it gets?

From a lovely, funny series of notes on 21st century relationships in FT Weekend.

FT Weekend: Another Week, Another Gay

“The body can be political, too. And I think the way people chose to dress was, for a lot of us, the only way we could express how we felt, and that seemed a very important part of what I was doing. Because it’s a visual art. How could you deny that what people wear means something?"

Michael Clark is this week's almost obligatory fag in FT Weekend.

PS And there's some rather entertaining poovery in today's Guardian Review with Brian Sewell on What I See In The Mirror, and Terry Eagleton reviewing Morrisey's Autobiography - which I'm maintaining is a massive piss-take, and an example of Professor Eagleton's wonderfully Wildean wit.
(The photo of MC above is by Mozza's "friend", Jake Walters, coincidentally).
The Independent has a very long profile of "Strictly Come Dancing's Mr Nasty", Craig Revel Horwood - which I couldn't be bothered to read.

David Hockney: "I Like Bums!"

Hockney, however, is reluctant to be seen as a symbol of anything, and seems almost insouciant about his influence. He doesn’t see himself as remarkable for being openly gay in the early 1960s, when it was still illegal. “No, because I lived in bohemia and I thought I would always live in bohemia. And bohemia was separate from suburbia and the rest was suburban and stuff.

“At the RCA, Quentin Crisp was a model and I got to know him a bit. I noticed he was the only model who’d go around looking at the drawings and comment on them. He’d make some funny comments. He was one of the first homosexuals I met, who was just gay, accepted what he was and he lived in a bohemian way. That’s what I did and I never thought much of it.”

Hockney may have enjoyed celebrity in London but it wasn’t enough to keep him. He was drawn to LA as his idealised version of America. “I was brought up in Bradford and Hollywood – because Hollywood was the cinema,” he told his biographer Christopher Simon Sykes. He was also in search of sun, sex and space. “I’d say one of the reasons I came here was sex. I knew all these Physique Pictorial [magazine] photographers were based here. I first came in 1964 and it was sexy, it was.”

Above a large pink bucket of paintbrushes in his studio, I notice a calendar of naked rugby stars on the wall. I point it out as Hockney is being photographed. “They’re nice bums,” he bellows, cheerfully from across the room. “I like bums.”

Caroline Daniel interviews David Hockney for FT Weekend.

All this and Grayson Perry and Douglas Coupland, too, in Britain's most gay-friendly weekend supplement.

See also David Hockney: A portrait of the artist as a gay man by Mark Brown in The Guardian on the exhibition of his early work at Liverpool's Walker gallery.

Hockney in the 1960s was making work on subjects he knew and cared about – primarily being a young gay man when you really couldn't shout about it. He wanted to propagandise homosexuality.

Some of the earliest paintings, heavily codified, reflect his desire for the singer Cliff Richard. Also in the show is the important We Two Boys Together Clinging, inspired by a work by the 19th-century poet Walt Whitman. The painting references a newspaper clipping detailing a climbing accident – "Two Boys Cling to Cliff All Night".

PS BBC Vision On-type gallery of your actual David Hockney homosexual art.

Grayson Perry: Radio On!

Isn't this delightful?
First copy of Radio Times I've bought since this one, curiously.
There's a big interview with Grayson inside and everything- here's some excerpts if you're too foolish to invest £1.60 in one of your actual works of modern art.
His first Reith lecture, Democracy Has Bad Taste, is broadcast on Tuesday 15th October at 9am.
Yes, 9 o'clock in the morning!
Only Radio 4 could schedule their prize series of the year at such a ridiculous hour.
Don't forget to listen carefully for Fagburn's endearing laugh and clapping.
Loads more stuff on the Playing To The Gallery site.
Did I tell you I met him after?
Or Claire, maybe.
Anyway, I think we bonded...

• Grayson Perry: A master of rabble-rousing and little else: The critic of today's art is ironically its biggest benefactor: Perry has taken a fifth-rate talent and made himself an old master

Ooh! Get Jonathan Jones trying to be all controversial on The Guardian Art Blog!

"This is my moment..." There have been brief Beginner's Guide To... profiles of Grayson in most of the broadsheets this week.
No other interviews, most have just pulled quotes from Radio Times, usually headlining him being a bit rude about Damian Hirst. Here's a quite good one by Boyd Tonkin from Saturday's Independent. 

FT Weekend has an edited version of the first of his Reith lectures...

Proust said something to the effect that we only see beauty when we’re looking through an ornate gold frame, because beauty is very much about familiarity and it’s reinforcing an idea we have already. It’s like when we go on holiday, all we really want to do is take the photograph that we’ve seen in the brochure. Because our idea of beauty is constructed, by family, friends, education, nationality, race, religion, politics, all these things. When somebody chooses curtains, I’m sure they just think, “Oh I like those curtains, they’re nice,” but when you are thinking “What art do I like?” it’s a nightmare!

Q&A in The Observer...

"I'm always open to any kind of establishment position because I think it's an opportunity for some sort of mischief."

Fagburn would now like a book of Grayson Perry interviews, please.

Nate Silver: Obilgatory Gayer

Despite his mild-mannered reporter look, Silver has become a punchy voice in debates over the future of a profession shaken by disrupted business models and new competitors. Some political journalists may dismiss him as a mere blogger whose work could not be compared with theirs and Silver’s sources may be numbers rather than nominees, but he says what he does is “almost certainly journalism”. Bald men and combs come to mind when shrinking newsrooms argue over who can define themselves as a journalist, and press-pack conformity is not for Silver, who told Out magazine last year that being gay had encouraged his independent-mindedness. (He described himself as “sexually gay but ethnically straight”.)

Today's obligatory interview with a gayer in FT Weekend is with Nate Silver - the American political stats data blogger dude.
He has a very nice flat in New York and is "effeminate", we learn.

FT Weekend: Victim Envy

Reading a Spectator blog post, in which the author – a man I like and once worked for – mischievously opined that such is the ridicule and opprobrium heaped on opponents of gay marriage that they are now as brave as those gay men and women who came out in the 1970s, after legalisation but well before acceptance. The writer is too intelligent to really believe this analogy. He knows that, while they may be mocked by Frankie Boyle, traditionalists do not get beaten up in the streets for appearing overly conservative. The Carlton Club is not routinely raided by police and The Spectator is not being prosecuted under the obscenity laws.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps across Britain people are leading double lives, keeping their secret position on gay marriage from their families. Maybe homes are being torn apart as husbands and fathers come out against equal marriage. “We just thought he liked wearing tweed,” sobs a family member. “We used to think he was out canvassing; now it turns out he was ‘meeting friends’ at the golf club.” Others live a lie, sitting at home pretending to enjoy The Graham Norton Show, but secretly watching Jim Davidson online when their partner is asleep...

Thus the people who actually enjoy most privilege in society – white, male Christians – engage in victim envy, convincing themselves that, in losing some privileges, they are in fact the ones being discriminated against. A group that has had its own way for centuries suddenly grasps what it must be like to be on the wrong end of history, and it doesn’t like it. But rather than move on, having an argument, they prefer to seek reassurance in the comfortable cloak of the dispossessed. In the victimhood Olympics they refuse to be also-rans.

FT Weekend - Fagburn never ceases to be stunned by how good their gay coverage is.
As The Guardian and Independent descend into Mail Online-esque patronising puerile populist pants...

"The prejudiced ones seem like the freaks now" - Grayson Perry.

Lunch With The FT: "I Hate This Hotel!"

"It’s grotesque! I hate this hotel!” says Sir John Richardson as I enter a fourth-floor suite giving on to a sweeping vista of the Thames and the London Eye. “I’m in my 90th year but this place makes me feel 100.”
Dressed in a grey jacket with dashing crimson border, cream shirt, black slacks and bright red slippers, the writer shuffles disconsolately around the huge living room. He can work neither the light switches nor the telephone at the five-star Corinthia Hotel, which means he has not been able to order breakfast. His boyfriend, a former footman at Buckingham Palace and “a hero”, normally looks after these things but he has gone out...

FT Weekend continues its bold quest to have lunch - here, technically, breakfast - with every gay man in the world by dining with 89 year-old art historian, John Richardson - the thinking queen's Brian Sewell. 

Thought For The Day: Julian Clary

I don’t understand how people can be anything other than socialist. Even if I don’t know someone’s politics I can tell if I like them, and those I don’t like tend to be of the rightwing persuasion.

Julian Clary is this week's obligatory gayer in FT Weekend.

Interesting place to place this thought.
Though, like the equally socially liberal The Economist, FT Weekend shows a belief in mammon's magical powers doesn't necessarily mean you have to be a hate-filled bigot in all areas.
Mr Clary also seems pleasingly unambitious ("I’ve never really planned my life or career") and unconcerned with fame; "I’d welcome obscurity. I’ve always missed being anonymous, though there are implications for one’s ego. But it would be nice to waft around being delightfully ordinary."
What a jolly decent fellow he seems. 

Lunch With The FT: Noam Chomsky

 
The Black Sheep
350 Main St, Cambridge
Clam chowder $5
Tomato soup $5
Kale and salmon salad $14
Mixed salad $14
Coffee x2 $6
Total $0*
John McDermott left a $44 tip

This week's lunch is with Uncle Noam.
What a funny and often fabulous magazine this is...

Still, Chomsky thinks about how hard to hit his targets. He admits as much as our soups arrive. “Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.” He argues that any criticisms about, say, Chávez, will invariably get into the mainstream media, whereas those he makes about the US will go unreported. This unfair treatment is the dissident’s lot, according to Chomsky. Intellectuals like to think of themselves as iconoclasts, he says. “But you take a look through history and it’s the exact opposite. The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests."

* The owner, clearly a fan, picked up the tab.

Chomsky is in London next week, giving the 2013 Edward W Said London Lecture, Reflections On the Middle East, on Monday - which will be put online afterwards - and talking about propaganda at the British Library on Tuesday - there will be a live webcast on the night. Both events are sold out.

PS Today's Guardian Review runs a short piece, My Hero: Noam Chomsky by Charles Glass; "When you know some people better, you see their flaws. With Noam, it was the opposite."

Chomsky Fact! Noam has eaten a turkey on marble rye sandwich for lunch most workdays for the last twenty years, followed by a banana; "Isn’t it interesting”, he pauses, reflecting, “that eating a banana is somehow comical.” BYT Online.

Chomsky Quote! "I never was aware of any other option but to question everything."

FT Weekend: Bona Lattie

This week's obligatory gay feature in FT Weekend is an interview with Nick Partridge, chief executive of the Terrence Higgins Trust.
I think the main point is to shake the proverbial bucket in front of the FT's wealthy readership, and more specifically to plug the THT's 30th Anniversary Auction at Christie's on March 21st.
So Nick does talk about the trust's origins and early days - “Every year between 1985 and 1997, at least one of our trustees would get sick and die – and then so would our volunteers...” - and current work.
They also "skirt around" criticism of the effectiveness of their HIV prevention work with gay men. 
But it's a rather strange piece as it's an At Home With... feature, and so keeps suddenly turning into a guided tour of Partridge's - admittedly lovely-looking - house in "up-and-coming" Peckham.
From what I know, Nick Partridge has always seemed like one of the good guys, and this may have been the only way of getting a significant and sizable plug in what's basically a high-end lifestyle magazine, but this did seem rather "odd", to say the least.

Richard Gere: Pet Shop Boy?

 
I’ve been glued to the scene from American Gigolo from 1980 in which Gere, a male prostitute, is moving around his bedroom half-dressed, selecting shirts and ties, singing along to Marvin Gaye. For male sexuality and narcissism, nothing on screen has come close, before or since...

Gere may have no illusions about himself, but others have plenty about him. Since he played a homosexual in Bent on Broadway in 1980, people have wondered (without any foundation) about his sexual orientation. Indeed, in the early 1990s he was the subject of one of Hollywood’s most outrageous and enduring myths – that he was admitted to the Cedars-Sinai Hospital in LA with a gerbil stuck in his rectal canal.
“I don’t know where that came from,” he sighs. “And I don’t care. So stupid. Childish."
Some other things they say about him are more soundly based in fact. The weirdest of them all is the story of the dissolution of his marriage to Cindy Crawford. Three years into the marriage of two of the world’s most beautiful people, the couple placed a full-page ad in The Times in which they declared: “We are heterosexual and monogamous and take our commitment to each other very seriously.” Shortly afterwards they got divorced. Even by the mad standards of Hollywood marriages, this struck me as odd. What possessed him?
“I don’t know,” he says flatly. “It’s so long ago. I don’t care."

More gaiety - if denied - from FT Weekend. 
Or GT Weekend as I've now wittily renamed it.
You may not be surprised to learn the interview was cut short.

Gay Marriage: Banal

 
Gay marriage has become so banal [in the Netherlands] that Boris Dittrich, a politician who helped introduce it, reports hearing a woman on the bus tell a friend that she’s just got married. The friend shouts across the packed bus: “To a man or a woman?"

Simon Kuper writing today's obligatory gay article in FT Weekend.
Not that I'm in anyway suggesting this amusing anecdote has been made-up, but I think someone's "friend" may have known who they were getting married to. 
Illustrated by this delightful depiction of some lovely gay cake toppers.
God, I've missed you guys!