Is That It's Open Salon Blog

Getting Lost with Dan and Kate

Tue, 7 Jul 2009 02:07:03 -0400

The shimmering US-70 in Arizona curves and dips suddenly to reveal a huge, ancient saguaro cactus flanking the road like an alien monster hitch-hiker. I glance over at Dan. Behind his sunglasses, his eyelids are heavy, but no, he’s not asleep. Neither is he dozing. Like me, he’s merely “zoning” on the road and the infinite perspective.

I was edgy and fussy as a baby. But I could be instantly calmed down by a trip in my parents’ car. Growing up, I loved everything about car rides: The hum of the engine, the gentle swaying and vibration, the entertainment of the slowly changing view from behind the safety of the window. Then, as now, I would prefer it if there were no talking, no radio: Only the purring engine should provide the sound track for a car trip.

Above all else, I loved the mystery of the unknown just around the next corner. Getting Lost, I’d call it. “Let’s Get Lost,” I’d ask Dad. And he’d take me on the little streets around where we lived. He’d come to a junction and say to me “Which Way? Which Way do we go now?” And I’d say, “Left”. And he’d say “Are you sure?” and I’d say, “No, I mean right. Let’s go right.” And we’d go right.

Back home in England, there are no infinite perspectives to zone on. The motorways are crowded and people drive fast. The country roads are narrow, and twist and turn like garden mazes, flanked by wildflowers and high lush hedgerows, which afford little view of the cosy green and gold countryside. Cruise control is unusable, except at night on the motorways. I drive a lot in England, to and from music gigs. Often the venues for these gigs are in the most beautiful spots in the country: fine stately homes set in gorgeous landscaped gardens, which have been leased out for nouveau riche weddings by their impecunious squires.

Driving home after a long and tiring gig in Somerset a year or so ago I found myself disorientated and lost. Mile after mile of tiny twisting lanes took me even further from the main road I was trying to get to. I was sleepy and my neck hurt. Finding myself returning to the same spot after an hour, I stopped the car, got out and screamed oaths at the top of my voice, cursing my life, my job, but above all, the jolly little country lane which as far as I could tell had not one side-turning, running in a continuous, endless, inescapable loop.

The next day I caved and bought a satnav, something each of the other band members had done long ago. I deliberately chose one that had U.S. maps as well as British and European ones, because I had long been planning a big Road Trip across the United States. It comes with a number of voices, the default being Kate, a nice, soothing kind of voice, calm but ever so slightly reprimanding when I miss a turn-off. Well-spoken.

And now here we are, me and Dan, four thousand miles into that long-planned Road Trip, somewhere in the inhuman heat of Arizona. Not Lost, though, because we have Kate with us. Like Dan, Kate is basically taciturn, speaking only when she has something important to say.

Oh, you Americans all know about the Road Trip. It’s in your blood, it’s in your childhoods: Forget Kerouac: It’s there in Tom Sawyer, in The Wizard of Oz, The Phantom Tollbooth. The outer journey mirroring the inner one: The pilgrim progresses, back where he started, back to the Home not the same as the one he left, because the returning traveller is not the same as departing one.

When Dan and I return to London in three weeks, my home will be different, because when we left my wife was there, and when we return my wife will be gone.

“After two miles, take the exit left, towards Phoenix.” Kate stirs me out of a reverie. Good thing one of us knows where we’re going.

Twenty-three years of Marriage: Salvage it or Scrap it?

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 18:06:06 -0400

So Mish and I are separating again. This time is different. She’s the one going. The kids are grown-up. Sex is no longer on the menu. I guess I better tell Mum.

Her house, the house where I was born, and where she still lives, frowns in grim stoicism against the grey British suburban drizzle. I walk up the front garden path with trepidation.

I get the Fixit attitude from my mother. She it was who would repair everything when I was a kid. Like my socks. Who the hell mends socks nowadays? As a child, I had a permanent limp, because one of my socks invariably had an irritating darning-wool scab which I used to detest the feel of on my heel.

In fact most of my clothes were patched-up hand-me-downs from my brother, though we were not poor. My books too, were usually sticky to the touch, held together with Band-Aids and duct tape.

All of which is no doubt admirable in its way, but, sometimes I wished my mother could just throw old stuff away.

My father, a writer, clever as anything when it came to solving a Times crossword or reading the weakness of West Ham United’s defence, was not a Practical Man, despite his working-class sympathies. His younger brother, my uncle Dave, on the other hand, had the rough, nicotine-and-paint-stained fingers of a worker. He was a “jig-and-tool maker”, a profession which died with the British Empire, as did his employer, the famous toy train manufacturer “Hornby”.

My mother and father were happily married for most of their sixty years together. Oh yes, he shouted and ranted, she wept and ran, but they stuck to each other all the way through, bound by love, politics and a fair bit of my Mum’s band-aids and duct tape.

I started exhibiting Fixit tendencies early in life: Encouraged by my father who swallowed hook line and sinker the post-war optimism about the power of science as a social panacea, I developed a passion for technology, particularly electronics. When my parents’ giant walnut-veneered valve wireless radio finally bit the dust, when I was ten or eleven, I acquired it and soon fixed it. I plugged in a hundred feet of wire for an antenna, which criss-crossed my bedroom ceiling, suspended from an elegant, but utterly pointless system of hooks and pulleys. I would eavesdrop with an illicit thrill to the police band, and through it eventually learned the complete Romeo Alpha Delta India Oscar Alpha Lima Papa Hotel Alpha Bravo Echo Tango.

Nowadays, my Mr Fixit tendencies have led to my office/recording studio being an animal rescue centre for computers and music equipment. I have dozens of keyboards and speakers, PC carcasses, their brains, their gizzards and their CD trays. Late at night, particularly during a thunderstorm, I put Bach’s Toccata and Fugue on loud, and laugh demonically as I create an entire living computer, out of an array of lifeless parts, or revitalize a moribund one.

All of this attitude originates, of course, in a very healthy awareness of the value and cost of our natural resources. Recycling was the standard practice in 1950’s Britain, before “recycling” even had a name. Plastic was a rarity. Glass, paper and food were recycled or reused as a matter of course. My mother still has “white-metal” cooking utensils, made of recycled WWII junk metal. To the British of the 1950’s, America, with its flashy consumerism was regarded (with no little envy) as a country of garish, ostentatious, heartless and above all tasteless excess.

The trouble with the Fixit attitude is that the way things work nowadays means it’s often cheaper to scrap than to fix. This inequality is, to my mind, one of the evillest and ultimately most destructive aspects of Capitalism. Capitalism, by nature is antithetical to thrift. But anyway, there it is, an undeniable fact: And it means that if you’re a Fixit kind of person you end up “pouring good money after bad”. For instance: The beautiful, famously reliable and economical Grey Volvo Amazon with Red Leatherette upholstery which my father bought new for £1,400 in 1966, had cost me about £20,000 in repairs by the time I finally gave it away for free to a neighbour in 1992. For the last five years I owned it, it had become everything my father had not bought it for: It was totally unreliable and was costing me a fortune. It had definitely outlived its use. But I just found it impossible to just let the thing go – so many memories, so many Road Trips.

Actually, now I come to think of it, I guess it was the trauma of what I did to Mingus that made me so afraid of scrapping the car.

Mingus was my hamster when I was twelve. It was a nasty brute that gave my latent nurturing tendencies absolutely zero chance for expression. On my first and last attempt to stroke it, it bit me, which required a Tetanus shot. I would get my own back by devising fiendishly difficult mazes for it to solve, for which the reward was a single shelled peanut. One Winter day Mingus, cold and fed up with mazes and peanuts, decided to hibernate. When a hamster hibernates its body temperature decreases to almost the same as the surrounding atmosphere – that is to say, it feels cold to the touch. And it breathes ever so shallowly, perhaps once a minute. And its heart rate drops to almost nothing too, so that to all intents and purposes it looks dead.

You see where I’m going with this.

So the peacefully sleeping Mingus was literally thrown onto the compost heap in my back garden, where he was promptly gobbled up by the local crows. A few days later I realized my terrible mistake, when a more knowledgeable fellow hamster-owner asked me if Mingus has started to hibernate as hers had just done.

The moral of which is “Don’t Throw A Hibernating Hamster on The Compost Heap”. I’ve sewn this into a sampler, which adorns my office wall, and is no doubt partly the reason for the profusion of un-recycled computers there.

Okay, now it’s time to cut to the chase: My twenty-three-year-old marriage: Is it a clapped out Grey Volvo Amazon with red leatherette upholstery, or is it merely a hibernating hamster? The truth, as with so many things, is that it is both of these.

And over the next few weeks, my defiant and wounded marriage, will come to and end. I hope that thereby our love, which after all, is what really matters in life, will be salvaged.

Mum answers the door. To the lines of sorrow in her face I add one more.

Comedian Stephen Fry writes a letter to his 16 y/o self

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:04:41 -0400

Stephen Fry. Photograph: Steve Forrest/Rex Features

I hope you are well. I know you are not. As it happens you wrote in 1973 a letter to your future self and it is high time that your future self had the decency to write back. You declared in that letter (reproduced in your 1997 autobiography Moab Is My Washpot) that "everything I feel now as an adolescent is true". You went on to affirm that if ever you dared in later life to repudiate, deny or mock your 16-year-old self it would be a lie, a traducing, treasonable lie, a crime against adolescence. "This is who I am," you wrote. "Each day that passes I grow away from my true self. Every inch I take towards adulthood is a betrayal."

Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.

I finally know now, as I easily knew then, that the most important thing is love. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether that love is for someone of your own sex or not. Gay issues are important and I shall come to them in a moment, but they shrivel like a salted snail when compared to the towering question of love. Gay people sometimes believe (to this very day, would you credit it, young Stephen?) that the preponderance of obstacles and terrors they encounter in their lives and relationships is intimately connected with the fact of their being gay. As it happens at least 90% of their problems are to do with love and love alone: the lack of it, the denial of it, the inequality of it, the missed reciprocity in it, the horrors and heartaches of it. Love cold, love hot, love fresh, love stale, love scorned, love missed, love denied, love betrayed ... the great joke of sexuality is that these problems bedevil straight people just as much as gay. The 10% of extra suffering and complexity that uniquely confronts the gay person is certainly not incidental or trifling, but it must be understood that love comes first. This is tough for straight people to work out.

Straight people are encouraged by culture and society to believe that their sexual impulses are the norm, and therefore when their affairs of the heart and loins go wrong (as they certainly will), when they are flummoxed, distraught and defeated by love, they are forced to believe that it must be their fault. We gay people at least have the advantage of being brought up to expect the world of love to be imponderably and unmanageably difficult, for we are perverted freaks and sick aberrations of nature.They - poor normal lambs - naturally find it harder to understand why, in Lysander's words, "the course of true love never did run smooth".

Sexual availability, so long an impossible dream in your age, becomes the norm in the late 70s and early 80s, only to be shattered by a new disease whose horrors you cannot even imagine. You would little believe that I can say to you now across the gap of 35 years that we are the blessed ones. The people of Britain are happy (or not) because of Tolpuddle Martyrs, Chartists, infantry regiments, any number of ancestors who made the world more comfortable for them. And we, gay people, are happy now (or not) in large part thanks to Stonewall rioters, Harvey Milk, Dennis Lemon, Gay News, Ian McKellen, Edwina Currie (true) et al, and the battered bodies of bullied, beaten and abused gay men and women who stood up to be counted and refused to apologise for the way they were. It has given us something we never thought to have: pride. For a thousand years, shame was our lot and now, turning on a sixpence, we have arrived at pride - without even, it seems, an intervening period of well-it's-OK-I-suppose-wouldn't-have-chosen-it-but-there-you-go. Who'da thought it?

I know what you are doing now, young Stephen. It's early 1973. You are in the library, cross-referencing bibliographies so that you can find more and more examples of queer people in history, art and literature against whom you can hope to validate yourself. Leonardo, Tchaikovsky, Wilde, Barons Corvo and von Gloeden, Robin Maugham, Worsley, "an Englishman", Jean Genet, Cavafy, Montherlant, Roger Peyrefitte, Mary Renault, Michael Campbell, Michael Davies, Angus Stewart, Gore Vidal, John Rechy, William Burroughs.

So many great spirits really do confirm that hope! It emboldens you to know that such a number of brilliant (if often doomed) souls shared the same impulse and desires as you. I know the index-card waltz of (auto)biographies, poems and novels you are dancing: those same names are still so close to the surface of my mind nearly four decades later. Novels, poetry and the worlds of art and ideas are opening up in front of you almost incidentally. You spend all your time in the library yearning to be told that you are not alone, and an unlooked for side-effect of this just happens to be a real education achieved in a private school designed for philistine bumpkins. Being born queer has given you, by mistake, a fantastic advantage over the rugger-playing ordinaries who surround you. But those rugger-playing ordinaries have souls too. And you should know that. I know you cannot believe it now. They seem so secure, so assured, so blessedly normal. They gave Cuthbert Worsley the Kipling-derived title of his overwhelmingly important (to you) autobiography The Flannelled Fool: "these are the men that have lost their soul/ The flannelled fool at he wicket/ And the muddied oaf at the goal".

You look down at the fools almost as much as you fear them. The ordinary people, whose path through life is guaranteed. They won't have to spend their days in public libraries, public lavatories and public courts ashamed, spurned and reviled. There is no internet. No Gay News. No gay chatlines. No men-seeking-men personals. No out-and-proud celebs. Just a world of shame and secrecy.

Somehow, as you age, a miracle will be wrought. You will begin by descending deeper into the depths: expulsion, crime and prison - nothing really to do with being gay, but everything to do with love and your inability to cope with it. Yet you will, as the Regency rakes used to say, "make a recover" and find yourself at university, where it will be astonishingly easy to be open about your sexuality. No great trick, for the university is Cambridge, long a hotbed of righteous tolerance, spiritual heavy-petting and homo hysteria. You will emerge from Cambridge and enter a world where being "out" is no big deal, although a puzzlingly small number of your coevals will find it as easy as you to emerge from the shadows. Before you damn anyone for failing to come out, look to their parents. The answer almost always lies there. Oh how lucky in that department, as in so many, you are, young Stephen.

But don't kid yourself. For millions of teenagers around Britain and everywhere else, it is still 1973. Taunts, beatings and punishment await gay people the world over in playgrounds and execution grounds (the distance between which is measured by nothing more than political constitutions and human will). Yes, you will grow to be a very, very, very, very lucky man who is able to express his nature out loud without fear of hatred or reprisal from any except the most deluded, demented and sad. But that is a small battle won. A whole theatre of war remains. This theatre of war is bigger than the simple issue of being gay, just as the question of love swamps the question of mere sexuality. For alongside sexual politics the entire achievement of the enlightenment (which led inter alia to gay liberation) is under threat like never before. The cruel, hypocritical and loveless hand of religion and absolutism has fallen on the world once more.

So my message from the future is twofold. Fear not, young Stephen, your life will unfold in richer, more accepted and happier ways than you ever dared hope. But be wary, for the most basic tenets of rationalism, openness and freedom that nourish you now and seem so unassailable are about to be harried and besieged by malevolent, mad and medieval minds.

You poor dear, dear thing. Look at you weltering in your misery. The extraordinary truth is that you want to stay there. Unlike so many of the young, you do not yearn for adulthood, pubs and car keys. You want to stay where you are, in the Republic of Pubescence, where feeling has primacy and pain is beautiful. And you know what ... ?

I think you are right.

• This is an edited version of an article from the 25th-birthday edition of Gay Times, out now. For more details, go to gaytimes.co.uk

13.1 Billion Years Ago, a Star Died...

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:04:30 -0400

...and last Thursday we finally got to see it. The star, romantically titled GRB 090423, is the most distant object ever seen -- so distant , that it's taken light all those billions of years to reach us, travelling at -- well, at the speed of light.

Here's a link to a New Scientist article about it: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17035-most-distant-object-in-the-universe-spotted.html

How you can build your blogging audience

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:04:25 -0400

A good technique is to start a blog titled

How you can build your blogging audience