Yesterday, I lost a scarf. In the last two days, I’ve been to the cinema twice. And I find myself listening to all the depressing songs that provide me with the grim comfort of reflecting my sour mood back at me, drenched with the colours of artifice; it’s sad soul and Mahler and Depeche Mode and Die Winterreise on the bus season. I’ve been having back problems and can’t cycle, so I am enjoying the social leveller that is the London bus, all of us crazy people just about holding on to our sanity together, annoyed we are in each other’s way in this city that never has enough space. Locked out of outside, I guess it must be autumn.
London has been wearing me down of late. On the one hand I have to be out, can no longer face my flat. And it’s great to just go for a drink, see friends, eat out or whatever (last Friday I went to this amazing Malay place in China Town, C&R cafe, try it). But this city is so expensive and I’m haemorrhaging money. Plus, have you heard much from culture lately? Every time you engage with a screen, it’s all like, let’s be virtuous and morally pure together, yours Google sponsored by Visa, solving the climate crisis. Leave me alone, I’m just trying not to think about my shitty little life by drowning it out with stories funded by blood money and have a giggle.
I said in my last post that it was the last day of summer in the hope that it wouldn’t be. With good grace, the warmth and light extended for another week or so, and we took small comforts in a pleasant end to a shitty summer. But now, in the midst of supply chain crises, the less certain economic consequences of the pandemic, and extortionate fuel bills, we await what the next season holds. It’s hard to entertain the economic consequences while the psychic ones bob beneath the surface, threatening to rush up.
Last month, I read the new Sally Rooney and enjoyed it, for the way that it abdicated any responsibility to polished coherence that characterised the other two, their slick plotting and deft neat little exercises in character straight out a creative writing textbook. Beautiful World, Where are You is a novel written by an author who has purchased enough success by virtue of towing the line that they now wonder what the fucking point was because it hasn’t made them happy and their books aren’t great. And so, the novel slips into the grand first-person tradition of jaded mouthing off: about the novel form and crisis and politics and fame, alongside some rather mundane descriptions of sex. It’s not a particularly brilliant novel. But it is an honest one, and I respect that. Azad pointed out that it’s like the appearance of a new Drake album “Woe is me, I’m so rich and so unhappy.” And that’s true. But what’s not enjoyable about that? It’s not a comfort to know that happiness evades even those showered and blessed with praise, but it does shatter all the exhausting lies. At least Sally Rooney is not asking me who can or can’t say wagwan.
One of my oldest friends moved to London from up north in June. In a grim time, he’s made me laugh a lot (northerner are just naturally funnier, sorry). He wants to do all the things here that I cannot face. But, after eighteen months funking out the bottom of my shoebox, brain rotting itself inside to out, it’s good to be forced to do things I don’t really want to. I relish it, the idea I am about to do something uncharacteristic. OK, I’m not going to Borough Market or drinking in microbreweries in Hackney Wick, but when Ash asks me on Saturday if I want to go see Ibiza disco legend, DJ Harvey at Troxy, a Whitechapel ballroom, after a little persuading I say sure, why not?
On entry, having somehow passed through at least three lines of DMZ-esque security just to dance, a friend points out that the Troxy resembles a cruise ship. And, accordingly, the dance floor is full of hip Chingford Jane McDonalds and other dazzling raver couples nibbling disco biscuits and sipping on prosecco. Of an age where it’s far more charming to dance around people in their fifties than their early twenties, I embrace it.
Everyone is so refreshingly unpretentious, chatting and bobbing along under the glimmer of a giant disco ball, as professional dancers vogue in latex on the stage, and Harvey uses a payphone handset as mixing headphones, taking the crowd through slow electro chug to stargazing, wide-eyed gospel. It’s all a bit E5 Bake House does Drag Race, but like, probably good? “It’s just nice to be out with all these different people isn’t it?” a man called Lewis says to me in the bar queue. A shiny Essex couple give me a Smirnoff Ice as an apology for brazenly pushing in front of me. “There’s barely any booze in that,” Lewis says.
The start of the week I am ecstatically overtired, unused to the nocturnal demands of disco, but upbeat from its spiritual nourishment. It’s just so nice to talk to strangers. Nevertheless, the week is marked by an interview on Wednesday for a job I really want and the preparation fully absorbs me.
On Tuesday night Toby and I go see No Time to Die at Walthamstow Empire, to take my mind off said job interview. Daniel Craig does an impressive job of being a surly Tory in a genuinely impressive selection of well-cut suits. It’s mostly a film designed to entertain while allowing people to have terrible opinions about it. And like all Bond films, it’s also about masculinity and wish fulfilment and how hard it is for men to take a back seat from state sanctioned murder [Stewart Lee doing Jeremy Clarkson voice] these days.
Out of retirement, James Bond now works for the CIA. The number 007 has been given to a black woman with an extremely professional work ethic (when machine gunning baddies in Cuba). But, in the end, she gives Bond his 007 number back because she feels sorry for him, therefore marring her own sense of self and career ambition and wounding his pride. But together they fight the baddies anyway.
The enemy makes no sense because, apparently, the world doesn’t anymore (when did foreign policy make sense?). In some vague acknowledgement of Trump, there’s a jockish American who is actually working for the Russians before Bond lets him get crushed under an SUV. Christoph Waltz does a cheap Hopkins impression as a psychotic Blofeld, before dying because Bond kills him with a biotech weapon planted on him by Rami Malek. No, I don’t know why either. Malek plays some sort of vaguely creepy ex-Soviet villain who wants to exterminate millions with a lab-engineered virus, without a clear national allegiance or financial backer, elements of the character pinched from Jared Leto in the also flimsy but well shot Blade Runner 2049.
I’m bad. You are bad too. I am your bad self, staring back at you. We want the same things, to kill, to purify, Malek says to Daniel Craig while holding his child hostage. No, I good. I good man. I good honourable man, Craig says in unconvincing retort. Oh, and also, Bond has a child from his ex-wife (who might be a baddy too), but this is such a flimsy plot device that it’s not even clear that Bond knows it’s his child. These holes in the plot stretch out the more the film goes on, with it just about managing to hold itself together to the end through the comfortingly predictable parameters of an action film; after killing Malek, Bond needs to escape from Bio Weapon Laboratory Island before it blows up. The scriptwriting is so badly executed it sometimes passes itself off as camp (a failsafe) and other times looks your Tory uncle deep in the eyes and says: this is the pure truth of unbridled vengeful masculinity playing out in its allegiances to British foreign policy. But then again, a lot of contemporary cinema is very confused in tone. Fuck it, I am confused in tone. Being alive in 2021, it’s extremely incoherent, no?
In the climax of the film, despite his historical obsolescence as a white man in a rapidly changing world, Bond does his noble duty—having spent the last three hours advertising the Best of Brexit Britain’s Bargain Luxury Brands while looking surly, ready to take down the democratically elected governments world over—sacrificing himself at the pivotal moment so his child will be safe, as a hailstorm Sea Viper missiles rain down from HMS Dragon. And that’s the films conclusion, the ultimate bit of product placement. Britain is open for business, in war or espionage. Truly British Cinema, where even the scene of a parent’s ultimate sacrifice also celebrates our most profitable exports: cutting edge principle anti air missile systems.
On Wednesday, the job interview goes well (thank you for asking). I can never focus after interviews. All I want to eat is heavy slabs of fried aubergine drenched in bitter tomato sauce and covered in parmesan, so I go into town and head to one of my favourite lunch spots: Italia Uno on Charlotte Street. The café is now home to a squad of Turkish Deliveroo drivers who chain smoke roll-ups and charge their electric bike batteries in the front of the cafe. An old French hippy is plotting how to get money to make a film back in India. Finishing my melanzane (£5.40!), I go to Skoob Books and fondle a copy of Barnaby Rudge before deciding I have too many unread books at home.
More in Part Two.