Sinister: Winter Dreams

[P F]

The 1980s xmas classic playing over the utter
stillness of the figures in the Rotary Club's Nativity
display: surrealism, almost beyond Phoenix Nights.

What most interests me this time in Wilde's Complete
Letters: his gradual assumption of command at the
Lady's World, henceforth Woman's World. A gender
politics in the change of name and in his insistences
about content - yet what a strange class politics
endures in his repeated lists of contributors! 'The
Princess Christian, Lady Portsmouth, Miss Thackeray,
Mrs Francis Jeune, Lady Meath, Lady Wentworth, Mrs
Fawcett, Mrs Craik, and others have promised to
write...'!

The tender gothics who gather still outside the ghost
of their favourite record shop, as if drawn to its
absence - or rather, as though coming to realize it
was always an excuse for them to gather here.

'Santa in red', writes Robert Lowell in 'Christmas Eve
Under Hooker's Statue', 'Is crowned with wizened
berries'.

Poignancy of the department store - whose structure
makes me wonder if it is a direct evolution from the
simple idea of a market with different stalls -
classy, yet uncrowded while lesser shops teem.

Taking Sides: 'One More Time' vs 'A Thousand Hours'.

How bog standard to see Ross and Gervais, I mean,
Greavsie, trying to make something unfunny funny, and
falling into the gutter. Yet the next night Coogan and
Brydon rise above the trashy interlocutor and the dull
smut, and as they compete with each other's
impressions a warm, clever comedy flies marvellously
free.

They no doubt rightly say that the iPod can make music
newly unpredictable. But so on occasion can our old
chum the old tape. I stick on my 1990 round-up and
wait. Radio highlights of England vs Germany... the
crowd noise drifting into that announcing Dylan,
singing 'Forever Young' in Hammersmith... and that of
the Glastonbury folk as the Cure launch 'Just Like
Heaven'. 'I Won', less than a year old; Adam Ant's
final February hit 'Room at the Top'; 'The King of
Wishful Thinking'. 'A New England' reminds me how late
I discovered so much; perhaps my sense of my own
experience pop history has been planed down to agree
more than once it did with pop history itself.

'Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs
shone smokily through the tranquil rain. It was late
afternoon and the streets were in movement; the
bistros gleamed. At the corner of the Boulevard des
Capucines he took a taxi. The Place de la Concorde
moved by in pink majesty.... Charlie directed his taxi
to the Avenue de l'Opera, which was out of his way.
But he wanted to see the blue hour spread over the
magnificent facade, and imagine that the cab horns,
playing endlessly the first few bars of Le Plus que
Lent, were the trumpets of the Second Empire'.

Merry Christmas, sinister!







	
		
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