After seeing Radiohead at Victoria Park last week, I thought concerts could not really get any better; Thom Yorke's crystal voice singing Nude under a lilac sky seemed like the ultimate shivering experience, 20.000 people chanting "for a minute there I lost myself, I lost myself" were, I thought, the closest I'd ever get to understanding the feeling of shared prayers. Yet.

Yesterday night, I saw Lou Reed performing Berlin at the Royal Albert Hall. He played with a 30-piece band that included a string section, a horn section, and a quite incredible children choir. Before that, I am not so sure I was aware of the potential of rock music at all. Before Tony Smith, there were no drummers.

Berlin, which first came out in 1973 (one year after the way more famous Transformer) is a rock opera, or conceptual album I guess you could say, and a painful exploration of demons and pain and vulnerability and fear; it speaks of addiction and of being in love, two American ex-pats drifting in a nightmarish, decadent Berlin, living in squalid rooms with their crying children, regretting some other wonderful reality that never really existed. Caroline will end up slashing her wrists, Jim will roam their rooms, following her ghost, in a dreamlike indifference to the depth of his pain and hers. The dark red auditorium of the Royal Albert Hall, and the huge organ looming over the orchestra, somehow added to the Cabaret feeling of some of the songs. The band was simply perfect, and they performed the whole of the album without interruptions, flawlessly.

If this wasn't enough of a treat, after Berlin, after the standing ovation, they came back out and gave us Satellite of Love. With a choir. With a string section. And for a minute there, I lost myself.

while me and misonou are at it, I also wanted to note how the otherwise usually funny and not-too-bad West End Whingers slash another Royal Court Theatre production, Marius Von Mayenburg's The Ugly One, on the basis, mainly, of its having no props, no set, no costumes, and most importantly on the basis of its discussing a theme that is not made explicit enough.

"So, we have a play about the superficiality of beauty (possibly, we weren’t sure) using none of the usual conventions of theatre to dress it up for an audience. Mmmm yes, very clever, but where’s the set? Come to that, where are the costumes? Call this theatre?

And where is the on-stage food? One character says “I’m peeling some fruit”, but he didn’t even seem to bother with miming the action. "

Much of the beauty and strength of this play, it seems to me, is specifically in the fact that when said character says "I'm peeling some fruit", even if he is sitting still exactly like he was 10 seconds before saying this, your brains make him into someone who is peeling some fruit. I actually *saw* him peeling some fruit, because by then I had entered the mechanism of the play, which requires you to actually participate intellectually to it a bit more actively than if you were watching Big Brother.

At this point, and especially so if one considers the perfect timing of her entry, one feels compelled to quote, again, misonou, who was just writing a few days ago about how

"The theatrical reality is built from scratch, just like no world is pre-given on the white sheet of paper. Faced with the impossibility of total re-imaging, theatre resorts to the more or less intelligent employment of few selected objects, sign-posting with more or less precision. The economy of theatrical time means that a play simultaneously builds a reality, and tears it apart to show how it leaks, how it creaks, what it is made of. It builds a cathedral out of signs, and tears it down with a few precise blows."

One of the most interesting powers of theatre is just the flexibility of this sing-posting operation; theatre, as opposed to cinema, does not need to show you a young person to make you think "young person", it does not need special effects to make you think "monsters", it does not need a piece of fruit to make you think "man peeling fruit". The willing suspension of the disbelief that theatre induces is profoundly different from the expectation of realism and correspondence to daily visual experience that cinema (or, should we say, most cinema) sets up. Part of the fascination I have with theatre is precisely linked to why it is so, why we give in to it so much more easily - and part of the talent of playwrights lies in being aware that they hold this power, and in knowing how to use it properly. Because of its relative freedom from staging conventions, The Ugly One turns out to be one case in which the author is very much aware of his power.

Most interestingly, the fact that this would be a play that discusses precisely appearance, and the conformist perception we have of visual perfection, and the way that this obsession with surface and with conventional looks becomes a real dictator to our lives, distorting our idea of ourselves and our relationships with others - all this means that the staging choices are even more significant that they would normally be. This is a play about a man who is so ugly that he cannot work, hence he undergoes surgery and becomes too beautiful for his own good; but nobody really expects the actor to undergo surgery every night and then undo it for the following performance, nobody feels betrayed or taken aback or shocked out of the suspension of disbelief when he comes back from surgery looking exactly like before. There is only one actress in the production, as required by the playwright's directions, and she interprets both the character's wife and the woman he cheats on her with, and there is not a moment when this comes across as not plausible for the audience, not even in the masterfully acted scene in which the action splits between two different times and places and she is actually playing one part in one line, and the other part in the next. The reason why we stay with them is that we are, by now, inside the play - that Von Mayenburg has captured us, and has involved us in his reflection on the superficiality of what we *see*.

And this is where, and this is how, Von Mayenburg conveys his message, and pushes you to think about the meaning, or if we have to use such word "theme" of the play. He does not tell you what to think, he does not spoon-feed you the answers, because he is not David Hare. I know it is so much easier, so much more comforting, when you face a work of art that immediately answers, preferably in a proper and respectable and liberal and politically correct way, the questions it poses. But this should not mean that you get angry when it does not, or demand theatre, of all forms of art, to become one more tranquilizing pill.

Just a couple of days ago, me and misonou were chanting the praises of Craig Thompson's Blankets, for its being so good at describing, or rather conveying, what it feels like to be in love - the sharing, the enclosing, the sense of complicity and flowing communication and private, intimate understanding.

Juhmpa Lahiri's new collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, seems to me to possess the same qualities as Thompson's graphic novel, only to move this understanding of love to more complex, more mature and less raw phases of life than adolescence.

Because Lahiri was born in London of Bengali parents, and because her first novel, The Namesake, was about an Indian family moving to the States, and filled with all the cultural clashes and awkardness that would ensue for them and their children, she is often read in the very comfortable, very politically correct light of the successful second-generation immigrant who writes about identity - much the way Zadie Smith was read after the publication of White Teeth and before she proved herself as the deeply English intellectual that she is.

But Lahiri is so much more than "someone who writes about identity", and it is more correct, I feel, to compare her to elegant, profound and New England authors than to second-generation English ones - Nathaniel Hawthorne maybe, an excerpt of "The Custom House" opening her book, or my adored JD Salinger, whose painfully sympathetic and vulnerable and lovingly clever and messed up brothers and sisters echo in the beautiful "Only Goodness". Or even Henry James, in her surgical (yet warm, one feels, warmer than James would have been in her place) analysis of people's confused hopes and of the multiple layers of family life: the clever and delicate description of a woman's secret passion as seen by her young daughter in "Hell-Heaven", or the complicated and continuous adjustments required and developed in time between father and daughter in the story that gives the collection its title. And there is Siri Husvedt, too, in the darkest of the stories, "Nobody's Business".

This isn't to say that the experience of immigration is completely irrelevant to the book, because it isn't - but this becomes part of larger and more universal dynamics, like what it feels like to be in love, or what it feels like to be somebody's daughter, or what it feels like to be somebody's sister. And Lahiri has an incredible understanding of this, a warm and participatory one, too, not the let's-look-at-these-people-going-mental-from-behind-this-glass understanding displayed by, say, Ian McEwan. One never feels like the people she is writing about would have done or said anything any differently than the way she makes them act and talk - something which James Wood would highly praise, this capability of speaking with her character's words and tone and volume of voice.

It is, altogether, an incredible book, maybe my new favourite one of hers, definitely the most touching one.

+++++

The second incredibly good thing is the amazing play that we saw last week, out of three (four, if we count the one I had already been to and Jana sort of dragged me to again) plays we saw last week, all strangely easy to accomodate in a spectrum of "good stuff", where the lowest form of good stuff (averagely good but not mind-blowingly-good) would be the Young Vic production of Brecht's The Good Soul of Szechuan, the middle form of good stuff would be the fringe-y ...Sisters at Gate Theatre, and, finally, the incredibly, mind-blowingly good stuff would be Anthony Neilson's Relocated at Royal Court Theatre.

Now. This is, by quite far, the best thing I have seen in the past couple of months. Me and Jana and Boyfriend were all equally trembling when we left the theatre, all shaking our heads in awe and disbelief at the wonder that this play is. Yet for many days we couldn't find a review (because we went during the officially preview period), and now that there is one by the Guardian, I am flabbergasted, yes, flabbergasted at discovering that they gave it one star out of five. Michael Billington actually describes it as "repellent".

The main reason for this terrible review, so far as I can see, is that:

"offering titillation without illumination, Neilson also deploys the full repertory of the Victorian sensation-novel and the modern horror movie".

Now this was actually anticipated by Boyfriend - who quite rightly observed, five minutes after we had recovered from the shock that the play is, that thriller and mystery and horror are all very much part of the 19th century tradition of English theatre, yet were since discarded as too popular forms of entertainment - in other words, it is too much fun, so it cannot be good enough for theatre.

Without going in all the details of why this play is probably the one thing you should see if you're only seeing one thing at the theatre this year (apart from being brilliantly directed and, as Jana put it, chiseled on the context, and apart from being so much fun to watch), I would just like to note, en passant, how interesting it is that Neilson himself, more than a year ago, had written a piece in the Guardian theatre blog, whose title, A Message to Young Playwrights: Don't Be So Boring, and especially whose content, seem to have been taken in no consideration whatsoever by Billington when he formed his opinions on theatre.

Neilson's following observation in that article:

"Many critics still believe theatre has a quasi-educational/political role; that a play posits an argument that the playwright then proves or disproves. It is in a critic's interest to propagate this idea because it makes criticism easier; one can agree or disagree with what they perceive to be the author's conclusion. It is not that a play cannot be quasi-educational, or even overtly political - just that debate should organically arise out of narrative. But this reductive notion persists and has infected playwriting root and branch."

sounds weirdly prophetic in the light of this (so far one) bad review.

[The Guardian blog, in the person of Chris Wilkinson does, instead, have something good and interesting to say about the play, even if it is not a review.]

Later on I will say about all the good things that happened yesterday, but first of all, about this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7429638.stm

This country and this city have a serious, serious problem.
Boifrend and I were taking the District line yesterday from Embankment, at around 10.30pm, and the situation on the Circle was already out of control: tightly packed trains full of semi-naked, completely drunken and wasted idiots, banging repeatedly on the roof, windows and doors of the carriages, shouting, vomiting and spraying beer everywhere. It was a mess, and it was unbelievable. Not only it would have been impossible for any normal person to use the Circle, but six stations had to be closed, including Liverpool Street, Euston and Aldgate, the trains were so damaged that today the service is suspended, and even the other lines were late, because they had to put up with the people who were going to get the Circle.

The fact that London Transport, Metropolitan Police, Boris Johnson and the various Councils let this happen is simply f.cking unbelievable. But most importantly, the fact that there would be so many thousands of idiots living in London is incredibly sad. Girls and women in the front row, of course - as in, we won't bother protesting because they want to restrict our abortion rights, we won't protest because our salaries will be an average 15% lower than those of men doing the same jobs, or, to be more mundane, we won't even protest because the transport in this city is so outrageously expensive and inefficient, but hell, we will all come out to defend our right of getting pissed and vomiting on the Tube and buses.

This is one more demonstration of the idiocy of many Londoners when it comes to Saturday night fun.
I pay for this with my money - my taxes pay for the police to be employed in dealing with this kind of stupid parties and with the fights and assault that inevitably come out of them, for the NHS to go and resuscitate some idiotic ladette who decided that she wanted to collapse out of too much Chardonnay, my travelcard money will have to pay for the Circle line trains to be cleaned by beer and piss and vomit and repaired.
Why do we allow for all of this to happen? Why do we shut up in front of a few thousands of drunken racaille taking control of London?

And most importantly, who ever said that being drunk and disorderly, violent and rowdy and harassing other people and destroying public property was anybody's constitutional right?

you see, when the Pope declares that he is full of joy & happiness over the present political climate in Italy, it seems obvious to me that something is seriously wrong, no?

Saturday was a lovely day, in spite of the horrible weather: we had late lunch at Ottolenghi, then a quiet visit at the Estorick, and then theatre - The City, the new play by Martin Crimp, @ Royal Court Theatre.

now. this started a long discussion between me & Boifrend, who didn't like the play - whereas I thought it was brilliant, and said discussion forced me to figure out why I thought it was brilliant in greater detail than I normally would. So here goes.

I had already seen Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life last year @ National Theatre, and found it an engaging reflection upon, amongst other things, the creative process. The City is similar, yet different. It still speaks about the creative process, but I think that here there is more at stake; yes, writers make up people. Yes, translators do to, in a level which is further distant from the original one, and the protagonist of this play is a translator. Yet all people do, to an extent, make up people. Not just in our minds, even if I believe this play to be a lot about nightmarish visions and fantasies [thus continuing in the Royal Court tradition of staging unusual perspectives on mental illness, like last year's The Wonderful World of Dissocia. This is not as explicitly about being crazy, but it is clear to me that with its references to nonsensical dialogue, imaginary friends, children saying obscene and violent things, confusion between seasons and time dimensions, it has a lot to do with the subconscious and its invasion of daily life, and it is interesting that neither Boifrend nor any of the reviews I've read picked up on that - interesting because it proves, once more, AA Gill is right, when he says that we only recognise the representation of madness in cinema, telly or theatre if we see the One-Flew-Over-The-Cuckoo's-Nest thing], not just in our minds but in our daily interaction with people. We never know other people completely, most of what we think we know is actually us filling in the gaps; and in long relationships, over time, as people change, it is easy to forget to update the information in whose gaps we're filling, and to just keep operating on what we learnt the first time we met.
"Am I invented too?", Chris asks his wife. "No more than I am, surely", she replies.
All of this brings about a lot of violence. A disturbing violence, disquieting, the violence of children hiding blood in the pockets of their coats, the violence of offering knives as a Christmas present. But also a more suffocating kind, the daily, repressed violence of bourgeois routine, the violence of Michael Haneke's movies, the violence rising from frustration and from effort, from whispering fights in suburbian bedrooms so as not to wake the children up, so as not to annoy the neighbours. All this violence ending up in the distruction of our inner city, initially "a full and varied city full of green squares, shops and churches, secret streets, and hidden doors leading to staircases that climbed to rooms full of light where there would be drops of rain on the windows", but then one day gone, when you reach out for it, turned to dust.

Martin Crimp offers no explanations, no answers, no opinions on this. And one more reason for me to find his play so brilliant: people like David Hare and Tony Kushner might give you the illusion that they want to make you think, but they don't, really. They want to show you things and tell you what they are and what you should make of them. Since they know from the start that you only need a tiny, if any, push in order to get where they want to get you, there is no real effort, controversy or challenge in their work: there is, instead, a lot of patting ourselves on our backs, congratulating ourselves on being so liberal and intellectual.
Martin Crimp is different. He opens The City with such a recognisable scene, a man and his wife having dinner, sharing the events of their working day. He makes you trust him. I know this, you tell yourself, I know where we're going, I know where you're taking me. You willingly give him your hand, as he will guide you through a story with people like you, in a city like yours, with a plot and a development and a moralising conclusion. And for a while he does, and then when you have completely given in to him, that's when you find out that you are not where you thought you would be at all. There is no conventional story, there is no conventional dialogue. The bridge ends abruptly, chains and cables dangling in mid-air, like a scene from one of those foreign, secret wars described by the couple's neighbour. You are left by yourself, and you are not comfortable. This is why you have to think.

The best kind of theatre, to me, the best kind of art actually, might be the art that makes me uncomfortable. I want to be taken out of myself and put somewhere that makes me feel uneasy, I want to struggle, I want to cringe, I want to be pushed around and challenged. This is not to say that I don't like other kinds of theatre, like Eugene O'Neill or even, in a good production, Tennessee Williams, because I do, I love O'Neill, and the 2006 Old Vic production of A Moon for the Misbegotten remains in the top-five of anything I've ever seen. But that is private theare, this is public one.
It is very, very difficult to find the balance necessary to make this happen: you don't want to lull people too much into comfortable territory, or they won't recognise the change when it comes, they will just keep going where they thought they were going, whether you take them there or not. Yet you don't want to shock and alienate people too soon, either, or they will be too scared to process what they see. This is why I believe Martin Crimp is so brilliant, because, in this play, he managed the perfect balance.

A lot, and it needs to be said, is surely owed to the beautiful acting - Benedict Cumberbatch as Chris, I saw him not long ago in another beautiful play, The Arsonists by Frisch, always at Royal Court. And the beautiful and almost eery Amanda Hale, again seen last year as the best-by-far member of the cast of The Glass Menagerie in the West End. But it is, in itself, a brilliant text.

It took me a few days to let it sink in and deposit, but I am now finally ready to talk about Lisbon.

Last April, my city upon the seven hills was Edinburgh. it is possible that too many European cities claim to be built on seven hills, yet for all my neverending love for Edimbra, I have to say Lisbon sounds way more sincere.
and it is clearly an enormously different city, but they do share one thing, to me, and that is that they both have a unique quality to their light - complex skies, gathering clouds, water gleaming in the distance, just perceived or sensed at the end of steep streets.

They say Lisbon is a white city, and it certainly is, if seen from above - as it often is seen, because it's a city full of viewpoints and windowed balconies and romantic squares overlooking other squares. But from the street, it is not really white, it is colourful, in green and blue and yellow, and it is a glossy and glowing colourfulness coming from the azulejos that cover the buildings. It is a city full of terraces and windows, because people like to spend time between the inside and the outside - and this is, of course, a very Mediterranean thing to do, so it could only be met with my approval. Everywhere, I felt fresh air, and often the same impression of being walking in a wood's clearing that I had in Granada, in the Alhambra. Because of the season and of our luck with the weather, I guessed the possibility of very hot days, yet we could enjoy incredibly sweet breezes, the sun warming up on our arms and shoulders just enough for it to feel good.

Lisbon felt, to me, even if I have never felt those places in those times, like Italy and Spain and maybe France would feel fifty years ago, in all the good ways - it is beautifully rundown, in some spots, yet full of young people and of trendy spots and deco-inspired bars and cafes (oh, I miss Vertigo, already, and the happy and charming Chapito). People read. People smoke. It feels very safe without having any ridiculously restrictive code. Most importantly, and to my surprise as this is something so rare in European capitals, ven the most touristic sites, like Belem or Castelo, have not let themselves be swallowed up by tourism, and it is almost impossible to find signs of the English colonisation afflicting some of the coast. The food is beautiful and very unassuming, people in early 1900s decorated shops let us peak and have a look around without any questioning. It is the feel of it, even more than the looks of it, that conquered me. It feels like it has been saved from so many horrible things that were forced down on Venice, for example. 

And even if this might be partially down to the fact that I was there with someone I am very much in love with, it really felt like happiness was possible there. Even easy to reach.

and out of the many things that I am thinking of writing about, this is the easiest one. I was asked today who my favourite singer is - I was asked by a child, 9 perhaps 10 years old, because adults would not ask such an uncomplicated, straightforward question, of course. And I struggled, but when I think of it... is anybody really, in the world, better than Dylan?

I've been listening to Dylan since I was the same age as this child. My father listened and listens to Dylan, but he's never really adored him the way I do. Dylan was my first meaningful CD and my first meaningful concert, he was the one I always went back to, he was the one whose songs I've discovered through time and slowly, as my English improved, I change my favourites. Dylan still is the one whose language most often leaves me wondering - why is it "positively" 4th street, what's so obvious about five believers, does he mean what I think he means when he says "everybody must get stoned"? What about the "mercury mouth in the missionary times" of the ever so splendid sad-eyed lady of the lowlands? Why is his voice never on time with the guitar? And how many years it took me to understand what he means by "but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now".

But I guess the thing is that Dylan enchants me. There are lines of his, oh so many, that break me in two every single time I hear them - "though I know the evening's empire has returned into sand", how beautiful is this? I cried at 15 for his evening's empire. And "the empty-handed painter from your street is drawing crazy patterns on your sheet", which to me sounds so erotic. "Go lightly from the ledge, babe, go lightly on the ground" - best breakup line, ever. Whole stanzas: "I couldn't see what you could show me /Your scarf had kept your mouth well hid/ I couldn't see how you could know me / But you said you knew me and I believed you did / When you whispered in my ear / And asked me if I was leavin' with you or her / I didn't realize just what I heared / I didn't realize how young you were" - this is an entire, complex love story in three or four sentences.Whole songs, as well: Visions of Johanna ("And Louise holds a handful of rain, tempting you to defy it"), Shelter from the Storm, Simple Twist of Fate, Subterranean Homesick Blues, Spirit on the Water, Like a Rolling Stone, If you see her say hello. It's not simply the lyrics, it's his music with it, his voice (so many people do not like it, I adore his voice), it's the heartbreak, the music of wind and moving landscapes and light touch with people and dust dancing in the light. "She looked at him and he felt a spark tingle to his bones".

So I guess it would have to be Dylan, if I had to choose, it would be Dylan.

so. Berlusconi owns Italy.
an ex (?) Fascist rules Rome.
all historical Communist parties have been wiped out of the Italian Parliament.
the xenophobic, quite honestly absurd Lega Nord has gained about 4 or 5 points in two years.

my last hopes for civilization lie with Ken and Brian. how ironic, since I strongly dislike Ken (who doesn't, anyway) and I do not believe Brian stands a chance of winning (I do like him though, yes, even if he used to be a cop. Boyfriend's anarchic friends now believe I am Ms Thatcher's lost daughter because of this, but while I kept all my adolescent anti-clericalism, I now no longer believe that society would be better off without cops; at least not my city's society, and definitely not my neighborhood's society. It is paradoxically plausible that if I could afford to live in South Kensington or Highgate, or even any other area that has never known the glory of the bendy buses, I would be way more radical).

So go on, Londoners, surprise me!, and do not hand over my city to a clownish ex-Etonian, Oxbridge-grown guy with inexplicable hair. Please?