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 28/2/2006
A Little Anarchy Does You Good.
February is carnival season in Nice. I expect the word carnival will summon images of laughter and gaiety, of street parties and masks, but the Nice carnival is a quite different affair.
The carnival in Nice has always been an organized affair; in fact from the beginning in 1873 an official committee organized everything, and an artistic director created a theme and style for the event.
But it was, above all, at the beginning at least, a moment for the people of the town to come out and have a laugh.
As the years have gone by however, the tourist industry and our epoch-defining ideal of making loadsa-dosh out of anything and everything has disfigured the nice carnival beyond belief.
First the carnival calendar was extended with the creation of multiple events – the bataille des fleurs, the carnival procession, a closing party…
Then someone has the brilliant idea of closing off access to the carnival and making it a pay-only event. Later still the town hall worked out that people would pay more for numbered seats, so thousands of spectator stands were set up.
The final nail in the coffin was to repeat the carnival procession (now a procession of professionally made floats costing hundreds of thousands of euros) twice weekly throughout the entire month of February – a great way to multiply the admission payments, lengthen the period of tourist pull to the town, and destroy any remaining spontaneity.
The dictionary describes a carnival as “a period of public revelry at a regular time of year”, and of course, a pay-to-get-in carnival, that keeps the locals out and everyone else seated, is an anathema.
A pay to see procession that runs twice weekly for a month isn’t a carnival at all - it’s simply a pay to see procession that runs twice weekly.
Ten years ago, angry that their street party has been stolen, the niçois re-instigated their own carnival – the “carnaval independant”.
Predictably, the business planners at the town hall saw no need for an independent carnival; indeed they did everything they could think of to stop it happening. But despite it all, and in complete anarchy (the procession organizers neither consult the town hall, nor are chaperoned by the police) the Carnaval Independent de Nice continues, year after year to provide a free-for-all antidote to the “sponsored by Orange” world we live in.
With a new generation of natural anarchists – the students, crusties, and ravers of this world, joining those old enough to remember what a proper carnival looks like, the independent carnival dances randomly through the streets around the port, scaring away tourists who have come for a clean, organized, official event, and pulling in anyone else who is up for a laugh.
The old tradition of flour-bagging – chucking flour and eggs at each other – is alive and well, and the rowdy crowd dress as brightly as possible, and for one day only they take back the streets, leaving a trail of flour and egg destruction behind them.
Old ladies tip flour from their balconies, and everyone else dances through the mess to the drum and base from the party-vans.
So if you fancy a February break, and you're not the sit and watch kind, then why not come to Nice and join in the mad street party, (the last Sunday in February)
You’ll see, it’s amazing just how little humankind needs to have a laugh. Give anyone some music, a bag of flour, and special rights – for one day only - to chuck it at anyone who passes, and they will be happy.
And the streets will be filled with joy.
And after all, isn’t that what a carnival is supposed to be?
More Photos here.
15/12/2005
Review of Buenas Noches Buenos Aires - Gilbert Adair
Just finished this one and I must say it represents everything I hate in a single book.
This story is not only dull, but dangerous.
Yet more AIDS identity literature, this novel tells the story of a timid young lad arriving in paris.
The first three quarters of the book are taken up by his observations of those around him and his endless tired winging about his lack of sex-life.
His exclusion from the goings on of the Parisian gay world are emphasised when aids arrives on the scene... He has "sadly" remained negative, and looks longingly at those around him as they struggle "heroically" with the disease.
Finally, in the final chapter AIDS "saves" him.
He realises that to "belong" he will inevitably catch the "gay" disease and die "proudly" from it.
This is gay literature at its most stupid, and would be amusing as such were it not so dangerous.
Aids is not a "gay" disease... Ask some Africans about it.
It's not "inevitable" to catch it... Ask any gay man with a condom in his pocket.
It's not "heroic" to sit on the toilet all day with AIDS or treatment-induced diarrhoea.
And there's nothing proud about dying stupidly of an avoidable disease.
As an older gay man who has made great efforts to enjoy his sex life whilst remaining negative and healthy, I find the premises of this novel both insulting and offensive.
In these days of a very loud HIV+ minority and a very quiet HIV- majority, the gay world looks to newcomers as if the only way to belong is to join those who don't want to stay alive enough to use a condom.
The message of these "AIDS as identity" novels is pitiful and terrifying.
Youngsters know this. You don't need AIDS in order to get an identity; you just need a life to live and a little respect for yourself and your partners. And you don't need to be a monk to avoid the disease. You just need a condom.
3/10/2005
Specimen Days - Michael Cunningham
I've just finished Michael Cunningham's new novel, "Specimen Days".
It's a strange work, similiar in so many ways to "The Hours" (Specimen Days is also set in three different times, past, present and future...) and yet so different to The Hours and from Cunningham's other novels it's hard to know quite what to make of it.
My initial reaction - as I read it and shortly afterwards - was that the novel was a failure.
What I usually enjoy the most about Cunningham is the love of humanity he puts across. His ability to put us inside each of his characters, and to make us understand the simultanous presence of the good, the bad and the ugly in each of us, to show the multi-facetedness of human nature, and to understand the non-evil origins of apparently "bad" acts as well as then not-so-good origins of so many "good" ones.
We grow to love and hate Cunnigham's characters for their complexity, and we weep for their death at the end of the book.
It took me about an hour to read the final 3 pages of Flesh and Blood... such were the tears blurring my vision.
There's none of this in Specimen Days. The novel seems short, and relatively unemotional. I haven't counted, but I think it actually is word short, and this time if there was any desire to attach us to character, there certainly wasn't the time or space. At a first reading it almost feels lazy.
But a few days after having finished, a distant dream slowly surfaced... Something vague yet powerful about the fundamental desire of the human race to run away from the life we have created, to return to the wild west, to the farm in the country, to escape the machines and get back to the archetypal lives of our ancestors.
Though this remains misty and is merely glimpsed through a mirage of constructed subtexts - a deformed child of the industrial revolution suffering at the hands of "the machine", a 9-11 contempory fighting the madness of modern fundamentalist terrorism, a robot seemingly pointlessly programmed with Walt Whitman's poetry which develops an inexplicable feeling of angst, Cunningham has expressed one of the underlying tenets of the human condition with a poetry all his own, and dream-like it will bubble to the surface, nudging and poking that same angst in each of us.
Highly Recommended.
25/08/2005
The SNEG, the organisation of gay businesses here in France is complaining about the decreasing numbers of people visiting the gay bars, saunas and clubs owned by their members.
In fact there is such a major decrease in cash flow that a significant number of gay bars and clubs across France are closing.
"Why can this be?" everyone is wondering.
With typical lack of insight, the explanation put forward by the SNEG is that it's all because of the increased integration of French gay men and lesbians into the fabric of society. They simply don't need gay bars anymore, the SNEG tells us.
It's complete bullshit of course. France remains as devoutly Catholic, as exquisitely homophobe as it ever has been. You only need to look at the statistics of violent homophobic acts to see that, and self respect amongst gay men certainly hasn't rocketed to produce a generation of gay men screaming "I am what I am" in every straight pub in the land.
No, the real explanation, is that the SNEG's members, always in search of extra cash, have cynically turned their bars into sex clubs, their bookshops into sex shops.
In order to increase the frequentation of these sordid sticky bars they have conveniently dropped any efforts to promote safe sex.
But there's not a lot of long term thinking in the strategy. Backrooms lead to unsafe sex, unsafe sex leads to HIV. HIV leads to AIDS or at best, HIV medication induced illness and that all leads to death.
The truth is that the brutal commercial exploitation of the gay community by the sex clubs, saunas, bath houses, and sex shops has destroyed that very community.
A silent majority no longer fits into the only visible signs remaining of gay society; the bars and clubs have become exclusive clubs for people with serious sexual addiction problems, little self respect, and a death wish. In a nutshell, we normal guys and girls out there have simply stopped going because to go isn't compatible with a long and happy life.
The minority of momentarily fashionable SM/leather/barebackers that the SNEG cynically identified as their future market, can only continue to shrink as its members realise the futility of the club they have joined or alternatively become ill and dissapear.
But worst of all is the SNEG wants us to show "solidarity" to keep these gay businesses alive. The SNEG wants us to "get out there" and "get involved". The SNEG wants us to weep at the closure of clubs and bars which, if the government of the country gave a damn about a single gay death would have been closed long ago for simple sanitary reasons.
Weep? yeah, I'll weep for all the young kids who now have no place to go to meet another gay man than a pitch black sex club. I'll weep for the rocketing infection rates and the pointless loss of life that will come when the wave of deaths hits us in 5 to 10 years. I'll weep for the destruction of the gay communities we worked so hard to build when the guilt of those who have intentionally infected themelves can no longer look their HIV- brothers in the eye, and when the HIV- majority becomes enraged against the barebackers who are ripping the soul from the gay community. I'll weep for the perfectly sane majority, who unable to defend the undefendable have had no choice but to pop back in the closet.
But don't ask me to weep for the SNEG.
27/07/2005
Virtual Reality.
God I hate this bit... The book is written, the review copies have been posted, and now I just have to sit and wait for the critics to have their say.
Lots of UK magazines have agreed to review my new novel, Sottopassaggio which is great news.
Gay Times, The Pink Paper, Tim Teeman of The Times, AXM, Attitude will all be posting reviews in their September/October issues.... I've sealed and posted to copies off, and now, I wait...
So far I've had "cover quotes" from good old Joe Storey-Scott (The Pink Paper/Prowler)
"A second novel that actually lives up the the promise of the first -
thoroughly recommended"
and one from the influential Richard Labonte in the states (www.btwof.com) who waxed lyrical:
"Friendships - old ones rekindled and new ones forged.
Love - lost in a heartbreaking heartbeat and found again against the odds.
These essentials for a good life are what this sexy, serious,
and ultimately quite cheery book is all about."
Thanks Richard! He even managed to find some typos that everyone else had missed.
And so it is that after 5 months of intense, absorbing activity, and a couple of months of proofing covers and licking stamps, suddenly I have nothing to do.
Amazingly enough that's as hard as any of the rest... Getting up and looking at the cats, and thinking, humm, what to do today?
It's hard to break out of the virtual world I've been living in, especially one that turned out to be so satisfying, to have such a happy conclusion.
Because in the end, Richard is right. These are the essentials for the good life.
I hear a knock on the door and stand, almost expecting to find one of my major characters behind the door, Jenny clutching a screaming baby, or the gorgeous Tom carrying his saxophone, but it's just an aging plumber looking for the keys to the flat downstairs.
Shame. The world inside my head is so much more satisfying... Maybe that's why I write...
Nick x
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