dad (5): normans

From a phone conversation in August 2010:

Dad: I’m getting a computer. A laptop.

Me: Oh great. At last! That’ll be good. I think you’ll get a lot of pleasure out of it.

Yes. I’ve got my eye on a Toshiba.

Okay. I’m a Mac man personally.

A what?

A Mac, Macintosh. Apple.

Is a Mac the same as an Apple?

Yes. Apple Macintosh. We just call them Macs.

They're bit too expensive for me, I think.

You’ll need broadband.

Yes, I’ve been told. And I’ve talked to BT about a package.

Oh good. Fantastic. Will Martin show you how to set it up and get it going?

Ooh yes, he’s very good. We’ve seen your website.

My what?

Martin found your website. He showed me a picture of a naked man with a big flag with a dog on his leg.

Oh. Blimey. Yes, okay: that’s Oleg Kulik.

Who?

Oleg Kulik. He’s a rather eccentric Russian performance artist. He used to do dog impersonations; he bit someone once, outside a gallery.

Oh. What’s he doing on your website?

It’s a blog. Oh, I don’t know, he’s quite funny. He’s a bit wild.

Is he? I’ve been watching ‘The Normans’ on television. There’s a new documentary.

Oh, have you?

They were a bit wild. Ooh, a rough old lot.

Are you in there? You being one of the Normans.

No, haven’t seen me yet.

Your name sort of means ‘Norman Norman’, doesn’t it. Norman Williams. Williams has Norman written all over it.

Does it?

Yes, it’s an old Norman word for helmet.

Is it?

I think so. Comes from Guillaume.

Oh yes, Guillaume.

Yes, Helmet. Do you know my name means ‘Beloved Helmet’. A combination of Hebrew and old Norman. David – beloved. And Williams – helmet. You named me Beloved Helmet.

Oh. That’s a good name.

Yes. David’s very Biblical.

Yes it is. By the time they got to me my family had exhausted the Biblical names so they turned to the Nordic names. Norman Eric.

But Norman’s Norman.

No, I’m not sure, I think it’s German or Scandinavian. A northerner. Maybe a viking.

Is it? Oh. So what were the other Biblical names in the family? Any good ones – an Ezekial, or a Leviticus? A Jehosaphat?

No no, James, and John, and Mary, that sort of thing. Although I think there was an Obadia …

No, really? Obadia? You're kidding.

No ...

Wow! Obadia Helmet. That’s a corker.

Although I’m not sure he was a Helmet …

dad (3): lazy chocolate

At Mortlake railway station, seeing my dad off on to his train back home:

Dad: Gawd it's nippy. Fancy a little snack? Some chocolate?

Me: Why not?

Dad: Good-oh.

At the stall on the platform, 2 men behind the counter:

Dad: What do you fancy? A kitkat?

Man 1: Nice cup of tea two sugar.

Dad: Sorry?

Man 1: You want nice cup of tea two sugar, isn't it.

Dad: No thanks, I've just had one.

Man 1: Oh. You look just like man who have nice cup of tea two sugar, he come here all time. But he don't wear hat.

Man 2: All time. But no hat.

Dad: Oh. (Lifts his hat for a second): Must be my double. I have been here before, lots of times, but not for tea. Erm, I'll just have some chocolate thank you. What have you got here? Ah, oo-hoo, a kitkat.

Man 1: Kitkat laaazy. Lazy chocolate. Laaazy man! (To me): I think you no have lazy chocolate, you have ... snickers! More chew! You look like snickers man.

Man 2: Snickers!

Me: Do I? Oh. Actually I think I'll have a caramel bar, thanks.

Man 1: Oh he lazy too! Laaazy chocolate. No good.

Man 2: Must have snickers!

Man 1: This your son? Yes. He look just like you when you young.

Man 2: Laaazy boy!

Dad: Last time I was here, there was a man from Iran. I said, oh you're from Iran: where were you born? He said, Twickenham. And I said, ha ha, I said, oh I'm from England but I was born in Iran.

Man 1: You from Iran? Where you from?

Man 2: Iranian!

Dad: Abadan.

Man 1: Oh Abadan! Abadan good place! Very good place to come from. Lot of oil. You own property?

Dad: Unfortunately, no.

Man: Do you have mistress in Abadan?

Dad: Do I look like I have a mistress in Abadan? ... Unfortunately, no. Ha ha.

Man 1: You only say that cos your son here. But we know. Abadan ladies very famous: beautiful.

Man 1 & 2 launch into joyous rendition of an Iranian song about Abadan girls, Man 1 banging out a rhythm on a pile of newspapers on the counter: 'Aba - daaan!'

Dad: That's nice. What does it mean?

Man 1: It talk about beautiful lady in Abadan. Famous.

Man 2: Aba-daaan!

A high speed train passes through the station without stopping.

Man 1: Too fast for you to catch, laaazy man! But he can catch it, he still young.

Me: Where are you from, then?

Man 1: We come from Mongolia.

Me: Really?

Man 2: Mongolia!

Man 1: Bayanhongor. We speak nine language: Baluchi, Armenian, Arabic, Farsi, Khalka ...

Man 2: Chinese ...

Man 1: Russian of course ...

Me: Wow! Mongolia to Mortlake, that's a helluva journey.

Man 1: What you do here? You live in Mortlake?

Dad: No, I live in Kent. He lives in London. Well, near Twickenham.

Man 2: Kent! Good.

Dad: We've just been visiting my sister.

Man 1: Younger sister?

Dad: Older sister. 96.

Man 1: 96! Good genes! Hey, you gonna be ok, good genes in family!

Dad: Oh, here comes my train ...

Man 2: 96?

Dad (pointing to my trousers): He has good jeans.

Man 1: Oh yes, very funny. Funny man! But laaazy!

Man 2: Very laaazy!

Man 1 & 2 start singing the song about Abadan girls as my dad's train pulls in. Dancing and waving.
_______________________________________________

For earlier 'dad' posts, see here, and here

dad (2): nutter

My dad has taken to sending me cuttings from the newspaper: invariably from the Times or the Telegraph, and usually obituaries of artists, reviews of art and performances he thinks I might like, and stuff about the mafia, Italian politics, crime writers etc.

A few weeks ago he sent me a lengthy rubbishing of Yoko Ono's exhibition at the Baltic. Today I received a piece cut from the Telegraph, entitled: 'My shocking encounter with a large naked lady - in a cage', by a journalist called Rupert Christiansen. It begins: "I have only to hear, or even read, the name of Tadeusz Kantor to feel a shudder down my spine ...", and continues in similar vein with a description of sorts of a Kantor event in Edinburgh some years ago that evidently appalled him. Purportedly the article is a preview of a retrospective exhibition of Kantor's work at the University of East Anglia's Sainsbury Centre, although its core purpose seems to be to tell us that Mr Christiansen "won't be attending, for fear of reviving my Kantorian trauma".

In the end, inevitably the text tells one a fair amount about its author and his particular perspectives on contemporary art, and very little about Kantor.

Elsewhere, in a section called 'Rupert recommends', Rupert recommends a DVD called 'The Best of the Bolshoi Ballet'. Now you're talking, Rupert.

At the top of the cutting, my dad has written in biro: 'Have you met this nutter?!'

I wonder quite which nutter he's referring to.












For details of the Sainsbury Centre's Kantor exhibition, ' An Impossible Journey', see here

For the Cricoteka ('Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor') website documenting Kantor's work, see here

For Rupert Christiansen's 'article' in the Daily Telegraph (25 May 2009), see here

Photo: Kantor's 'Meerespanorama Happening', 1967

dad (1): one of the dragons is gay

(Extract from a phone conversation with my dad last night):

Dad: - So what have you been up to?

Me: - Well, been busy as ever.

- Good, good. That's good.

- Work mainly. A bit endless. Um, can't think. Oh, at the weekend I went to London to a kind of gathering of artists and intellectuals in Hyde Park. All sorts of people there. It was great.

- What sort of gathering?

- Well, a bunch of artists and others were presenting kind of manifestos, you know, they were talking about the state of things, what art could be or should be, that sort of thing. It was in the park near the gallery.

- Oh. What sort of artists? Any painters? Would I have heard of any of them?

- Well, no, no painters as such. But some other quite famous ones you'd probably know. Contemporary artists really. Gilbert and George were there.

- Oh were they. They're a bit odd aren't they.

- Um, well, they're certainly eccentric. But they're hilarious. Maybe they run the risk of turning into parodies of themselves, you know, a bit like Kenneth Williams turned into a parody of himself. But they're very funny ... Um, who else? Yoko Ono.

- Oh yes. There's a new biography of John Lennon that's just come out.

- Is there?

- I never much liked John Lennon.

- Really? Why not? He was way the most interesting of the Beatles.

- I didn't say he wasn't interesting. I just never fancied him much.

- Well, I didn't fancy him either, dad. But he was great. One of my heroes when I was a kid. But I guess a dope-smoking anarchist hippy's never quite going to float your boat, is he?

- I don't know why, was it because he didn't go to his father's funeral or something?

- I don't know, but I think he had an unhappy family life as a kid.

- Yes, probably ... so what was Yoko Ono doing?

- Well, she showed some videos, and talked a bit, and then we danced with her.

- Oh. What, you danced with her?

- Well, we all did. There were loads of people there. She invited us to dance and so we did.

- Oh. I see.

- I love her stuff. She's fantastic. She looks amazing, really great for her age.

- Yes, although she looks a bit freeze-dried and leathery.

- Dyou think so? I don't think she's had any surgery. She's just in really good nick. She must be all of 70.

- Is she.

- Sadly in Britain it seems she's most famous for being the 'weird' wife of John Lennon, and the supposed cause of the break-up of the Beatles. I blame the Daily Mail.

- Oh. Do you.

- But she's a super interesting artist, and she's really well known in her own right - she's done some brilliant things. She's a bit conceptual, a bit zen. Very witty. Does all sorts of different kinds of art.

- Oh. I don't think I understand conceptual art. All those instructions ... She does things with ladders, doesn't she?

- Does she? I don't know. What do you mean?

- Well I read something about her and ladders.

- Really? Mmm, I'm not sure. She's certainly used ladders in her work in the past, although I don't know that they're central. What was that thing where she met John Lennon in a gallery?

- I don't know.

- Didn't she have a ladder in the gallery, and you climbed up it with a magnifying glass, and there was a tiny 'YES' written on the ceiling ... Or was it that one with nails and hair, you climbed a ladder with a nail with a piece of hair wrapped round it and hit it into a frame on the ceiling, and the painting was finished once you could only see hair.

- Oh god.

- Something like that. Maybe the hair thing didn't have a ladder ...

- Oh well.

- Okay, who else was there? Mmm. Maybe you've heard of Marina Abramovic? She's really well known, you know, the performance artist. I think she's from what was Yugoslavia.

- I'm not sure. Rings a bell.

- Oh I know who you'd know: Eric Hobsbawn, the historian. Amazing old bloke. He's in his nineties and sharp as a button. A bit frail physically, but not intellectually. He was brilliant.

- He's a communist.

- Well, yes, he is, you're right; but that's alright isn't it, no reason to write him off surely.

- Like John Berger.

- I thought you'd like that book. And Berger's hardly some hard-line Stalinist. He's got a huge heart.

- I didn't understand that book. Something about a pocket.

- Oh well. Okay, okay. Um, who else was there? Partly I went to support some friends who were doing something.

- What, that lot you work with? The Lonely Twins?

- Lone Twin. No no, it was a different lot, a couple of friends in a group called SpRoUt.

- Sprout?

- Oh I know, there was that guy Owen or Evan, the economist who's on the telly. You know, the gay guy on the news, he's the economics reporter. You know who I mean - he's on 'Dragon's Den'.

- What, one of the dragons is gay? Which one is he?

- No no, he's the presenter, he's the one who interviews the people who pitch things to the dragons.

- Oh. No, I don't know.

- Well, he was there in the audience. Doesn't matter ... I tell you what, dad, London's dead weird after Devon, you bump into all sorts of people. It's quite surreal. I met Ian Wright in a shop.

- What, Ian Wright? Wrighty?

- Yes.

- Oh he's a nice bloke. He got into trouble recently for saying something or other about diving in the box.

- Did he?

- Yes, he was on telly. Something about Drogba. He said, well you'd do the same in his shoes, and he got into trouble for it.

- Oh, I didn't hear about that. Yes, he seemed nice ... I said hello.

- Good. Good. So ... any news on the job front?

say your goodbyes

When I was 5 or 6, I watched my dad performing the role of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons. I thought he was brilliant. I lived richly. At the end of the play, after some sort of trial and some fine last words of which I have no memory beyond a kind of calm jaw-jutting defiance, my dad slowly dropped to his knees and placed his head on a block of wood; then a drum roll kicked in as a large man with a black hood raised an enormous axe … A still point in silence. Then, as the axe came down, sudden black out, a thud of metal on wood, and the sound of something rolling slowly across the stage … Oh no. My dad’s head had just been removed. That was the end of him.

I was distraught, outraged at the sudden horror and injustice of his demise. My mother tried to console me and shush me and wipe away my tears, but I wasn’t having any of it. Perversely, other people were turning round and smiling at me and my widowed mother. And my mother was laughing. It was very weird ... Minutes later, my dad reappeared for the curtain call, his head miraculously reconnected to his body. I was astonished, and gradually my sobbing gave way to relief and a wide-eyed incredulity. How did they do that? Later in the bar, I inspected my dad’s neck in great detail, but there was no trace of the axe’s passage. Honestly. You couldn’t even see the join. How did they do that?

‘In the realm of the naked eye nothing happens that does not have its beginning and its end. And yet nowhere can we find the place or the moment at which we can say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this is where it begins, or this is where it ends. For some of us, it has begun before the beginning, and for others of us it will go on happening after the end. Where to find it? Don’t look. Either it is here or it is not here. And whoever tries to find refuge in any one place, in any one moment, will never be where she thinks she is. In other words, say your goodbyes. It is never too late. It is always too late’ (Paul Auster, 'White Spaces', in Selected Poems, London: Faber & Faber, 1998, 83).

(Extract from 'how do you say goodbye? last songs': an invited presentation given at the symposium 'Goat Island: Lastness, raiding the archive, and pedagogical practices in performance', Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University, 2008:
© David Williams)