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8 existential panics for our times
Undone by fake Lafite
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Becoming inured to conspicuous wealth is a quirk of life in Hong Kong. Stirred into distraction near my office in Central by a revving Lamborghini or Porsche, I might well remark to myself “there goes an expensive sports car”. Having heard tell of a VIAGRA and a SATAN, I might even scan its personalised plates for some momentary amusement. But, pace their owners’ intentions, after a while these thoroughbreds of our gridlocked precincts come to seem, well, commonplace.
A Sheung Wan sidewalk stacked with cases of fine Bordeaux, long the turbo-consumer’s tipple of choice in these parts, might therefore be calculated to induce a similarly world-weary reaction. Something less passive reared in me, however, as, on a mid-day saunter, I was forced to circumnavigate easily HK$2million worth of Lafites and Latours, resting on the journey from loading van to some out-of-sight restaurant holding cell. Mingled with my excitement – at the thought of liberating a case and working a crowbar on it for a lunchtime straightener since you ask, yes – was the nagging reminder that I have some Lafite-Rothschild 1996 doing absolutely nothing for me in a cellar in London.
I don’t make up the rules; I’m just gullible enough to have invested, modestly, in fine wine when I was told it would outperform everything else in sight. If European aristocrats, the uber-charlatans who rate wine growths and multitudes of newly-minted Asians conspire to create a big fat money market in the stuff, then carpe diem, no?
Well, that was a while back now. Of late, prices at auction, for Château Lafite in particular, have sunk to at least a ten-year low on the back of President Xi Jinping turning the screw on corruption, guanxi and extravagance – his trapping of tigers and quashing of flies. Now even the tigers daren’t drink Lafite, even if it’s mixed with Coca-Cola (terribly infra dig – who’s to say the whole campaign wasn’t motivated by embarrassment, besides Xi’s thirst for power?). Or at least that’s what’s reported; I do wonder what they’re drinking at Zhongnanhai these days. And the wolves – are they to be spared?
In truth, the bottom had been falling out of the whole business for some time, owing to another facet of capitalism with Chinese characteristics: fakery. In its upward march, the country has excelled itself in many spheres, but in the standard of its fakes it is in a league of its own. Sure, the Ferraris and Lamborghinis have been easy enough to detect, but the best of the wine fakers have been so successful that they’ve fooled serious investors, auctioneers, even oenologists. It’s set some people back, myself included, but what can you do? In the purity of the deception and in the denuding of European exceptionalism, it almost merits awe.
Nobody really complains about the mass-produced but largely convincing knock-offs of Western oil paintings you can buy from Shenzhen’s Dafen Village. But then faking it, or at least repetition, is by and large the name of the game in the art racket anyway. Fear of cliché begets cliché in a world in which artists and critics collude to take themselves in – convincing themselves that they are, respectively, purveyors and arbiters of originality. It’s all so much intellectual evasion, but so long as the price tag convinces the purchaser he’s buying Art, it ticks along. And so it goes with the Lamborghini and the Bordeaux – their prestige depends on faith in the power of money itself.
By the way, marked up in a restaurant a bottle of that Lafite will still cost you HK$9,500, easy.
Trivial hirsute
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post’s Post Magazine as a Rant column
Jesus Christ, famously a December birthday boy, declares in Matthew 6:3: “Let not the left hand know what the right hand doeth”. In other words, give alms for the sake of it, not so you can tell yourself, and everyone else, that you’re an alms-giver. In humility, there is beauty and grace.
If male facial hair is any guide, it cannot be said that November is a month for such things. The wisdom anchoring “Movember” – now a fixture on global calendars, with its mandate on men to grow a “mo”, or mo-ustache (clever, eh?) for 30 days – seems to be: “Let the left whisker, and by extension the world, know exactly what the right whisker doeth.”
Look chaps, I know you’re doing it for a cause – raising awareness of men’s health issues and suchlike – and if you’ve badgered me for money you’ll get it. And I know that, y’ know, you care about stuff. But what’s to stop us all doing charity, thoughtfulness and all the rest of it without the circus – and the endless selfies?
Movember, now in its tenth year, was just the start of it, unfortunately. Singposting that you’re good / moral / give a stuff – whether via self-defacement (an off-putting Movember tache here, an Ice Bucket Challenge video there) or some small act of self-empowerment (giving up the fags for “Stoptober”: that’s a real thing in the UK) is where charity is at now. It’s like social media has made little celebrities of us and we’re all running our own PR – you only care if you care conspicuously.
Narcissism is at large, unshaven and wearing philanthropy’s trousers.
Blood in the water: My latest feature in HK Tatler
This article was published in Hong Kong Tatler
It would be easy to attribute Ric O’Barry’s slight irascibility to the fact that he’s been campaigning on the same issue for more than 40 years and still finds he’s not being listened to where it matters. Then again, it could be down to his jetlag.
The 73-year-old dolphin-lover and activist has been flown to Hong Kong from his home in Miami for a week at the behest of a student group at Hong Kong Baptist University and – surveying a sparkling Victoria Harbour from a restaurant on the 31st floor of the Regal Hotel – he’s just getting going on the environmental exigencies facing our oceans.
The contamination of fish stocks from industrial pollutants is one thing you might want to think about next time you order a tuna salad, he says taking off his Ray Bans, seemingly to get a better look at me. Over-fishing is another: “We’re stripmining the oceans. My daughter [O’Barry lives in Miami and Denmark with his wife and an adopted Chinese daughter] is seven. In her lifetime there won’t be any fish.”
Crikey. So the message he’ll deliver to the HKBU branch of the international student organisation AIESEC the next day is that conservation is doomed to failure? Well, not exactly. Years of frustration at a lack of global action to protect dolphins have failed to extinguish O’Barry’s idealism. With the sleeve of his smart Explorer’s Club blazer only partially obscuring a multi-coloured agglomeration of charity wristbands, he is a curious mix of old-school swashbuckler and modern activist-warrior. “It’s about people power,” he tells me. “Governments aren’t going to fix these problems. And right now you’re seeing legions of new activists.”
These days O’Barry travels the world trying to stop the traffic in captive dolphins, which he believes is linked to the killing of 23,000 dolphins in Japan every year. But his relationship to the species is more complex than his single-minded – some might say obsessional – dedication to its emancipation might suggest. In the 1960s it was O’Barry who, at the Miami Seaqarium, trained the five dolphins used in the popular US television series Flipper. “For seven years I actually lived with the Flipper dolphins,” he says.
His transition towards opposing dolphin captivity came gradually. “I used to take the television set down to the pool so that Flipper could watch Flipper on television and there was a self-awareness – they could see themselves. It’s really all about consciousness and where dolphins are concerned the porch light is on and somebody is home. When you become aware of that there’s a responsibility that comes with it.”
After leaving Flipper in 1970, O’Barry for a while went around “freeing” as many captive dolphins as he could, eventually landing himself in trouble with the law 13 years ago for releasing two dolphins off the coast of Florida which were ill-equipped to survive in the wild and sustained grievous injuries.
“I was initially motivated by guilt, because it was Flipper that inspired all these dolphinariums,” he says. “I went from training dolphins to trying to untrain them and put them back in the wild. What motivates me now, though, is seeing results – all the dolphinariums in the UK for instance are now closed.”
O’Barry’s major breakthrough in terms of bringing the dolphin’s plight to general notice came, however, with the release of the Academy Award-winning documentary film The Cove in 2009. Suspenseful and gripping, it follows the efforts of a team of divers, technicians and other brave sorts led by O’Barry to record and expose – under the noses of the local police – the annual drive hunting season in which thousands of dolphins are brutally slaughtered at a cove in the remote Japanese village of Taiji.
For all the film’s shock value, three years later the killing continues; but where it has been successful is in recruiting people to the cause. Vriko Séraphina Kwok, vice-president of the AIESEC group at HKBU, says it was seeing The Cove a year ago that inspired her to raise awareness locally by inviting O’Barry over. “The issue of dolphin conservation is one that is relevant to Hong Kong and the rest of Asia and we thought it should be promoted,” she says. “Change can’t happen immediately. Traditional ways of doing things don’t just disappear overnight; but it’s important to educate this generation.”
In common with O’Barry and – judging from a recent US Public Service Announcement a whole battalion of Hollywood celebrities – Kwok is opposed to the keeping of dolphins in captivity for the purposes of entertainment. But not all dolphin-lovers agree. On O’Barry’s visit, HKBU hosted a debate on the issue between him and Dr Allan Zeman, the billionaire chairman of Ocean Park. Zeman, citing a figure of 105 million visitors to Ocean Park since it opened, said such attractions had a role to play in connecting people with nature in ways that would otherwise not be possible. “One thing you can be sure of,” he added, “is that we really care for the animals. We only have captive-born animals and rescued dolphins and we’re a non-profit organisation so we put a lot of money into conservation – US$26m since 2005. We raise a lot of money and we educate children about conservation and we’ll continue to do so.”
A key assertion in The Cove is that dolphinariums around the world are connected to the slaughter of dolphins at Taiji, and it is true that the whalers earn most of their money from the sale of a few live dolphins while the rest are killed and sold for their meat. However, while a thriving market for captured dolphins for entertainment exists in Japan itself, this is not the case in most other countries, where dolphinariums have their own breeding programmes. At the time of The Cove’s release, the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums, a trade group representing more than 50 such facilities in the US and elsewhere, accused the film-makers of “misinformation”.
When I press him on this, O’Barry responds somewhat tetchily. “The dolphins are captured with the trainers present – and they’re all connected, even to Ocean Park,” he insists. “They’re connected through the World Association of Zoos and Aqariums, through the Marine Animal Trainers’ Association. They’re all colleagues, they all know what goes on.”
Where he’s on surer ground is in his assertion that the International Whaling Commission’s moratorium on commercial whaling has never been extended to smaller cetaceans largely because of Japanese opposition. And as he rightly points out: “The Cove exposed the IWC in a way that’s never been done before.”
Moreover, in his efforts to challenge entrenched habits, he takes encouragement from the recent removal of shark fin soup from menus at some of Hong Kong’s top hotels, and by the fact that – as recorded in Blood Dolphins, a Discovery channel spin-off from The Cove featuring O’Barry and his son Lincoln – dolphin whaling has been stopped in the Solomon Islands. “With money raised from the sale of wristbands worldwide, we were able to help people invest in bee-keeping as an alternative source of income,” he says. “People just want jobs. It’s economics.”
I venture to suggest that it’s that kind of pragmatism that gets results, but he’s already off on a more bullish egression. “We’re winning; we will stop the whalers,” he says. “It’s down to people like the kids who brought me here.”
An interview with Alan Cumming
This article appeared in the magazine Metropolitan
It’s earlyish in the day, but Alan Cumming seems to be in one of his more sombre moods. The Scottish actor, now a joint American and British citizen, is refusing to entertain tittle tattle, certainly. Even his own. “That’s just trashy gossip stuff”, he groans when I bring up his purported desire to see Barack Obama naked.
Regarding the man whose election campaign he endorsed (he was vetted by Team Obama and would have been an “official” supporter but for his citizenship not being approved in time), Cumming said last year: “Great leaders, charismatic leaders […] usually have big penises.” But this morning he’s less declamatory about the US president. “I’m still really, really amazed that he’s president and also really glad,” he says, “but I wish he would act on some of his policies sooner.”
The source of his anguish is gay rights, and in particular the admission of openly gay men and women to the US military, a policy he believes the Obama administration has dragged its heels over: “They’ve made gay people feel like the train is coming, but they’ve not delivered.”
Bisexual himself, though now espoused to his partner of some five years, the graphic artist Grant Shaffer, Cumming is not entirely what you might expect if you had seen him in, say, the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of the Bacchae, as Dionsyus, or in Cabaret, as the Emcee, on Broadway, or indeed in his own cabaret show I Bought a Blue Car Today. Or if you consider that he plays a gender-bending doorman in the movie Burlesque, out this month, and a transvestite in swinging 1960s Soho in The Runaway, a six-part drama that will screen on Sky next year; or that he once launched a fragrance called Scent of Cumming. Sure, he’s camp and occasionally vampy, and he may even indulge in scabrous talk about the presidential appendage, but he’s also strikingly normal, in the down-to-earth sense, considered and pensive; even, at 45, a little shy and boyish at times.
There is, in short, something endearingly straightforward about Cumming and the way he ponders his own experiences and complexities. He is who he is: talented, an actor, a celebrity, Scottish (he retains a pronounced Highland intonation), driven to work, stage or screen, sometimes in “straight” roles, sometimes in roles which are rather less so.
He has, moreover, been doing that work for more than 20 years. After training at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, performing as a stand-up comedian and gaining exposure in the Scottish TV soap Take the High Road, he went on to work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre. Before moving into film he was an award-winning Hamlet. On the big screen he has alternated between roles in blockbusters (Goldeneye, X-Men 2, the Spy Kids trilogy) and smaller, independent movies, including Titus (opposite Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange), Sweet Land (for which he won an Independent Spirit award as a producer), and last year’s Boogie Woogie and Dare. He has also found the time to co-host his own talk show, with his dogs, moonlight on Broadway, model Lee Jeans and write a Sunday Times best-selling novel, Tommy’s Tale, about the life of a bisexual Londoner having an early mid-life crisis.
And all of that merely scratches the surface of a vast output. Of late, he has been a regular cast member in the CBS legal drama The Good Wife, which has screened on Channel Four in the UK. It’s a fairly straight role – he plays Eli Gold, a smooth, well-tailored political advisor brought in to help a former State’s Attorney relaunch his political career following a corruption scandal – but there is a certain waggishness about the character that suggests there may be more to him than meets the eye. “You get to learn a bit more about him as the current season progresses – a bit about his personal life, his past life, chinks in his armour, that kind of thing,” says Cumming.
Intrigue of a more personal nature gripped him in the summer, however, when he agreed to look into his own family history for BBC One’s Who Do You Think You Are? series. His grandfather, who won a medal for bravery in the British Army’s retreat from France in 1940, and was wounded in battle in Burma later in the war, was an enigma even to his own daughter, Cumming’s mother Mary, who was a child when he died, in 1951, in colonial Malaya. As Cumming was to discover, the circumstances of Tommy Darling’s death were considered so shocking that they were even kept from his wife back home in Scotland: he had shot himself in the head during a game of Russian Roulette.
“Clearly he had been affected mentally by his experiences in the war and they stayed with him and he couldn’t just go back to normal life, which is half the reason he ended up in Malaya,” says Cumming. “The thing I found most galling was that the army just didn’t take combat stress at all seriously. And I think it’s shocking that, even today, in certain circumstances where there is a death that doesn’t involve combat, families aren’t paid compensation.
“It was a pretty devastating thing to discover and my mother found it quite hard to deal with. I think for anyone to find out such a shocking thing about a parent would be hard, but also finding that out and knowing that millions of other people are going to know too, because it’s on television, is a lot to deal with.”
That comes with the territory for her son, of course, but Cumming proclaims an ambivalence towards fame and celebrity that suggests he finds it all a little strange. “There’s a level of self-consciousness that you have to live with,” he says. “You don’t want to draw attention to yourself when you take the dog out for a walk, but it’s there. I’ve learnt that kindness is always the way to respond, but I don’t particularly want to have my photo taken on the street at two in the morning on someone’s camera phone.” He pauses. “At the same time I don’t want to live in a box away from the rest of humanity.”
The tabloids in Britain – Cumming lived in London for many years – tend to be much more invasive than their American equivalents, he says, although Americans obsess more, on the whole, about celebrity. “But it’s getting more like that in Britain as well – the whole thing of people who’ll do anything to be on television seems to be getting more prevalent.”
“I like it when people don’t know who I am,” he adds. “It’s an academic question: if I want to keep doing my job, what do I do? I could go away and hide in the woods, but…”
Doth he protest too much? Maybe, but then on the evidence of his work he is not overly-consumed, as an actor, by his own ratings. “I do feel that I just do what I like,” he says. “Even the things that pay the bills are quite idiosyncratic. I feel I’m on a nice plateau: I get to do interesting work, I get a certain level of access to things because of what I’ve done. I’m content to carry on this way, I’m not on an upward curve of domination.”
If you were being unkind, you might describe the cabaret show he brought to Edinburgh and London in the summer as an ego trip, but he insists it was in fact his most daunting project to date. “I wanted to run away the first time I did it,” he says. “It was terrifying. I’d never stood up before and said ‘this is me, I’m Alan and I’m going to sing a song’. Ask any actor and they would be horrified at the notion.”
The Runaway appealed to him, he says, because of its unconventionality: it’s gangland stuff, but his own character, the transvestite club owner Desree, “is the strongest, the most rational and the kindest person in it.” He has also voiced characters in a spate of animated films this year, including that of “a tranny Hitler” in Jackboots on Whitehall, and appears as Sebastian, alongside the “fantastic” Helen Mirren and a star-studded ensemble cast in a new film version, out this month, of the Tempest. “It’s nice to do Shakespeare for the screen, saying those lines for the camera instead of having to be all bombastic in a theatre.”
Earlier this year the RSC had young actors enact a bizarre six-week-long dramatisation of Romeo and Juliet via Twitter. It would not, alas, have been Cumming’s cup of tea. “I’m not a Tweeter,” he says. “I really don’t think it’s a good thing that people should be sitting commenting on the present at the expense of experiencing the present.” For his own edification he hopes to find the time to write longer dispatches. “I’d like to write a book about things that have happened to me and where I’m from and my life’s course. Not ‘I was born and brought up, blah blah blah’, more short stories about experiences I’ve had.” For this restless, boyish man, the experience, it seems, is all.
Wojtek the soldier bear
This article appeared in The Times
THE common wisdom about bears is that they are best left alone, unless they are Gentle Ben or of the stuffed variety. That policy was disregarded, to propitious effect, however, in the case of a Syrian brown bear befriended by Polish soldiers in 1942, and about whose remarkable life there is currently an exhibition running at London’s Sikorski Polish Institute.
Wojtek – the handle he was given by the Polish Second Corps, an army formed by Poles newly released from Soviet internment camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan after Hitler declared war on Stalin – was an orphaned cub when he was acquired from a boy in Hamadan, Iran, in exchange for a few tins of meat.
His only comrades being human, he grew to be the most human of bears: he was adopted by Artillery Supply Command as the Poles joined British forces fighting Rommel in the desert, lived with the other men in their tents and was taught to salute when greeted. By 1944 he had an official rank and number, and in Italy, at Monte Cassino, he carried live shells and artillery from truck to gun emplacement unfazed by the explosions going on around his fuzzy ears. He was even given rations – honey, cigarettes and beer. Of the latter, he drank two bottles daily, while his party trick involved swallowing lit cigarettes and exhaling the smoke.
The Sikorski exhibition has been curated by Krystyna Ivell. Her father, an officer, was shot by the Soviets at Katyn in 1939. Her mother would spend the latter part of the war working for the Polish government-in-exile’s Secret Bureau, alongside Menachem Begin, but when she and her daughter were released from a Siberian camp in 1941, they crossed the Caspian Sea and found themselves well within the compass of the Wojtek legend.
“I never met him but I followed him as a child,” says Ivell, who has told Wojtek’s story with archive film footage, stills and cuttings. “The exhibition is for my own satisfaction. For Poles under Communism, they weren’t allowed to know this history, so it’s an accessible route through Wojtek to a bit of history – the film we have made has children glued to it.”
She adds: “Wojtek is not a cuddly toy or a cartoon character. He was essential to the soldiers; he kept their sanity in a way. They gave him their love and attention and he returned it in spades.”
By the end of the war, Wojtek and his company were living on a farm in Berwickshire. When the soldiers were demobbed in 1947, he was taken in by Edinburgh Zoo, where he died in 1963. When his old mates visited they would frequently climb over the fence and hug him, much to the consternation of the zookeepers. Now, Edinburgh City Council plans to erect a statue of him. Whether he’ll be smoking remains to be seen.
This article appeared in The Times
A king for our times
This article appeared in The Herald
There is always pressure to say something rude about Prince Charles. Just as mocking George Bush still guarantees the most witless of comics a captive audience, it is the surest way for journalists to get a readership on their side. But aside from the fact that our future monarch is a very opinionated man and therefore capable of antagonising the majority of his merciful subjects on some matter or other, it must be allowed that he does possess that distinctly royal ability to lead by example.
It would seem that the era of obscenely cheap clothing is currently threatened. Sure, there may yet be vast armies of the malnourished lining up to work an 80-hour week for the kind of money you or I might grudgingly give a work-mate for running the marathon, all so that people in wealthier countries can go to a discount store and buy a pair of jeans for three quid. However, increases in VAT and shipping costs, coupled with a weaker pound, mean that clothing and footwear prices have started rising for the first time in 18 years. And with “fair trade” clothes gaining in popularity, the worm may be turning.
This is where old Chas comes in. Not only has he taken a moment from muttering on about Gaia to tell readers of American Vogue that they should go back to wearing wool and eschew the kind of throwaway garments which invariably end up in landfill sites, he has even donated some of his own corduroy trousers to Oxfam.
Happy the man who alights on said trousers. Charles was named World’s Best Dressed Man by Esquire magazine earlier this year, and not without good reason. Here is a man who cares not a jot for fads – his double-breasted suits, his dandyish waistcoats, his fogeyish Oxford lace-ups, all are “investment” pieces, which can be worn for decades on end and repaired as and when necessary. Charles’ attire has never been out of fashion, because it was never really in fashion.
Admittedly it is women who have driven this mania for more and more clothes, gripped as many of them appear to be by the mistaken belief that owning as many pairs of shoes, regardless of quality, as Carrie from Sex and the City will make them more desirable.
But one cannot expect the Prince to make this point. His mother and 50% of his future subjects are women, and he has martyred himself enough.
The crying game
This article appeared in The Herald
There was, apparently, more crying on The X Factor this week. Quite a spectacle: Cheryl Cole, a former winner on the programme, and a young woman named Cher Lloyd – who has “got through” – keening away together like a pair of infant marmoset monkeys. In other news, there will be tax hikes due at some point.
Crying is like a form of punctuation on television nowadays. People cry if they win something, or if they don’t, or if they come last. They cry if they like the fuchsia the makeover team has done their living room up in, or if they hate it. They cry for no rhyme or reason, and to show that they are capable of it.
It is the same in sport. You may very well have seen the Spanish goalkeeper crying when his team scored during the World Cup final and satisfied yourself with the explanation that he is Latin. But the fact is our own athletes currently in Delhi for the Commonwealth Games will have put the drainage system there under considerable duress before they leave.
Tears are, in short, all the rage. It may be that the death of Princess Diana started everyone off by divorcing embarrassment from emotional incontinence, but the New Labour years were marinated in the latter, as is evident in the torrent of memoirs they spawned. Even as early as 2000, Andrew Rawnsley, in one of his many books, was telling us about a Downing Street weepathon after Peter Mandelson’s first resignation: “[Alastair] Campbell, himself blubbing, gave Mandelson a hug.”
No doubt it can be argued that tears are a sign of one’s emotional intelligence, or that the old stiff upper lip approach lacks a certain humanity. But there is a difference between real tears of sorrow and tears at some check to one’s ambitions, which are merely childish.
Churchill, it is said, frequently shed tears in public but, then, a combination of war war and strong drink is perhaps likely to have that effect. I have otherwise always held it to be an article of faith that, whatever their other failings, Conservatives do not cry at trifles. When others around her snivel and sob, therefore, I would expect Ann Widdecombe, who is currently appearing on television’s Strictly Come Dancing, to maintain her sangfroid and simply look bewildered. But we shall see. Perhaps she will agree to serve one of Ken Clarke’s community sentences if she fails.
kenny hodgart 