Joni's starry nights

I'm pleased to see that Joni Mitchell has been given a major biography, written by New Zealander Karen O'Brien.  I haven't read the book but I hope the singer was cooperative, though it wouldn't be any surprise if she wasn't.  She would have every right to say that she had already written her autobiography over the last thirty years or so, in the lyrics to her songs.  In my opinion its a far better piece of literature than Dylan's equally long-winded chronicle of himself..

Received wisdom among people who haven’t really followed her career is that her masterpiece was the album BLUE, a contemporary snapshot of the Woodstock generation, but Mitchell moved on smartly from there.  In  COURT AND SPARK, songs about David Crosby gave way to ones about David Geffen.  It seems to me that these have stood the test of time better.   Crosby's world has gone whereas the world of Geffen is still with us.  The squeaky hippie yodelling of  Mitchells first and only number one single Big Yellow Taxi,  mellowed into a  heavy smoker's silvery purring.

 The album after COURT AND SPARK  was even better, the one after that better still and so on, until jazz, like a drug that helps at first, suffocated her creative life.   But then she got over it.  I remember reading a review of one of her nineties records which said: this is probably the best seventeenth album ever.  That is the truly great thing about Mitchell.  She got to number seventeen and kept on going. And, overall, she has continued to get better.

Her emotional life was never easy.  Fascination turned quickly to litigation.  On the album HEJIRA she sings about a strange boy

weaving a course of grace and havoc

on a yellow skateboard

through midday sidewalk traffic

A few albums later the strange boy, or someone very like him, is sueing her for everything she's got.  She hisses at him

You'd eat your young alive

For a Jaguar in the drive

When she writes like that I, for one, can forgive her the occasion when she rhymed years  with mirrors.

Her nearest and dearest counselled her to give up these debilitating entaglements, become an environmental campaigner, get into  charity.  And for a while, she did.  But Mitchell is too much the artist for all that. Misery is her  meat and drink.

There's a wide world of noble causes, and lonely landscapes to discover -  the thirty-year- old millionaire sang.   But all I wanna do right now is find another lover.  

 Mitchell is an inveterate traveller,  the original lonely planet.  But she doesn't go on the road,  like other Americans of her generation.   She goes on hejira,  takes flight, like Mohammed from the enemies of true religion.  HEJIRA ends with a meditation on the smallness of human life.

In a highway service station, over the month of June

was a photograph of the earth taken coming back from the moon

and you couldn't see a city, on that marble bowling ball

or a forest or a highway

or me here, least of all.

The humility  seems  absolutely false.  It somehow leaves me with the feeling that if I was up in a spaceship, looking  at the earth, I would see the singer's face moving across the oceans and continents.  

But who would have thought that, so late in the day, anyone would have found new life in the rhyme of moon and June.  The album is an essential item in anyone's collection.

 Her egoism is part and parcel of  Mitchell's over-weening self-proclaimed but under-recognised genius, like the curiously awful paintings that she inflicts on us through her album covers.   She has said that she regards painting as her true vocation - such perversity could well be a hallmark of genius.  Music to her is a base trade that she engages in with reluctance. Surveying her brushwork, one can only thank God for the demise of the fold-out LP sleeve. 

 Yet who would be without the self-portrait of Joni as Van Gogh, complete with bandaged ear, on the cover of her '94 album TURBULENT INDIGO - after HEJIRA, her best work to date?

As she sails into grumpy old age  the fascination and love of life are still there, but in Joni's California, the forces of revenge are on the rise.

lawyers haven't been this popular since Robespierre slaughtered half of France

In some of the most beautiful lines she has written, she laments her own beauty.

 Once I was blessed,  I was awaited like the rain

like eyes for the blind,  like feet for the lame

Kings heard my words, and they sought out my company

but now the janitors of Shadowland flick their brooms at me.

These lines are from Job's Sad Song, in which Joni, without a blush, compares herself to God's most long-suffering victim.   Squarely confronting her creator/tormentor, she demands to know

What have I done to you

that you make everything I dread

and everything I fear

come true?

Let's hope that, before it all comes true, she can find the acceptance that earned Job his immortality.

Beware the posthumous death-bed conversion

The Last Word

'Girls, there are no atheists in foxholes,' a form mistress of my cousin used to say, in what I  imagine was a Jean Brodieish voice, at a Presbyterian school  in New Zealand in the dark 1960s.  Even then, when family church going was largely a thing of the past,  vestiges of instruction lurked in the classroom.  Many decades later, the shells are whistling over the heads of the baby boomers.  My cousin,  as the great Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci is said to have done, has returned to the faith of her childhood.

  But we are not interested in people who, as the reaper enters the room, make some small adjustment, plump for Rome instead of Canterbury,  Allah instead of Christ,  Catholicism instead of Communism.  The evidence of the polls is clear and consistent.  65% of respondents answered 'No' to the question 'Are you religious?' when asked by Yougov in March this year.  An ICM poll in 2006 put it at 63% and it was 65% among young people surveyed by the Department of Education in 2004.  The lowest figure for people claiming to have no religion whatsoever,  the British Social attitudes survey, still puts it at over fifty percent.

In 2007 ipsos Mori, with terrifying directness, asked respondents to agree or disagree with the statement. 'This life is the only one we have and death is the end of our personal existence.'   Even put like that, 41% of  us stuck to our irreligious guns.  

Given these figures, it's reasonable to assume that most of us, these days, die what used to be called 'the philosopher's death'.  That is, we are all card-carrying Stoics.   But are we?   The very term 'philosophers death,' suggests it's hard, a state of mind arrived at by long thought,  difficult to maintain in the face of our instincts.

Sitting by the beds of our lifelong companions in doubt,  who would begrudge them a little back-sliding at the end?  After all, it is they who are entering the tunnel, not us.  Who is to say that the light they see is only the side-effect of the morphine?  Or even that they are in a tunnel at all.  They may be climbing a tree or crossing a sea or riding  a jewelled turtle's back or the back of a shining sheep.  The decline in formal religion has had the paradoxical effect of opening up infinite possibilities for the details of the  death-bed get out clause.   We are not  people who convert from one branch of belief to another.  We are  people who believe in nothing,  but that's not the problem. 

The problem has been described by Iranian writer  Jalal al Ahmad, talking about the 'Weststruck' man, who ' not only believes in nothing, he does not actively disbelieve in anything.'   The problem is that the  65% of us who have no religion are not actually atheists.  To use Al Ahmad's term, we are time-servers.  But time runs out. 

All our lives we are happy believing nothing,  then suddenly at the end we feel an urgent need to believe in something, or as G.K. Chesterton sagely predicted,  ANYTHING.  If you think you will be different, you had better get ready to  make it plain.  Otherwise some well-meaning friend or relative, anxious for your soul,  will sign you up to this or that celestial cause afer you're gone.

  Who in their right mind, would believe that story about Gramsci?  Yet it's out there for whoever wants to sully to his memory, admittedly only on a Hypermedia page with a health warning attached.   But the strange symbiosis of Catholicism and Communism makes it not totally  implausible... if it was anyone but the stoutly secular Gramsci. 

Charles Darwin was accused of death-bed conversion by  a nosy neighbour,  appositely named Lady Hope, who told an American Baptist newspaper that the scientist had said he was 'eagerly savouring the heavenly anticipation of bliss,' as she sat at his bedside.   Darwin's son refuted the story, declaring that Hope was never anywhere near the room where his father died.  But the legend persists – mainly in America of course, where  bold hunters chase the biggest game.  Richard Dawkins,  Christopher Hitchens, beware.  Diligent gardeners of the inquisition always find the  seeds of belief, holy detectives spot salvation's  smoking gun.  

Seventeen hundred years ago, Constantine The Great set the model for the death-bed conversion, though it should be noted he had  accepted the truth of Christianity  decades earlier.    The clever Christians  promised him a lovely heaven,  but Constantine knew that actually living a Christian life wouldn't  be as much fun as staying a pagan,so he put it off until just before he drew his last breath. 

 My cynicism is crude.   I apologise to followers of the saintly emperor.  I am only reacting to the equally ruthless tactics of the opposition whenever they see a chance to claim that someone has recanted the  wisdom of a lifetime.  To be fair, some famous sceptics have left the door  of posthumous misrepresentation wide open.

 Oscar Wilde's love of display and artifice has been an obstacle to anyone wishing to defend him from the charge that 'he went over Rome,'  when he was dying in Paris. We can only feebly plead his love of mischief. 

Jean Paul Sartre, disciple of the deicidal Nietzsche, wobbled dangerously close to embracing Judaism in his last interviews, having already weakened himself with an earlier  period of slavish devotion to the cult of Stalin.   The briefest investigation of the great existentialist, however, makes it plain that his interest in messianic religion  arose from a feeling that he himself was the one we've all been waiting for. 

Another French titan, Voltaire,  showed similar endearing pretentions when a priest implored him to renounce Satan and turn to God before he died: 'Now is no time to be making new enemies,'  Voltaire replied.

Do you, good sceptic, think you have the strength to face the philosopher's death, to make an enemy  of both God AND Satan? 

Or are you of the opinion that Yoda's happy departure, in THE RETURN OF THE JEDI, rested in the sure and certain hope that his essence would be absorbed back  into  The Force?

Utopia of a Chinese masseur

The best way to get to know a strange city is to be tracking down  something odd.  An actor who tours with British Council shows told me the first thing he does in a foreign country is visit the law courts; you can tell so much  from the way they treat their criminals.  Artisan craftmen, legendary restaurants,  churches and temples; these things are fine if they are dying out or very hard to find.   More appealing are the travels of a Vanity Fair writer who went all over Asia in search of a colonial era opium den.  My modest interest in men's bath houses has taken me down some very queer streets, always starting, if I am anywhere east of the 120^th parallel, with a visit to  Utopia.  (www.utopia-asia.com)

The first thing Utopia tells you about any Chinese city is its population, then, using a rule of averages,   'that means about 200,000 Utopians,'  in the case of Nanjing - a wonderfully encouraging statistic given that, at first glance, it's very hard to see where they are.  After an hour stumbling under  Ming  walls I found Red Bar  ( Beijing East Rd) where the students call themselves comrades, not because they share any values with the elderly Party  bosses who are the only other Chinese  still using the word .  This new definition orginated in Hong Kong, in 1989, when gay students appropriated  the word comrade to signal a new solidarity. 

Apart from some desultory dancing, the scene is much like any  bar – groups of males  drinking at tables until the entire surface is covered by a wasteful forest of green glass, so low is the alcohol content of each bottle.   Across town, near the Confucian temple,  I was confronted by a hangar-sized roller door covering the entrance to a bar called Zhongtian Yu Le Gong  ( Piang Jiang Fu Rd).  A hatch opened in the rippled iron, revealing  a warm glow; I stepped through and made my way down a concrete ramp.  After a few minutes of staring, a drinker from one of the tables came over to mine.  'Gay ma?'  he asked.  I nodded, we reached a linguistic impasse, he walked away.

Nearby Shengzhou Road is a wide avenue of arching planes planted by the French after the city's defeat in the Second Opium War.  Here I found what I was looking for – a motorcycle repair shop.  'Go through it,'  Utopia advised,  'the entrance is behind the bikes.'  A flophouse worthy of Old New Orleans, wailing saxes and Tennessee Williams sighs.  A bored masseur with slapping slippers collected me from the shower and locked us in a room where, over half an hour, he found out more about me than my mother learned in forty years.  We exchanged hardly a word , but afterwards he described the whole thing in detail to the other masseurs - at least that's what I assumed  from the gales of laughter in the locker room.  (This place has vanished from the Utopia listings.  Bibochi,135 Shengzhou Road, is better.)

Work-weary Beijingers are pampered in the early evenings at luxurious spas (Batiya, nr Chongwenmen Station)  There is cleanliness and elegance and attentive staff who charge like wounded geishas.   Only I could  manage to upset the decorum; a moon-faced masseur felt obliged to make a scene when he found me dressing without taking a final shower –  either he risked banishment for failing to raise a sweat or he was genuinely outraged by my grubbiness.  I tapped my watch and tried to explain that enjoying  time with him had made me late for dinner with some relatives who thought I was sightseeing at the Drum Tower.

In Shanghai, there is so much English and so many British people that if you are reading this you probably know someone who can give you a first hand account.  Its small gay quarter  grows like a buried seed in the heart of the old French quarter.    Studio 2006 (1639 Hua Shan Rd) is a friendly sauna in a quiet residential compound.  Utopia advises visitors to 'look for the big green sign on the bomb shelter and please be very discreet.'

 Suzhou  is dangerously close to the spreading grey tumour of the metropolis.  The 'Venice of the East,' has lost many canals. but the  gardens that inspired willow pattern plates are  protected by UNESCO.   Down an alley opposite the Bank of Communications is Hai Xing sauna (499 Zhu Hui Road).  I arrived at ten and was one of the last  admitted.  The format of these places is always the same: a few dozen men  spend the night in a big dim room with long rows of mattresses; they lounge around chatting and  watching sport or action movies on a giant screen then snuggle up to sleep and get up early to go to work.   

In the locker room I met a junior sales executive from a company that exports car parts.  From the whiteness of his teeth  and rich colour of his skin, he  looked more Burmese than Chinese –  but everything he said in his careful English expressed the  world view of the Han.   I persuaded him to forgo his sociable night and leave with me. 

Walking into the hotel, I was reminded of the wisdom that the communists could never quite undo.   Same sex relations, though much diminished, were not outlawed,  merely regarded as childish and irresponsible.  Current  policy remains The Three No's:  No approval, no disapproval, no promotion.  The receptionist, like a tolerant teacher, busied himself with his register as we passed. (Gusu Hotel,133 Xiangwang Road)  The  hours  in my room above the water were interrupted only by texts from the salesman's girlfriend.  'Soon I will marry her,'  he told me.

 'And still go to the bath house? ' I asked. 

 'Of course.  I will never stop going.'

''Does she know that you go?  Have you told her you are bisexual?'

He laughed and shook his head.  'There is no girl in China who could understand that.'

 Before we parted I presented him with a pirate DVD about the martyr of the early gay movement Harvey Milk,  hoping he could see past the terrible clothes to the message that seventies San Francisco is still sending out.  Lately he has been emailing that he wants to come to the UK but won't come unless he has a job, so if you are an importer looking for qualified Chinese personnel, please get in touch.  His name, most winningly, is Mao.