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Monday
Much discussion in my household this week about the possibility of hantavirus or Ebola becoming Covid-like in their spread. As darkening news from central Africa throws the withdrawal of US international aid into terrible relief, so we revisit memories of those early months of 2020 when reports of a strange virus in China slowly crept from final item on the news list to blaring emergency.
For anyone with kids finishing primary school, there’s a question as to what and how much about that time they’ll remember. My two, who are deep into the second world war as part of their year 6 history curriculum, like to speculate that when they’re 80 they’ll be subjects of what-did-you-do-in-the-blitz curiosity for having lived through the great pandemic of 2020. (I have to hold back from saying that 70 years from now, if Covid is still regarded as the worst thing to have happened to their generation, they’ll be extremely lucky.)
They were five when the first lockdown happened in New York and mainly remember it as a time of unlimited iPad time and sweets that resulted in one of them having two fillings before she was seven (the shame!). Six years later and they adopt a tone of fond, ancient mariner-like nostalgia, which on closer inspection involves no actual memories – not of an empty Broadway, nor the field hospital in Central Park, nor the sound of sirens echoing through the city. For me, meanwhile, strange memory glitches occasionally surface so that even this morning, as I left the house, I had a moment of patting myself down thinking I’d forgotten something; for a split second my brain provided me with the answer: “Damn, where’s my mask?”
Tuesday
We need to talk about John Travolta’s beret, which the 72-year-old director wore to the Cannes film festival this week and, when questioned, explained was a kind of cosplaying gesture to publicise his directorial debut, a one-hour film called Propeller One-Way Night Coach. “You’re an actor [playing] the part of a director, look like an old-school director,” he said, adding: “I looked up pictures from the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and the old-school directors wore berets, and the glasses. And I thought: ‘That’s what I’m doing. I’m doing an homage to being a director, so I’m going to play the part of being a director.’”
Bit odd, and it doesn’t explain the facial hair, which looked sprayed on and gave him a glancing similarity to the cancelled director James Toback. Still, Travolta is a legend, which buys him leverage for this kind of whimsy and seems obliquely connected to some of his other gestures over the years, like parking that Boeing 707 he bought outside his front door and sticking with Scientology.
Propeller One-Way Night Coach, meanwhile, sounds like the title of a novel written by Sean Penn and when you dig deeper, turns out to be an autobiographical piece based on Travolta’s memoir of his childhood. Critics have been strainingly nice (the Guardian’s three-star review described it as “sweet”), while Variety implied the greatest thing about the movie was the preroll featuring a montage of Travolta’s greatest film rolls, and the beret, advisedly or otherwise, stole the show.
Wednesday
I don’t think I’ve ever liked Rachel Reeves more than in this week’s footage of her fighting a powerful urge to tell some passing heckler to shove it up his back door then re-channelling that impulse in a more constructive direction. It was like watching media training happen in real time as the chancellor first ignored, then mildly admonished, then full on lost it in the direction of a man in a hi-vis vest shouting the words “Nigel Farage” at her while she tried to do a TV interview at a petrol station in Leeds.
Smiling with the tolerance of someone who has to interact with the public all the time, Reeves, it seemed to me, would like to have gone the full Shabana Mahmood and told the guy to “fuck right off”. Instead, as he went off at her about immigration and Englishness, she yelled at his retreating white van: “I love our country! I love our country!” and “one of the things about our country is good manners!”
This was painful to watch, like a person trying to suppress a sneeze, and, my god, she’s only human. Towards the end of the vignette, Reeves says, “it’s not very British” then does a manual override of what appears to be an adrenaline-charged malfunction in the smooth running of her persona and snaps: “Right. Very good. You can put that on the telly.”
Reclaiming basic civility as a tenet of Britishness was a smart save in the face of dire provocation, but, of course, she’d have gone up in the estimations of voters across the spectrum if she’d said what we were all thinking, which was: “Hey, incel, thanks for dropping by and good luck winning a woman’s attention without screaming and gesturing across a petrol forecourt.”
Thursday
To the Soho Theatre Walthamstow for the opening night of End of the Rainbow, the musical drama starring Jinkx Monsoon as Judy Garland – addled by addiction, but still Judy – in the last months of her life in London, and it’s a joyous evening with the best people present, including Mason Alexander Park, fresh off the West End stage in Oh, Mary, and a lot of very excited Garland super-fans. The play, by Peter Quilter, positions Garland cleverly between her horrendous fifth husband, Mickey Deans, and her loving, loyal piano player, Anthony, a fictional character written to encapsulate Garland’s meaning to the gay community and the limits to what it could do to protect her.
Monsoon, who twice won RuPaul’s Drag Race, is terrific in the role, and I thought I could see in her performance the influence of Garland in I Could Go On Singing, the 1963 film she made with Dirk Bogarde in which she played a lightly fictionalised version of herself, right down to her tardy appearance on stage at the Palladium when she had to win over a hostile audience. There’s a scene in that movie which Garland apparently extemporised – “I’ve hung on to every bit of rubbish there is to hang on to in life; and I’ve thrown all the good bits away. Now can you tell me why I’d do that?” – and the energy of which Monsoon inhabited with pitch-perfect attention to the keening intensity and unvanquished charm of an icon in the last years of her life. Bravo!
Friday
With 30C weather and a bank holiday coming down the pike, I feel the urge to introduce my kids to a bank holiday tradition in this country by buying train tickets, standing for two hours in a sweltering, unairconditioned carriage that has stopped for reasons unknown, dragging ourselves to a pebble beach and a freezing, iron grey sea that may or may nor contain E coli from waste overflow and struggling home again, sunburned but happy. There’s no place like home.
Digested week in pictures
English (US) ·