Hypocrite Minimalist

This was written for New Escapologist‘s now-defunct Patreon situation in 2020. It was part of a show-and-tell series called Hypocrite Minimalist.

Object Number 4 in our inventory is a velvet jacket.

In 2016, I was friendly with the performance artist Diane Torr.

She’s associated with New York but was Scottish and lived around the corner from me in Glasgow. I think we’d have become great friends but she died in 2017 before we properly got to know each other.

Friend Laura took me quite insistently to one of Diane’s performances at the Buzzcut festival. She must have known I’d be impressed because I was blown away.

Diane was a drag king. She was very funny and clever and had the power to move us with her stories and ideas.

On top of the concept of the drag king, a theme of that Buzzcut performance was “loss.” One of the show’s set pieces involved us (the audience) writing down the names of people who had died and then incinerating them one at a time in a burning pestle as a way to “let go.” My Nan had recently died but I wasn’t quite ready to incinerate her name, so I wrote “Olive,” the name of an elderly neighbour who was the first person I could remember dying.

(I remember thinking that, should I ever do a show about Minimalism, part of the show could be a “wanton destruction ceremony” where people could “let go” of a physical thing by destroying it with me on stage).

Later the same day, my pals and I were hanging out at a festival-adjacent art installation. We were gathered inside a tent, listening to strange recorded sounds being piped out of hanging speakers. Such was contemporary art in 2016. Don’t ask me how, but I recognised the sounds as the magnetic field oscillations of a comet that had recently passed through the solar system. I did so!

I’d already spotted that Diane was in the room, drinking wine from a paper cup, but suddenly she was with our group inside the tent, just as I was murping on about the comet. She accused me of mansplaining! But is it really mansplaining, I asked, if the only person who knows a thing happens to be male?

She launched into an analysis of my body language and vocal tics and how the women in the group had looked to me for validation on what they were saying. Needless to say, this was very entertaining, even flattering, to me as someone who has never felt particularly macho. I could be an arsehole with the best of them!

And it wasn’t just anyone telling me this: it was Diane Torr, who’d studied the bottom-line minutia of masculine behaviour in the interests of performative realness. I was a tad smitten. I think everyone knew it.

“So where are we going now?” asked Diane.

“Well,” I said, “we were thinking of going to an experimental music thing at the City Halls.”

Our friends Graeme and Sven were scheduled to floss the strings of an exploded piano with lengths of horsehair.

“Excellent,” said Diane, “that’s just what we should do!” and she went off to get her purse.

And that’s how we met.

When Diane died, an email from her daughter went around to say there’d be a “giveaway” at Diane’s flat. We could all go along and take something from her collection of drag clothing to remember her by. Friend Neil had already been along and was now walking around the Merchant City in a pair of Diane’s pink Doctor Martens. Dead “man’s” shoes, as it were.

One could talk here about Tsukumogami (how, in Japanese folklore, frequently-used objects develop souls) or atom exchange (how, in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, a copper rides his bicycle so much as to gradually become one with it) or how The Velveteen Rabbit only becomes “real” when he has been loved by his human boy, or “uniquely bereaved objects” — a phrase I picked up from Nina Conti’s film about what happens to ventriloquist’s dummies when the ventriloquist dies.

I couldn’t imagine there’d be anything for me in Diane’s wardrobe. She was a little potato while I look like something you’d grow sunflowers against.

But there was this jacket.

“I think it was made for you,” said Diane’s daughter.

It was hard to deny. I can’t imagine Diane ever wore the jacket on stage: I can’t see it fitting her. But maybe it did once? Or maybe it had been worn by a double-act partner or something? Who knows. It fits me perfectly. Better even than a lot of jackets I’ve bought for myself.

I wear the when I’m feeling a bit theatrical and confident enough to shut down any unwanted attention. It’s good for that because, thanks to Tsukumogami or something like it, I can channel Diane and her total understanding of masculinity and knock any heckler into the ground like a tent peg.

I wore it yesterday. Not a single person commented on it. Bastards.

You can see me wearing the jacket Max Crawford’s photography in this 2022 interview.

I also wear it in the interview segments of Melt It! The Film of the Iceman.

This was written for New Escapologist‘s now-defunct Patreon situation in 2020. It was part of a show-and-tell series called Hypocrite Minimalist.

Object Number 3 in our inventory is my Kubrick Box. All will be explained. I have written a thousand words here about a cardboard box. No, it’s you who is weird.

Sixteen years ago, I sat in an office canteen on my lunch break and read a story by Jon Ronson in the Guardian. Pre- smartphone ubiquity, the paper was in print and my eyes were on stalks.

Ronson told the story of how he’d visited the English estate of Stanley Kubrick after his death and been confronted by boxes and boxes and boxes.

“There are boxes everywhere,” wrote Jon Ronson, “shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen portable cabins, each packed with boxes.”

Kubrick, famously obsessive, had kept almost everything from his life in film.

As well as being a Kubrick fan, I also had a slightly complicated relationship with stuff. By 2003, I already had a tendency towards Minimalism but this had come after an early life of collecting things. I still liked material objects, especially when they were archived or organised in some fussy and logical way. I loved (and still love) libraries, museums, storehouses and collections, so long as I don’t have to own them myself, and I admired Kubrick’s demented, almost religious, maximalism.

A few years passed and I escaped office life. In a bookshop in New York, I picked up a collection of Jon Ronson’s journalism. I wondered if the Kubrick article had made the cut. It had. So I read it again. I bought the book and took to reading the Kubrick piece every so often. I found it soothing. All that nicely-organised cardboard. Ah, lovely.

When I told someone this, they looked at me askance and said, “do you mean the film about Stanley Kubrick’s boxes?” A film? Well, no it was in the newspaper ages ago. But it turned out Ronson had made a film about it in the meantime.

In the film, there’s picture after picture of the boxes. Some of them are opened in what is essentially a really good unboxing video. At the end, the boxes are shown being taken away to the University of the Arts London. I was a bit sad to see this, preferring to think of the boxes in their original home, but at least you can go and look at the boxes now if you want to, without even having to be Jon Ronson.

A filmmaker friend AJ (Hi, AJ!) went to see the archive a few years ago and there’s a Taschen book about it too, full of photographs.

Ronson says in his film that he’d been looking for a “rosebud” in the boxes but that, actually, the boxes themselves were the key to Kubrick’s character. Apparently, Kubrick hadn’t been willing to settle for the standard archive box you can buy from stationery stores (though it’s on record that he loved commercial stationery from his local Rymans) and went to the lengths of commissioning the perfect archive box from a box manufacturer.

There’s a memo from the box maker in the archive with a note about the “fussy customer” who wants the lid to slide off without a struggle but not to fall off by chance. Also on that memo was the name of the box company: G. Ryder and Co.

I wonder if they’re still in business, I thought one day. I Googled. They are. I called them, a man picked up the phone, and I asked if he could make me a box exactly to Stanley Kubrick’s specifications. He laughed at me.

“I’m researching a book about Stanley Kubrick,” I lied.

“Well,” he said, we don’t normally take orders for a single box. We have to make a whole run of them.” And if they did that, he explained, it would cost thousands of pounds for loads of unwanted boxes.

“But since you’re working on a book,” he said, “I’ll do you a box for forty pounds.”

Forty pounds. After embracing and selling off all my CDs one by one, was I really going to spend forty actual quid on a cardboard box?

“Okay,” I said.

A couple of weeks later, the boxes arrived. Two of them! A steal at twenty quid apiece.

I now use them as, well, archive boxes. The box maker, meanwhile, now sells them as a featured product with a clip from Ronson’s film.

Showing my boxes off to Landis one night, (Landis being easily as fussy as Stanley Kubrick and didn’t think it was strange that I wanted to show him a cardboard box) we wondered if one day “a Kubrick” could be a standard measure of stuff.

People could say “yeah, I’ve got 736 Kubricks at home” or “did you know Bill Gates has an estimated three-million Kubricks spread over six different homes?” or “I have whittled my life down to three eminently-portable Kubricks.” It’s a lovely dream.

Inside a Kubrick: