Websites That Should Exist

Catching up with a friend in Oxford over drinks, a moment of nostalgia for The West Wing led our thoughts by way of the fictional thingsthatarewrong.com (apparently debunking urban myths & bad science) to websites that are absolutely necessary yet so far unrealized. Here's what we came up with...

wheredidileaveit.com
Suggestions for the absent of mind.

doesntholdacandleto.com
A place that prepares you for disappointment with new work by Dylan, Bowie, The Stones, Neil Young, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Godard, Tarantino etc.

theyareouttogetme.com
A place for those on witness-protection programs.

aretheyabunnyboiler.com
User-generated content for all orientations and genders to vet potential dates.

idontrememberthatfreckle.com
A place for health reassurance.

youremymate.com
A social-networking site for drinkers.

ithoughttheyweredead.com
A compendium of public figures doing substantially less well of late.

didileavethegason.com
A place for the obsessive-compulsive.

aretheyreal.com
A place devoted to the aesthetics of plastic surgery.

William Hazlitt, Blogfather

It is all Hazlitt's doing. I realised this when walking through Soho after a lunchtime showing of Michael Moore's Sicko. I was in search of caffeine, and suitably fixed with a curiously orange/pink-cupped latte from the nearby Patisserie Valerie, I found myself in a contemplative mood at the north end of Frith Street. The effects of the healthcare polemic & invigorating beans had nicely left my synapses fizzing when I stumbled upon the one-time residence of the aforementioned radical journalist (currently a bijou hotel offering "intimate charm and old fashioned hospitality").

Now, I adore Hazlitt. His muscular prose and unabashed enthusiasm for both demotic and high culture is one of the few high points of English literature in the nineteenth-century (if you mention Wordsworth then I'm afraid that we really can't be friends). I never tire of reading his essays on Gusto, Indian Jugglers, walks in the country, boxing-matches, painting, sculpture, theatrical performances, common-sense, well-thought prejudices, even the sketches of contemporary figures from every conceivable field of life. And in a buttoned-up politically suspicious age, he was honest enough to map out his own revolutionary beliefs and romantic entanglements (a 4-volume work on Napoleon and the reputation-destroying Liber Amoris).

After a legendary encounter with Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the height of his powers in 1798, it probably could not have been any other way for him. Ingrained with a palpable sense of wonder, Hazlitt's writings also delight in the very pleasure of ordering and expressing that wonder. And so it was, hovering on that Soho pavement with a north-westerly wind whipping round my ears, it occurred to me that not only is Hazlitt the father of journalism in English, but he is the father of Web 2.0 as well. For when he wrote, 'Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets', he was actually articulating the very notion of blogging. I raised my cup on behalf of the capital's 48,000-plus blogger members and continued on my way.

It Was The Monkeys That Killed Him

You hear the oddest things on the Tube. In a moment of travel resignation, I was using the Northern Line the other day, sandwiched uncomfortably between a hygiene-challenged gentleman of the old school and a twenty-something Vladimir Putin lookalike who was convincing his female companion that he was now totally clean, when just after Charing Cross Road the pleasant seeming WAG-wannabe standing in front of me came out and said it. Given the circumstances, my interest was piqued (an escape from the grimly immediate physical surroundings of an impromptu staging of The Jeremy Kyle Show in which I had apparently found myself). And at first I really had no idea where the conversation with her almost identical friend was going as they clung on to the yellow pole in the central part of the carriage. The rattling, screeching and howling noise of the train combined with the odd 'No!' interrupted the flow and sense, but she was unfolding the story of the unfortunate deputy mayor of Delhi, SS Bajwa who has died of head injuries after a fall from a terrace during an attack by feral Rhesus Macaques. I had been away from newspapers, TV and the radio for a few days so this was all genuinely new to me.

Some hours later, the opportunity to go online revealed a more disturbing context for this peculiar vignette from the subcontinent. As well as being an unfortunate week for Mr Bajwa, who leaves behind a wife and child, it was really an unfortunate week for monkeys as a whole (exposure of monkey criminality aside). A new report from the International Primatological Society and Conservation International has listed 114 primate groups that are on the verge of extinction. Hunting and de-forestation, especially in Asia, are the primary causes for this dire situation. The Golden-Headed Langur, the Horton Plain's Slender Loris, and Miss Waldron's Red Colobus are all among the likely casualties. Even two of man's closest simian relatives, the Cross River Gorilla of Cameroon and the Sumatran Orang-Utang, make the top twenty-five list of endangered apes. Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International, outlined starkly the scale of this man-made catastrophe, 'You could fit all the surviving members of these twenty-five species in a single football stadium'. Despite the success of some conservation schemes, one of the report's authors, Eckhard Heymann, argued that the fundamental problems of habitat loss simply increase with each passing year. So, while we are drawn to the outlandish sad end of Mr Bajwa, let's also spare a thought for the plight of our distant relatives.

The Big Frieze

Well, it's October and the visual arts have customarily hit London with all the subtlety of an American of a certain age visiting a restaurant. Amid the gaucheness, intemperate language & noise of the various fairs, auctions, museum and commercial shows, it's the Frieze Art Fair that still reigns supreme after five years of operation. In spite of falling stock markets and the credit crunch, it is thriving as the most influential fair in terms of cultural and monetary prestige. While the commission of Richard Prince's hand-built gleaming yellow Dodge Charger provided uncomplicated pleasure, this year neon was obviously where it was at. From Tracey Emin's sold out 'hand-written' sculptures to Pierre Huyghe's more wittily astute piece of 'I Do Not Own 4' 33'. The carbon footprint for these artists must be more than a little dizzying. Perhaps Gianni Motti's yoga-practising policeman could have offered them stress relief. However, it was the Chapman Brothers who again provided the headline-grabbing wheeze, this time by providing 'free' art for attendees - defacing portraits of the Queen on whatever value sterling notes were presented to them, in a variety of typically intricate & horrific ways. Of course, they only actually did this on the preview day for the great and the good, the hip, the happening and the hedge-fund manager. Although self-proclaimed practitioners of 'bad art for bad people', Jake and Dinos undoubtedly know where their bread is buttered. Far more democratic and running for all five days of the Fair was Rob Pruitt's Flea-Market exhibited by Gavin Brown's Enterprise. Here a collective of artists organised by Pruitt (including Elizabeth Peyton and Peter Doig amongst others) showed all manner of found & fabricated ephemera from caustically defaced newspapers and celebrity magazines, vintage clothes, drawings, chocolate brownies, woollen sculpture, badges, TV remote controls, and even haircuts, or polaroids taken posed with Sam Taylor-Wood. The wittiest and waspish of these offerings were Jonathan Horowitz's 70s kitsch figurines declaring variously, 'Jihadists are People too', 'Junkies are People too', or more challengingly 'Guy Ritchie is a Person too'. In a year in which the dealers on the whole played corporately safe, Pruitt's daily-changing stand was constantly bustling and bright, bringing a much needed sense of joie de vivre.

As always it's not just the art that was fun to browse. The people were just as compelling, from an intense Dennis Hopper going undercover in tweed and flat-cap to a domestic Jarvis Cocker with his family. Two bright young things in regulation spiky haircuts, 80s jackets and Michael Caine glasses earnestly commented on how pretentious everyone was; while an ageing hipster crossed uncertainly between Jay Jopling and Joe Pasquale valiantly tried to control his more spontaneous designer-clothed offspring; and less established gallerists from Germany or Spain stood forlornly as the crowds resolutely ambled past towards the more recognisable names; at White Cube one client was even treated to his own impromptu show of various Gary Hume American Tan paintings. The air was heavy with aspiration, money & sometimes even art. And still it was the most fun you can have in a tent in Regent's Park.

A Jet Tone Production

Four words from the late nineties that laid out a thrilling paradigm of city life soaked in the neon-lit photography of Chris Doyle & a tantalisingly eclectic pop soundtrack. For me, the films of Wong Kar-Wai still represent those potential possibilities of urban living. And although I've yet to meet a hitman who's the object of unrequited passion, a cop so quite obsessed by tinned pineapple, or even a Chinese femme fatale in a blonde wig, I'm still holding out for such encounters. The city is where it happens. As Dylan Moran once said, it's just a much more likely place for conversation and cafes. Galleries, cinemas, theatres, museums and delicatessens too, come to that. That's not at all to say the countryside is bereft of meaning (it's sublime in Poussin's history paintings, the recent films of Zhang Yimou, and glimpsed fleetingly in dappled roseate sunlight through the dusty windows of a high-speed train), but all that implied hiking & shorts-wearing feels like a strange lack of imagination when you can have 37 types of falafel and browse insouciantly in a record shop. And when you can eat ice-cream with strangers in the wee small hours as The Cranberries pump out from a 24-hour cafe. Yes, those four words show the way it can be.