FAILURE
S01E13. Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.
PREVIOUSLY — Witch, the neo-gallerist friend, with the blessing of her husband Vampire, wants to turn BBH into the gallery’s next artist, pushing her to abandon performing in order to produce large collage-canvases for sale on the prestigious art market she’s entering. Between irony and surrender, BBH goes along with the plan while Better Than Luck stays silent. But over dinner with friends, Witch’s announcement provokes a clash with Great Mother who — with her bourgeois realism — accuses them both of nepotism, deceit and ridicule. The encounter becomes a dramatic laboratory on creation and authenticity; the atmosphere thickens with tension and turns into a micro-representation of the art world: glamorous, venomous, intellectual and hypocritical. BBH remains in the middle, wavering, while concealing the truth about her real project: writing HAPPY DREAM. The evening ends in strategic peace and a question for the audience: is BBH’s art a scam, a therapy, or simply a different way to tell a story?
I’d prepared something else to tell you, however the events just now have forced a change of plan. Full transparency: you won’t need to read to the end of the episode to extract any kind of useful moral, because I’ll give it to you straight away: I am a fucking idiot and anyone who, like me, feels eternally above tongue-twister clichés (see, for example: those who fail to plan, plan to fail) is, in all probability, a fucking idiot too. And neither Art nor Literature nor This Column will ever redeem me. Redeem us.
Anyway, you know the setting: Witch and Vampire’s sitting room, curved along the terrace; the Camaleonda sofas as islands; art on the walls; Sottsass vases spewing flowers (today: peach dahlias); perfumed candles atop stacks of Assouline tomes. And you know the dramatis personae: the actress in creative limbo (me); the neo-wedded, neo-gallerist couple couple I’m staying with (Witch and Vampire); the judgmental hipster graphic-designer friend (Devil); the artist on the rise (Monster), who’s awaiting my permission to betray his girlfriend; and — surprise twist — a new figure we’ll call Death (technically nothing new, we all know him from high school, but what do you know?).
Well, the evening did not begin with its usual charge. If you recall, the post-masked-party left some friction. After my gift-performance came Witch’s idea to transform me into her next protégé artist: remove the acting, the “meta” layer, from the aforementioned show and produce 100 artefacts (collages of obsessively repeated words or symbols) which she could exhibit and sell. In her view, it would give me an occupation that didn’t betray my promise never to perform again, while still resting on some form of creativity. Above all, she said, those repetitive collages are satisfying, honest, “necessary” works. Proud of her intuition, Witch pitched it to our friends as official news, triggering Great Mother’s insurrection, according to whom launching a nobody dabbling in text-art onto the contemporary art market would be unwise for a young gallerist such as Witch, and reinventing myself as an unconventional craftswoman at thirty-one hoping to get away with it would be ridiculous for me. Pretending to be what we aren’t (a veteran gallerist, an honest-to-God artist) would be self-destructive. In the moment (we were still at dinner passing eel nigiri and ikura) I patched things up: a witty line and we moved on to green-tea ice-cream and sake thimbles. Everyone (Vampire, Manticore, Werewolf, Monster, Nymph — well, not really Nymph) helped the evening proceed in a way that diverted attention from the triangle’s tension — me, Witch, Great Mother. The atmosphere was saved. Witch and Vampire’s living room continued to frame a cohesive company of interesting people, well dressed, with original things to say.
But the aftermath?
Witch got offended: she does everything for me and I don’t even defend myself.
Great Mother apologised, a gesture which authorised her to keep pressing her point.
Vampire spent days whistling and replying to every question I asked by repeating a single word.
Do you know the time, Vampire? It’s eight, eight, eight, eight, eight.
Manticore vanished: not that he truly belongs to the inner circle, but what hadn’t seemed an absence now is one.
Nymph is away and whocares. Even Monster didn’t show, but there he was last night, reappearing with that lowered gaze he reserves for me, like when I used to answer NO to those “Will you go out with me?” notes and, despite the disappointment, he kept loving me.
ONE MOMENT, THOUGH — Before we continue, it must be said that here BBH dodges a confession: if the pre-party and pre-performance had given her both an occupation and the sense she could protect her writing, the after-party — with the clamour of others’ opinions on what she should or shouldn’t do, who she should or shouldn’t be — left her literally defenceless. No direction, no role and, above all, no alibi. And again: late mornings, idle evenings, pirouettes to swallow the painful awareness of not knowing what to do with herself.
After dinner (Indian takeaway — naan, biryani, samosas, tandoori — re-re-plated into metal bowls as — Witch’s words — in the gardens of Jaipur) we sat, under-inspired, running our hands over the sofa velvet. Monster had already said five or seven times that he couldn’t stay late because at dawn he had to go to the airport to pick up Nymph. He slithered between the Camaleonda and the low tables, dodged vases, dahlias and status symbols, then returned to the lit bookcase, ran his finger along the spines (Bacon, Beecroft, Bourdin, Brunelleschi), unable to settle. Resting a hand on Devil’s shoulder, he even announced at one point, raising his voice with deliberate clarity, how pleased he was that Nymph was coming back: he didn’t believe in long-distance relationships and yet. He had missed Nymph these days. Devil, legs crossed on the Campana brothers’ armchair, leafed through a vintage Moholy-Nagy publication, sharpening his beard into a villain’s point, eyes fixed on Bauhaus conceptualism, limited himself to arching his right eyebrow to a sharp peak.
Meanwhile Vampire was fixing a round of gin and tonics at the bar cabinet and Witch, when Monster downed his in one gulp, chewing the cucumber, rolled her eyes at me: the first conspiratorial gesture in my favour for days. Monster might easily have seen it, had he not been busy declaiming that in this period when his reality (Monster’s reality) is turning upside down for the better (the show sold out), it was important not to get confused and not to lose sight of (he’s buying a house, changing studio, planning trips, considering a PA for heaven’s sake), not to lose sight of the fact that what matters is the heart. About at the mention of the word heart — or perhaps at the implicit request for another gin — the intercom sounded; my breath froze with hope/terror that it was Manticore, but instead Death arrived (a surprise to all, except Vampire, who had invited him).
His entrance consisted of loudly complimenting the hosts on the museum-grade works and the curry smell, a greeting of faux respect to “Mr Lucifer”, and, after asking Monster where that total piece of ass of a girlfriend was, hastening to dip me in a theatrical bend and plant a long, stagey, non-consensual but permitted kiss on my mouth.
BY ALL MEANS — Criticise Death: his selfish, legible chaos; the intrusive kiss; the structural emptiness; the sinister flavour he imposed. But what about the coherence of one who knows how to remain so faithful to his own persona? Just like Death: the kind of man who amazes by never being intimidated, who promises without delivering, all sound and fury, signifying nothing but his own harmless, placid hypocrisy. Is BBH any different? Doesn’t she, too, use performance as a shield?
What Death should start doing, Monster immediately suggested, is grow up — begin, for instance, by pruning the machismo from his quips: does he even know that besides being very beautiful (upgrade from that total piece of ass) Nymph is also very mature for her age? Vampire turned up the speakers, perhaps tired of Monster, perhaps uninterested in a hypothetical redemption arc for Death, and reprised barman duties. Small reminder before the next round: Monster wouldn’t drink too much because he had to drive to the airport, because Nymph was landing at dawn. He’d said so, hadn’t he?
On the sofas, sitting beside me, Death launched his time-worn flirt protocol, entertaining me this time with travel accounts: whenever some detail amused him (Frankfurt airport is ridiculous!), he placed his hand on my knee with a light pressure — a follow-up for the room, in case the territoriality of the stage-kiss had slipped anyone’s notice. I know, I know: whose attentions aren’t flattering? But believe me, when he tried to take my hand to enlist me in his Dubai rally I felt a moment of compassion for myself, a dense, menacing fatigue. How many topics concerning himself can Death produce every time we meet? How many plans of things to do together open up before us (I’ve never tasted Laal Maas? then Death must take me to Rajasthan!). Meanwhile Monster rubbed the hollow between his eyes and nose, and every so often checked his new Mickey-Mouse Rolex — a manifest frustration which, it seemed to me, rekindled Witch’s good humour.
AHEM — Is anyone noticing how Better Than Luck is entirely absent from this episode? Barring the opening thesis (the failure maxim she read right there), of course.
I won’t bore you with the dynamics of a thoroughly negligible evening, nor with the obvious pact between that devil Devil and that witch Witch to bet on whether Death or Monster would leave first, so I’ll tell you how it ended.
Death left first: in the future we’d do this and that, but during the evening he imploded, swallowed by his own confusion. What a pity to see his handsomeness standing in for his arguments — and what a melancholy pang for the novel I haven’t even written yet, in which caricatures like Death would be the mirror of my talent.
As the sky began to pale, Vampire and Witch went to bed, and Devil — out of sheer spite or out of an obvious pact with Witch — showed no sign of fatigue until Nymph was officially over our heads and Monster truly had to go. I walked Monster to the door. He murmured goodnight, then hesitated as he stepped back. Then he drew close. He braced one fist on the jamb, the other behind his back, and bent towards me: “I don’t think you should remove the performance from the collage-canvases,” he murmured. “I mean, I think [Witch] had a real intuition — your canvases are very powerful. But the advice to strip the ‘meta’ layer from the panels devalues them. I’m not saying imitate your friend — the red wig and so on — that wouldn’t work, I know, but you can’t omit that the works are a critique of themselves, and that layer shouldn’t be missing. And you shouldn’t give up making them just because [Great Mother] sleeps little and is a bit jealous that you and [Witch] live together.”
I’d thought Death’s kiss had riled him. I’d thought Nymph’s arrival had hardened him. Every time I’m beside him I’m so convinced of being desired that the idea Monster might actually have opinions about me had never crossed my mind.
“Thank you,” I blurted — thank you for what? For caring about my occupation? “I’ll think about it,” I added.
“Yes,” he said. “So will I.”
And he drew closer still, slipped the chewing gum from his mouth, parted my lips and offered it to me like a hallucinogen.
“Laal Maas tastes like dead goat,” he whispered.
Then he pressed his thumb to my chin to ensure my jaw closed, stroked my cheek and left.
AGAIN? — Another chewing-gum exchange? It seems everyone is planning what to do except our heroine. But who’d have thought that Monster, silent catalyst, would answer repressed jealousy with such intellectual tenderness?
In the sitting room Devil chuckled: “What a loser, the artist of the moment.”
“Aren’t you sleepy?” I replied.
“You’re such an idiot,” Devil said, hugging me, and left.
I leaned in to snuff the remaining Diptyque candles — Baies and something burnt. I felt drained and yet too awake to sleep, too sorry for the time and opportunities gone and lost forever; so here we are, now.
Soon it’ll be already Baby’s fisrt birthday. But what’s that got to do with anything? Sorry — an involuntary overspill of stream of consciousness. Remember how I said (and said again) that without a cover it’s too hard to write HAPPY DREAM? See, I always believed the only ally worth fidelity was luck. And now a manual wants to teach me that the world works precisely the other way round: consistency is worth more than excitement; commitment has more power than stardust.
Look, Witch is an experimental gallerist, I’m a performer. If I want to plan HAPPY DREAM, I need an official occupation or the alibi is lost: and why not a meta-show — the show of imitating a show? I could perform the role of The Artist, with the entire space dressed in the “art-like” artefacts I produce as my scenography, while Witch, submitting to the critical imitative act of her own role, could interpret the other face of creativity in its purity: business.
Found it: the compromise to pretend without lying!
The work is the performance of the performance!
It’s morning and I’d wish you goodnight now: the sitting room is mute, my conscience intact.
But there it is again, that itch in the soul, that tenderness of thought. What’s the problem? What am I complaining about? That I am perhaps a character without an arc, who wanted to change and didn’t manage it?
Until next week, HAPPIDREAMERS,
— BBH
