This
first one isn't really something I've made, at least not in the most
literal interpretation of the words. It's a poem by Harry Giles, and
he wrote it for me in return for me starting to give him money viaPatreon. I'd been meaning to do so since he emailed me about this
“scary money experiment thing” in February 2015: I love him,
despite having very little contact with him, and think he's all good
things in the world, so of course I want to support him. And yet, it
wasn't until January 2016 that I actually made that support
financial. I still feel weird that there is now this financial
element to our relationship.
At
the time, Harry wrote an excellent post laying out his own arguments
for and against asking for patronage, which I found really helpful.
Like him, I worry that “it’s so clearly all a part of the
neoliberalisation of arts funding: the expectation that artists have
to become solo entrepreneurs” – and, the correlative of that, the
expectation that art is something to be funded by its consumers, and
not in common, as a basic provision of healthy civil society. More
positively, like him, “I like making it clear that art is not
something that just happens, is not something that other people
decide to make happen, but rather something that we all have a stake
in making happen, and in making happen in more radical ways.”
In
an email, I admitted to him that the relationship between giving on
Patreon and giving to registered charities confuses me. In a
nutshell: “if I give £5 a month to Shelter and that's to help ALL
the homeless people in the UK then to give £2 or even £1 a month to
a single person so they can make art kind of doesn't add up; but
then, I can spend twice as much on a single ticket to go to the
theatre as I do on a monthly donation to Unicef which is supposed to
be helping ALL the children living in poverty and plight around the
world, and I could just as effectively give that ticket money to you
in £2 per month donations”. In the event, that's pretty much what
I decided to do.
The
thing that makes me most uncomfortable with Patreon is exclusivity:
the idea that, because I have some funds at my disposal, I can get
stuff that other people don't get. That's how capitalism divides
people and I want to resist it. But Harry's gift to all new patrons
is to write them a poem, on a subject of their choosing. I decided
that I was only happy for this to happen if it could be a poem that
we made publicly accessible, and he agreed, in an email that also
contained a gentle reminder that maybe the key problem of capitalism
isn't commerce but exploitation. The word that was stuck in my head
at the time was “longing” (it quite often is, to be honest), and
this is what it inspired Harry to write. I like to think that his
poem reflects the many conversations we've had together about class,
and capitalism, and togetherness, and making; that, although it isn't
something I've made, it has a specificity rooted in our relationship
that means I have, in some way, made it happen – and not just by
giving money.
THE
LONGING FOR ONE THING INSIDE OF ANOTHER
by Harry Giles
There
was a world where tokens were exchanged
for
food, and when a token met your hand
a
spur extended blandly into your palm
to
take a sip of blood. This payment kept
the
tokens bright enough to check your hair in,
cool
enough to glide from purse to purse.
And
in this world there were two friends who made
assemblages
of wood and steel: stairways,
sunshades,
simple things to see through, things
to
pause on, things to touch. They worked apart,
and
then from time to time they met to look
and
say, "This works", and say, "This doesn't work."
One
day one friend came with a gift, a question.
They
bought some time discussing techniques, and then
they
said, "I heard your purse was light. I saw
your
building shed was empty and your tools
were
sore for oil." And they held out their hand
with
sixteen hungry tokens free to take.
Now,
both these friends were just the kind of folk
to
argue far too hard about the way
things
are on other worlds, or could be, or were,
and
how to cross between them without snapping
painful
laws of space and time. At times,
they
held that wood and steel could build a bridge
to
where a body could eat without blood.
And
so they laughed as they watched the sixteen tokens
pass
from palm to palm and felt the prick
and
wiped the reddish smears on the handkerchiefs
that
all folk carry tucked in their back pocket,
the
depth of the dye declaring the force of the flag.
*
This
second one started as a whim but became an act of love. At Devoted
and Disgruntled in January, a tall man with sandy hair wearing a
checked shirt voiced a request for “someone with sewing skills to
help a 6'5” drag queen”. I tweeted in response that I might be
about to find my calling, and a couple of hours later I was fixing a
date with Robert Beck, aka the Marvellous Miss Mimi Martini, to talk
frock-making. Our first meeting was spent sharing images: Rob emailed
me a few pictures that had given him some tentative notions
(floatiness, a big split up the front for showing off shapely legs);
we scanned google for drag queens and Adrian of Hollywood dresses,
and flicked through my Schiaparelli paper-dolls book (pause to sigh
with pleasure that such a thing exists in the world). By the end we
had a few sketches, a vague idea to make a dress with a ribbon of
chiffon around it like the pink line twisting through a stick of
rock, and a plan to go fabric shopping.
Fabric
shopping changed everything. To be honest, it was so exciting that
after an hour I had a violent adrenaline crash. Luckily we'd already
found Rob's dream fabrics: a hot-pink satin and a chiffon dyed
fuchsia at one end and electric blue at the other. To show off that
colour shift, we switched patterns to something more like a Greek
gown (showing my roots, dears) with chiffon floating around the skirt
and rippling over the bust before swooping off the shoulders. It took
two fittings to get the pattern right, and a third for tweaks with
the actual fabric; there are all sorts of things about it that I wish
I'd done better, or differently, or more professionally, but at the
same time I recognise that it's one of the most ambitious things I've
ever made, and not too bad for it. Here it is on my dressmaker's
doll: her figure isn't quite as buxom as Mimi's, but you get the
general idea.
I
rarely sew for anyone other than myself, and doing so was just
delightful. As in, I genuinely got teary when Mimi's frock started to
come together: the magic of sewing never ceases to amaze me. I
already have heaps of ideas for other things I'd like to make for
her: things I'd never dream of wearing myself, but would love to
construct, to bring into being. And I would so love to do this for
more people. So if there are any other drag queens out there looking
for someone with sewing skills...
*
This
third one I made in the way I make most cakes or puddingy things:
somewhat haphazardly, from scratch and imagination and vaguely
retained memories of endless reading of recipes. It was for my lovely
friends Andrew and Marta, who were coming to my house for dinner
before flying off to Poland. I had bought tickets for the double bill
at the Yard that night, and so prepared a meal then left my husband
to serve it, thinking they were only going away for a couple of weeks
on holiday. I found out on my return, at 11.30pm, with everyone
heading for bed, that they were leaving at 8am and planned to stay in
Poland for several months. Indefinitely even.
I've
been feeling a lot lately that I have my priorities all skewed. Going
to the theatre as much as I do means I'm almost never home to give my
kids a bath, read to them at bedtime, tuck them in with a goodnight
kiss. It means that I rarely have proper conversations with my
friends, rarely even see them, because I put seeing theatre first.
Sometimes that theatre is nourishing, joyful, inspiring; it makes me
feel like I'm levitating, like my brain has expanded, that I want to
write and write like it's the only thing that matters. Sometimes that
theatre is Ophelias Zimmer: technically impressive but gruelling,
draining, an act of intellectual violence. Either way, the strongest
relationship I have at the moment isn't with a human being, it's with
the collective human act of theatre. And I don't know if that's
right.
The
shows I was seeing at the Yard that night were by people I know and
admire and enjoy chatting with; people I would love to call friends,
were our encounters less transient, or insecure. It felt important to
see their work, to support them in some way, knowing that for each of
them it was a leap and a challenge to make this performance. But I
feel sad that I sacrificed this other night of friendship for it. I
feel sad that so many of the choices I make in life feel like the
wrong choice. I'm writing this tonight, having been meaning to write
it for three weeks now – I finished Mimi's dress on 7 May, and
Harry sent me the poem on 10 May – because at 9.01pm this evening I
made the decision not to watch Hannah Nicklin's Equations for aMoving Body at CPT but to come home and work. I've felt a twist of
nausea ever since: guilt at not being there for Hannah, not
supporting her. She is another person I admire and enjoy chatting
with and would love to call a friend; this was my only chance to see
the show; the audience was small; it would have been a kindness to
stay. I've made the wrong call again, but in the other direction.
Sometimes it feels as though the thing I make most productively in my
life is worry.
Anyway:
Andrew and Marta emailed me from Poland to ask for the recipe for
that dessert, and as it came out quite well I thought I'd post it.
Apologies to Nigel Slater if it turns out to be one of your recipes
that I've unconsciously memorised and am now claiming as my own.
Pistachio
and chocolate tart
Stupidly
I didn't write down what I did at the time, but I'm pretty sure this
was it: first I ground 150g shelled pistachios with 50g caster sugar
in a blender, adding some dried orange peel towards the end (in
season, I'd use peel grated from a fresh unwaxed orange I think).
Pretty sure I picked up the blending nuts with sugar trick from
Nigella: it helps to soak up the oil that comes out as they're
ground. I then melted 40g butter in a saucepan, and stirred that
together with the nut and sugar mixture, a sprinkle of cinnamon and
another 50g caster sugar in a bowl until it was all nicely
emulsified. I lined a 20cm flan or sandwich tin with greaseproof
paper, smoothed over the nut mixture and pressed it down so the
surface was flat and the mixture as tight as possible, then baked it
for what I think was the equivalent of 15 minutes at about 150C or
gas 2 (my oven use is never as simple as that, hence the uncertainty
here. Basically: nuts burn easily, and that makes them bitter, so
keep things quite gentle). The base has to cool after that for a bit.
Next
step is the chocolate ganache topping, which is pretty simple: pour
300ml double cream into a heavy-bottomed saucepan and warm over a low
heat until nearly boiling point, then stir in at least 150g dark
chocolate (that's how much I used, but I wanted more – I reckon
250g would be good). I used 72% cocoa solids: you need that darkness
to counter the cream. Once that's melted, take the pan off the heat
and beat the mixture with a whisk for as long as you can be bothered
– the more time you give it, the smoother the mixture will be.
Pour that over the nut base, smooth the surface, then leave in the
fridge until ready to serve – the chocolate mixture firms up in the
cool temperature. We didn't have it with raspberries, but I bet a few
on the side would be bloody delicious.
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